50 years ago today (July 24th), Led Zeppelin’s self-titled debut album was certified gold for half a million sales by the Recording Industry Association of America. The Led Zeppelin song “You Shook Me” had a new recording technique on it from Jimmy Page. His engineer told him that getting backwards echo was impossible, but Jimmy Page had already experimented with reversing the tape and putting echo on it and told him to “just do it.”
The cover of the blues standard “You Shook Me” on Led Zeppelin’s first album makes for interesting comparative listening, because Jimmy Page’s onetime Yardbirds bandmate Jeff Beck released a version of the same song on his group’s debut album. But Page says one thing Zeppelin’s version has that Beck’s does not is backwards echo, an effect his engineer said couldn’t be done. Jimmy Page:
“The engineer, Glyn Johns at the time – he’s the engineer for the first album – he said, ‘This is impossible. Won’t work. It’s Impossible.’ I said, ‘Will you do what I’m telling you to do? Just do it.’ And of course when he put the tape round the right way again and played it back, he was grudgingly moving the fader up and you could hear this fantastic sound, which is only really employed on that album, on the end of ‘You Shook Me.’”
