EACH BAND'S TOP 10 SONGS ― LED ZEPPELIN

LED ZEPPELIN   

10. Misty Mountain Hop (1971)

The Zeppelin canon is full of mysteries, but none greater than this: How can a song about flower people and Tolkien be so crushingly funky? Jones' humid electric piano locks in with Page's headlong riff and Bonham's slippery avalanche of a groove, as Plant evokes a fracas between cops and hippies that makes him want to escape to the fantastical peaks alluded to in the title. Plant later said the lyrics were about "being caught in the park with wrong stuff in your cigarette papers."


9. Rock and Roll (1971)

Zeppelin were struggling to rehearse "Four Sticks" when Bonham spontaneously played the now-famous snare and open-high-hat drum intro to "Rock and Roll," which imitates the first few bars of Little Richard's 1957 hit "Keep A Knockin'." The song – initially called "It's Been a Long Time" – expresses a palpable longing for youth and the innocence of Fifties rock: Plant refers to the Stroll, an old dance, and to "The Book of Love," by the Montones, from 1958. But the music recasts rock & roll as something fierce and modern.





8. When the Levee Breaks (1971) (Zepparella)

This is Zeppelin as bad-trip blues band, with lyrics cribbed from Memphis Minnie about an epic flood and freaky, drowned-world production by Page, using heavy echo, backward harmonica and slo-mo playback. Bonzo's drums, recorded in a stairwell at Headley Grange, are so ginormous they became a classic sample (most famously opening the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill). "The acoustics of the stairwell happened to be so balanced we didn't even need to mic the kick drum," Page recalled.


7. Immigrant Song (1970) 

No hard-rock song has ever had a more ominous opening line: "We come from the land of the ice and snow." It was inspired by the band's concert in Iceland in June 1970, a month when the sun never fully sets. Plant started fantasizing about vikings and wrote in the voice of a Norse chieftain leading a sea invasion and expecting to die. It "was supposed to be powerful and funny," he said. Page's menacing staccato riff could scare Thor into surrendering, and Plant's Tarzan holler adds another layer of primal barbarism.





6. Good Times Bad Times (1969)

The first song on the first album introduces the band with a declaration of surly defiance ("I don't care what the neighbors say"), a stun-gun riff and a restless, syncopated drum pattern, which Page cited as evidence of Bonham's "amazing technique." Though the lyrics are a standard evil-woman blues complaint, the message was as immediate as a car accident: Zeppelin intended to use four-piece dynamics in exhilarating new ways.

5. Ramble On (1969)

The song where Plant first nails his mystic-storyteller alter ego combines familiar folk-blues concerns – hitting the road, looking for a woman – with a riff on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It starts with Page's acoustic strumming and Bonham patting out a rhythm (probably on his knees, possibly on a guitar case or a drum stool; no one seems to recall). Then the chorus crashes in and Page switches on, flinging knife-edge licks while Plant turns from a Hobbit back into a sex machine.

4. Kashmir (1975)

It's their hugest-sounding track, partly because it was one of the few that used outside musicians – a string and brass corps that augmented Jones' Mellotron swirls, Bonham's druid storm-trooper processional and Page's Arabic-­Indian vibe ("I had a sitar before George Harrison," he said). Plant's lyrics were born from an endless car ride through southern Morocco, and his 15-second howl around the four-minute mark may be his most spectacular vocal moment. Plant called it "the definitive Zeppelin song."


3. Black Dog (1971)

Arguably the most badass Led Zeppelin riff: It was cooked up by Jones, who had a Muddy Waters song stuck in his head. Page turned it into a chain-saw ballet on his Les Paul over Bonzo's stealth groove, with snarling multitracked rhythm guitar tearing up the midsection. But Plant's vocal come-on – "Hey, hey, mama, said the way you move/Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove" – brings the real alchemy. It may not be Shakespeare, but as Plant later said, songs like "Black Dog" "make their point.





2. Stairway to Heaven (1971)

The signature power ballad on Led Zeppelin IV towers over Seventies rock like a monolith. From the Elizabethan ambience of its acoustic introduction to Plant's lyrical mysticism to Page's spiraling solo, the eight-minute song is a masterpiece of slow-reveal intensity that withholds power, then ascends skyward like nothing in rock. "It speeds up like an adrenaline flow," said Page, whose on-the-spot improvisation was the perfect complement to Plant's evocation of excess and salvation. "It was a milestone for us."

1. Whole Lotta Love (1969)

Led Zeppelin's defining song – obscene, brutish and utterly awesome. "Way down inside," squeals Robert Plant, "I'm gonna give you every inch of my love" – adding, "I wanna be your backdoor man!" just for extra romance. His post-verbal singing is even dirtier, especially around the 4:30 mark, where he starts saying "love," and then shoots his wad into a black hole of echo. (The ghost vocals were a happy accident, the result of a bleed-through from an unused vocal track that Jimmy Page decided to leave in.) Years later, Plant freely admitted his heavy lyrical debt to "You Need Love," by uncredited blues-master Willie Dixon (who sued and won); "I just thought, 'Well, what am I going to sing?' That was it, a nick. Now happily paid for." But "Whole Lotta Love," recorded at London's Olympic Studios and mixed in New York, was far more than a remake. The midsection is a black-light head trip, a tornado of orgasmic moans, cymbal teases and shivering theremin foreplay, all magnified by wild stereo-panning. Page's pumping riff – made with a metal slide and augmented with some backward echo – is one of the most straightforwardly bruising to ever come out of a Les Paul, and John Paul Jones and John Bonham back it up thrust for thrust. Said Page, "Usually my riffs are pretty damn original. What can I say?"

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