When “Led-Heads” think about their favorite band Led Zeppelin, often two names pop up first: lead singer Robert Plant and lead guitarist Jimmy Page. It makes sense—the word “lead” is ahead of each of their respective roles with the band.
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However, the group also included perhaps the baddest rhythm section in classic rock history, thanks to drummer John Bonham and bassist/multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones. But while it’s customary for a group’s vocalist and six-string player to work together in unison, it’s rarer for its singer and bass player to pen tunes as a duo.
[RELATED: 3 Songs You Didn’t Know Jimmy Page Wrote Solo for Led Zeppelin]
Below, we wanted to dive into the two songs that Plant and Jones put together for the group that have stood the test of time—these are the two songs you didn’t know Plant and Jones wrote together for Led Zeppelin.
1. “All My Love“
Written by Robert Plant, John Paul Jones
Released on the band’s 1979 LP, In Through the Out Door, this song has an especially tender meaning. Not just a love song for some unnamed object of affection, this track was written to remember Robert Plant’s son Karac, who’d passed away two years prior in 1977 while the British-born group was on tour in North America.
Karac Pendra Plant, born in 1972, died just five years later on July 26 of a stomach virus. The tragedy was one of a series of issues that arose for the famed rock band in the mid-to-late 1970s, including a serious car accident that Plant and his wife Maureen suffered in the summer of 1975 while vacationing in Rhodes, Greece.
And while, after Karac’s death, Plant and Jones wrote “All My Love,” Bonham and Page were unsure of the track’s softer sound at first. In the end, the offering has lasted over the years and remains one of the band’s best-known and most beloved. On it, Plant sings:
Yours is the cloth, mine is the hand that sews time
His is the force that lies within
Ours is the fire, all the warmth we can find
He is a feather in the wind
Oh, all of my love, all of my love
Oh, all of my love to you, now
All of my love, oh yes
All of my love to you
All of my love, all of my love
All of my love!
2. “South Bound Saurez“
Written by Robert Plant, John Paul Jones
The second track on the band’s 1979 record, In Through the Out Door, this song opens with a rollicking piano riff by Jones. The multi-instrumentalist played keys, mandolin, and several other instruments for the group. On the song, Plant pushes his vocals, almost as if he’s channeling another famed British-born frontman, Queen’s Freddie Mercury.
On the song, Plant plays a bit of the peacock, brash and bold, offering embellishment to the subject of his lyrics. With bravado, Plant sings:
Baby, when you walk that sweet walk
Oh, you walk it good, yes you walk it good
Baby, when you talk that sweet talk
Oh, it sounds so good, oh so good
With a little bit of concentration
And a little bit of helpin’ hands, yeah
And a little bit of raving madness
You know it makes me feel, baby
Both my feet are back on the ground
And when the rhythm takes me
It feels so good, oh, so good
Baby if it keeps a-shaking
It will do you good, oh so much good
Photo by Keystone/Getty Images
