Music/news What is the longest Led Zeppelin song?
Following the break-up of The Beatles in 1970, Led Zeppelin joined The Rolling Stones and The Who as candidates for the rock ‘n’ roll throne. Their heavier blues-inspired approach, fuelled by John Bonham’s thunderous percussion and Jimmy Page’s rapturous guitar, brought something unprecedented when combined with the resonant, dynamic vocals of Robert Plant.
From the iconic, headbanging perversity of 1969’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ to 1979’s chaotic, surging ‘Carouselambra’, Led Zeppelin matured on and off the stage, documenting their musical odyssey with eight seminal studio albums. The group entered the fray with notable talent but proved themselves outstanding creatives and master composers throughout the 1970s.
Although their heavy rock sound was associated with the heavy metal genre it helped establish, Led Zeppelin was also widely considered a prog-rock band. Like their prog-town neighbours Pink Floyd, Yes and Rush, Led Zeppelin liked to put their instrumental and compositional talents to the test.
In 1971, the band released ‘Stairway to Heaven’, one of their most enduring epics, setting the tone for the complexities of future material. While the eight-minute chartbuster garnered attention on the level of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, it wasn’t the most technically complex track on its home album, Led Zeppelin IV.
The signature-switching ‘Black Dog’ certainly made ‘Stairway’ look like a piece of cake, but ‘Four Sticks’ was the only song to completely stump the band in the live arena. The drumming pattern lifts from a 5/4 verse section to a 6/8, and in the studio, it proved to be quite the challenge for drummer John Bonham to get his sticks around.
“It took him ages to get ‘Four Sticks’,” bassist John Paul Jones once recalled. “I seemed to be the only one who could actually count things in. Page would play something, and [John would] say, ‘That’s great. Where’s the first beat? You know it, but you gotta tell us…’ He couldn’t actually count what he was playing. It would be a great phrase, but you couldn’t relate it to a count. If you think of ‘one’ being in the wrong place, you are completely screwed.”
As well as complexity, Led Zeppelin were partial to expansive compositions. Although they never gave Pink Floyd’s 23.5-minute epic ‘Echoes’ a run for its money, Led Zeppelin often drew ‘Stairway to Heaven’ out to just over ten minutes during live performances and recorded several lengthy tracks in the studio.
In their studio-recorded discography, Led Zeppelin have just three songs clocking over ten minutes in length. In second and third place are late classics, ‘Achilles Last Stand’ and ‘Carouselambra’, at ten minutes and 31 seconds and ten minutes and 34 seconds, respectively. However, out in front by a more resounding margin is the side-one closer from Physical Graffiti, ‘In My Time of Dying’, at 11 minutes and eight seconds.
Listen to Led Zeppelin’s take on ‘In My Time of Dying’ below. It was originally recorded by Blind Willie Johnson as a traditional gospel song in 1927 but has since been adapted and covered many times, most famously by Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan.
