Since I've Been Loving You

A slow blues that Zeppelin plays like a wound reopening in real time. Built over a minor-key twelve-bar frame that keeps sliding into unresolved chords, it lives on the friction between John Paul Jones's Hammond organ pads and Jimmy Page's guitar, which doesn't so much solo as bleed — long bent notes that hang past the point of comfort, then flurries that outrun the beat. The famous squeak of Bonham's bass drum pedal is audible throughout, a defect nobody fixed because the take was too alive to touch. Robert Plant sings from the top of his range down into a rasp, less a boast than a man losing an argument with himself: he works from seven to eleven every night, and it still isn't enough to keep her. There's no swagger here, which is exactly why it matters — this is the band answering the charge that they were mere plunderers of Chicago blues by out-feeling their sources rather than out-shouting them. Recorded in the Headley Grange era of communal, live-room takes, it's a single performance with all its scars intact. Best heard alone, late, at a volume where the organ's low hum sits in your chest, when you already know how the argument ends.