The song holds up well after 50 years. I posted this because after all these years, I just found something new and cool about it.
It's Bonham's drumming. The time signature is straight ahead 4/4 -- there are some starts and stops throughout and I'd like to know if a metronome would reflect Bonham's precision sense of time. Anyway, near the end (3m, 25s), right after Jimmy Page does his "call and response" riffing, Bonham comes back in with a heavy 4/4 beat but he has reversed the snare (first and third) and bass drum (second and fourth) backbeat. But more, he deliberately holds back the snare drum back beat -- Page uses that space to fill Bonham's missing snare backbeat. Hear it?
In this live version, Bonham fills that space with bass drum triplets:
There's a bit too much focus on Plant and Page in that live video, but there you go. Plant was a god of rock and cock.
[added]: Here's the isolated drum track for the studio version. It proves me wrong:
3 comments:
His bass drumming is impressive as all get out. You can hear why I figured he, like the other dead Brit drummer used two bass drums - what he accomplished should not be possible, just sayin'.
And kids, don't drink 40 shots of vodka then go to sleep. It will be the big one.
In the second video, beginning around 3m 40s, you can hear the bass drum triplets. It reminds me of horses galloping -- like standing in the infield at a race track, feeling the hooves thunder past. That was a Bonham style signature -- something others couldn't do with just one foot; it was like a one-handed drum roll.
I added another video which appears to blow a hole in my theory. Cue the 4 min mark. He comes back an does a 4/4 beat but he fills the 1 2 3 4 turns in space between 1 and 4 into a very light snare drum roll. He's skipping two quarter notes. What would the snare rolls be? 16th notes? They are twice as fast as the cymbal 8th notes.
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