Led Zeppelin released their untitled fourth album on November 8, 1971. Anyone looking for it in a record bin had to go by the picture: an old man bent beneath a bundle of sticks, his portrait hanging on a wall of peeling paper. Jimmy Page, who produced the album, recalled going to New York with the band’s manager to hear Atlantic’s objections. The label wanted at least a few words on the jacket. The record went out without them, and listeners came to know it as Led Zeppelin IV.
Page had grown tired of reading that the band owed its success to hype, particularly after the acoustic turn on Led Zeppelin III. He wanted to hear what people made of the next record on its own. One of the songs they’d hear was “Rock and Roll,” which came out of a stalled attempt to record “Four Sticks.” As Page recalled, John Bonham started playing the drum intro to Little Richard’s “Keep A-Knockin’.” Page answered with a guitar riff, and the band followed it for twelve bars. They put “Four Sticks” aside and kept going. The official video uses the alternate mix issued in 2014.
That kind of detour was one reason Page wanted everyone living at Headley Grange in Hampshire, with the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio parked outside. John Paul Jones remembered leaving the instruments set up in a room with a big fireplace. Someone could wander downstairs and start playing, and whoever heard might join in. Robert Plant recalled sitting by that fire with a pencil and paper while Page played the chord sequence for “Stairway to Heaven.” The opening words came to him there. The band later recorded the song at Island Studios in London.
Page gave “Stairway to Heaven” the last spot on side one, after Plant’s duet with Sandy Denny on “The Battle of Evermore.” He had a different ending in mind for the listener who turned the record over. On “When the Levee Breaks,” Bonham played in the entrance hall at Headley Grange, with microphones up the stairwell catching the sound of the room. Page told Classic Rock he wanted that drum sound and the weight of the song to be what listeners carried away when the needle lifted.
The sleeve rewarded a closer look, too. Four symbols appeared on the inner sleeve and record label. Jones and Bonham chose theirs from a book, while Plant and Page designed their own. Open the gatefold and the portrait on the front becomes part of a wider scene: the wall belongs to a partly demolished house, with modern apartment buildings beyond it. Page remembered finding the framed picture while browsing antique shops with Plant near his home in Pangbourne. When Royal Mail put the cover on a British stamp in 2010, Page said he still didn’t know who the man was.
In 2023, historian Brian Edwards was looking through an auction listing for early photographs of Stonehenge when he recognized the figure. A Victorian album held a black and white print with a handwritten caption, “A Wiltshire Thatcher.” The album was dated 1892 and inscribed as a gift to an aunt from someone named Ernest. Edwards traced the handwriting to photographer Ernest Howard Farmer. His research pointed to Lot Long, a thatcher from Mere, as the likely subject. Wiltshire Museum acquired the album, preserving the photograph behind the image Plant and Page had found in the shop. University of the West of England’s account of the discovery
