“Wrong again”: the producer that walked out on Led Zeppelin
When working with someone like Jimmy Page, most producers knew to get the hell out of the way. Even though any producer can normally act as a guide to lead an artist to something more innovative every time they record, Page was a veteran of the studio scene and had most of the Led Zeppelin catalogue worked out in his head before he even walked into the studio. Not every one of his approaches was necessarily the proper way of doing things, and it took this producer only a few seconds to leave the guitarist on his own.
Granted, Page was always looking for someone who could engineer rather than properly produce half the time. A musician can only do so much when working on an album, but Page was like a man possessed when going through Zeppelin’s tunes, usually playing the board half the time alongside Eddie Kramer when working on tracks like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or getting the warped sounds of ‘The Rain Song’.
On the band’s debut record, it was clear that they were working out the bugs of their sound half the time. While that still led to some phenomenal moments like ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘How Many More Times’, Led Zeppelin II was the real template for what they were going to become, even if it happened to have a shotgun approach to recording.
The whole record was being pieced together as the group was touring, and listening back to tracks like ‘Heartbreaker’ or ‘Moby Dick’, half of it serves as a diary of what their lives on the road were like, from John Bonham’s thunderous drums to Robert Plant finally getting used to his vocal chops on tracks like ‘Bring It On Home’.
Zeppelin were building towards something, though, and their untitled fourth record was the moment they reached their final form. While they may have still been indebted to blues rock, there was hardly anyone who could produce something as heavy as ‘When the Levee Breaks’, complete with that massive echoing drum sound from Bonham that sounds like the apocalypse coming.
While Andy Johns was on hand to help Page produce the record, the guitarist remembered legendary producer Glyn Johns coming in and being disgusted with their bluesy cover, saying, “I’ll tell you a funny story about that song. Andy Johns did that mix with me, and after we finished it, Glyn, Andy’s older brother, walked in. We were really excited and told him, ‘You’ve got to listen to this.’ Glyn listened and just said, ‘Hmmph, you’ll never be able to cut it. It will never work.’ And he walked out. Wrong again, Glyn. He must have been seething with envy.”
It’s not like Glyn didn’t have a small point. The idea of getting something with that amount of ambient noise in the background felt impossible at the time, but compared to acts like The Beatles and The Who, Page’s sense of experimentation meant working with anything and everything he could get his hands on and listening to ‘When the Levee Breaks’, he took the same type of groove Bonzo had played countless times and gave it the massive sound you’d expect from a symphony.
Even when Zeppelin tried toying with the drums again, some of the takes never matched what he did on this cut. ‘Fool in the Rain’ and ‘Kashmir’ might still be the best examples of what Bonham could do, but there are only so many times someone can make something that sounds this perfect.
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