5 Led Zeppelin Songs With the Dirtiest Lyrics
For Led Zeppelin, the music tended to be more important than the lyrics. Need proof? Only one album came with a lyric sheet. At the same time, Zep’s tunes would have been supremely boring without Robert Plant’s vocals. These are the five Led Zeppelin songs with dirty lyrics.
Robert Plant’s lyrics developed during his Led Zeppelin career
Before we get to the Zep songs with dirty lyrics, we must acknowledge how far Plant came with his writing while in the band.
He turned 20 years old soon after Led Zeppelin formed. Suddenly, he was performing with two professional musicians in Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones (plus one of the greatest drummers ever in John Bonham). Before that, his only experience in working bands came in some barely notable regional groups (Band of Joy, Hobbstweedle).
The singer basically copied lyrical phrases from blues songs he liked early in Led Zeppelin’s career. Plant admitted he stole the words and vocal delivery on “Whole Lotta Love.” Yet he developed his skills and wrote lyrics that told epic stories (“Achilles Last Stand”) and conveyed heartbreak and sadness (“All of My Love”). Still, Plant was always good for delivering some nasty lyrics on Led Zeppelin songs.
1. ‘Whole Lotta Love’
- Dirty lyrics: “Way, way down inside / I’m gonna give you my love / I’m gonna give you every inch of my love.”
Plant copied the lyrics (from bluesman Willie Dixon) and gritty vocal delivery (from The Small Faces’ Steve Marriott) on “Whole Lotta Love,” but he made them even dirtier than either artist.
It’s not just that Plant sings, “Way, way down inside / I’m gonna give you my love / I’m gonna give you every inch of my love,” (quite graphic for late 1969). It was also that he added orgasmic howls that came straight from the bedroom. But remember what we said about the music being important to Led Zeppelin? “Whole Lotta Love” was case in point.
The opening song from Led Zeppelin’s second album was all about Page’s forceful riff and the experimental psychedelic freakout in the middle of the song. Plant’s lyrics were secondary, but that doesn’t make them any less gross.
2. ‘The Lemon Song’
- Dirty lyrics: “Do squeeze, squeeze me, baby, until the juice runs down my leg / The way you squeeze my lemon / I’m gonna fall right outta bed, bed, yeah.”
A few moments after “Whole Lotta Love” ended, Plant returned with some of his grossest Led Zeppelin lyrics. And he once again copied from a legendary blues musician in the process. Zep’s singer lifted the “squeeze my lemon / until the juice runs down my leg” (starting around 4:10) directly from Robert Johnson’s lyrics for “Travelling Riverside Blues.” The line played better in the more liberal 1960s and hardly raises an eyebrow in the 21st century. Still, that doesn’t make the vivid imagery any less disgusting.
3. ‘Trampled Under Foot’
- Dirty lyrics: “Gun down on my gasoline / Believe I’m gonna crack a head.”
As 1975’s Physical Graffiti was a double album, it allowed Plant to fully explore his deep well of sex euphemisms. “Custard Pie,” “The Wanton Song,” and “Sick Again” are all about bedroom antics. “Trampled Under Foot” takes the cake for having the dirtiest lyrics.
It didn’t take a codebreaker to understand what Plant sang about, but that doesn’t make his words less gross. The line “Gun down on my gasoline / Believe I’m gonna crack a head” at 1:48 stands out as the grimiest. That said, it’s actually pretty impressive how many car-related sexual double entendres Plant stuffed into “Trample Under Foot.”
4. ‘Candy Store Rock’
- Dirty lyrics: “Oh baby, baby, I like your honey and it sure likes me / Oh baby, baby, I got my spoon inside your jar.”
Led Zeppelin’s 1976 album Presence might be their heaviest, both musically and emotionally. But Plant abandoned heavy themes for tossed-off fun on two of the seven songs — “Royal Orleans” and “Candy Store Rock.” And one of those — “Candy Store Rock” — has some of the dirtiest Led Zeppelin lyrics. Spoiler alert — Plant’s words have nothing to do with buying Pixie Stix.
Plant began nearly every line with the lustful words “Oh baby baby.” He sang about “wanting every mouthful more of you” and how “it’s not the wrapping that sells the goods.” It’s Plant at his most lascivious, and it all built to a verse that contained the lines, “Oh baby, baby, oh you sting like a bee / Oh baby, baby, I like your honey and it sure likes me / Oh baby, baby, I got my spoon inside your jar.” As if we didn’t already know what he was singing about.
5. ‘Hot Dog’
- Dirty lyrics: “I took her love at seventeen / A little late these days it seems / But they said heaven is well worth waiting for.”
Plant was no stranger to singing about teenage love. He did it on “Sick Again,” the final song from Physical Graffiti. (It’s worth noting that the album contained several tunes where Plant barely hides his libido with his lyrics). Yet the singer has said his intention on “Sick Again” was to decry the Los Angeles groupie scene.
We’re not sure what his intention was with “Hog Dog,” but Plant delivered some of his dirtiest Led Zeppelin lyrics with the line, “I took her love at seventeen / A little late these days it seems / But they said heaven is well worth waiting for.” He sang those words on 1979’s In Through the Out Door, a point in time where he should have known better than to sing about bedding a minor, especially considering he had a young daughter at home.
We almost went with the “I got a woman wanna ball all day” line from “Hey Hey What Can I Do” in this spot, but thought better of it. After all, that was just Plant singing about unreciprocated love. Plus, those Led Zeppelin lyrics didn’t seem so dirty when you had KISS putting out an album called Love Gun and a band named Butthole Surfers finding mainstream success in the 1990s.
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