Discuss Oh Well

[kowk]

Originally Posted by chiliD

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Listen to Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog"...how much of an inspiration was "Oh Well" in the creation of that song? Quite a bit, it appears.

That's true. Here is a piece of an article from GuitarPlayer:

If there’s one Fleetwood Macera Peter Green riff you’ve gotta know, it’s the one from “Oh Well” (from Then Play On). How come? There are few honors in the music biz greater than having one of your songs provide the inspiration for another classic-rock standard, so dig this: According to John Paul Jones, who penned Led Zeppelin’s immortal “Black Dog” riff, the song was intentionally modeled after Green’s “Oh Well.” Jones, in a recent feature in the UK publication Record Collector, cited the song’s lengthy, low-register riff and quirkily timed vocal breaks as chief motivational factors. Admittedly, Green’s riff, the studio version of which begins with the growling, low-register syncopations notated in Ex. 9a played on nylon-string acoustic (!), is much longer. This four-bar call-and-response figure— echoed by Green’s overdriven Les Paul on the repeat—features nearly identical passages in bars 1 and 3, the only difference being the B versus Bb in the middle of beat two’s triplet. The song continues with Green and Kirwan matching each other’s phrasing note-for-note in different octaves on the pair of riffs shown in the first two bars of Ex. 9b, before concluding with another “Black Dog”-ish move as Green shifts the meter to 5/4, prefacing his own “B.D.”-like vocal breaks. Depending on which version you reference, G&K either play this measure in octaves, as in bar 3, or in harmony, when Green would replace the lower octave part with the one shown in Ex. 9c. Rock on and keep shakin’ it!