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One of Led Zeppelin's most dramatic songs, 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You', has a similarly dramatic history behind it.
In the beginning, 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You' was a traditional bluesy folk song. Quicksilver Messenger Service, a 60s blues pop group, performed an arrangement of the song... and it was often played by artists of the time, even Page himself: 'I used to do the song in the days of sitting in the darkness playing my six-string behind Marianne Faithfull,' although he came to the song via Joan Baez' operatic folk version. In fact, Zeppelin's version owes a couple of verses and the rolling guitar arpeggios to Baez' record, but Jimmy added a few Zeppelin twists to it.
Back in August 1968, the song provided one of the cornerstones of Jimmy's grand plan to get a new group together. Jimmy invited Robert over to his boathouse home in Pangbourne, England so he could get to know him better: 'So I asked him if he wanted to come down to Pangbourne and spend a few days talking things over, listening to records, discussing sounds and whatnot, and to see what he thought.'
The pair's common musical ground helped to forge their new found friendship, as Plant recalls 'One day when Jimmy was out, I looked through his records and pulled out a pile to play and somehow or other they happened to be the same ones that Jimmy had put aside to play for me when he returned - just to see whether I liked them. When he saw that I'd picked them out too, we just giggled at each other for a bit. We found out that we had exactly the same tastes in music.'
Page played Baez' record and told Plant that he wanted to perform this song in their new group - 'Obviously, it was geared that way from the start. When Robert came down to my place for the first time, when I was trying to get an idea what he was all about, we talked about the possibilities of various types of things, "Dazed And Confused," for example. Then I played him a version of "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You." It was the version by Joan Baez, the song is traditional, and I said, "Fancy doing this?" He sort of looked at me with wonder and I said, "Well, I've got an idea for an arrangement," and started playing it on acoustic guitar. That's indicative of the way I was thinking with regards to direction. It was very easy going.'
Page had been working on the arrangement for quite some time, and developing some of his ideas from The Yardbirds. 'I had alot of ideas from my days with The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds allowed me to improvise a lot in live performance and I started building a textbook of ideas that I eventually used in Zeppelin. In addition to those ideas, I wanted to add acoustic textures. Ultimately I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses -- a combination that had never been done before. Lots of light and shade in the music... prime example of that is "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You".'
Plant, with his tastes in folk rock, was eager to go along. 'Robert suggested I go check out his friend John Bonham,' Page remembers. 'When I saw what a thrasher Bonzo was, I knew he'd be incredible. He was into exactly the same sort of stuff I was!' In other words, Page knew right away that his "light and shade" approach could easily be recorded with his two new friends.
Page now felt he had the right bandmembers to really explore this light and shade technique. His arrangement of 'Babe' included some hard rocking power chords, which are beautifully evident on two incredible rehearsals of the song. There are no overdubs or production included on these two takes, but none is necessary. Jimmy is confined to a Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar, which he had borrowed from a friend. 'It was a beautiful guitar, really great. I've never found a guitar of that quality anywhere since. I could play so easily on it, get a really thick sound; it had heavy-guage strings on it, but it just didn't seem to feel like it.' With the outtakes, one gets a terrific mental image of Page sitting in a chair strumming, picking, swaying to his new masterpiece. The joy of this success is more than apparent in his guitar playing. Meanwhile, Jones floats ethereally around on his bass, while Bonham sets the pace for all four of them.
Jimmy would take a later take and polish 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You' with some of his finest production work. The beautiful ambience created on record allowed space for the numerous guitar overdubs (crunching electric and fluid Spanish acoustic leads) which are all backed by Bonzo's absolutely insane cymbal crashing. John Paul Jones' bassline on 'LED ZEPPELIN' wasn't as elaborate as the outtakes, but it's an under-rated aspect of the final song.
In both outtakes (take 8 and 9), Robert's youthful vocals are raw, and a bit over-the-top, almost out of control. Neither of these versions, nor the one released on 'LED ZEPPELIN', have the same lyrical arrangement (though take 9 actually has the most "baby baby's"!). Nonetheless, Plant obviously felt a connection to the song - even though he didn't write it. He has told the story numerous times of how one of his girlfriends asked him to choose between his music or her. The music was calling young Robert, so he left her, to much chagrin. With this emotion, he attacked 'Babe' - and returned to in his own lyrics for 'Ten Years Gone', and to a lesser extent 'Ramble On'.
Originally, 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You' was credited as being 'Traditional, arranged by Jimmy Page'. While both of these things are true, it was later discovered that Anne Bredon wrote and recorded the song in the 1950s. Bredon was a relatively obscure folk musician, who one day in the 1980s was playing the song. Her obviously cool son was surprised to hear his mother performing a Led Zeppelin song (and who wouldn't be?). This discovery led to a quick correction, and in all releases of the song since 1990 (on box sets, cd re-releases, etc.).
The production and performance have made this one of Zeppelin's most timeless songs. John Paul Jones sums up the importance of the track, 'I still really like this. It was Jimmy's idea and really signalled the start of the true Zeppelin style - all that loud and soft dynamic contrast. Jimmy's acoustic work on this was superb. When we did "ZEP III", there was that outcry that we'd gone acoustic. This track proves that we were never stuck in one groove and that there were acoustic overtones from the start.'
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