Unfortunately, the tape is now lost, as are definitive memories of the time, although Gobhai recalled also playing Whole Lotta Love. The show was supposedly recorded onto cassette by the club’s resident DJ, Arul Harris, after which it fell into the possession of Atomic Forest’s Keith Kanga. Plant and Page looked like they were having fun. There was a long jam at the end, when Plant started talking about Bombay, then they did Black Dog. I remember Page going for a Stratocaster and it being in very bad shape, so he picked up my bandmate’s guitar, an old German thing, and played that instead.They started with Rock And Roll and played for 20 or 25 minutes. They just walked out on stage with the two musicians here.

Plant and Page didn’t have any equipment, and hadn’t rehearsed. “The Slip Disc was really a hole, not a very huge place at all,” he says. Stairway To Heaven gets all the attention – those intro arpeggios now a guitarist’s rite of passage – but the pitter-patter of mandolin and big open acoustic chords of The Battle Of Evermore are so comprehensive that drummer John Bonham could sit this one out.Īnd the hypnotic Going To California, with Page tuned to double drop D tuning (low to high: D-A-D-G-B-D), performs a miracle, switching the mood from Middle-earth to West Coast Pacific, setting up the album’s swampy denouement, When The Levee Breaks.A few days later, on a Monday night (most likely October 16), Plant and Page gave an impromptu concert at Bombay nightclub Slip Disc, accompanied by two local musicians and primitive stage gear. Then came the officially untitled album commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV. A spruce-topped acoustic, rosewood back and sides, the Craviola has a shape that resembles a lute crossed with a dreadnought, and a tone that was positively celestial. Live and on record, Page would use his 1970 Giannini Craviola 12-string for Tangerine. Tangerine is a classic minor-to-major key ballad, featuring both six- and 12-string acoustics. Led Zeppelin III signed off with a country-folk supernova of strumming and another nod to Jansch, Bron-Y-Aur Stomp, but not all of its acoustic arrangements were folk.

It was Fred Gerlach’s version that caught Page’s ear.Īgain, Page would take a traditional piece and make it his own: “I thought it was quite curious the way that song had started off in England and gone all the way around the States and come back, so then we were going to do it and send it back to the States again as a folk song.” One of those tracks was Gallows Pole, a foot-stomping folk tune that was centuries in the making, evolving out of an olde English standard, The Maid Freed From The Gallows, that had been reworked by the likes of Bob Dylan and Lead Belly. There were so many ideas put into the first album, but they were able to grow and be developed.” “It’s just variations on a theme, really. “People were saying, ‘Oh, Led Zeppelin’s gone acoustic.’ Well, what happened to your ears on the first album and the second album?” he said. Well, what happened to your ears on the first album and the second album? Jimmy Page People were saying, ‘Oh, Led Zeppelin’s gone acoustic’. Speaking to Total Guitar in 2020, Page said it gave them the space to explore the acoustic side of the band. On treble clef, it almost looks like an electric arrangement. As is Ramble On, a Tolkien-inspired track given forward motion by acoustics strummed hard. Either way, Thank You is one trippy journey. The three-dimensionality of Page’s production feels like a VR headset would be more appropriate than headphones. Page and Jones repeated the trick on Led Zeppelin II with Thank You, the ne plus ultra of gourmet ’70s rock arrangements. Page’s acoustic often did its best work when seeking out pockets of frequencies in busy mixes, adding texture and changing the feel of the composition. The hot summer ennui of Your Time Is Gonna Come transitions to pure Americana once John Paul Jones’ organ opens the floor to Page’s fingerstyle acoustic. That first album had more great acoustic moments. Performed on a Gibson J-200 jumbo, Black Mountain Side was an early showcase for Page’s acoustic orchestration and the freedom he found in open tunings, DADGAD on this occasion.

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