(Credits: Far Out / Heinrich Klaffs)
In rock and roll’s early years, the biggest stars in the world didn’t necessarily need to be Ernest Hemingway on every one of their tunes. There might be one or two great lines to pull out of any of their songs, but if they were writing a typical love song or a tune to get the party started, that was more than enough qualifiers to get them on the radio for at least a few weeks.
But by the time Led Zeppelin arose, it was time for people to get serious with their lyrics, and Robert Plant was up to the challenge.
Granted, when talking about Zeppelin, that also involves looking at all the artists they stole from. There are some fantastic tunes in their catalogue that are all their own, but when looking at the way that they transformed songs like ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Bring It On Home’ to suit their own needs, it’s not like they were the most original band in the world when they started out.
Nor were they trying to be, either. Page was a messenger for the blues in many respects, and when they started branching out into other things, everyone started to get a bit more original. They had done away with any of their covers by the time they reached Houses of the Holy, but Physical Graffiti may as well be a one-stop shop for everything that made Zeppelin great in the first place.
They may have had a few covers like ‘In My Time of Dying’, but ‘Kashmir’ was the epic piece in the vein of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, there were fun rockers like ‘Night Flight’, and there were even hints at the kind of acoustic material they would indulge in on Jimmy Page’s ‘Bron-Y-Aur’. But when looking back on the record, Plant remembered having more fun writing ‘Trampled Under Foot’.
The song is admittedly not the most thoughtful on the record, but ‘Percy’ remembered nicking that songwriting style from Chuck Berry’s playbook, saying, “I disappeared upstairs into a bedroom because we were recording at a house, and I wrote the rest of the song in about half an hour. It’s a wordplay: ‘Greasy slick damn body, groovy leather trim/Like the way you hold the road, momma it ain’t no sin’. Chuck Berry really was the master of that sort of thing.”
While the end result sounds absolutely nothing like one of Berry’s tunes, his fingerprints are all over that kind of wordplay. As much as Berry’s songs could sound the same depending on what phase of his career you were listening to, every one of his tunes is a standalone story about everyday life, whether that was talking about riding to school or talking about his friends who wanted to play rock and roll until dawn.
And by Zeppelin’s era, plenty of bands had taken those lessons to heart when they made their classics. The tone of the guitars had become a lot heavier than normal, but people like Aerosmith were always happy to shout his praises, and when Tom Petty started to emerge in the late 1970s, a lot of his deep cuts are indebted to the kind of slice-of-life stories that Berry would write from time to time.
Although Zeppelin have been trash-talked for years about their intense “borrowing” of other artists’ material, this is an example of them doing it in exactly the right way. Nothing on this song can be traced back to Berry specifically, but there’s a distinct tip of the hat to the kind of tunes that made him so beloved by generations of rock and roll fans.
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