“Truly awful”: The terrible song that birthed a Led Zeppelin classic
They might have been one of the world’s most influential bands, and so successful that they even knocked a moribund Beatles off their perch, but Led Zeppelin are not without their fair share of problematic moments. Sure, they made rock darker, more expansive, and had a defining hand in metal coming to fruition, but other aspects have understandably turned people off them for good.
Perhaps the most notorious is the allegation about the young groupie being molested with a mud-shark, which is one of the darkest tales in rock music lore, but there is a string of others that paint Led Zeppelin in a different light to purely golden gods. Elsewhere, guitarist Jimmy Page’s well-documented relationship with teenage “baby groupie” Lori Mattix when he was nearly 30 and her story of the way it started, saying it was “like I was being kidnapped”, provides more than enough reasoning to never listen to the band ever again.
The band’s music and aesthetic might be iconic and widely influential, but this hasn’t benefited culture at large. This is something the late Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain, outlined. He was a fan when he was younger, but after getting deeply ensconced in the punk movement, his attitude shifted, and he began to see the darker side of classic rock – or even ‘cock rock’ – outfits such as Zeppelin and their controversial American counterpart, Aerosmith.
“It took me so many years to realise that a lot of it had to do with sexism,” Cobain told Rolling Stone in 1992. “The way that they just wrote about their dicks and having sex.” Of course, the aforementioned acts would have a defining impact on hair metal groups such as Mötley Crüe, a genre the likes of Cobain and his era detested with all their being.
There’s another reason Led Zeppelin are problematic too. Surprisingly, this came straight out of the mouth of their leader, Page. When speaking to Guitar World, he revealed that a classic song by the group, ‘You Shook Me’ – a reworking of the original by Willie Dixon, J.B. Lenoir, and made famous by Muddy Waters – emerged after them recording a version of ‘Ten Little Indians’, the mid-19th century folk song condemned for its evidently racist undertones, both in its American and British versions.
Given that Led Zeppelin were so heavily reliant on the influence of Black musicians and would later explore ‘world music’, it’s surprising that they should try to record such an infamous song, despite it being in the late 1960s and Page calling the product “truly awful”.
Page recalled to Guitar World: “During one session, we were recording ‘Ten Little Indians’, which was an extremely silly song that featured a truly awful brass arrangement. In fact, the whole track sounded terrible. In a desperate attempt to salvage it, I hit upon an idea. I said, ‘Look, turn the tape over and employ the echo for the brass on a spare track. Then turn it back over and we’ll get the echo preceding the signal.’ The result was very interesting — it made the track sound like it was going backwards.”
Later, the band recorded ‘You Shook Me’. Page told the engineer, Glyn Johns that he wanted to use backwards echo at the end of the track. Johns maintained that it couldn’t be done, but he was informed that it could, as they’d already done it on their lousy recording of ‘Ten Little Indians’. One good thing came out of it, but even then, there are claims that the idea to adapt ‘You Shook Me’ was nabbed from Page’s good friend Jeff Beck.
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