Black Dog

The opening of Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" is made of muted guitar sounds, as if the guitars were still warming up. It was Jimmy Page's idea. The sounds are recordings of the openings of various guitar tracks played at the same moment, and the tape can be heard spinning up to speed. Then Robert Plant starts singing a cappella, "hey, hey, mama", which sets up a call and response between the vocalist and the band.

Page used a Gibson Les Paul and made a complicated series of overdubs through various compressors. The result was so distorted that he said it sounded like an analog synthesizer. John Paul Jones is credited with the main riff. He first said it came from Muddy Waters's Electric Mud, then retracted that in 2007 and named The Howlin' Wolf Album, especially "Smokestack Lightning", whose riff he and Page sped up. The turnaround gave the band trouble until John Bonham decided to play straight through it as if it were not there.

The title came from a black Labrador Retriever the band saw wandering the grounds at Headley Grange. The dog vanished each evening and came back exhausted in the early morning. The song was the first track on the untitled fourth album, released in 1971.