VIDEO

Robert Plant: "I was holding a pencil and paper, and for some reason I was in a very bad mood. Then all of a sudden my hand was writing out the words, 'There's a lady is sure [sic], all that glitters is gold, and she's buying a stairway to heaven'. I just sat there and looked at them and almost leapt out of my seat. ... was some cynical aside about a woman getting everything she wanted all the time without giving back any thought or consideration. The first line begins with that cynical sweep of the hand ... and it softened up after that."

Jimmy Page: (I wrote the music) "over a long period, the first part coming at Bron-Yr-Aur one night. I had these pieces, these guitar pieces, that I wanted to put together. I had a whole idea of a piece of music that I really wanted to try and present to everybody and try and come to terms with. Bit difficult really, because it started on acoustic, and as you know it goes through to the electric parts. But we had various run-throughs [at Headley Grange] where I was playing the acoustic guitar and jumping up and picking up the electric guitar. Robert was sitting in the corner, or rather leaning against the wall, and as I was routining the rest of the band with this idea and this piece, he was just writing. And all of a sudden he got up and started singing, along with another run-through, and he must have had 80% of the words there ... I had these sections, and I knew what order they were going to go in, but it was just a matter of getting everybody to feel comfortable with each gear shift that was going to be coming."

Jimmy Page: "I do have the original tape that was running at the time we ran down "Stairway To Heaven" completely with the band. I'd worked it all out already the night before with John Paul Jones, written down the changes and things. All this time we were all living in a house and keeping pretty regular hours together, so the next day we started running it down. There was only one place where there was a slight rerun. For some unknown reason Bonzo couldn't get the timing right on the twelve-string part before the solo. Other than that it flowed very quickly." (1977)
**KILL ME**

(Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant - lead vocals, tambourine
Jimmy Page - acoustic, electric guitar, and electric twelve-string guitar
John Paul Jones - recorders, Hohner electric piano, bass guitar
John Bonham - drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: ??
Recorded at: Headley Grange Studio, Headley, Hampshire, England, UK.
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

Jimmy Page: "I had [the riff] worked out already before entering the studio. I had rehearsed it. And then all of that other stuff, sonic wave sound and all that, I built it up in the studio, and put effects on it and things, treatments."

Jimmy Page: "No. No. (not written onstage) Absolutely incorrect. No, it was put together when we were rehearsing some music for the second album. I had a riff, everyone was at my house, and we kicked it from there. Never was it written during a gig"

Robert Plant: "Page's riff was Page's riff. It was there before anything else. I just thought, 'well, what am I going to sing?' That was it, a nick. Now happily paid for. At the time, there was a lot of conversation about what to do. It was decided that it was so far away in time and influence that ... well, you only get caught when you're successful. That's the game." (1990:Musician)

Eddie Kramer: "The famous Whole Lotta Love mix, where everything is going bananas, is a combination of Jimmy and myself just flying around on a small console twiddling every knob known to man."

Eddie Kramer: [A]t one point there was bleed-through of a previously recorded vocal in the recording of "Whole Lotta Love". It was the middle part where Robert [Plant] screams "Wo-man ... You need ... Love" Since we couldn't re-record at that point, I just threw some echo on it to see how it would sound and Jimmy [Page] said "Great! Just leave it."
**KILL ME**

Page came up with the guitar riff for "Whole Lotta Love" in the summer of 1968, on his houseboat along the Thames in Pangbourne, England. Playing the loose blues riff for the intro, on a Sunburst 1958 Les Paul Standard guitar which ascends into the first chorus. Then, beginning at 1:24 (and lasting until 3:02) the song dissolves to a free jazz-like break involving a theremin solo and a drum solo and the orgasmic moans of Robert Plant. ..... Led Zeppelin's bass player John Paul Jones has stated that Page's famous riff probably emerged from a stage improvisation during the band's playing of "Dazed and Confused". (Wikipedia)

In 1962, Muddy Waters recorded a blues vocal, "You Need Love", for Chess Records. As he had done with "You Shook Me", Waters overdubbed vocals on an instrumental track previously recorded by blues guitarist Earl Hooker and his band. Willie Dixon wrote the lyrics, which Dixon biographer Mitsutoshi Inaba describes as being "about the necessity of love". In 1966, British band the Small Faces recorded the song as "You Need Loving" for their eponymous debut Decca album. According to Steve Marriott, the group's vocalist and guitarist, Page and Plant attended several Small Faces gigs, where they expressed their interest in the song. Plant's phrasing is particularly similar to that of Marriott's, who added "he [Plant] sang it the same, phrased it the same, even the stops at the end were the same". Similarities with "You Need Love" led to a lawsuit against Led Zeppelin in 1985, settled out of court in favour of Dixon for an undisclosed amount. On subsequent releases, Dixon's name is included on the credits for "Whole Lotta Love". (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(John Bonham, Willie Dixon, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – electric guitars, theremin, slide guitar, backing vocals
John Paul Jones – bass guitar, backing vocals
John Bonham – drums, maracas, shaker, tambourine, bongos, congas

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Eddie Kramer
Recorded at: Olympic Studios, London, England, May 1969
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

Robert Plant: "Let me tell you 'bout this poor old dog because he was a retriever in his early days, and the only thing he could ever find in his late days was his old lady who lived two houses away from where we were recording. And he used to go see the old lady quite regularly, but after he'd "boogied" and everything else he couldn't get back. And we used to carry him back."

John Paul Jones: "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." (Triple M Led Zeppelin special)

John Paul Jones: "I wanted to try an electric blues with a rolling bass part. But it couldn't be too simple. I wanted it to turn back on itself. I showed it to the guys, and we fell into it. We struggled with the turn-around, until [John] Bonham figured out that you just four-time as if there's no turn-around. That was the secret."

Robert Plant: "Not all my stuff is meant to be scrutinized. Things like 'Black Dog' are blatant, let's-do-it-in-the-bath type things, but they make their point just the same." (Cameron Crowe interview)
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The song's title is a reference to a nameless, black Labrador Retriever that wandered around the Headley Grange studios during recording. The retriever, despite his advanced age, was still sexually adventurous, like the song's protagonist who reiterates his desperate desire for a woman's love and the happiness it provides. The lyric "Eyes that shine burning red" is also reminiscent of the Black dog legend. Plant's vocals were recorded in two takes. John Paul Jones, who is credited with writing the main riff, wanted to write a song with a winding riff and complex rhythm changes that people could not "groove" or dance to. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – guitars
John Paul Jones – bass
John Bonham – drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: ??
Recorded at: Headley Grange, Headley, England, 1971
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

Robert Plant: "The whole inspiration came from the fact that the road went on and on and on. It was a single-track road which neatly cut through the desert. Two miles to the East and West were ridges of sandrock. It basically looked like you were driving down a channel, this dilapidated road, and there was seemingly no end to it. 'Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dreams …' It's one of my favourites … that, 'All My Love' and 'In the Light' and two or three others really were the finest moments. But 'Kashmir' in particular. It was so positive, lyrically. ..... It was an amazing piece of music to write to, and an incredible challenge for me. … Because of the time signature, the whole deal of the song is … not grandiose, but powerful: it required some kind of epithet, or abstract lyrical setting about the whole idea of life being an adventure and being a series of illuminated moments. But everything is not what you see. It was quite a task, 'cause I couldn't sing it. It was like the song was bigger than me. It's true: I was petrified, it's true. It was painful; I was virtually in tears." (Cameron Crowe interview)

Robert Plant: "'Kashmir' came from a trip Jimmy and me made down the Moroccan Atlantic coast, from Agadir down to Sidi Ifni. We were just the same as the other hippies really." (2010:Mojo)

Jimmy Page: "I had a sitar for some time and I was interested in modal tunings and Arabic stuff. It started off with a riff and then employed Eastern lines underneath."

Jimmy Page: "The intensity of 'Kashmir' was such that when we had it completed, we knew there was something really hypnotic to it, we couldn't even describe such a quality. At the beginning, there was only Bonzo [drummer John Bonham] and me in Headley Grange. He played the rhythm on drums, and I found the riff as well as the overdubs which were thereafter duplicated by an orchestra, to bring more life to the track. It sounded so frightening at first..."
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The lyrics were written by Robert Plant in 1973 immediately after Led Zeppelin's 1973 US Tour, in an area he called "the waste lands" of Southern Morocco, while driving from Goulimine to Tantan in the Sahara Desert. This was despite the fact that the song is named after Kashmir, a region in the Indian subcontinent. In an interview he gave to William S. Burroughs in 1975, Page mentioned that at the time the song was composed, none of the band members had ever been to Kashmir. ..... The song is almost entirely built upon an ascending chromatic ostinato over a pedal drone[5] that Page had first recorded in his home studio, using the same guitar tuning (DADGAD) as he used for "Black Mountain Side", "White Summer" and the unreleased "Swan-song". Page recorded a demo version with drummer John Bonham late in 1973 when John Paul Jones was late for the recording sessions. Plant later added lyrics and a middle section and, in early 1974, Jones added orchestration. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(John Bonham, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead vocals, harmonica
Jimmy Page – electric, acoustic, lap steel/slide guitar, mandolin
John Paul Jones – bass, organ, acoustic/electric piano, mellotron, guitar, mandolin, VCS3 synthesiser, Hohner clavinet, Hammond organ, string arrangement
John Bonham – drums, percussion

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: George Chkiantz, Andy Johns, Eddie Kramer, Ron Nevison
Recorded at: Headley Grange, Headley, England, 1974 ..... and Olympic Studios, London, 1974
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

Robert Plant: "We weren't being pompous ... We did come from the land of the ice and snow. We were guests of the Icelandic Government on a cultural mission. We were invited to play a concert in Reykjavik and the day before we arrived all the civil servants went on strike and the gig was going to be cancelled. The university prepared a concert hall for us and it was phenomenal. The response from the kids was remarkable and we had a great time. 'Immigrant Song' was about that trip and it was the opening track on the album that was intended to be incredibly different."

Robert Plant: "We went to Iceland, and it made you think of Vikings and big ships ... and John Bonham's stomach ... and bang, there it was – Immigrant Song!" (1970)
**KILL ME**

"Immigrant Song" was written during Led Zeppelin's tour of Iceland, Bath and Germany in the summer of 1970. The opening date of this tour took place in Reykjavík, Iceland, which inspired vocalist Robert Plant to write the song. ..... The song begins with a distinctive, wailing cry from Plant and is built on a repeating, staccato riff by guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham. It is performed in the key of F? minor at a moderate tempo of 112 beats per minute.[8] There is a very faint count-off at the beginning of the track with lots of hiss which appears on the album version, but is trimmed from the single version. The hiss is feedback from an echo unit. ..... The song's lyrics are written from the perspective of Vikings rowing west from Scandinavia in search of new lands. The lyrics, such as "Fight the horde, sing and cry, Valhalla, I am coming!" make explicit reference to Viking conquests and the Old Norse religion. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – guitar
John Paul Jones – bass
John Bonham – drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Andy Johns
Recorded at: Headley Grange, England, 1970
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

Jimmy Page: "We were recording another number [Four Sticks]; we’d just finished a take and John Bonham did the drum intro and we just followed on. I started doing pretty much half of that riff you hear on Rock n Roll and it was just so exciting that we thought, "let’s just work on this". The riff and the sequence was really immediate to those 12-bar patterns that you had in those old rock songs like Little Richard, etc, and it was just so spur-of-the-moment the way that it just came together more or less out of nowhere. ..... It actually ground to a halt after about 12 bars, but it was enough to know that there was enough of a number there to keep working on it. Robert [Plant] even came in singing on it straight away."
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Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has said that this song came to be written as a spontaneous jam session, whilst the band were trying (and failing) to finish the track "Four Sticks", at the Headley Grange mansion they had rented in Hampshire, England to record the track. Drummer John Bonham played the introduction in triplets and Page added a guitar riff. The tapes were rolling and fifteen minutes later the basis of the song was down. To achieve the distinctive guitar sound on the track, Page plugged his guitar directly into the mixing console, bypassing the traditional amplifier and microphone setup. The song structure was completed in thirty minutes. The working title for the recording was "It's Been a Long Time". (Wikipedia)

Robert Plant wrote the lyrics, which were a response to critics who claimed their previous album, Led Zeppelin III, wasn't really rock and roll. Led Zeppelin III had more of an acoustic, folk sound, and Plant wanted to prove they could still rock out. (Songfacts)
**KILL ME**

(John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – electric guitars
John Paul Jones – bass
John Bonham – drums, tambourine
Ian Stewart – piano

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered:
Recorded at: Headley Grange, Headley, England, 1971

(some sources say Nicky Hopkins on piano, not Stewart) **KILL ME**

VIDEO

"Dazed and Confused" is a blues-rock song written and performed by Jake Holmes. The song refers to the potential break-up of a relationship, typical of blues numbers. The song was later covered by the Yardbirds, which inspired a reworking by Led Zeppelin. The latter's version appeared on the group's debut album and became a popular live piece, featuring improvisation that stretched the track's length to up to 40 minutes in concert, and theatrics including playing the guitar with a violin bow. ..... When the Yardbirds disbanded in 1968, Page planned to record the song yet again, this time with Led Zeppelin. According to Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, the first time he heard the song was at the band's first rehearsal session at Gerrard Street in London, in 1968: "Jimmy played us the riffs at the first rehearsal and said, 'This is a number I want us to do'." Led Zeppelin recorded their version in October 1968 at Olympic Studios, London, and the song was included on their debut album Led Zeppelin (1969). "Dazed and Confused" was the second song recorded at the Olympic Studios session.

The Led Zeppelin version was not credited to Holmes. Page used the title, penned a new set of lyrics, and modified the melody. The song's arrangement, however, remained markedly similar to the version performed by the Yardbirds the previous year. Holmes' publisher Universal Music declined to get involved. In June 2010, Holmes filed a lawsuit in United States District Court, alleging copyright infringement and naming Page as a co-defendant. Led Zeppelin's live album Celebration Day (2012) attributes the song to "Page; inspired by Jake Holmes", although the writer's credit with ASCAP remains unchanged. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(Jimmy Page, inspired by Jake Holmes)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – guitars
John Paul Jones – bass
John Bonham – drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: ??
Recorded at: Olympic Studios, London, October 1968
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

Jimmy Page: "I didn't expect people not to get it. I thought it was pretty obvious. The song itself was a cross between reggae and a '50s number, "Poor Little Fool," Ben E. King's things, stuff like that." (1977)
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The title is a play on the word "Jamaica" when spoken in a British accent. This song was meant to imitate reggae and its "dub" derivative emerging from Jamaica in the early 1970s. Its genesis is traced to Led Zeppelin's rehearsals at Stargroves in 1972, when drummer John Bonham started with a beat similar to 1950s doo-wop, and then twisted it into a slight off beat tempo, upon which a reggae influence emerged. The distinctive drum sound was created by placing three microphones a good distance away from Bonham's drums.

The name of the song is derived from an old joke, where two friends have the following exchange: "My wife's gone to the West Indies." "Jamaica?" (which has a similar pronunciation as "D'you make her?") "No, she wanted to go". On 21 July 2005, Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant discussed the song during an interview with Mike Halloran, a DJ on radio station FM94.9 in San Diego. During the interview, he talked about the different interpretations and pronunciations of the name of the song. The title, which appears nowhere in the lyrics, was chosen because it reflects the reggae feel of the song. Plant has said that he finds it amusing when fans completely overlook the apostrophes and naively mispronounce the title as "Dire Maker". (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – guitars
John Paul Jones – bass, piano
John Bonham – drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Andy Johns, Eddie Kramer
Recorded at: Stargroves, East Woodhay, England, 1972
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

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Lyrically, the song is about a man who is supposed to meet a woman on a certain street corner. When the woman does not appear, he is filled with sorrow at being stood up. By the final verse, he realizes that he has not gone to the right place, making him "just a fool waiting on the wrong block," as Plant sings.

The song exhibits a Latin feel. The main section is in 12/8 meter; this section employs an unusual polyrhythmic groove, with the piano and bass playing six beats per measure and the melody (and parts of the drum kit) playing four beats per measure. The result is that most of the instruments appear to be playing quarter-note triplets against the swing of the melody and drum kit. Drummer John Bonham plays a shuffle beat similar to the "Purdie shuffle" rhythm, along with a samba-style breakdown and hop-skip riff arrangement. A master drum track shows that the samba breakdown (2:25) was recorded separately.

Bassist John Paul Jones and vocalist Robert Plant developed the idea for the samba beat from watching the 1978 FIFA World Cup tournament in Argentina. Guitarist Jimmy Page used an MXR Blue Box effect pedal during the solo to produce the octave sound.
**KILL ME**

(John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant - lead vocals
Jimmy Page - electric guitars, 12-string acoustic guitar
John Paul Jones - bass, piano, marimba(?)
John Bonham - drums, timbales, agogo bells, whistles, cowbell, maracas, claves

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Leif Mases
Recorded at: Polar Studios, Stockholm, Sweden, Nov.–Dec. 1978
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

Jimmy Page: " we played it through entirely as you know it, but I was playing electric. Yeah, that’s right (edited out of the beginning). “Presumably”. It sounds that way. It sounds like the acoustic is going straight through." (1993:Guitar World)
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Plant's lyrics were inspired by the J.R.R. Tolkien book The Hobbit, and to Tolkein's 1915 poem of the same name. "Over The Hills And Far Away" describes the adventure the Hobbits embark on. ..... The music was inspired by Jimmy Page's Celtic ancestry. (Songfacts)

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant originally constructed the song in 1970 at Bron-Yr-Aur, a small cottage in Wales where they stayed after completing a gruelling North American concert tour.[3] The song was first called "Many, Many Times", as shown on a picture of the original master on the Led Zeppelin website. Page plays a six-string acoustic guitar introduction and repeats the theme with a 12-string acoustic guitar in unison. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – guitars
John Paul Jones – bass, harpsichord
John Bonham – drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Andy Johns, Eddie Kramer
Recorded at: Stargroves, East Woodhay, England, 1972
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

The lyrics were inspired by blues musician Robert Johnson's 1936 "Terraplane Blues." A Terraplane is a classic car, and the song uses car parts as metaphors for sex—"pump your gas," "rev all night," etc. The themes of these songs however differ; "Terraplane Blues" is about infidelity, while "Trampled Under Foot" is about giving in to sexual temptation. The song was written by Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, and evolved out of a jam session in 1972. Much rehearsal went into perfecting the relentless semi-funk riff that dominates this song. John Paul Jones has credited Stevie Wonder with the inspiration for the beat ("Superstition", 1972), which he played on a clavinet. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – vocals
Jimmy Page – guitars, production
John Paul Jones – bass guitar, clavinet
John Bonham – drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Andy Johns, Eddie Kramer, Ron Nevison
Recorded at: Headley Grange, Headley, England, 1974
...... and Olympic Studios, London, England, 1974
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VIDEO

It was written in honour of Plant's son Karac, who died while Led Zeppelin was on their 1977 North American tour. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

Robert Plant: “After the death of my son Karac in 1977, I received a lot of support from [Bonham], and I went through the mill because the media turned on the whole thing and made it even worse. I had to look after my family and at that time, as we regrouped, I applied to take a job at a Rudolph Steiner training college in Sussex. I wanted to just get out of it – to go away and forget it.” (Barney Hoskyns interveiw)

Robert Plant: " In '77, when I lost my boy, I didn't really want to go swinging around—"Hey hey mama say the way you move" didn't really have a great deal of import any more. In Through The Out Door is more conscientious and less animal" (1990)

Jimmy Page: "We both felt that In Through the Out Door was a little soft. I was not really very keen on "All My Love". I was a little worried about the chorus. I could just imagine people doing the wave and all of that. And I thought, 'That is not us. That is not us.' In its place it was fine, but I would not have wanted to pursue that direction in the future." (1998: Guitar World )


**KILL ME**

(John Paul Jones, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – guitars
John Paul Jones – bass, synthesizer
John Bonham – drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Leif Mases
Recorded at: Polar Studios, Stockholm, Sweden, Nov.–Dec. 1978
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

The track is done in the style of a 1950s rock and roll number. Some of lead singer Robert Plant's lyrics are a homage to rockabilly idioms. John Bonham's drumming is controlled rather than bombastic, driven by interplay between the ride cymbal's bell and snare. Meanwhile, Jimmy Page's guitar solo is short and measured, coming in halfway through the song. The band recorded the song at Musicland Studios in Germany, and it only took them about an hour to write it. Plant sang from a wheelchair because he was recovering at the time from a car accident he had sustained in Greece. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(immy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant - lead vocals
Jimmy Page - guitars
John Paul Jones - bass
John Bonham - drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Keith Harwood
Recorded at: Musicland Studios, Munich, Germany, Nov.–Dec. 1975
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

Jimmy Page: "The most stunning thing about the track, of course, is Bonzo's amazing kick drum. It's superhuman when you realize he was not playing with double kick. That's one kick drum! That's when people started understanding what he was all about.["

John Paul Jones: "Usually anything [by Led Zeppelin] with lots of notes was mine and anything with chunky chords was Page's. Things like 'Good Times Bad Times', those are my sort of riffs, they're quite busy."
**KILL ME**

: "" ()

: "" ()

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**KILL ME**

(Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, John Bonham)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – guitars, backing vocals
John Paul Jones – bass guitar, backing vocals
John Bonham – drums, backing vocals

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Glyn Johns
Recorded at: Olympic Studios, London, October 1968
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

The most common interpretation of the song's title involves a reference to the Misty Mountains in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. The lyrics refer to the events of the 7 July 1968 "Legalise Pot Rally" in Hyde Park, London, in which police made arrests for marijuana possession. The lyrics reflect Plant's quest for a better society, a place and time when hangups are replaced with individual freedom and a life of mutual support and rapport.

The song is a medium tempo rocker which begins with bassist John Paul Jones on Hohner electric piano. The basic structure developed from a riff Jimmy Page came up with which was enhanced by John Paul Jones, whose electric piano introduces the theme on the finished track. It is notable for the presence of layered, melodic guitar and keyboard parts. The song features a memorable riff, on which Page and Jones harmonize using keyboard and guitar. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – guitars
John Paul Jones – bass, electric piano
John Bonham – drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Andy Johns
Recorded at: Headley Grange, Headley, England, 1971
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

Jimmy Page: "The interesting thing about the guitar solo is that it was recorded after we had already finished "Heartbreaker" - it was an afterthought. That whole section was recorded in a different studio and it was sort of slotted in the middle. If you notice, the whole sound of the guitar is different." (1998:Guitar World)
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"Heartbreaker" opens Side II of the album, and is famous for its memorable guitar riff by Jimmy Page, along with its unaccompanied solo, which he improvised on the spot. The song begins on beat 4, bending the minor 7th (G) up to the root (A), kicking off an aggressive riff constructed around the blues scale, followed by a powerful power chord assault during the verse from not only the guitar but the bass playing power chords also. Robert Plant sings about a woman named Annie, who is up to her old tricks again; the lyrics recall a tale of a man painfully wizened after their encounters. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – guitars
John Paul Jones – bass
John Bonham – drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Eddie Kramer
Recorded at: A&R Studios, New York City, 1969
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

The song evolved out of a jam session in the studio. John Bonham started the beat, John Paul Jones came in on bass, Jimmy Page played a funk guitar riff (and a chord sequence that he'd been experimenting with since 1970), and Robert Plant started singing. For the recording of this track, Page played on a Fender Stratocaster guitar and it is possible to hear him depressing a whammy bar at the end of each phrase.

This song is a play on James Brown's style of funk in the same way that "D'yer Mak'er" (which it backed on a single release) experiments with reggae. Since most of Brown's earlier studio recordings were done live with almost no rehearsal time, he often gave directions to the band in-song e.g. "take it to the bridge" - the bridge of the song. Robert Plant pays tribute to this at the end by asking "Where's that confounded bridge?" (spoken, just as the song finishes abruptly since the song doesn't contain a bridge). Jones considers this to be one of his favourite Led Zeppelin songs. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

(John Bonham. John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant - lead vocals
Jimmy Page - guitar
John Paul Jones - bass, VCS3 synthesizer
John Bonham - drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Andy Johns, Eddie Kramer
Recorded at: Headley Grange, Headley, England, 1972
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

"When the Levee Breaks" is a blues song written and first recorded by husband and wife Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie in 1929. The song is in reaction to the upheaval caused by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The Great Mississippi Flood ravaged the state of Mississippi and surrounding areas. It destroyed many homes and devastated the agricultural economy of the Mississippi Basin. Many people were forced to flee to the cities of the Midwest in search of work, contributing to the "Great Migration" of African Americans in the first half of the 20th century. The song focused mainly on when more than 13,000 residents in and near Greenville, Mississippi evacuated to a nearby, unaffected levee for its shelter at high ground. The tumult that would have been caused if this and other levees had broken was the song's underlying theme. "When the Levee Breaks" was re-worked by English rock group Led Zeppelin as the last song on Led Zeppelin IV, released in 1971. The lyrics in Led Zeppelin's version, credited to Memphis Minnie and the individual members of Led Zeppelin, were partially based on the original recording. (Wikipedia)
**KILL ME**

Jimmy Page: "On "Levee Breaks" you've got backwards harmonica, backwards echo, phasing, and there's also flanging; and at the end, you get this super-dense sound, in layers, that's all built around the drum track. And you've got Robert, constant in the middle, and everything starts to spiral around him. It's all done with panning." (2008:Uncut)

Jimmy Page: ""When the Levee Breaks" is probably the most subtle thing on [the album] as far as production goes, because each twelve bars has something new about it, though at first it might not be apparent. There's a lot of different effects on there that, at the time, had never been used before. Phased vocals, a backwards echoed harmonica solo."
**KILL ME**

(John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Memphis Minnie, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead/backing vocals, tambourine, harmonica
Jimmy Page – electric/acoustic guitars
John Paul Jones – bass, electric piano, mellotron
John Bonham – drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Andy Johns
Recorded at: Headley Grange, Headley, England, 1971
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

It has been suggested that the title of the song was originally supposed to be known as "Wheelchair Song" as an acknowledgment of Plant's broken ankle which caused him to fear he would never walk again, and which was a result of a car accident. Lyrically, the song was inspired by Plant's experiences in Morocco, where he and Page travelled following Led Zeppelin's 1975 Earl's Court concerts. Plant specifically refers to Morocco's Atlas Mountains in the line: "The mighty arms of Atlas hold the heavens from the Earth". This is a double-meaning to imply the Atlas mountains in a physical sense seeming to hold up the sky, as well as the reference to the Titan Atlas and his task to hold up the sky on his shoulders and thus separate it from the Earth. Plant's lyrics were also inspired by some of the poetry he was reading at the time, which includes William Blake.[citation needed] "Albion remains/sleeping now to rise again" is a reference to Blake's engraving The Dance Of Albion (Albion is the most ancient name of Great Britain). (Wikipedia)
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Jimmy Page: "I'll tell you about doing all the guitar overdubs to "Achilles Last Stand." There were basically two sections to the song when we rehearsed it. I know John Paul Jones didn't think I could succeed in what I was attempting to do. He said I couldn't do a scale over a certain section, that it just wouldn't work. But it did. What I planned to try and get that epic quality into it so it wouldn't just sound like two sections repeated, was to give the piece a totally new identity by orchestrating the guitars, which is something I've been into for quite some time. I knew it had to be jolly good, because the number was so long it just couldn't afford to be half-baked. It was all down to me how to do this. I had a lot of it mapped out in my mind, anyway, but to make a long story short, I did all the overdubs in one night ... I thought as far as I can value tying up that kind of emotion as a package and trying to convey it through two speakers, it was fairly successful." (1977)
**KILL ME**

(Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant – lead vocals
Jimmy Page – guitars
John Paul Jones – eight string bass
John Bonham – drums

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Keith Harwood
Recorded at: Musicland Studios, Munich, Germany, Nov.–Dec. 1975
**KILL ME**

VIDEO

Robert Plant: "might be a bit embarrassing at times lyrically, but it did sum up a period of my life when I was 22." (2002:Spin)

Robert Plant: "Me reflecting on the first years of the group, when I was only about... 20, and was struggling to find myself in the midst of all the craziness of California and the band and the groupies... " (2007:Spin)
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The song is reportedly about Canadian singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell, with whom Plant was infatuated. ..... This song started out as a song about Californian earthquakes and when Jimmy Page, audio engineer Andy Johns and band manager Peter Grant travelled to Los Angeles to mix Led Zeppelin IV, they coincidentally experienced a minor earthquake. At this point it was known as "Guide to California". (Wikipedia)

**KILL ME**

(Jimmy Page, Robert Plant)

Robert Plant — vocals
Jimmy Page — acoustic guitars
John Paul Jones — mandolin

Produced: Jimmy Page
Engineered: Andy Johns
Recorded at: Headley Grange, Headley, England, 1971
**KILL ME**