When you think of Led Zeppelin, your mind meanders to the evangelical and spiritual sounds they omitted. ‘Joke’ is one word that you’d never use to describe such a fearsome band, but that’s precisely what one of their songs was born from — and it ended up going a step too far.
It’s easy for a band to make a mistake. To veer too close to the creative sun and end up falling from their place up high down to the doldrums of pastiche. But very few people expected Led Zeppelin to make such a drastic decision.
That’s because Led Zeppelin were an ethereal rock powerhouse who didn’t become the most important group on the planet by chance or without taking themselves seriously. The beautiful blend of Jimmy Page on guitar alongside the expertly delivered bass from John Paul Jones, Robert Plant’s world-class searing vocals and underpinned by the masterful drumming of John Bonham is a recipe for the ages that took them to the top.
Due to the majestic technical talent between the four of them, Led Zeppelin could turn their hand to any genre and turn it into something (usually) magical, but not always. On one occasion, they stepped too far outside of their wheelhouse when they pivoted into reggae. A dangerous genre-switch has caught out hundreds of bands over the years. Changing genre has a habit of making good bands look very foolish. But it was worst than that.
Rather than simply trying to apply themselves to making a reggae song, the band took things up a notch and even turned the title of the track into an inside joke. It was a move that set the tone for what might be classed as their worst-ever song.
The title of ‘D’yer Maker’ is pronounced ‘Jamaica’ in an ode to the island which inspired the track and is written in the way that locals of the Caribbean country would pronounce their native land’s name. However, this was lost to many at the time. Some even thought it was some kind of reference to the occult that Page had hidden in the track, when in truth, it was just a lame joke.
John Bonham loathed it, and the rest of the band seemingly agreed with the drummer as they never performed it live even once. “John was interested in everything except jazz and reggae,” explained bassist John Paul-Jones in Chris Welch’s biography on the drummer, John Bonham: A Thunder of Drums. “He didn’t hate jazz but he hated playing reggae – he thought it was really boring,” he added.
“He wouldn’t play anything but the same shuffle beat all the way through it,” Jones continued. The former Led Zeppelin member even went as far as to add that Bonham “hated” the song. Jones continued: “It would have been all right if he had worked at the part, [but] he wouldn’t, so it sounded dreadful.”
Bonham wasn’t alone in having reservations about the track, and Jones shared his perspective on the slower number. “The whole point of reggae is that the drums and bass really have to be very strict about what they play,” he scathingly remarked. The truth is, while the band wrote, recorded and released the song, very few of them actually liked it. It was a joke that never really got a laugh.
Most of Led Zeppelin’s history is glittering, yet, ‘D’yer Maker’ is proof that even the best bands are capable of misfiring, albeit their hits far outweighed their misses. On a positive note, at least the track shows their low bar is for humour which is perplexingly admirable and explains why music, not comedy was their chosen path.