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My all time fave Led Zepp.

[–] 0 pt (edited )

This must have been around 1971?

I will always remember when I first heard this song, I was sneaking into a girl's house after driving about 20 miles through a blinding rainstorm in an old unreliable 63 Rambler to get there, in the middle of the night.

The girls inside were playing the record. I was only 15.

[–] 0 pt

The title does not appear in the lyrics, and has nothing to do with the song itself. The band worked up the song at Headley Grange, a mansion in Hampshire, England that is out in the country, surrounded by woods. A nameless black Labrador retriever would wander the grounds, and the band would feed it. When they needed a name for this track, which didn't have an obvious title, they thought of the canine and went with "Black Dog." Zeppelin bass player John Paul Jones got the idea for this song after hearing Muddy Waters' 1968 album Electric Mud. He wanted to try "electric blues with a rolling bass part," and "a riff that would be like a linear journey."

Jones rarely had completed songs together, but the bits and pieces he brought to Led Zeppelin's writing sessions proved worthy. When they started putting the album together, Jones introduced this riff, the song started to form. The first version Jones played was comically complex. "It was originally all in 3/16 time, but no one could keep up with that," he said.

When the mobile recording studio (owned by The Rolling Stones) showed up at the mansion, this song was ready to go and recorded there.

The sounds at the beginning are Jimmy Page warming up his guitar. He called it "Waking up the army of guitars." As Robert Plant sings every line after the music stops, you can faintly hear Bonham tapping his drumsticks together to keep the time and this was one of the few songs for which John Paul Jones used a pick to play his bass.

It has been claimed that John Paul Jones arranged the complicated time signatures so nobody would be able to cover the song. Asked about the allegations during Australia's Triple M Led Zeppelin special, he responded by saying the story was just a myth, adding: "I actually wrote it in rehearsal from Jimmy's house on the train. My dad was a musician and he showed me a way of writing down notation on anything. And so I wrote the riff to 'Black Dog' on the back of a train ticket which I unfortunately don't have." The guitars are heavily layered. Four separate Jimmy Page guitar tracks were overdubbed. Page recorded the guitar directly into a 1176 limiter preamp (manufactured by Universal Audio), distorted the stages of it, and then sent that to a normally operating limiter. In other words, no guitar amplifier was used in the recording process.

I guess I am old school. I just liked the way it fell into place. Seems the effort worked for me. I am not a Led Head I only like a couple and this is one of them.