The 1973 Led Zeppelin classic Jimmy Page never expected to be so wildly misinterpreted
It is the plight of every artist and writer that they cannot control with any certainty how their work is interpreted upon its release into the wider world. During the height of Led Zeppelin’s rock and roll revolution, Jimmy Page’s output became rather difficult for the general public to decipher, leading to a variety of unjust misinterpretations.
To be fair to Zeppelin’s audience, the hard rock pioneers were rarely aligned with the experiences of everyday folks during their rise to rock stardom. Even before the group had officially come together, Page’s extensive experiences as the most sought-after session guitarist in England meant his life, rubbing shoulders with everyone from The Who to Petula Clark, was already far removed from the reality of working life for most 1960s-era Britons. Still, that didn’t stop the public from connecting to Led Zeppelin’s early work.
Within only a few months of their emergence, the group were already on their way to defining an entirely new era of rock. Inevitably, though, once the band descended into the depths of rock hedonism, characterised by private jets, copious amounts of impossibly pure cocaine, and an interest in occult mythology that bordered on obsession, it was easy to understand how some of their work was being misinterpreted. Most people, after all, had no reference point for the lives they were leading at the time.
Perhaps the band’s most misunderstood song, however, isn’t one which is awash with occult symbolism or complex literary references. Instead, it was the band’s rather left-field adoption of Jamaican reggae, on 1973’s ‘D’yer Mak’er’, the title itself being a play on the local pronunciation of that Caribbean nation.
Uniting those reggae rhymes with a retro doo-wop atmosphere, to call the song a rarity within Led Zeppelin’s output would be an understatement. It was completely different from anything they had released before, and it sticks out like a sore thumb on the track listing of the otherwise magnificent Houses of the Holy. Unsurprisingly, then, the song became a point of contention on the album, so far as the music press of 1973 was concerned.
While Houses of the Holy, in general, was rightfully praised for its hard rock mastery, few people could seem to make sense of ‘D’yer Mak’er’, with even John Paul Jones himself expressing a certain degree of regret over releasing that track. According to the bassist, the song evolved from little more than a session jam, and it probably should have remained within the safe confines of a jam, rather than being committed to wax.
In contrast, Jimmy Page has stood by the track, although even he couldn’t properly defend the criticism that the song attracted upon its release. “I didn’t expect people not to get it,” Page told The Trouser Press, “I thought it was pretty obvious. The song itself was a cross between reggae and a ’50s number, ‘Poor Little Fool’, Ben E King’s things, stuff like that.”
Zeppelin’s collision of those two styles is one thing, striking audiences as bizarre at best and baffling at worst, but the prevailing question that Page did not answer within that quote was ‘why?’
It didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of Led Zeppelin’s output, and it doesn’t have the musical quality to allow that fact to be ignored. Whether audiences ‘got it’ or not is rather redundant, because it doesn’t seem as if the band themselves truly got it, either.
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