The Heavy
Hall.

It started at Trident Studios in London on 22 February 1969, under the working title “I Want You”: 35 takes, with Billy Preston on organ.

The finished track is stitched together. An April 1969 take carries the first four and a half minutes, and the Trident master carries the rest, a riff that circles and builds under a rising wash of noise.

On 20 August 1969, during the final mix, John Lennon told the engineers to cut the tape at the spot he chose. The music stops dead at 7:47 and side one of Abbey Road is over. No fade. That silence is as heavy as anything in the song.

Eric Clapton wrote “Badge” with George Harrison, and Harrison plays rhythm guitar on it. For contractual reasons he couldn’t be named, so the credits list “L’Angelo Misterioso”, the mysterious angel.

The title is an accident. Harrison wrote “Bridge” on the lyric sheet to mark the middle section; Clapton, reading it upside down from across the table, saw “Badge”. It stuck.

It was a favor returned: months earlier Clapton had played the uncredited lead on Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. Early pressings credited Clapton alone; Atco fixed the credit in 1969.

“Hey Joe” was the Experience’s first single, in December 1966, and it reached No. 6 in the UK. But Hendrix didn’t write it.

Billy Roberts registered the song’s copyright in the United States in 1962. Folk singer Tim Rose said it was traditional, a song he’d heard as a child, but no documentation has backed that up.

The Leaves, Love and the Byrds all cut it fast. Hendrix’s slow, brooding version follows Tim Rose’s arrangement, which Linda Keith played for Chas Chandler. Chandler went on to manage Hendrix and brought him to London to record.

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant started it in 1970 at Bron-Yr-Aur, a cottage in Snowdonia, as an acoustic piece.

In 1972 the band reworked it into a hard rock track at Stargroves, Mick Jagger’s country house, during the Houses of the Holy sessions. It didn’t make that album.

Page added guitar overdubs in 1974, and the song finally came out on the 1975 double album Physical Graffiti. Zeppelin never played it complete on stage.

Snowblind was going to be the album’s name. The record company refused: the song’s subject, cocaine, was too obvious, and the band didn’t argue.

So the album became Vol. 4, and the band got the last word in the liner notes, thanking “the great COKE-Cola Company of Los Angeles.”

Iommi’s down-tuned riff with Butler and Ward locked underneath: the curator’s pick for the heaviest thing on the record.

In memory of Ozzy Osbourne (1948–2025), who sang his last show with the band in Birmingham on 5 July 2025.