Jimmy Page Reflects on Led Zeppelin IV
Written by Logan Phillips on April 13, 2023
Led Zeppelin’s iconic album ‘Led Zeppelin IV’ is their fourth studio album released in November of 1971. Highly regarded as the band’s greatest work, the LP features songs like “Stairway to Heaven,” “Black Dog,” and “When the Levee Breaks.”
Recently Jimmy Page sat down with “Louder Sound” and reflected on the process that produced one of the greatest Rock albums of all time.
According to Page, from the beginning, he felt that the band had something special from the jump when they were able to make arrangements to record at Headley Grange.
“This house in Hampshire where Fleetwood Mac had rehearsed, not recorded, but they rehearsed there. So that ticked box one for me there, you wouldn’t have neighbor problems, you know, you could make some noise and not have that sort of restriction to mess it all up. So, you could get a flow of music going,” explains Page.
“The second thing was that you could actually stay there…to fulfill this idea whereby the group would all stay on the premises, eat there, sleep there, and make music there…then bring in an auxiliary truck, with a mobile recording studio, which actually at the time happened to be the Rolling Stones one, and then you just get on with it,” says the legendary guitarist.
Some Zeppelin albums that were recorded in the Rolling Stone unit include ‘III’ ‘IV’ ‘Houses of the Holy’ and ‘Physical Graffiti.” But Led Zeppelin was not the only band to take full advantage of the unit. Other groups such as Deep Purple, Fleetwood Mac, Bad Company, Santana, and Iron Maiden, also used the Rolling Stone recording unit.
Jimmy Page went on to establish the importance of having the band stay on the premises to record ‘IV’ stating that by having the band all together, they could create and evolve all sorts of musical concepts and deliveries. Page explains because of the band staying all in the same place, they could go to extremes in sound like ‘When the Levee Breaks’ which brings an intense, menacing darkness to the album but could quickly switch gears to something with a caressing and mellow feel like “Going to California.”
Page goes on to say that “Going to California” is his favorite Led Zeppelin track.
“There were various things happening like that. The fact that we were retuning ‘Stairway to Heaven’ there, and it was tricky going through it without having any sung verses for it; and while we were going through it and everyone was trying to learn it. Robert was writing the lyrics in the same room, and he was sitting down there and writing. He eventually came to the microphone and started singing, and it was like wow, we’re really on to something here.”
Page goes on about recording at Headley Grange, “It was really a place that inspired, you know. That whole approach of having gone there to live the music, to work the music, to create the music was the right thing for Led Zeppelin to do at the time.”
Led Zeppelin IV was an overnight sensation becoming certified gold within just one week of its release in the U.S. The album would also stay on the charts for the following five years but never hit number one. At this time, Led Zeppelin IV is the second-highest selling record of all time with over 23 million record sales in the United States.
