“What the hell is going on!”: How the Led Zeppelin song ‘Celebration Day’ was almost deleted from history.
It’s hard for any artist to know when they have gold on their hands in the studio. They might take some time to flesh out some guitar parts or find the right tone for how the vocals should sound, but somewhere in the mix, there’s that one moment where everything starts gelling together in the exact right way. While that could justifiably be half of the Led Zeppelin discography, Jimmy Page remembered that one of the biggest highlights of their middle period was nearly lost forever.
Granted, Zeppelin had more rock and roll marvels than they knew what to do with back in the day. Although their music was far from the most single-heavy in the world, hearing them embrace the album as an art form led to them turning in the most savage assaults of hard rock put to tape, whether that was hearing Robert Plant bark his way through ‘How Many More Times’ or leaving Page to his own devices when making something as brilliantly hectic as ‘Heartbreaker’.
When listeners first heard the opening notes of ‘Immigrant Song’, they knew they were in for another wild ride with Led Zeppelin III. Although the album is now praised as one of the band’s finest acoustic-driven works, ‘Celebration Day’ remains one of their most adventurous tracks. It takes the raw power that made Led Zeppelin II a success and infuses it with offbeat rhythms and sonic elements that wouldn’t feel out of place on a vintage blues record, showcasing the band’s ability to push boundaries while staying true to their roots.
But recording with Zeppelin also means working with Page’s strange mind. There was nothing off the table for him and Eddie Kramer as an engineer, and when working on songs like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ for instance, Page proved that he was never afraid to take the song into noncommercial territory if it meant creating the right vibe for the song.
When you’re that caught up in the moment, some things tend to slip by, and that meant missing out on a piece of ‘Celebration Day’ before we even heard it. As Page was tracking his guitar parts, he remembered getting so swept up in his playing that he didn’t see one of the engineers recording over one of the guitar tracks for ‘Celebration Day’, leaving the section completely blank.
While Page only noticed it in passing, he managed to rescue the tune at the last minute, saying, “The rhythm track in the beginning of ‘Celebration Day’ was completely wiped by an engineer. I forget what we were recording, but I was listening through the headphones and nothing was coming through. I started yelling, ‘What the hell is going on!!’ Then I noticed that the red recording light was on what used to be the drums. The engineer had accidentally recorded over Bonzo!”
This kind of thing may have led to any other engineer getting fired on the spot, but seeing how Zeppelin recovered it, they actually managed to make the mistake that much better. Rather than record the whole thing again, getting Page to crossfade both of them and connect it to the beginning of ‘Friends’ makes it feel like you’re watching the band in the rehearsal room as they play.
Although ‘Celebration Day’ might be as celebrated in the same breath as songs like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or ‘Dazed and Confused’, it’s a miracle that we’re even able to hear it today. Many pieces of Zeppelin’s story may be lost to history, but they knew better than to let songs fall by the wayside.