There aren’t many genres where each member of a musical ensemble has the chance to be as individual as rock music allows. While many genres might have a lot of people contributing to the overall sound, only a couple of people in the mix can stand out among the rest. In rock, whether you play bass, guitar, drums or sing, you can be an individual and make head-turning music. Led Zeppelin are proof of this.
The magic of Led Zeppelin is a funny thing, as it is the result of each band member as an individual and the band as a whole. When you look at Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham, you are looking at some of the very best artists in their field. When you look through rock music and pick the best bassist, guitarist, vocalist and drummer to make a super band, you simply end up making Led Zeppelin again.
It’s not enough to just have a band of excellent musicians, though. When you are looking at good music and want to make a statement with the sound you’re putting out into the world, these excellent musicians need to come together in a way that will inspire. This is precisely what Led Zeppelin did; their individual talent merged perfectly, meaning they could create a cohesive sound of exemplary musicianship.
One of the tracks where this can be seen most clearly is ‘Black Dog’, the opening for Led Zeppelin 4 and widely considered one of the band’s best and most complicated songs. From start to finish, the entire band flexes its musical muscles, delivering solos, fills, and vocal acrobatics that somehow come together to make one song.
Even for a Led Zeppelin track, ‘Black Dog’ is incredibly complicated. It was initially written in a 3/16 time signature, which had to be changed because none of the band could keep up. However, the song comes across as a musical masterclass even after switching to an easier-to-play time signature.
Because of how successful Led Zeppelin was at the time and given they were inspiring a lot of the current musical landscape, there were a lot of bands who were adopting their style and covering their music. In light of that and because of the obvious complexity of ‘Black Dog’, there were a lot of people who believed that the only reason the band wrote the song and put it as the first track on the album was a statement of intent, making a song that no other musical outfit would be able to cover.
John Paul Jones, who was responsible for the initial riff and a lot of the track, eventually dispelled these rumours, saying, “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 rigg to ‘Black Dog’ on the back of a train ticket which I unfortunately don’t have.”