‘Black Dog’: the one Led Zeppelin song Jimmy Page didn’t write the riff for
Jimmy Page was a rock and roll weapon during the reign of Led Zeppelin. After spending years honing his craft as a sought-after session musician and, later, as a key component of The Yardbirds, Page’s guitar skills stood head and shoulders above the rest of the British rock scene during the late 1960s. It was his songwriting and performance that first established the groundbreaking hard rock sounds of Led Zeppelin, but strangely enough, not all of the iconic riffs he played were self-penned.
Led Zeppelin was a once-in-a-lifetime band composed of four of the most talented musicians in Britain at the time. Every core component of their line-up was as perfect as a hard rock outfit could get, paving the way for countless future artists to follow in the footsteps of the pioneering outfit. It must be said, however, that Page’s guitar riffs formed a huge part of the band’s appeal; he played like nobody else, and riffs sound as revolutionary today as they must have done back in the 1960s and 1970s.
Of course, a lot of Page’s material was inspired by – or, in many cases, ‘borrowed’ from – old-school blues artists like Howlin’ Wolf. However, he was not the only member of the group to take inspiration from that pioneering blues star. For the opening song of Led Zeppelin IV, the band took heavy inspiration from Wolf, constructing an instantly recognisable riff with its roots in blues storytelling. Unlike the vast majority of their songs, however, that riff was not penned by the hand of Jimmy Page.
John Paul Jones was often overshadowed within the line-up of Led Zeppelin, but his musical skill is truly undeniable. The bassist regularly contributed to the songwriting of the group, and in 1970, he wrote that iconic riff for ‘Black Dog’, forming the basis of the entire song. “I wrote ‘Black Dog’ on a train,” he told Bass Player in 2008.
“My Dad taught me how to write musical notation without using manuscript paper – just with numbers and note values – and I wrote that riff on the back of a train ticket coming back from a rehearsal at Jimmy Page’s house,” he continued. That riff, potentially written on the back of a train ticket, quickly took shape as ‘Black Dog’. Page, of course, aided in the song’s composition, along with Robert Plant, but the riff that Jones had scribbled down on the train was virtually untouched.
Recorded soon thereafter, at Headley Grange in December 1970, the song became a fcal point of the band’s fourth album, capturing their hard rock spirit and dedication to originality. After all, ‘Black Dog’ is not a typical Led Zeppelin song. Its call-and-response opening and unusual structure made it a strange and captivating anthem for the group, and one that guitarists everywhere have driven themselves mad attempting to replicate.
Arguably, the fact that the riff was written down first, rather than worked out on a guitar, is to blame for its unusual sound. Jones himself has often admitted that he would write riffs or pieces of music that he then found he could not play, working tirelessly to master the sounds that he himself had invented.
‘Black Dog’ exists as a good reminder that, although Jimmy Page’s riffs were essential to the sound and success of Led Zeppelin, the rest of the band were just as important when it came to songwriting.