For all the praise deserved­ly heaped on Jim­my Page for his tech­nique as an inno­v­a­tive rock-blues shredder—with his vio­lin-bowed walls of noise and motor speed­way licks—one can lose sight of just how great he was as a dri­ving rhythm play­er. The rough mix of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lot­ta Love”—which chugs along with­out the stu­dio ver­sion’s sig­na­ture stock car-engine sound in the refrain—brings Page’s rhythms to the fore. The song’s pro­duc­tion also demon­strates Page’s skill in the stu­dio. The gui­tarist mas­ter­mind­ed the sound of “Whole Lot­ta Love” and the record­ing of AOR ground­break­er Led Zep­pelin II, and he tells the sto­ry of the song’s cre­ation, along with that unfor­get­table riff, in an inter­view with The Wall Street Jour­nal:

I came up with the gui­tar riff for “Whole Lot­ta Love” in the sum­mer of ’68, on my house­boat along the Thames in Pang­bourne, Eng­land. I sup­pose my ear­ly love for big intros by rock­a­bil­ly gui­tarists was an inspi­ra­tion, but as soon as I devel­oped the riff, I knew it was strong enough to dri­ve the entire song, not just open it. When I played the riff for the band in my liv­ing room sev­er­al weeks lat­er dur­ing rehearsals for our first album, the excite­ment was imme­di­ate and col­lec­tive. We felt the riff was addic­tive, like a for­bid­den thing.

The rough mix above trav­eled with the band as they toured the U.S. in May and June of 1969, over­dub­bing in stu­dios in Los Ange­les and New York. Page describes how he, engi­neer George Chkiantz, and mix­er Eddie Kramer cre­at­ed the song’s reverb-drenched son­ic enve­lope, design­ing each piece to work specif­i­cal­ly for stereo FM radio. “For the song to work as this panoram­ic audio expe­ri­ence,” he says, “I need­ed Bon­zo [drum­mer John Bon­ham] to real­ly stand out, so that every stick stroke sound­ed clear and you could real­ly feel them. If the drums were record­ed just right, we could lay in every­thing else.” He com­pares Robert Plant’s sear­ing vocal to his gui­tar work:

Robert’s vocal was just as extreme. He kept gain­ing con­fi­dence dur­ing the ses­sion and gave it every­thing he had. His vocals, like my solos, were about per­for­mance. He was push­ing to see what he could get out of his voice. We were per­form­ing for each oth­er, almost com­pet­i­tive­ly.

As for the pre-echo and mas­sive amounts of reverb on Plant’s vocals in the song’s breakdown—all of this came about by acci­dent. An alter­nate take of Plant’s voice bled through on the mas­ter tape. Page and Kramer decid­ed to leave it in and add the effects to make it seem inten­tion­al. More impro­vi­sa­tion­al stu­dio wiz­ardry between the two pro­duced the crazed out­ro. “Jim­my and I went nuts on the knobs,” recalls Kramer, “We had eight dials con­trol­ling the lev­els on eight indi­vid­ual tracks, so we rehearsed the chore­og­ra­phy of what we were going to do to cre­ate the far-out sounds.”

Like cur­rent claims against the band for musi­cal theft in “Stair­way to Heav­en,” “Whole Lot­ta Love” engen­dered a law­suit from Willie Dixon, who wrote Mud­dy Water’s “You Need Love.” Page and Plant both admit the debt, but Page defends his con­tri­bu­tion, say­ing “if you take Robert’s vocal out, there’s no musi­cal ref­er­ence.” In any case, they were even­tu­al­ly forced to give Dixon co-cred­it for the song. In a 1990 inter­view with Musi­cian, Plant waxed philo­soph­i­cal about the con­tro­ver­sy: “Page’s riff was Page’s riff. It was there before any­thing else. I just thought, ‘well, what am I going to sing?’ That was it, a nick. Now hap­pi­ly paid for. At the time, there was a lot of con­ver­sa­tion about what to do. It was decid­ed that it was so far away in time and influ­ence that… well, you only get caught when you’re suc­cess­ful. That’s the game.”

Of course, the essence of the blues is musi­cal quo­ta­tion, and the affair was more a mat­ter of mon­ey, not a case against the song’s cre­ative pow­er or the orig­i­nal­i­ty of that killer riff. Read more about the mak­ing of “Whole Lot­ta Love” from Page, Chkiantz, and Kramer at The Wall Street Jour­nal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Whole Lot­ta Led Zep­pelin: Live at the Roy­al Albert Hall and The Song Remains the Same–the Full Shows

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of “Kash­mir”

Hear Led Zeppelin’s Mind-Blow­ing First Record­ed Con­cert Ever (1968)

Decon­struct­ing Led Zeppelin’s Clas­sic Song ‘Ram­ble On’ Track by Track: Gui­tars, Bass, Drums & Vocals

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Aside from a sur­prise send-off per­for­mance on the roof of their own Apple build­ing in 1969 (which you can see here), The Bea­t­les played their last offi­cial con­cert on August 29th, 1966 at Can­dle­stick Park in San Fran­cis­co before mov­ing on to make their most icon­ic stu­dio albums, then split­ting up three years lat­er. Know­ing it would be their final show, the band brought a cam­era onstage to take pho­tos of the crowd and them­selves. Paul McCart­ney asked the band’s press offi­cer Tony Bar­row to record the con­cert on a hand-held tape recorder. Bar­row described the atmos­phere as an “end of term spir­it,” even if “it wasn’t a spec­tac­u­lar occa­sion […] noth­ing like Shea Sta­di­um.” His rec­ol­lec­tion might seem strange, but we should keep in mind that the band had been tour­ing inces­sant­ly, play­ing mas­sive shows to are­nas packed with scream­ing fans. The Can­dle­stick Park con­cert by con­trast had large sec­tions of emp­ty seats, with only 25,000 tick­ets sold in a sta­di­um with a 42,500 seat capac­i­ty.

Bar­row record­ed the show, then, as he recalls, made one copy and locked the oth­er away:

Back in Lon­don I kept the con­cert cas­sette under lock and key in a draw­er of my office desk, mak­ing a sin­gle copy for my per­son­al col­lec­tion and pass­ing the orig­i­nal to Paul for him to keep. Years lat­er my Can­dle­stick Park record­ing re-appeared in pub­lic as a boot­leg album. If you hear a boot­leg ver­sion of the final con­cert that fin­ish­es dur­ing Long Tall Sal­ly it must have come either from Paul’s copy or mine, but we nev­er did iden­ti­fy the music thief!

Who­ev­er it was, we have that per­son to thank for the record­ing above. The audio qual­i­ty is what might be expect­ed from a hand­held recorder in a huge sta­di­um con­cert, but the his­toric val­ue of the doc­u­ment is ines­timable. See the com­plete track­list below and read more about that final show at The Bea­t­les Bible.

01 — Rock And Roll Music [0:00]

02 — She’s A Woman [1:40]

03 — If I Need­ed Some­one [4:53]

04 — Day Trip­per [7:50]

05 — Baby’s In Black [10:58]

06 — I Feel Fine [13:43]

07 — Yes­ter­day [16:24]

08 — I Wan­na Be Your Man [19:10]

09 — Nowhere Man [21:48]

10 — Paper­back Writer [24:36]

11 — Long Tall Sal­ly [27:20]

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Bea­t­les’ Rooftop Con­cert: The Last Gig Filmed in Jan­u­ary 1969

The Bea­t­les: Live at Shea Sta­di­um, 1965

Watch All of The Bea­t­les’ His­toric Appear­ances on The Ed Sul­li­van Show, 50 Years Ago

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

You know the old joke: “if you don’t like the neigh­bor­hood, wait ten min­utes.” New York­ers know it the oth­er way around, too. If you like the neigh­bor­hood, wait ten min­utes; your local haunts will dis­ap­pear. But while the phys­i­cal mark­ers of my own New York era shut­ter one by one, dur­ing said era all I ever want­ed was for it to be the late 70s again, when you could catch such upstarts as the Talk­ing Heads, Devo, the Ramones, Tele­vi­sion, or Pat­ti Smith at Max’s Kansas City. Or even ear­li­er in the decade, when Max’s served as the NYC home base for David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and even a young Bruce Spring­steen.

Despite Max’s hal­lowed sta­tus in the New York rock scene, pre­cious lit­tle footage sur­vives from its hey­day. The film at the top shows us what pro­duc­er David Weis­man says in voice-over nar­ra­tion is to his knowl­edge the only 35mm, motion pic­ture-qual­i­ty film of “the renowned, leg­endary, unfor­get­table Max’s Kansas City,” where Andy Warhol “held court every night from mid­night till dawn.” Weis­man points out local stars of the Warho­lian scene in the vin­tage film, rem­i­nisces about his own time there, and describes a light­ing sit­u­a­tion that made film­ing in the club very dif­fi­cult. Just above, hear what those denizens in the footage heard: live audio of the Vel­vet Under­ground play­ing “I’m Wait­ing for the Man” and “Sweet Jane” live at Max’s in 1972.

Film­ing at Max’s may have been chal­leng­ing, but clear­ly, as you see above, one could get it right, even in less­er for­mats. Here we have clas­sic 1976 film of the Ramones play­ing “Havana Affair” and “Lis­ten to My Heart” at Max’s dur­ing its post-Warhol sec­ond phase, when the club became sec­ond only to CBG­Bs as the home of New York punk rock and new wave.

The Ramones film may not be 35mm, but the qual­i­ty of sound and image sure­ly excels that of every oth­er doc­u­ment from the peri­od, like the short, blur­ry film above of Devo play­ing their bizarro take on “Sat­is­fac­tion” in 1977.

Yet anoth­er pre­cious arti­fact from the late-70s Max’s scene comes to us with­out any mov­ing images at all, but the audio is quite good and rep­re­sents a for­ma­tive moment in the evo­lu­tion of the Talk­ing Heads, only a trio at the time. Hear them do “Artists Only” above in 1976.

Max’s didn’t only shel­ter punks and strung-out art rock­ers. In the ear­ly sev­en­ties, book­er Sam Hood also secured six­ties folk main­stays like Dave Van Ronk and new­com­ers like soon-to-be wild­ly famous Bruce Spring­steen. See the young Boss open for Van Ronk above with an acoustic ver­sion of “Grow­ing Up” in 1972.

Max’s closed down in 1981 with a head­lin­ing per­for­mance by DC hard­core punks Bad Brains, but it has since reopened in anoth­er loca­tion (1998). The new (gasp!—Midtown) Max’s isn’t Max’s Kansas City in any­thing but name, but its web­site at least pre­serves the mem­o­ry of the old club’s heady 70s days with more live audio and mem­o­ra­bil­ia from The Vel­vets, Sid Vicious, John­ny Thun­ders & The Heart­break­ers, and many more “Max’s Icons.” Also don’t miss this Fla­vor­wire gallery of clas­sic pho­tographs from 70s-era Max’s.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

CBGB’s: The Roots of Punk Lets You Watch Vin­tage Footage from the Hey­day of NYC’s Great Music Scene

1976 Film Blank Gen­er­a­tion Doc­u­ments CBGB Scene with Pat­ti Smith, The Ramones, Talk­ing Heads, Blondie & More

The Talk­ing Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club that Shaped Their Sound (1975)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.