Remembering Alabama Shakes’ electric live cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘How Many More Times’
Alabama Shakes are one of the greatest live outfits you’ll ever be lucky enough to see. Brittany Howard has a voice that could stop a category five hurricane in its tracks simply for the joy of hearing her soulful growl, one step up on the same Zeus scale that summoned the phenomenon. Very few singers in history have that same Thor-like thunderous force without straining beyond their chest voice. Fortunately for this cover, Led Zeppelin’s frontman Robert Plant is one of them.
Slipping like a jigsaw piece into the Shakes’ back catalogue, the song is swamped in a bluesy origin. As Led Zeppelin’s guitarist Jimmy Page explained to the BBC: “We had numbers from the Yardbirds that we called free form, like ‘Smokestack Lightnin’,’ where I’d come up with my own riffs and things, and obviously I wasn’t going to throw all that away, as they hadn’t been recorded.
Continuing: “So, I remodelled those riffs and used them again, so the bowing on ‘How Many More Times’ and ‘Good Times, Bad Times’ was an extension of what I’d been working on with the Yardbirds, although I’d never had that much chance to go to town with it, and to see how far one could stretch the bowing technique on record, and obviously for anyone who saw the band, it became quite a little showpiece in itself.”
As fate would have it, ‘Smokestack Lightnin’ singer Howlin’ Wolf has a similar live prowess to Howard. As Bob Dylan once said of the old blues sensation: “Howlin’ Wolf, to me, was the greatest live act, because he did not have to move a finger when he performed — if that’s what you’d call it, ‘performing.’”
As fellow bluesman Cub Koda testified, “No one could match Howlin’ Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits.” While Howard might not bring about any fear, she can certainly rattle the rafters of the heavens while hushing a crowd into stultified awe.
As Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys testified when he saw Alabama Shakes at an unsigned stage in their career in Nashville, “They knocked our socks off, everything about it was just [speechless].”
When you add the truly exceptional band behind Howard into the mix — a band that entwines as tightly as any, you have yourself a force to contend with. Thus, they’re pretty much tailor-made for the anthemic flow of ‘How Many More Times’. The clip below is testimony to that.
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