Example 1a is like the song’s main riff, which can be a little tricky to play. After the rocking root-5-root movement in bar 2, be sure to fret the D on the “and” of two with your middle finger, staying in that position for the chromatic climb that follows.
John Paul Jones cuts loose with some killer fills into the song’s breakdown sections (similar to Examples 1b and 1c). After using open D’s to help make his way down the neck into first position, Jones grabs a D# in beat four, giving the fill its unique flavor. The second time around, Jonesy opts for a more guitaristic approach with three-against-four phrasing, again playing with both major- and minor-scale tonality.
Much of Zeppelin’s early material was lifted from blues man Willie Dixon, including “Bring It On Home,” a blues stomp from Led Zeppelin II. As heard on the expanded reissue of The Song Remains The Same, the band sometimes used the tune’s main riff (similar to Ex. 2) as a playful crowd teaser before launching into one of its finest originals, “Black Dog.”
“I wrote ‘Black Dog’ on a train,” says Jones. “My dad taught me how to write musical notation without using manuscript paper—just with numbers and note values—and I wrote that one on the way back from a rehearsal at Jimmy Page’s house. There was a Howling Wolf song I was attracted to at the time—a kind of rolling blues with a riff that never ended. I fancied writing something that did the same thing. Just when you think the riff is going to finish, it goes off somewhere else.”
“I lift the fingers in my left hand to cut the string off. Pick players don’t seem to do that so much. They let the strings ring all the time, which I find completely obliterates the bottom end.” Examples 3a and 3b give a sense of how the iconic riff twists and turns on itself, creating a truly unique rhythmic statement. Compare the chorus at bar 9, with its R&B-flavored 6ths (F#), with Jones’s live interpretation of the tune as it appears on The Song Remains The Same.