"Trampled Under Foot," Led Zeppelin
Fifty years ago this month - February 24, to be exact - Led Zeppelin released their double album Physical Graffiti, which of course sold like gangbusters. "Trampled Under Foot," the album's first single, was a departure from the band's standard heavy-metal fare.
"Trampled Under Foot" evolved out of a jam that the band did in a 1972 session and features lyrics inspired by Robert Johnson's "Terraplane Blues" Both songs use car parts as sexual metaphors, and the Zeppelin song puts the words in the context of a mechanic explaining to a female car owner what needs to be done. Musically, however, the sound leaned more toward funk than rock. Jimmy Page used a guitar with a wah-wah pedal and John Paul Jones, the band's bass player, was also its keyboardist. He employed a Clavinet keyboard to play the main riff not unlike the Clavinet riff Stevie Wonder had used in his 1972 hit song "Superstition" and the keyboard riff Steely Dan sideman Michael Omartian employed on Andy Kim's "Rock Me Gently" of a year earlier. Robert Plant, for his part, delivers the lyric in a gruff blue-eyed soul style. Because Led Zeppelin were always an album band first, "Trampled Under Foot" - credited to all the band members except drummer John Bonham - was not a big hit like "Superstition" and "Rock Me Gently" had been, though it did scrape the Top Forty, peaking on the Billboard singles chat at number 39.
This clip of Led Zeppelin - my Music Video Of the Week - is a live performance of "Trampled Under Foot" from their August 1979 concert in Knebworth, England, where they headlined a rock festival. A European summer tour followed the summer after, and as the autumn of 1980 neared, the band made plans to tour the United States and Canada that October and November. (Unfortunately, John Bonham died on September 25, and the surviving members of Led Zeppelin announced they were calling it quits that December, signaling, musically, the end of the seventies.) Timed at 5 minutes 36 seconds on record, "Trampled Under Foot" clocked in at Knebworth at just over eight minutes long. Enjoy.
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