I like to dip into Rick Beato’s YouTube channel once in a while. He’s too Boomer-ish and curmudgeonly about current pop music for my tastes, but when he rhapsodizes about the 70s rock that he loves, he’s delightful. His list of the top 10 Led Zeppelin riffs is especially pure Beato essence.
Number six on Rick’s list is “Ten Years Gone”, a power ballad from Physical Graffiti and a bit of a deep cut. After this video reminded me that it existed, I went and listened to the song with fresh ears, and I very much enjoyed it.
The meter is very confusing at first! Halfway through the song when the beat enters, it becomes more clear, but between the odd phrase lengths and the syncopations, it’s still not obvious what’s happening. Here’s my transcription of the main riffs:
Right off the bat, the rhythm is very confusing. Is that first A chord supposed to be the downbeat? Or is it the F chord? If it is the F chord, then it’s anticipated by half a beat. Maybe we are coming in halfway through a measure? It’s totally ambiguous. There are no drums or anything, and Jimmy Page is playing the tempo very loosely, so the meter really floats. Later on in the track, you hear the riff with John Bonham’s drums underneath, and then it becomes perfectly clear, but that intro only makes sense in retrospect.
Harmonically, riff A is a lovely bit of modal interchange. There are only the two chords, A and F6. (You could also just as easily write the F6 as Dm7/F, they are literally the same chord. I subjectively hear F as being the root rather than the third.) We are in the key of A major, but the F6 chord implies A natural minor. What is more romantic and wistful than that combination?
The transition from Riff A to Riff B is a mysterious sequence of jazzy-sounding chords. You could think of the D#°7 as acting like B7, the dominant chord in the temporary key of E minor. Then the pairing of Em7 and Dmaj7 implies A Mixolydian mode. The Cmaj7 is the result of sliding the Dmaj7 down a whole step. Cmaj7 and Fmaj7 together imply C major, which is the same pitches as A natural minor. But then it’s back to A major at the beginning of riff B.
At the end of the transition, the meter gets ambiguous again. The little melody on the Fmaj7 sounds like it might begin on a downbeat because of the way it’s accented, but it doesn’t, it starts on beat three. The melody carries over into the next bar in a confusing way, too, with the last note on the downbeat where you were expecting riff B to begin. So the actual first note in riff B is displaced half a beat, on the “and” of one, the weakest spot in the bar. After that, every downbeat in the riff is anticipated, on the “and” of four of the previous bar. That is all extremely hip!
Riff B’s harmony resembles the main riff in “Dear Prudence“, a static major chord over a chromatically descending lament bass. It’s A, then A/G (implying G9#11), then A/F# (implying F#m), then A/F (implying Fmaj7#5). Like John Lennon, Jimmy Page almost certainly got this idea from a standard blues turnaround rather than from classical music.
The rest of the tune is harmonically moderately interesting and metrically not very interesting. I’m not going to transcribe the whole song unless one of you convinces me via Patreon that it’s worth doing. About the lyrics, well, the less said the better. Robert Plant got laid a long time ago. Okay. Anyway, that intro is a beauty.