hey, welcome to 12tone!
Led Zeppelin III is, unsurprising, the third album Led Zeppelin released, and it represents
a sort of turning point for the band.
it's where they started to really experiment with styles, stepping away from their early
psychedelic blues rock stuff in favor of more acoustic, folk-influenced music.
but that's not to say it wasn't heavy: I mean, the very first track was the Immigrant Song,
a proto-metal ode to the viking invasion of England, and that's the song we're looking
at today.
it starts like this: (bang) and the first thing I want to look at is the notes or, rather,
the note.
we've got a bunch of low F#s occasionally punctuated by a high F#, and that's pretty
much it.
there's not a lot of harmonic complexity here, but that's not a bad thing: it allows the
guitar to become an almost rhythmic instrument, like a second set of drums, to really play
up the militaristic vibe of the piece.
and that drummy feel is further accentuated by the placement of those high F#s: they're
on beats 2 and 4.
In a traditional rock drum pattern, these are where you play the snare, and they're
the most rhythmically accented parts of the bar, so playing the high F#s there helps emphasize
that backbeat feel.
in fact, the entire rhythm of the riff seems carefully crafted to make that bit stand out.
at a glance, it looks a lot like a pattern called a gallop, where we have an 8th note
on the beat, then two 16th notes leading us into the next one, like this: (bang) but,
well, by itself it's... pretty boring.
it's not interesting enough to compensate for the lack of melodic diversity, so to spice
it up they take the second-to-last note in the bar and play it a bit early, giving us
this instead: (bang) continuing the drum theme, this reminds me of a common hi-hat technique.
normally, when playing a hi-hat, you have two choices: you can play it closed, with
the two cymbals pressed together, which gives you a short, percussive tick, or you can play
it open, which gives you a more traditional, sustained cymbal sound.
but there's also a third option: you can play it open, then immediately close it, giving
you a splashy, accented hit that's exciting without overstaying its welcome.
I'm not a drummer so I reached out to a friend of mine who is to ask what this is called
and they told me that as far as they know it doesn't really have an official name, it's
just a thing drummers know how to do, but if you have a good name for it, please, let
me know in the comments.
anyway, point is, by hitting a high F# and then immediately jumping back down to a low
one, Page is basically doing that hi-hat thing but on his guitar, and I think that's pretty
neat.
also, quick aside: this last 16th is a bit of a ghost note.
the drums don't really play it, at least not on the kick or snare like they do with the
rest of the notes, and the guitar will often mute it so it's only sort of there.
it's definitely a part of the riff, but it's a little bit less present than the rest of
the notes, which helps prevent it from taking over the spotlight from the downbeat it's
setting up.
it's a subtle dynamic trick, but it makes a huge difference.
the last element of this intro we need to address is the vocals.
I doubt I'm blowing anyone's mind when I say that Plant's part here sounds more like a
warcry than a melody, which is fitting for a song about vikings, but I want to talk about
how they get that effect.
check it out: (bang) so in terms of notes, we start on a low C#, jump up to a high C#,
and then end on another high C#. if we're in the key of F#, and the guitar riff pretty
strongly implies that we are, then C# is the 5th, which is the second most stable note
in the key after the root.
again, we're sticking to the fundamentals here, to really drive that sense of tonality
home.
but you may have noticed that I skipped a note in the vocal line: in between this quick
jump up and this short ending, he sits for a really long time on C natural.
this is a tritone above F#, which is a lot less stable than the 5th, to put it mildly.
it's one of the most dissonant notes in the key, and if you listen to the song you can
hear how hard it rubs against the guitar riff before resolving back up to C#. this is where
the simplicity of that riff really comes into play: if there were a bunch of different notes
flying around already, adding a tritone on top of it all could very easily collapse the
entire thing, but since all we've got is one note, it gives Plant's line the space it needs
in order to really shine.
the dissonance makes it stand out, giving it a sort of otherworldly, almost non-musical
quality that makes you think warcry, but it doesn't become too unpleasant to listen to.
moving on, the next section sounds like this: (bang) and the bulk of it is this long, sustained
E major.
this is the bVII chord, and it's a pretty common dominant function chord in minor, which
means its job is to point you back to the root, F#. going to the bVII here helps take
us away from the harmonically monotonous riff, creating motion while still pointing us back
home.
more interesting, though, are these A majors on either side.
this is technically the bIII chord, but I think more important here is that it's what's
called the relative major, which means it's the major key that shares all its notes with
F# minor, introducing a little brightness without sounding too alien.
in fact, E major is also dominant in the key of A, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to read
this section as a I-V-I in the relative major that's growing out of the underlying minor
tonality.
the E sort of points in both directions at once, but the quick passing and rhythmically
weak placement of the A chords means it never really sounds like they're our actual root.
they're just there for decoration.
finally we get to this section: (bang) here, the chords are A major, B major, and C major,
and I think this bit feels more like a real shift to the relative major.
we start on the new I chord, with the melody hammering on A to really drive the point home.
after that, we step up to B major, which is borrowed from a scale called Lydian, which
is like major but with a raised 4th, giving it a major II chord. using Lydian is like
turning the major scale up to 11, and it's a common sound in fantasy settings, so seeing
it here makes this section feel bright and powerful.
that brightness is immediately contradicted, though, by the next chord, C major, which
is borrowed from the key of A minor.
this is a big tonal shift, from one of the brightest scales in western music to a much
darker sound, kind of like it's juxtaposing the romantic power fantasy of the seafaring
Viking raiders with the violent reality of what actually happened on those raids. this
chord leads into what's called a rhythm stop, where the rhythm, well, stops, giving us a
big, dramatic pause before we drop into the riff. this break helps smooth over the transition
from C back to F# which, as we saw in the beginning, is a pretty dissonant leap.
but there's something else I want to talk about in this section, and it has to do with
the bass. underneath each of these chords, the bass is playing these fast 16th-note major
scale walk-ups.
(bang) it's a really neat effect, running all the way up and then suddenly dropping
back down, and it gives the whole section a sort of lurching feeling that heavily emphasizes
the downbeats.
but there's one thing in there that I really want to draw some attention to: at the end
of the second bar, when he's walking up the B major scale for the second time, he actually
overshoots the high B and plays a C instead.
now, if I'm being honest, my first instinct was to assume this was a mistake: maybe his
finger slipped, and it just went by so fast that no one in the studio noticed in time.
and the idea that no one would notice is pretty well supported by the results of a quick google
search for bass tabs: every single one I've looked at says he played a B there, which
is a pretty reasonable assumption, but I am nothing if not thorough so I took the song,
ran it through a low-pass filter to isolate the bass, slowed it down to 50% speed, and
looped the section over and over, and I can assure you he's playing a C. what I can't
tell you is why.
I know it's not a mistake, though, for a couple reasons.
first, the section happens twice in the song, and he does it both times, so it can't just
be a finger slip. and second, I mentioned this to Tim Blais from A Capella Science and
he pointed out that the guitar actually moves to C major a 16th note early as well.
on further inspection, I think Page actually doesn't strum there, but he slides the chord
figure up at the same time Jones plays the C, and both of them doing it together in both
sections means it was definitely a deliberate decision.
and the obvious explanation is that it's what's called an anticipation, which is where you
play the upcoming chord a little bit early for some extra rhythmic interest, but here
I think that's a fairly weak analysis, for a couple reasons.
first of all, it goes by so fast that almost no one, including many otherwise good transcribers,
actually noticed that it was happening, so it's hard to argue that it impacts the listener's
sense of rhythm.
plus, they still land pretty hard on the downbeat right after it, so even if you do notice it
it doesn't really feel all that different.
besides, if they were trying to anticipate, why didn't they do it on the B chord too?
my best working theory is that it's about those big drops: when we go from A to B, the
bass jumps down a minor 7th, which is a fairly neutral sound, but if we were to do the same
thing from B to C, it'd be jumping a major 7th, which is much more dissonant, so maybe
they figured they could slide it up to a C, get a nice octave leap instead, and no one
would really notice? but honestly, would anyone have noticed the major 7th either?
I don't know, it feels super thin.
I mean, look: at the end of the day, it's an anticipation.
that's what this device is called, and it's what they're doing.
but I believe the point of a good analysis isn't just to slap labels on things, it's
to explain why those things work, and here?
I'm at a loss.
I don't know what this anticipation is for.
that's not to say it's bad: it doesn't make the song worse in any way, but as far as I
can tell it doesn't make it better either.
it just feels like an irrelevant quirk, but who knows, maybe I'm missing something, so
if anyone watching this happens to know John Paul Jones, could you do me a favor and ask
him why he played a C instead of a B on the last beat of the second bar of the chorus
of the Immigrant Song 49 years ago?
I'm sure he still remembers, and I really need to know.
let's move on, though, 'cause I've spent like 3 minutes on this one 16th note and even by
my standards, that's ridiculous.
although, really, there's not much to move on to: the song plays through those sections
again, and then we end by looping this: (bang) which is basically the riff but it keeps getting
interrupted by this C9. again, we have a C popping up over our F#, this time as the root
of another dissonant chord. it's dominant, so we'd expect it to point us somewhere, but
instead it just jumps back a tritone to the riff, making it a sort of directionless dissonance
that creates a strong sense of conflict to help wrap up this incredibly powerful song.
and that's pretty much it.
it's one of my favorite Zeppelin songs, and for something so short it's really got a lot
going on.
it's a great example of how basically any instrument can be a rhythm instrument in the
right hands, and of how you don't need to use everything you know in every song you
write.
just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy, and it doesn't mean it doesn't sound
great.
The Immigrant Song proves that, even if that one note has been giving me nightmares.
anyway, thanks for watching! this song was chosen by my patrons over on Patreon, so if
you want to help pick the next song we analyze just head on over to Patreon and pledge at
any level! you can also join our mailing list to find out about new episodes, like, share,
comment, subscribe, and above all, keep on rockin'.