Anatomy of a Song by Marc Myers

Author:Marc Myers
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-10-13T15:04:20+00:00

Interviews with JIMMY PAGE (Led Zeppelin guitarist

and cowriter), GEORGE CHKIANTZ (recording engineer),

and EDDIE KRAMER (final-mix engineer)

Jimmy Page: I came up with the guitar riff for “Whole Lotta Love” in the summer of 1968, on my houseboat along the Thames in Pangbourne, England. I suppose my early love for big intros by rockabilly guitarists was an inspiration, but as soon as I developed the riff, I knew it was strong enough to drive the entire song, not just open it. When I played the riff for the band in my living room several weeks later during rehearsals for our first album, the excitement was immediate and collective. We felt the riff was addictive, like a forbidden thing.

By January 1969, we cracked America wide open with the release of our first album and our first U.S. tour. I had this avant-garde master plan for “Whole Lotta Love” and could hear the construction coming together in my head. From the start, I didn’t want “Whole Lotta Love”—or any of our songs—to be a single. I had been a session musician since the early 1960s, as had [bassist] John Paul Jones. We had recorded on hundreds of singles and hated the abbreviated, canned format. I also knew that stereo FM radio was emerging in America and playing albums. I wanted to develop our songs emotionally, beyond just lengthy solos.

Our label, Atlantic Records, got it, but there was really very little risk on their end. John Paul and I knew our way around a recording studio, so we weren’t going to waste studio time or produce something that wasn’t cohesive. More important, I wanted to expand our approach to ensure that our album wouldn’t be chopped up into singles for AM radio. To make sure that didn’t happen, I produced “Whole Lotta Love”—and our entire second album—as an uneditable expression, a work that had to be aired on stereo FM to make sense.

During the band’s rehearsals in early ’69 for our second album, “Whole Lotta Love” sounded strong enough to open it, so I wanted to record the song first. In April, we went into London’s Olympic Studios and cut “Whole Lotta Love” with engineer George Chkiantz, who had recorded Jimi Hendrix there.

George Chkiantz: There were two studios at Olympic—one large and one small. Management had installed our sixteen-track recorder in the small one with hopes of luring rock bands in there and away from the larger sixty-by-forty-foot space with twenty-eight-foot ceilings, where we recorded mostly classical works and film scores. But Jimmy chose the larger one—even though it had only an eight-track recorder. He wanted the extra space so the drums could be miked properly for stereo.

I was a relative novice then, and what Jimmy wanted was a stretch, given Olympic’s traditional way of miking drums. So I invented a new way. I didn’t mike the snare, since that would have reduced the size and space of the drum sound. Instead, I used a stereo mike on an eight-foot boom above the drums, along

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