There’s nothing quite as motivating as reverse psychology, is there? Tell a person to do something, and you have a 50/50 chance of them meeting your request. Tell someone, “Ah, well, you wouldn’t be able to do it anyway,” and just watch how fast they run to prove you wrong. Such was the case for Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who heard an offhand comment by the then-ex-Beatle George Harrison through the grapevine. It wasn’t necessarily a dig on Harrison’s part. But it was enough to light a fire under Page.
Former Guitar World editor Brad Tolinski once asked Page if it was true that Harrison inspired the signature Led Zeppelin track, “Stairway to Heaven”. The question puzzled the guitarist until he realized, “You’ve got the right story but the wrong song.” He explained, “George was talking to Bonzo [John Bonham, Led Zeppelin drummer] one evening and said, ‘The problem with you guys is that you never do ballads.’ I said, ‘I’ll give him a ballad.’”
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Eager to prove his contemporary wrong, Page composed the moody, orchestral, sprawling track, “The Rain Song”, which is unlike anything else in Led Zeppelin’s catalogue. But Page didn’t stop at just writing a ballad. He also teased Harrison with a bit of a tongue-in-cheek homage. “You’ll notice I even quote ‘Something’ in the song’s first two chords,” Page told Tolinski. “Something”, of course, refers to the Harrison-penned ballad from Abbey Road.
Led Zeppelin Embodied The Beatles in More Ways Than One
Jimmy Page opting to incorporate a small movement from George Harrison’s “Something” in response to the ex-Beatles’ critique of Page’s band is pure petty brilliance. But it wasn’t the only way Led Zeppelin harkened back to the Fab Four in the late 1960s. Even inadvertently, this Houses of the Holy track embodied a similar energy to a Magical Mystery Tour track, which came out six years earlier. The lush string arrangements you hear on “The Rain Song” are actually played by Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones on a Mellotron synthesizer, the same one John Lennon played on the iconic Beatles track, “Strawberry Fields Forever”.
The synth strings—as well as other overdubs and the general arrangement—were all composed by Page in a rough demo, which the band used as a basic outline for the album version of “The Rain Song”. Page later admitted, “It was hard until we got the feel of it. It was one of those cases where you keep going at it, initially because we’d played all the instruments ourselves, and it was a matter of sorting out which overdubs were the least important or maybe inserting a new phrase,” per Martin Power’s No Quarter: The Three Lives of Jimmy Page.
Indeed, anything to prove a competitor wrong.
Photo by Robert Knight Archive/Redferns