The hit songwriting trick Led Zeppelin deliberately avoided
Billy Sheehan has highlighted the trick many bands use to transform a song into a hit – which Led Zeppelin made a conscious habit of avoiding.
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The Mr Big bassist points out in a conversation with Heavy Interviews that the trick was first deployed by The Beatles. It involves singing the pre-chorus right at the song, particularly if it uses the song’s title. That said, he acknowledges that although it’s common, other bands have deliberately avoided structuring their songs that way as a means of differentiating themselves.
“A lot of bands do a pre-chorus before the song even starts, which was an old Beatles trick, and the chorus is usually the title of the song,” he explains [as transcribed by Ultimate Guitar]. “So when they sang Paperback Writer, you knew what song it was before it even started. That’s how you have a hit record, or Bon Jovi’s ‘Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame, you give love a bad name.’
“Okay, now we know the name of the song before it even started, and we already can sing along with the chorus the first time it comes. There’s ways of making songs accessible and more hitly, if you will. And then sometimes you avoid that stuff completely because you don’t want to seem like you’re following the pack, or pandering to the audience.
“Some stuff is designed to be a hit. I mean, people are writing songs to have hits. That’s what songwriters do. There’s all kinds of ways of doing that. There’s all kinds of mechanisms they use to bring that about – the chorus right up front, and the title of the song being the chorus.”
Sheehan then elaborates on how Led Zeppelin dodged that trick on purpose. “I think Led Zeppelin – all their song titles, they don’t sing Black Dog in the whole song. And they purposely did that because they didn’t want to have radio hits. They wanted to be like a jamming, music band. They didn’t want to get in the pop music world.”
“Their secret weapon is, let’s do a title that has nothing to do with the song. I mean, Stairway to Heaven does, of course, and some of them, but nevertheless.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
