Jimmy Page: The Rolling Stone Interview
Let’s talk about riffs.
I like talking about riffs [laughs].
One of my favorites is “Black Dog” [on Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album], because it is so irregular — the way it spills across the drumming. It should not work. But it does.
That’s one I didn’t come up with. John Paul Jones had that riff. It was not easy to play. The drums had to play 4/4 through it. But “Black Dog” is more than a riff. You have the call-and-response of the vocal and riff, then the bridge and other parts to move the song along.
The guitar is the lead instrument in most Zeppelin songs. But in “Celebration Day,”you can hear the way the bass plays countermelodies under the guitar. There was so much action, on different levels, in those songs.
This is the thing. There’s a riff. What are you going to do with it? That’s where you shape things. The opening of “No Quarter” [on 1973’s Houses of the Holy] — that was a keyboard thing. But mainly the song was coming from the guitar. “Heart-breaker” is one where John was involved in the writing as well. The opening is guitar-led, then John’s [bass] pattern becomes the verse.
What makes a great Zeppelin riff?
A riff ought to be quite hypnotic, because it will be played over and over again.
Do you test it — play it over and over — to make sure it works?
You just have something that feels instinctively right. And it doesn’t have to be guitar-led. In the Zeppelin era, a lot of the music was riff-led. But there was this other, more acoustic element. “Ten Years Gone” [on the 1975 double album Physical Graffiti] was totally different, with an orchestrated-guitar element.
That’s what was so good about having a band with longevity — the touring, the albums. Nothing, theoretically, should have been beyond our grasp. We should have been able to take anything on board — if it was credible, if it had legs.
Your fingerpicking introduction in “Stairway to Heaven”is a riff- it has that repetitive hypnosis. But it is also much more than a riff. There is a lot of melody and layering in there.
That was written on an acoustic guitar. I was trying things at home, shunting this piece up with that piece. I had the idea of the verses, the link into the solo and the last part. It was this idea of something that would keep building and building. I didn’t have any of Robert’s lyrics, only a sort of melody that related to the guitar parts I had.
The amazing thing about that building is how the song actually ends with just Plant’s voice. The band has left the room. He has the last word.
He didn’t have the last word. Originally, there was another guitar part that I had done for the ending. It was like the opening, a bit different. But I never tagged it on. The statement was there. I thought, “Leave it all there with Robert.”
Led Zeppelin started hard and fast. The first album was recorded in 36 hours; “Led Zeppelin II” was made on the run, while you were touring. How did you, as the leader and producer, maintain that momentum? The first album was done methodically, with ruthless efficiency. The second — the plan was to capture the energy of the band on the road. There was no messing around. I knew instinctively what the music should be doing. I wanted to touch everything: the acoustic, fingerpicking thing; then blues and rock — mainly riffing, which I had learned from the Chicago blues players. “Good Times Bad Times” — John Paul Jones came up with the riff. I had the chorus. John Bonham applied the bass-drum pattern. That one really shaped our writing process. It was like, “Wow, everybody’s erupting at once.”