I’m looking for songs that have Easter Eggs, although that’s probably not the exact term I need to use. Basically I’m looking for mistakes (such as Sting sitting on the piano before “Roxanne”), melodic nods to other songs, or other little treats, intentional or no, that you have to be paying attention in order to catch.
“I’ve Seen All Good People” by Yes has a chorus of “Give Peace a Chance”
I found the point in the video and set the link to that time.
A lot of Rappers sampled older music. Led Zep was a popular one to be sampled. I’m thinking you don’t mean that?
Would the line snuck in “How does the Song go?” in Uncle John’s Cabin count?
I swear at the beginning of “Whole Lotta Love,” Robert Plant is suppressing a belly laugh.
Weird Al make liberal use of those.
Case in point. Upper left corner.
Matthew Fisher was part of the original Procol Harum. For his solo album after the left the group, he starts out with “Going for a Song” about how he’s sick of playing the same song over and over. At about 2:50, he quotes from “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
Listen to Zappa, there are tons of them. In Dinah-Moe Humm, there’s a line “Can I interest you in a pair of zircon-encrusted tweezers?”, which is right out of “Montana” - “With a pair of heavy-duty/zircon-encrusted tweezers in my hand”.
Sugarloaf’s ‘Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You’ contains quite a few samples.
Another Led Zeppelin one: the beginning of “The Ocean” features (at low volume) drummer John Bonham, apparently referring to four previous non-successful takes, when he says:
And, a mistake which was kept on the track: on the Electric Light Orchestra’s “Rockaria!”, the band hired a female opera singer (Welsh soprano Mary Thomas) to sing; at the beginning of one take, she started singing early, then stopped, and said, “oops!” Jeff Lynne decided to use that track, complete with the “oops.”
Steve Earle and the Dukes “Hardcore Troubador” including the line: “Hey Rosalita won’t you come out tonight”.
(Like that?)
If I recall correctly, Eminem’s comment, “Where’s my snare? I’ve got no snare in my headphones. There we go,” in “Cleaning Out My Closet” was not planned.
There’s also Ringo’s “I’VE GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!” at the end of The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter”.
Ironically, a year later, Alan White (the drummer on “Give Peace a Chance”) was hired to replace Bill Bruford as Yes’s drummer.
For some reason, Zappa invited “Bob Dylan” to the track Flakes on Sheik Yerbouti
Cued to where it starts (if it doesn’t work, Zappa prompts it with ‘Take it away Bob’ at 1:20)
I assume the cough and subsequent cracking up & carrying on at the end of “In My Time of Dying” was not planned by Led Zeppelin.
Billy Swan’s “I Can Help” features impromptu applause near the end (at 2:53 in this Youtube clip, which is cued up to that point). There was a German shepherd puppy in the studio while the song was being recorded (reports differ as to whether the puppy belonged to Swan, or to producer Chip Young); the dog was playing with Swan’s leg while he was recording the vocal track. The applause is from the band, who were congratulating Swan for finishing the take despite the distraction.
Wasn’t there an urban legend about a song where the faint screaming in the background was actually a woman who was raped in another room near the recording studio?
In Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed”, he sings:
“The next sixty seconds could seem like an eternity”
There are sixty seconds remaining in the song when he sings this.
mmm
Lou Adler produced this song, and Bones Howe was the engineer for the session. According to Bones, the part around the 2:45 mark where “I saw her” is repeated twice was a happy accident. Said Bones: “We were punching vocals in, and when we came to that part where the rhythm stops and the group goes, ‘I saw her again last night,’ I just punched in early. They came in early, and so we stopped. And then we went back and started again, and I punched in at the beginning of the vocal, they started two bars later or whatever it was. And when I played it back, the vocal went, ‘I saw her - I saw her again.’ It was a mistaken punch. And Lou said, ‘I love it! Leave it in.’ It was an error, it was a mistake. But Lou was wise enough, it caught his ear and he left it. And I learned something from that. You go with your gut. If something catches - they could be - there are wonderful mistakes that happen in the studio and you have to learn to catch those when they happen and use them.”
“Paul McCartney told group members that the false start on one of the choruses had to be a mistake. He said, “No one’s that clever.””
Another great false start that was left in: the laughter and the little interception from producer Tom Wilson at the start of Bob Dylan’s funniest song, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”:
“Mr. Blue Sky” has a small bit of panting as an homage to “A Day in the Life”
Harry Nillsons cover of “Cowboy” segues at the end into a bit of “Midnight Cowboy”
The Jeff Beck instrumental “Beck’s Bolero”, featuring Keith Moon on drums, was recorded in one take. Keith’s drums are muted because, when he screams and starts playing about halfway into the song, he knocked over his microphone and there was no one there to stand it back up.