Led Zeppelin by Martin Popoff

Author:Martin Popoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2017-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

Where’s that confounded bridge? “The Crunge” was a name ginned up for an imagined dance one might perform to the song. Page even considered including instructional dance steps as part of the album artwork. Live, it was used sparingly.

DANCING DAYS

PAGE/PLANT/3:43

“Dancing Days” was the first of Led Zeppelin’s great Eastern-influenced songs, this one inspired by a tune the band heard on their exploratory trip to Mumbai, but also by their visit to Japan and by the Indian music heard in Birmingham, England. Sure, the band had experimented with these mysterious melodic juxtapositions before, but now they were employing them in the context of an eyes-forward rock song every bit the equal of many on the band’s forthcoming creative tour de force, Physical Graffiti.

Not only was the track the first from the new record played on the radio, debuting on BBC Radio five days before the album’s launch, it was played live repeatedly beginning in the summer of 1972, more or less in a form matching the final version (save the lack of Jones’s gorgeous keyboard part, his only use of a Farfisa VIP-255 on a Zeppelin track). “Dancing Days” was also picked as the B-side to the band’s widely issued “Over the Hills and Far Away” single, the song having been so well regarded that immediately upon recording it at Stargroves, the band went outside and did a little victory dance, according to engineer Eddie Kramer.

Musically, this is Jimmy at his experimental best, creating a snaky and ethereal foreshadowing of grunge, while Bonham holds the fort with a forceful, simple beat—subtle shuffle to his high-hat work, spare bass drum, gorgeously accented the beats at song’s close. Jimmy recalls recording his slide parts in the Olympic Studio One control room with his cord running to an amp situated in the studio and cranked to create a swell of room ambience. An additional number of touch-ups and double-tracking and it was done, quicker than usual. Filling out the sound, Jones adds the aforementioned innovative keyboard work much like he did on “The Crunge,” while Robert turns in a laconic, monotone vocal, capturing the lazy haze of midsummer and a hippie-fried affair that may go nowhere, harassed by the heat.

On that note, the band had hoped the album would have come out in August 1972, at the conclusion of nine on-and-off months of recording, in time for “Dancing Days” to be the song of the summer. However, more work (mostly mixing and sorting out the cover, the main cause of the delays) up to the end of the year pushed the anticipated release date into 1973. A final delay of nearly seven months into March 1973 set up “Dancing Days” to be an anthem for the following summer, essentially a year after the band was done—and with nearly enough material for a double.

Markedly not summer music is the twenty-four minutes of eerie soundtrack material Jimmy would work on at his Boleskine House home, previously owned by Aleister Crowley, in November 1973 for Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising project.

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