Every rock song doesn’t have to be some grand showcase of skill. It’s always best to play what’s right for the song, and no matter how flashy someone’s licks can be, having an intricate lick at the wrong time is what can make or break a classic song. Although Led Zeppelin prided themselves on leaving some of their best moments on record, Jimmy Page knew that one of their earlier tracks showcased everything that Robert Plant could do in only a few minutes.
At the same time, Zeppelin wasn’t meant to be known as only a hard rock band throughout their discography. On some of their most celebrated albums, there was no telling whether one song would be a straight-ahead ballad, a strange trip into the realm of world music, or one of the heavier dirges that anyone had ever heard in their lives.
That was the whole point behind what Page envisioned for the group. The Yardbirds had started to become a bit too samey sounding for his taste, so this was his excuse to stretch into whatever area he wanted to while still keeping his integrity as a musician. As much as fans were willing to take the trip along with him, Led Zeppelin III remains a bit of an odd duck whenever looking at their first four records.
Whereas there may have been an acoustic ballad here and there, their third album is an almost entirely acoustic affair, complete with different mandolins sprinkled into the mix and even reworking pieces of an old Yardbirds tune for ‘Tangerine’. If anything, ‘Immigrant Song’ seems to give everyone that exact wrong impression they should have, especially when the rest of the album turns nearly all the gain down and taps into something that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Joni Mitchell record.
Then again, even Mitchell herself probably wouldn’t have attempted something like ‘Friends’. Outside of the bizarre tuning it’s in, Page flirts with different inversions of chords and creates an ominous groove in the middle of the track. By the time the strings come in, his use of the tritone in the arrangement may have even been a slight parallel to what Black Sabbath had been doing on their namesake track around the same time.
The arrangement on its own is fantastic, but Page thought the tune was a vehicle for Plant, saying, “John Paul Jones wrote an incredible string arrangement for this, and Robert shows his great ranger—incredibly high. He’s got a lot of different sides to his voice, which come across here. It has a menacing atmosphere. A friend came into the studio during the recording and it was bloody loud, and he had to leave. He said, ‘You’ve really done something evil!’”
The tune works compared to every other Zeppelin classic partly because Page tends to take a back seat. He may have come up with the basic skeleton, but most of his parts involve him playing his guitar like a rhythm guitarist, usually driving the band along while Plant and Jonesy can flex their muscles a bit more.
Led Zeppelin III might have a nasty reputation for being the mellow version of Zeppelin’s early years, but if that means getting ‘Friends’, that’s not a bad thing at all. If nothing else, this is the moment where Zeppelin proved that even without any electric instruments, they could still sound heavier than most other bands around at the time.
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