Jimmy Page - The Making of Led Zeppelin IV (Pt.1)
Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page on the making of Led Zeppelin IV, the band's 1971 album that featured Stairway To Heaven, Black Dog and When The Levee Breaks and is widely regarded as their greatest work, selling over 37 million copies worldwide.
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00:20 It had been said that at this house, which is in Hampshire,
00:37 that Fleetwood Mac had rehearsed there.
00:41 Not recorded, but they'd rehearsed there.
00:45 So that ticked box number one for me,
00:49 that you weren't gonna get neighbor problems.
00:54 You can make sort of noise and not have that sort of restriction to mess it all up.
00:59 So you could sort of get a flow of music going.
01:01 The second thing was that you could actually stay there.
01:07 I don't know what other groups would stay there.
01:09 I don't think too many, but it did have accommodation within the main house.
01:13 So that sort of ticked another box, that we could actually sort of stay there.
01:18 So basically, in effect, it seemed to become like a candidate to be able to do
01:25 this idea, or fulfill this idea, whereby the group would all stay in the same premises.
01:34 Eat there, sleep there, make music there, and
01:37 then you could just bring in an auxiliary truck, a mobile recording studio,
01:44 which actually at the time happened to be the Rolling Stones one.
01:48 And then sort of just get on with it, get on with the job.
01:51 [MUSIC]
02:01 I think it is a fusion of all manner of ideas.
02:11 But the fact of having everybody living in the same place,
02:17 and sleeping there, etc., and just being able to evolve
02:23 all of these musical sort of concepts and deliveries.
02:29 And you get something which is so extreme from, say,
02:35 Levee Breaks, which is so, it's the intensity of it,
02:41 the menace of it, the threat of it.
02:44 And the density and the darkness of it is to sort of turn the coin and
02:51 then have something which is really caressing like the Going to California.
02:58 And it's a really, really intimate close-up picture.
03:02 So these whole things were able to be accomplished within this working
03:08 atmosphere.
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03:16 Rock and Roll more or less came out of thin air, and so did the Battle of
03:21 Evermore, from my side of it anyway, the mandolin,
03:25 cuz it was written on the mandolin.
03:28 There were various things that happened like that.
03:31 The fact that we were routining Stairway to Heaven there.
03:36 And it was tricky going through it without having any sort of sung
03:40 verses to it.
03:41 And while we were going through it and everyone was learning it,
03:47 Robert was writing the lyrics in the same room.
03:51 He was sitting down there and writing, and then he eventually came to the microphone,
03:55 started singing, and it was like, wow, we're really onto something here,
04:00 cuz his lyrics were superb on it.
04:03 But it was a place that really inspired, and
04:08 that whole approach of having gone there to live the music,
04:13 to work the music, to create the music,
04:15 was the right thing to do for Led Zeppelin at that point in time.
04:19 [MUSIC]
04:31 Well, it was complex, and this idea of having the fragile
04:36 acoustic guitar opening up, and then as it comes,
04:41 and you've got the electric pianos and the electric 12 strings in stereo.
04:48 And the whole thing starts to unravel, and
04:51 the layers start to unravel as it goes on.
04:56 And there's a momentum to Stairway as well.
04:59 It's all really intentional to have this, and
05:03 actually from the first point of the opening guitar,
05:09 to what's going on at the end of it, in the last verse,
05:13 although it says, you have Robert singing at the end after the solo,
05:19 all that section.
05:21 Well, there's an increase of tempo, it's got fast.
05:25 And the whole object of the exercise to have this thing that would almost be like
05:29 an orgasm, really.
05:30 [MUSIC]
05:40 Well, there were times where you might start a number and
05:51 might just jettison it.
05:52 But no, everyone really seemed to understand that this was
05:57 really breaking some ground, and it was tricky and it was hard work.
06:00 Well, if it was tricky and hard work, that's why we should be on it and do it.
06:05 But what happened was, the residential situation
06:11 of Headley was really, really good.
06:16 But I wanted to be able to take it into a traditional
06:20 studio setup rather than the truck, which was outside.
06:24 It was sitting in the drive, and you'd have to keep going backwards and
06:27 forwards into the truck.
06:29 I wanted something where, just like this, you've got the control room and
06:33 a more traditional way of doing things.
06:35 Cuz everything had worked admirably for
06:38 everything else that was being done from Headley.
06:41 But I wanted to have the facility whereby you could have close contact and
06:48 in a large room, that's it.
06:50 [MUSIC]
07:00 Each and every one of us in the band instinctively knew you couldn't
07:17 fail to know that the work that we've done, cuz we were such fine musicians,
07:23 all of us in the band, it was substantial work.
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