“So much thicker”: The Beatles sound Jimmy Page copied for a Led Zeppelin song
In terms of influence, The Beatles are about as omnipresent in music as Citizen Kane is in film history. Even if someone couldn’t care less about what ‘Rosebud’ is, anyone who has stepped behind a camera to see something come to life is taking at least a little something from Citizen Kane whether they know it or not.
The same can certainly be said for a plethora of bands from the 1960s and ’70s. While Jimmy Page was already looking to create his own model for rock and roll, he admitted that he had a few tricks up his sleeve from the Fab Four on ‘No Quarter’.
Looking at Zeppelin’s discography, Page wanted to transcend anything that had come before. Most of the biggest blues bands in the world were already taking cues from The Yardbirds, but with Zeppelin, Page had a vehicle to work on every new toy he could in the studio.
Suddenly, rock and roll didn’t have to only be about replicating the blues. It could be anything that Page wanted, whether that meant playing strange folksy material like ‘The Battle of Evermore’ or making their equivalent of a ballad with ‘The Rain Song’, complete with a guitar tuning that hasn’t been found on any other tune since.
By the late 1970s, Page already seemed to go beyond what The Beatles had done. Since they had long since broken up by the time of Physical Graffiti, the next phase of rock and roll was going to follow The Gospel, according to Zeppelin, especially when people started making blatant knockoffs of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘Kashmir’.
‘No Quarter’ is a bit of a different beast in Zeppelin’s discography, though. For all of the heavy metal comparisons that they tried to outrun, this is probably the closest that they came to competing with the Black Sabbaths and Deep Purples after them, complete with a guitar part that seems like it’s being played in slow motion.
It sounds thick and ominous, but The Beatles had beaten Page to the punch almost a decade before. Listening back to tracks like ‘Rain’, the whole thing was put together from the slowed-down tape, which somehow made Ringo Starr’s pummelling drum performance sound even thicker than his usual standard.
As it turned out, that slow motion was a direct lift from what The Beatles had done, with Page recalling, “The only song I can think of that we vari-speeded up were a couple of overdubs on ‘Achilles Last Stand.’ However, I applied the vari-speed to the overall track of ‘No Quarter.’ I dropped the whole song a quarter tone because it made the track sound so much thicker and ominous.”
‘No Quarter’ has all the makings of a classic heavy metal stomper, but vari-speed was more than just something to make a song sound slightly slower. Since it’s slightly out of tune, both ‘Rain’ and ‘No Quarter’ don’t just feel like traditional rock anthems. They’re practically the sound of a completely different sonic world.
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