The hardest Led Zeppelin song is not the fast one.
Since I’ve Been Loving You is a slow blues in C minor, recorded live in the studio for Led Zeppelin III in 1970. Standard tuning. Moderate tempo. A progression every blues band on earth thinks it knows. And it has been separating players from guitarists for fifty-five years, because the guitar part is not a riff in the chugging sense. It is a conversation of silences. What you leave out is the instrument.
Kfir Ochaion’s cover is worth your time for one specific reason: he plays the singer too. The Israeli guitarist built a channel of over two million subscribers on covers where the guitar carries the vocal melody, and this song is the ultimate test of that trick. Robert Plant’s vocal is half the drama of the original. Take it away and the guitar has to weep for two people at once. Ochaion runs his through a Tone City Golden Plexi and lets it.
Why the original breathes
Three things, all of them about restraint.
It was cut live with very little overdubbing. One band, one room, tape rolling. John Paul Jones is not even playing bass guitar. He is on Hammond organ, holding the low end down with the bass pedals. That organ swell under the quiet verses is why the loud parts land like a door slamming.
Bonham’s Ludwig Speed King pedal squeaks through the entire take. Audibly. Half a century of remasters and nobody has ever removed it. Good. The squeak is the sound of a performance no one dared to fix. The first time I heard the studio version on headphones I genuinely thought it was my chair.
And Page’s tone is thin by modern standards. Almost brittle. That is the point. Every bend has air around it. Modern players compress the life out of slow blues and wonder why it sounds like a backing track. This one breathes because nobody was safe.
The metal connection
Every doom band slowing a pentatonic lick to a crawl, every dynamic quiet-loud build from post-metal to Opeth’s mellow passages, learned this lesson here first. Loud only works if the quiet is honest.
And no, this one is not on the forbidden riff list. Guitar shop staff know nobody dares to attempt it.
Watch the cover. Then put on the original and wait for the squeak.
Listen to this: Led Zeppelin III
