Trampled Under Foot

"Trampled Under Foot" is Led Zeppelin discovering funk and refusing to be polite about it. Jones plays a Clavinet through a wah pedal, and that clipped, percussive figure — clearly indebted to Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" — carries the entire track, with Page's guitar answering in short scrapes rather than a proper riff. Bonham plays tightly behind the beat, and the production is dry and close, a deliberate contrast to the cathedral reverb elsewhere on Physical Graffiti. The lyric is pure automotive innuendo lifted from Robert Johnson's "Terraplane Blues": talk of pumps and gears and headlights, a body described entirely as machinery, delivered by Plant in a rapid, chanted near-monotone that abandons his usual soaring for something rhythmic and insistent. It's genuinely funny if you're listening, and relentlessly physical if you're not. Page's solo arrives compressed and shrieking, then cuts out without ceremony. Culturally it sits at the moment mid-seventies rock started borrowing from the dance floor, though Zeppelin took the groove and left the elegance. This is a driving song in the most literal sense — windows down, cheap speakers overloading, the Clavinet turning the whole thing into forward motion with no destination attached.