Jimmy Page Describes the Creation of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”

Despite the well-deserved praise Jimmy Page receives for his innovative rock-blues shredding technique, including his violin-bowed walls of noise and fast-paced licks, it's easy to overlook his exceptional skill as a rhythm player.

The rough mix of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”---which chugs along without the studio version’s signature stock car-engine sound in the refrain---brings Page’s rhythms to the fore. The song's production also demonstrates Page’s skill in the studio. The guitarist masterminded the sound of “Whole Lotta Love” and the recording of AOR groundbreaker Led Zeppelin II, and he tells the story of the song’s creation, along with that unforgettable riff, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal:

I came up with the guitar riff for "Whole Lotta Love" in the summer of '68, 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.

The band carried the initial mix with them during their U.S. tour in May and June of 1969, adding overdubs in studios located in Los Angeles and New York. Page explains the process of creating the song's reverb-heavy sound with engineer George Chkiantz and mixer Eddie Kramer, tailoring each element for optimal playback on stereo FM radio. “For the song to work as this panoramic audio experience,” he says, “I needed Bonzo [drummer John Bonham] to really stand out, so that every stick stroke sounded clear and you could really feel them. If the drums were recorded just right, we could lay in everything else.” He compares Robert Plant’s searing vocal to his guitar work:

Robert's vocal was just as extreme. He kept gaining confidence during the session and gave it everything he had. His vocals, like my solos, were about performance. He was pushing to see what he could get out of his voice. We were performing for each other, almost competitively.

The pre-echo and extensive reverb on Plant's vocals during the breakdown of the song were actually unintended occurrences. A different recording of Plant's voice accidentally overlapped on the master tape. Page and Kramer chose to keep it and enhance it with effects to give the impression that it was intentional.More improvisational studio wizardry between the two produced the crazed outro. “Jimmy and I went nuts on the knobs,” recalls Kramer, “We had eight dials controlling the levels on eight individual tracks, so we rehearsed the choreography of what we were going to do to create the far-out sounds.”

Similar to the accusations of musical plagiarism in the case of "Stairway to Heaven," the band faced a lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement in relation to "Whole Lotta Love" from Willie.Dixon, who wrote Muddy Water’s “You Need Love.” Page and Plant both admit the debt, but Page defends his contribution, saying “if you take Robert's vocal out, there's no musical reference.” In any case, they were eventually forced to give Dixon co-credit for the song. In a 1990 interview with Musician, Plant had the following to say about the about the controversy: “Page's riff was Page's riff. It was there before anything else. I just thought, 'well, what am I going to sing?' That was it, a nick. Now happily paid for. At the time, there was a lot of conversation about what to do. It was decided that it was so far away in time and influence that… well, you only get caught when you're successful. That's the game.”

---