The Led Zeppelin song nobody understood: “No one could keep up with that”
After over 50 years, it feels like we’re still just scratching the surface of what Led Zeppelin did throughout the 1970s.
There are certain songs that are more straightforward than others, but what kind of divine musical god gave these four musicians the power to write something as epic as ‘Kashmir’ or turn in as emotional a performance as ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’? Most of that genius might come down to Jimmy Page, but John Paul Jones admitted that when he presented the band with ‘Black Dog’, no one knew where it would go.
At this point, Zeppelin had washed their hands of wanting to be the commercial band that got their hits on the charts. They were album artists, and most of their fans were more than happy to take in their records as a whole rather than pick out the handful of songs that had any mainstream potential.
Almost as a way to spite all of their critics, Zeppelin’s fourth outing was deliberately untitled just to see whether they would succeed without name recognition. By not saying anything, the band made their statement abundantly clear: we don’t even need to show ourselves on the album cover to sell millions.
Deliberately trying to confuse your fans on your upcoming release is a bold strategy, and one only usually performed by the greatest, which might be why Led Zeppelin could get away with it. But they went one step further and even made some of their songs a little confusing to try to get to grips with.
Once you stick the record on the vinyl, ‘Black Dog’ was far from any kind of commercial juggernaut, either. Outside of its strange structure of Robert Plant singing in between the gaps of the music, there’s a lot of confusion surrounding the song’s riff, alternating between common time and 7/8 time depending on which section of the riff you’re listening to.
For Jonesy, this kind of thing was a walk in the park. He had already been known for his brilliant arrangements for artists like The Rolling Stones, so changing up the time signature of a song may have just been his way of having some fun in the studio. Where Jones saw fun, Page and John Bonham were completely lost.
Jimmy Page is one of the most cultured lead guitarists around, so his misunderstanding of the signatures is a little out of left field, but Bonzo was a powerhouse drummer, and cared little for the technicalities of such a construction. Jones, however, relished the opportunity to geek out.
When talking about putting the track together, Jones remembered getting a lot of long faces when he started, telling Classic Rock, “It was originally all in 3/16 time, but no one could keep up with that. I told Bonzo he had to keep playing four-to-the-bar all the way through ‘Black Dog’. If you go through enough 5/8s, it arrives back on the beat.”
While the thought of someone telling Bonham what to do on the drums sounds insane, you can hear that kind of tension when they’re playing the song on the record. Despite taking the lion’s share of the spotlight, the riff does feel out of time when it changes key halfway through, almost like everything’s hanging in the air before it syncs back up for the initial riff.
Even with years of practice, some of the greatest guitarists in the world, like Slash, have still had trouble trying to put the song together, wondering how to hell they actually managed to record it before being told the “real” way to play it by Jason Bonham. Led Zeppelin always faced ridicule from the press for being mostly hype, but was there anyone else in the world who managed to get millions of fans dancing to a song that plays around with time signatures this much?
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