What was the first Led Zeppelin song Jimmy Page played through a Marshall stack amp?

Throughout the decade that Led Zeppelin ruled rock and roll, their guitarist Jimmy Page delivered the hardest version of the devil’s music ever strummed on six (or 12) strings. He shook stadiums and tore through terraces with a rip-roaring guitar sound the like of which no one had ever heard before, shredding solos and pummelling power chords out on definitive hard rock numbers like ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘Immigrant Song’, ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Rock and Roll’.

It was through an amp setup unique among musicians at the time that Page achieved his potent combination of noise and harmonic resonance. From March 1969, he began using an ear-splitting combination of Marshall stack amps – a Super Bass Marshall 100 to give his guitar sound a sustained low-end punch and two Super Lead Marshall 100s. The former was his primary recording amp from the album Led Zeppelin II onwards, while the two super Leads could be seen regularly in live shows from 1972.

While Page was taking guitar music to the next level, technology hadn’t developed sufficiently to keep up with new sound requirements for live rock shows in front of tens of thousands of fans. Venue sound systems just weren’t built to project the full force of a guitar solo to crowds hundreds of metres away. And so, musicians and the technicians who designed their equipment had to get creative to make a little power go a long way.

Led Zeppelin’s guitarist was at the forefront of this creativity, working directly with the chief designer for Marshall’s US distributor Unicord to modify his setup for the specific demands of playing in the biggest band in the world. In a 1977 interview with Guitar Player magazine, Page confirmed that his amps had been “customised by Tony Frank,” Unicord’s top engineer, over in New York. “He customized Hendrix’s amps too, actually,” he added proudly. “So they’re about 200 watts, KL88s, or whatever they call them.” Around double the power of a standard model – the kind of exceptional innovation needed for a one-of-a-kind guitar player playing shows of historic gigs on a weekly basis.

But which song was the first to use the stack?

Page first plugged his Gibson Les Paul guitar into a Marshall stack in the recording studio during a July 1969 overdubbing session for Led Zeppelin’s second album. It was likely the Super Bass that would become the mainstay of his sound, and Page claims it’s the first instance in music history that the Les Paul/Marshall stack combination was recorded.

He was recording the full-blooded 50-second solo that splits the track ‘Heartbreaker’ in half, with his Marshall stack helping to create a pristine yet fleshed-out tone that allows the part to hold its own weight without the need for further instrumental backing. With the exception of Hendrix, no other guitarist in history had managed to defy song structure with such abandon and get away with it up to that point, let alone add muscle and intensity to a song with the sound of six solitary strings.

This solo snippet on ‘Heartbreaker’ was just a glimpse of what was to come on Led Zeppelin’s subsequent records and in the band’s live performances. John Bonham’s pulsating drums may have driven their songs, but Page’s guitar-fired V8 engines made them roar.

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