Jimmy Page is credited with writing some of the greatest riffs in rock guitar. “Whole Lotta Love,” “The Immigrant Song,” “Kashmir,” “Stairway to Heaven”… At the heart of it all is his deep love of blues, which informs much of his work with Led Zeppelin.
As Page explained to Dangerous Minds, riffs often come to him when he's practicing.
"I play at home, and before I knew where I was, things would be coming out, and that’s those little sections or riffs or whatever,” he said. “At that stage it’s selection and rejection. It’s whether you continue with something or you go, ‘No that’s too much like something else,’ and then you move into something else.
"If you’ve got an idea and you think that’s quite interesting, then I’d work and build on it at home.”
Other times, however, the riffs have come to him spontaneously, as they did when he wrote “Rock and Roll.”
“‘Rock and Roll’ was something that came purely out of the ether,” he said. “We were working on something else and John Bonham happened to play — just as you do sometimes, because we were recording — this intro from ‘Keep A-Knockin’,’ from Little Richard, and I went, ‘Oh, that’s it!’ — I did this chord and half a riff that was in my head — ‘Let’s do this.’ ”
But not all of Led Zeppelin’s riffs were written by Page. In fact, one of the group’s most famous — and most difficult to perform — riffs was composed by Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.
It’s “Black Dog,” the lead track to Led Zeppelin IV.
And as both Page and Jones have said, it’s a riff that proved one almost impossible for the group to get their heads around.
“I wrote Black Dog on a train,” Jones told our sister magazine Bass Player in its February 2008 issue. “My dad taught me how to write musical notation without using manuscript paper — just with numbers and note values — and I wrote that riff on the back of a train ticket coming back from a rehearsal at Jimmy Page’s house.”
In early interviews, Jones attributed the song’s influence to Muddy Waters’ 1968 album Electric Mud. “There was a Muddy Waters song I was attracted to at the time,” Jones said. “It was a rolling blues with a riff that never ended. I fancied writing something that did the same thing. Just when you think the riff is going to finish, it goes off somewhere else.”
But in 2007, Jones clarified that he’d actually meant to credit the repeating riff in Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” as his inspiration.
Either way, the line proved difficult from the start. As Jones told Classic Rock magazine in 2007, “It was originally all in 3/16 time, but no one could keep up.”
Even once Jones and Page put the song in 4/4 and slowed it down, it continued to frustrate the group's efforts. Bonham had difficulty navigating its rhythmic shifts as he tried to locate the “one” in each shift in the pattern.
It was Jones who hit upon the solution.
“I told Bonzo he had to keep playing four-to-the-bar all the way through,” he told Bass Player. “If you go through enough 5/8s it arrives back on the beat.”
The riff was compelling and ear catching on its own. There was no need for vocals, nor was there any likelihood singer and lyricist Robert Plant would be able to compose something to fit the snaky, circular riff.
This time it was Page who found the solution by following the example of “Oh Well, Part 1,” Peter Green’s monumental riff-driven tune from Fleetwood Mac’s first album, Then Play On. Instead of playing the riff straight through, Green interspersed its repetition with a vocal break, creating a call-and-response motif reminiscent of early blues, R&B, folk and gospel.
Although Jones and Page play the “Black Dog” riff in tight unison, Jones lays back on the middle-eight breaks to give the guitarist plenty of room to work out.
“I think you have to make a decision to support the guitar,” he explained to Bass Player. “Sometimes you can be really sparse and that will really highlight what the guitar’s doing. Or you can do a repeated pattern and build up intensity.
“In ‘Black Dog’ I would leave a lot of space and Page could come out in those spaces. You’ve got to look at the whole picture.”
And bassists, take note: While Jones was predominantly playing fingerstyle at this point in his career, he used a pick when playing his bass guitar on “Black Dog.”
“My preference is always to play fingerstyle, but I often had to play with a pick in the session days, so I got quite used to it,” he said. “I can play ‘Black Dog’ with my fingers, but it just sounded better with a pick. It just gives you different phrasing, and a more metallic, guitar sound. I didn’t see any reason not to swap one for another if the occasion demanded it.”
For his part, Page played his Number 1 Gibson Les Paul, a 1959 ‘Burst he purchased in 1969 from Joe Walsh.
“We put my Les Paul through a direct box, and from there into a mic channel,’ he told Guitar World. “We used the mic amp of the mixing board to get distortion. Then we ran it through two Urie 1176 Universal compressors in series.”
But Page didn’t just record his guitar part once. No — he triple-tracked it, creating a potent Les Paul–on-steroids tone.
“Curiously, I was listening to that track when we were reviewing the tapes and the guitars almost sound like an analog synthesizer,” Page noted.
As for the song’s title. Although it appears nowhere in the lyrics, the name refers to a black Labrador Retriever that wandered the grounds of Headley Grange, the former workhouse in Headley, Hampshire, England that Zeppelin converted into their home/studio for Led Zeppelin III, IV, Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti.
The dog would go out at night and return exhausted every morning, leading Plant to believe it was having sex in the woods. Using that as his premise, the singer composed lyrics befitting a classic blues tune as well as the life the bluesmen who inspired “Black Dog” in the first place.
For all Jones' contributions to "Black Dog," 'in the end the song was the result was a group collaboration. As Page explained in conversation with All The Songs, “We were always trying to encourage him to come up with bits and pieces, so to speak. Because that’s what they usually were. He never came up with a complete song or anything.”
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