“Custard Pie” by Led Zeppelin

"Custard Pie" throws open the doors of Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin's sixth album, from 1975, with a riff that swaggers in like it owns the place. The words are a grab bag of old blues, tipping the hat to Sleepy John Estes' "Drop Down Mama", Bukka White's "Shake 'Em On Down" and, more faintly, Blind Boy Fuller's "I Want Some of Your Pie", and they're loaded with sexual double meanings. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant share the writing credit.

The playing is pure grease: John Paul Jones on electric clavinet, Plant blowing a harmonica solo, Bonham's drums right up front, and Page, who produced, pushing his wah-wah solo through an ARP synthesizer. Oddly, the band rehearsed it for the 1975 North American tour but never played it all the way through onstage; the closest it came was a fragment in the acoustic set in Houston in 1977.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.