Whole Lotta Love

"Whole Lotta Love" is a riff, a lawsuit, and a psychedelic breakdown, in that order. The riff itself is one of rock's most physical objects — a descending, slightly behind-the-beat E figure that Page double-tracked and panned so it seems to lean into the room, with Bonham's snare landing a hair late and enormous, recorded in a stairwell-adjacent space with ambient mics far back. Plant's lyric is lifted substantially from Willie Dixon's "You Need Love" via the Small Faces, and Dixon eventually sued and won; the song's cultural context is inseparable from that theft, British blues appropriation at its most unapologetic and most electrifying. His vocal is pure priapic bravado, all upper-register wailing and the notorious "way down inside" build, delivered without irony or apology. Then, at roughly a minute and a half in, the song dissolves entirely: theremin swoops, backwards-echoed vocal moans, Bonham's toms panned in circles — an engineered orgasm that Eddie Kramer and Page assembled from a bleeding-through vocal track they decided to keep. The re-entry of the riff after the drum break is one of the great returns. Best deployed in a car with the windows down, or in any room where you want the volume argument to end immediately.