“A musical landscape”: The 1975 song Jimmy Page said was difficult to remember
Considering how Jimmy Page stands as one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most unrivalled guitar forces, it is near impossible to imagine someone with his proficiency ever being intimidated by the scope of a song. But of course, at times, even his own compositions, however complex he chose to make them, proved to be a challenge, no matter how often they were played.
“Ultimately, I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses, a combination that had never been done before,” Page expressed to Guitar World in 1993, “Lots of light and shade in the music.”
The multi-layered brilliance of Led Zeppelin was honed by Page, who not only saw the opportunity to fuse genres, as such, but to expand how his guitar could sound and communicate with what was being sung in the given lyrics. One of Led Zeppelin’s standout performances of this is on 1975’s ‘In My Time of Dying’, with Page explaining, some 50 years after its release, that there was a constant difficulty in remembering its chords.
“It’s really, really complicated,” he admitted to Planet Rock in 2015, “I was talking about this the other day: I said, ‘Well, there was a lot to remember’. The person who was interviewing me looked as though he didn’t really understand just how much you had to remember when you go, one, two, three, four, and you start and get right through to the end of, as you say, 11 minutes.”
‘In My Time of Dying’ has a long, varied history, where it originated as a gospel song in 1927, its title referencing a deathbed, taken from Psalms 41:3: “The Lord will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing, thou wilt make all his bed in his sickness”. The song was first recorded by Blind Willie Johnson, a foundational American gospel blues singer and guitarist, with lyrics sourced from various iterations in the years before 1927, carrying on the tradition.
Before Led Zeppelin made their rendition known, Bob Dylan recorded his version (and credited himself as the arranger) on his 1962 eponymous debut album. “Dylan had never sung ‘In My Time of Dyin’ prior to this recording session,” the album’s liner notes claimed, “He does not recall where he first heard it”. Led Zeppelin followed with their version on 1975’s Physical Graffiti, and at 11 minutes, it would remain their longest studio recording. Of its lyrical credits, all four members are named, with the versions and authors that came before left out. Still, the band made their rendition different from the rest, reinventing the song as it fused with their sound, close to the balance of light and shade that Page prophesied for them in their earliest days”.
“It’s got all these sort of different changes and pauses,” he explained, of how he managed to fit his guitar playing into the song’s patterns, “The first time a pause will come, it might be six beats that you’re gonna do… The next time that pause comes, it might be eight beats, you know what I mean?… It’s such a musical landscape to remember, but there was just this fusion of the four of us, and it was just phenomenal.”
Over the course of its 11 minutes, one can hear the exact patterns of change that Page mentions: the fluctuations from calm to upbeat melodies, the steady grooves in tandem with John Paul Jones’ basslines and John Bonham’s otherworldly drum techniques, flowing on their own path. As Robert Plant sings of angels marching and calls out for Jesus, the band reconfigures the song into an ongoing invocation of a higher power, both experimental and refined. “Oh, Lord, deliver me / All the wrong I’ve done,” Plant cries, “I only wanted to have some fun”.
“It was great to play live, but to record it, as well…there’s such an attitude to that,” Page mused, “There’s an attitude to all of these things: real sensitivity, or just [a] serious attitude and hard-hitting”. On ‘In My Time of Dying,’ Led Zeppelin harnessed a balance of both, turning the blues tradition into one of their defining moments, as a unit.
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