November 7, 1969 –
The opening track from Led Zeppelin II, Whole Lotta Love, was released as a single on this date. It was the first single the band released. The B-side of the single was, Living Loving Maid. It became their highest chart topper, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Charts.
One of the more intriguing sections of this song comes at the 4-minute mark, where the distant voice of Robert Plant sings each line (“Way down inside… woman… you need… love“) before his full-throated vocal comes in. This is known as “backward echo,” and one of the first uses of the technique, but it happened by accident: A different take of Plant’s vocal bled over to his master vocal track, so when Page and engineer Eddie Kramer mixed the song, they couldn’t get rid of it. They did what most creative professionals do with a mistake: they accentuated it to make it sound intentional, adding reverb to it so Plant sounded like he was foreshadowing his lines from afar.
The Haus of Dcaligari 