The Greatest Songs Ever! Black Dog

By winter 1970, rock-god avatars Led Zeppelin were three blockbuster albums into their career.

Comprising former Yardbird and session guitarist Jimmy Page, classically trained John Paul Jones and two working-class Midlanders in singer Robert Plant and drummer John “Bonzo” Bonham, album number four should have seen them cruising. Instead it was, as Jimmy Page remarked, “make or break,” a riposte to their critics who, despite the band’s huge success in America, saw them as derivative and opportunistic.

After initial sessions at Island Studios in London, they decamped to Headley Grange, a three-story manor house in the Hampshire countryside in southern England. They’d rehearsed there previously, but now, in the depths of winter, John Bonham sensed the place had deteriorated. Tour manager Richard Cole, in his Stairway to Heaven memoir, recalled reminding Bonham “that during our last visit we had sacrificed a banister to the gods when we needed firewood.”

Perhaps it was the cold, but Led Zeppelin kept to a grueling schedule. They would write and rehearse for a week. Then the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording studio was booked to record the album. They hired it for just six days.

“Jimmy had the nickname ‘Led Wallet,’ and it’s true, he was a bit tight,” says Andy Johns, brother of legendary producer Glyn Johns and engineer on Led Zeppelin IV. “Mick Jagger had offered us his baronial mansion Stargroves for £1,000 a week and Jimmy wouldn’t pay it. So we ended up in this 20-by-25-foot room with Bonzo playing drums in the hallway.”

Chief songwriters Page and Plant arrived with 12 taped songs, including fragments of a tune that would evolve into the epic “Stairway to Heaven.” But uncharacteristically, Jones stepped in with a riff inspired by a track on the Muddy Waters LP Electric Mud.

“I wanted to try electric blues with a rolling bass part,” Jones said. “Black Dog” was born.

Zep fans knew of Page’s keen interest in occultist Aleister Crowley. But any of them believing “Black Dog” carried some satanic resonance were off-base.

“There was a black dog hanging around Headley Grange,” the guitarist says with a shrug.

“Jimmy thought he’d seen a ghost there too,” Johns adds. “The rest of us moaned about being cold, but Jimmy was more concerned with creepy noises or flying fucking furniture.”

It was agreed that Jones’s idea would provide an ideal opener for the new album. To get the intense, dense sound, Page’s guitars were triple-tracked and recorded directly from the mixing desk rather than amplified.

“I stole the idea from Bill Halverson, who worked with Buffalo Springfield,” Johns says. “And you never had any problem convincing Jimmy his guitar should be as loud as possible.”

“That’s the guitar army waking up: Rise and shine,” Page said of the song’s intro.

But raw power wasn’t what they were after. That would obliterate Plant’s erotic “Hey, hey, mama, said the way you move.” Page suggested an a cappella stop-start vocal after hearing Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well.”

Meanwhile, Bonham, who often approached his drum kit like it was an old piece of furniture that needed smashing into more manageable pieces, proved capable of great subtlety. Ensconced in Headley Grange’s vast hallway, he perfected the song’s deceptively simple time-signature variations (4/4 with a 5/4 variation), inspired in part by his knowledge of Little Richard’s “Keep a Knockin’.”

“The band is getting really attuned to time slips,” Plant enthused. “We were messing around when the other lads suddenly came up with that passage on ‘Black Dog.’ They just played it, fell about all over the floor for 20 minutes in fits of laughter, played it again, burst into more laughter, then put it down on tape.”

All they needed now was a suitable banshee wail. “Black Dog” was a primal howl that nodded to the blues greats who inspired so much British ’60s rock. Plant’s lyrics followed this tradition: Essentially an essay on relationships that could’ve been written by a caveman, the author bemoans a long-legged girl who’s good at sex but otherwise unreliable.

“There are moguls of lyrics-writing in every generation, and I guess I’m just below the mogul zone,” Plant later manfully conceded.

“Black Dog” embodied the sound of a peerless drummer, a transcendent vocalist and two multitalented musicians pushing each other to new heights.

“Before Zeppelin, when I’d played with Bonzo, we felt we were the best,” Plant said. “With Page and Jonesy, suddenly we weren’t. You were challenged and everything you wanted was in that room.”

The album was completed in August 1971, and its artwork would arouse a fair amount of controversy. Page decided the new record would eschew all marketing considerations: Its sleeve would bear no title, no band name, no record-label logo.

“If the music was good, we could call ourselves ‘The Cabbage’ and still get across to our audience,” Page explained. But the cover’s cryptic runic symbolism would give rise to all manner of dark, occultist speculation. Atlantic Records executives believed the band was committing commercial suicide.

Nevertheless, after prolonged mixing difficulties, the officially untitled album was released in November 1971.

The album has since become known as “Led Zeppelin IV,” the “Runes album,” “Zoso” (after a misreading of the album’s symbols) or “Untitled.” With “Stairway to Heaven,” the band wrote the pomp-rock ballad par excellence. And “Black Dog” became an instant FM hit; it remains playlisted more than 30 years on.

“When I was 14,” remembers Velvet Revolver guitarist and Guns N’ Roses alum Slash, “I stayed with my grandmother in L.A. She was a middleclass black woman with fine Southern manners. I’d play ‘Black Dog’ full volume, and she’d shout, ‘Stop playing that honky-tonk music!’ It was the biggest, baddest, sexiest riff out there.”

It was also an unforgettable opening to 42 minutes of music, which, at 22 million copies sold, became the fourth-highest-selling album in history.