It sounded completely different from anything the band had recorded before, and it bore a title that both fans and DJs stumbled over. Yet casual Led Zeppelin listeners know it better than many of the heavier pillars of their repertoire. We're talking about D'yer Mak'er, the band's only excursion into reggae. American Songwriter ↗
Strange things often happen on the record that follows the big one. For Led Zeppelin, the big one was their fourth album, and they used the following record, Houses of the Holy from 1973, to push their stylistic wandering to the extreme. That's where the sprawling orchestral ballad The Rain Song comes from, the mocking funk of The Crunge — and also D'yer Mak'er. American Songwriter ↗
The original intention was to lay the song over a dub rhythm, but drummer John Bonham went his own way, one that diverged quite a bit from the typical rhythmic approach of that reggae offshoot. Jimmy Page later explained that elements of doo-wop also crept into his mind while writing it. So a tribute to reggae, filtered through the band's own sensibility, ended up as something entirely its own. American Songwriter ↗
And then there's the title. Anyone who tries to read it phonetically ends up with "Dire Maker" or "Deer Maker." In reality, it refers to an old joke that the sentence "Did you make her?" spoken in a thick British accent sounds like "Jamaica." American Songwriter ↗
Robert Plant considered the song so far out there that, in his view, it would have been the ideal occasion to break the band's rule of not releasing singles in England. The other three outvoted him — though Plant may have sensed something, since D'yer Mak'er made the Top 20 in the United States in 1973. The most accessible Led Zeppelin song thus arose as a joke the band played on itself. American Songwriter ↗
SuperMusic.cz has the lyrics and chords for D'yer Mak'er, as well as the lyrics for The Rain Song and The Crunge — the whole trio through which Houses of the Holy stands apart from the rest of the catalog.
Illustrative photo: Led Zeppelin in a promotional shot from 1971. Photo: Atlantic Records / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Led Zeppelin and their only foray into reggae. Nobody could figure out how to pronounce the song's title
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