The classic Led Zeppelin song that Jimmy Page lied about: “Quite a little showpiece”
By the end of the 1960s, the record industry had yet to catch up with rock and roll properly. As bands like the Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers Band began to make the three-minute single passe, record companies still baulked at extended compositions, fearing that the bloated run times would scare away potential listeners. Led Zeppelin was on the cutting edge of rock music.
Having developed their sound into a hard-edged version of classic blues that was cranked up a couple hundred decibels and played at ear-splitting volumes. Part of the band’s pioneering sound was in their live performances, which often stretched to extended lengths with solos, jams, and interpolations of other songs.
‘Whole Lotta Love’ quickly became an open vehicle to incorporate the sounds of other songs, including famously becoming the perfect time for Robert Plant to bust out his Elvis Presley fandom by singing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’ after the spacey theremin section. John Bonham got his own star-making turn during ‘Moby Dick’ the wild drum solo that could easily expand to half an hour, depending on Bonzo’s mood on any particular night.
But Led Zeppelin were pushing boundaries from the very beginning, as can be heard on their self-titled debut album. Three of the album’s first four songs extended beyond the six-minute mark, including the psychedelic ‘Dazed and Confused’ and the folky ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’. Zeppelin had no interest in singles, wishing for their albums and live performances to speak for themselves. However, Atlantic Records were still preoccupied with the idea of making music singles-friendly.
Jimmy Page made note of this and felt that radio was outside of the band’s reach as well. FM and AOR stations had yet to catch on properly, and any band who played beyond the standard single length were unlikely to find any kind of radio exposure. So Jimmy Page concocted a simple trick to see if he could fool broadcasters: he lied about how long ‘How Many More Times’, the final track from Led Zeppelin I, ran on the album.
Original pressings of Led Zeppelin I list ‘How Many More Times’ as lasting only around three minutes and 30 seconds. In reality, the song was the album’s longest track, sprawling well past the eight-minute mark. It’s unclear whether the cosmetic change actually made any difference since one look at the album’s vinyl would reveal just how long ‘How Many More Times’ actually was, but it was an interesting idea to try and get beyond the single-minded nature of the record industry at the time.
The track was also somewhat duplicitous for another reason. The record has Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham all credited as songwriters, while Robert Plant was left off the credits. But, in reality, Plant did contribute a line: “I got another child on the way, that makes 11,” in reference to his own forthcoming child.
About the song, Jimmy Page said in the BBC book The Guitar Greats: “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, 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.”
It may have ended up a “little showpiece” and a song to be largely proud of, but one wonders what Page’s mother may have thought of her son using a little white lie to try and gain some airplay.
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