“Since I've Been Loving You” by Led Zeppelin

Tucked into Led Zeppelin III in October 1970, "Since I've Been Loving You" finds the band slowing to a crawl for a heavy, brooding blues in C minor, all ache and slow burn. It was among the first tunes worked up for the album, yet it reportedly gave them more grief in the studio than anything else there, and they finally caught it more or less live, with hardly any overdubs.

There's no bass guitar on it: John Paul Jones sits at a Hammond organ and plays the low end with its pedals, while John Bonham's drum pedal squeaks right through the take, a flaw that earned it the nickname "Squeak King". Jimmy Page produced, with Andy Johns and Terry Manning engineering and Johns mixing. A footnote for the crate-diggers: the words that open and close the song nearly match Moby Grape's 1968 track "Never".

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