I don’t listen to much classic rock radio these days, although I did quite a bit back in high school. I was in a store today and they had one of the local classic rock stations on, and Heartbreaker was playing. As Jimmy Page’s beautifully sloppy guitar solo came to an end, I thought back to how the station I used to listen to back home used to always would play this particular song together with the following track on the album, Living Loving Maid. And sure enough, this radio station did the same thing.
Any theories on why this is? Neither song seems unusually short, precluding it from being played on its own (although looking it up, I see LLM is only about 2:40… short, but I don’t think so short it couldn’t be played alone). They don’t really segue into each other; Heartbreaker just kind of abruptly ends, and LLM has a pretty standard-type opening. So I’m wondering why it became a seemingly wide-spread practice to always play these two songs together.
I do know that LLM was the b-side to whole lotta love. We Will Rock You & We Are the Champions have the same distinction and are also played back to back more often than not. Can’t tell you why exactly, but, the fact they shared a single probably has something to do with it.
Partly, it’s because H ends on the same note that LLM starts on, and they have similar “feels” (instrumentation and vocal technique), so after you’ve heard them a few times, it’s hard to hear then end of H without your brain moving on to the start of LLM.
HB ends on the supertonic. There’s a little “Ha” at the very end which I think is on the tonic, but it’s so short that it really doesn’t provide resolution. So it would be really irritating to stop at that point.
I get really peeved when I don’t hear them back-to-back. To me, Heartbreaker is just a long intro to the real song here. I don’t start playing air guitar at 70 mph until LLM starts.
Thank you for the question, Anamorphic. I only had Zepp II on cassette, and the two songs weren’t even on the same friggin’ side. I had always wondered about that, but in my Led Zepplin days was too cool to ask.
I haven’t thought about that in forever. My ignorance was fought today.
Been many, many years since I owned this album (I’m not much of a Zep fan), but isn’t there only the very briefest silence between the two songs on the LP, so that it sounds more like a one-beat rest than the usual several seconds of separation between tracks?
You’re not the only one. The Led Zeppelin boxed set has “Heartbreaker” by itself without the “Living Loving Maid” follow-up. My brother got this set as a Christmas gift and we both found that hearing one without the other really bugged us.
My guess is that in the Days of Vinyl, the pause between the two songs was so brief that the DJ couldn’t stop between songs in time anyway. The fact that there’s a natural segue is just another reason to let the two play back to back. And after a while, you get used to hearing them in tandem and it sounds weird when the iPod shuffle or what have you doesn’t do it.
The same is true of the last two songs from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Brain Damage/Eclipse, always played one into the other… Or The Happiest Days of Our Lives/Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 2 from The Wall. Many people who have only heard the song on the radio probably don’t even realize those are really two separate tracks on the album.
Who thought of putting them together like that in the first place? I’d guess it was Jimmy, since he was also the producer. A well-put together rock and roll album is more than just a collection of songs. Touches like that are one of the reasons why I love the format so much.
I recall an interview with Page and his comment that he never understood why (I don’t remember if he said “people” or “Americans”) think it is all one song. It was never intended to be presented that way.
Do any of our Dopers across the pond have thoughts on this? Do those outside of the US also percieve this pair the same way?
Journey’s “Feeling That Way” and “Anytime” is another pair of songs you rarely hear separately. Like the HB/LLM pairing (and “We Will Rock You”/“We Are The Champions”), the first song has a fairly abrupt vocal ending, and the second song begins with vocals. They’re clearly separate songs, but just flow together.
it could be a simple error at the studio end, if you ever had a copy of QueensRyche’s 4 song ep you know exactly what I mean. the gap between the first and second song is huge, between 2 and 3 normal and 3 and 4 is non existant. I really doubt it was planned that way and probably screwed up their chances at getting some airplay as the final track started with the end of the previous one.
(not saying thats the case but who knows?)
