Celebration Day
| "Celebration Day" | |
|---|---|
| Song by Led Zeppelin from the album Led Zeppelin III | |
| Released | 5 October 1970 |
| Recorded | Headley Grange, England, 1970 |
| Genre | |
| Length | 3:29 |
| Label | Atlantic |
| Writer(s) | |
| Producer(s) | Jimmy Page |
| ISWC | T-070.027.876-7 |
"Celebration Day" is a song by English rock band Led Zeppelin, and the third track from their 1970 album Led Zeppelin III. The band's last concert film and album, released on 19 November 2012, took their name from this song.
The song starts with a number of guitar chords played at high speed on top of a monotonic drone created with a Moog synthesizer. This connects the song musically with the preceding track on the album, "Friends", which ends with the same buzz. Originally, one of John Bonham's drum tracks was to be used in the intro of "Celebration Day", but an engineer accidentally erased the recording. Unable or unwilling to re-record it, they used the synthesizer drone from the end of "Friends" to fill up the gap.
In an interview Page gave to Guitar World magazine in 1993, he discussed the construction of the song:
There's about three or four riffs going down on that one, isn't there? Half was done with a guitar in standard tuning and the other half was done on slide guitar tuned to an open A, I think. We put that together at Headley Grange. Because we rented the Rolling Stones' mobile recording studio, we could relax and take our time and develop the songs in rehearsals. I do not remember too much about that song other than that and what I told you earlier about the opening being erased. I used to play the whole thing live on my electric 12-string.
Robert Plant's lyrics were inspired by his impressions of the city of New York. On Zeppelin's 1971 concert tour of the United States, he would sometimes introduce it as "The New York Song". "Celebration Day" was often played live in Led Zeppelin concerts from 1971 to 1973, and was returned to the band's setlist at the Knebworth Festival in 1979, where Page performed the song using his Gibson EDS-1275 double-necked guitar.
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