Ok, so I’m kind of cheating here. Number 19 is actually two songs that most Led Zeppelin fans will know are simply not played any other way, but together.
“Heartbreaker” ranks among the great classic rock guitar showcases of all time, with an unforgettable riff by Jimmy Page that drives the song into your memory and a guitar solo that redefined what it meant to play a “solo”. Eddie Van Halen has credited Jimmy Page’s technique in this song as the primary influence behind the “tapping technique” that was popularized in Van Halen’s “Eruption”. Steve Vai has claimed this song influenced him to pick up a guitar in the first place.
“Heartbreaker” is a classic example of a song driven by “the man with the axe” instead of the typical lyrically-driven song. So much that after roughly 2 minutes, all of the instruments (and vocals) in the song are silenced with the exception of Jimmy Page and his Gibson Les Paul. For the next 50 seconds, Page puts on an unaccompanied guitar solo that was ranked #16 in Guitar World’s “greatest guitar solos of all time”. If you were one of the lucky people to have seen the band live, that solo would last 15-20 improvised minutes, with shades of Bach’s classical piece "Bourrée in E minor" peppered throughout the performance. If you listen to the studio recording closely, you’ll notice the guitar solo has a different sound altogether than the rest of the song...this is because it was actually recorded in a completely separate studio. Just like writing music while on tour, this was more of a circumstantial necessity than a deliberate act.
When their second album, Led Zeppelin II, was released, it was on a vinyl record, of course. With vinyl, comes certain unique challenges that disc jockeys no longer deal with today. In this case, the song immediately following “Heartbreaker” was “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)” and the combination of an abrupt ending and an explosive intro created confusion across most radio stations in America as to “where one song ends and the other one begins”.
The byproduct of this confusion is that both songs have been played together on the radio since they were released in 1969. Radio stations playing “Two for Tuesday” promotions will actually consider the two songs as only one song if the caller requests a “two-fer” of Led Zeppelin. If only they would have asked Jimmy his opinion before fusing the two songs together...he has stated in the past that “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)” is his LEAST favorite song to play. It’s no wonder “Heartbreaker” was played at almost all of their tours until they disbanded in 1980 and the latter was never played even once in front of a live audience.
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