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Sat 8 November 2025 16:30, UK
Becoming one of the biggest hitmakers of all time wasn’t exactly on the cards when Jimmy Page first formed Led Zeppelin.
He knew that the band had the potential to be huge, but the idea of them putting out singles at the same rate as The Beatles was never part of the plan. Page wanted everyone to appreciate the album as an art form, but even if you had to listen to the full record to get the best experience, there were bound to be more than a few tunes that stuck with people for generations to come.
Then again, it makes sense why Page would never have wanted Zeppelin’s records to be focused on singles. Much of their celebrated work is nowhere near the three-minute mark, and judging by how many times their songs have been played on the radio, it’s not like they were going to sell their record label on the idea that one of the best radio hits of all time was going to be an eight-minute opus like ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
And yet, there’s a funny thing that happens when looking at Zeppelin’s music. Their first album, for instance, was far from the kind of commercial records that The Yardbirds had been aiming for, but with tracks like ‘Communication Breakdown’ and ‘Good Times Bad Times’, the band at least had a firm foundation to work off of. This was the beginning of a heavier brand of rock and roll, and if their debut was the foundation, Led Zeppelin II was the sound of them staking their claim as the best band in the world.
It’s not like they didn’t have a fair argument, either. Their later period certainly had more gargantuan songs, but every track on their sophomore effort was a clinic in what a rock song could do. There was the introspective ballad ‘Thank You’, the acoustic-rock jam ‘Ramble On’, and even the token blues covers like ‘Bring It On Home’ and ‘The Lemon Song’, but ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was the first time things felt different.
This was the sound of the band transforming blues into something else, and despite not having any plans to release it on its own, Page knew he had written a classic, saying, “With ‘Whole Lotta Love’, that was clearly going to be the track that everybody was going to go to, because that riff was so fresh and it still is. If somebody plays that riff it brings a smile to people’s faces. It’s a really positive thing.”
If you look at the mechanics behind the riff, though, it’s not like it’s the cleanest piece of music in the world. Page was already trying to mess things up a little bit by playing the open string and bending the lower string at the same time, but that strange dissonance is also what adds to its magic. And if we were to look at every band that this one riff inspired, we’d probably be here all day.
There are certainly who took things in another direction after Zeppelin, but it’s hard to think of hard rock as being the same without this one riff. Even over a decade after it came out, Slash said that hearing ‘Whole Lotta Love’ for the first time was like looking into the future, and it’s hard to think that a band like Aerosmith would have even existed without what Page did on this one tune.
But above all else, ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was more than simply capturing lightning in a bottle. Rock and roll had its fair share of classic riffs already from the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Keith Richards, but it’s geniuses like Page that proved that rock and roll was never afraid to get a little bit dirty as well.
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