How a Quasi-Reggae Beat and a Weird Title Landed Led Zeppelin in the Top 20 in 1973

Its sound was an extreme departure from the band’s normal approach. And it featured an in-joke of a title that caused fans and DJs to butcher the pronunciation.

And yet, you can’t deny that casual fans of Led Zeppelin know it better than many of the band’s towering warhorse tracks. We’re talking about “D’yer Mak’er”, Led Zeppelin’s strange foray into reggae.

‘Holy’ Terrors

Bizarre things often happen on the record after the big one. For Led Zeppelin, the big one was their fourth record, the untitled beast they released in 1971. It took a confident leap forward from all that the British quartet had delivered on their first three albums. The scope and ambition of what the band did left most of their hard-rocking peers in the dust.

One of the qualities that made this band so great was their refusal to do pale imitations of what they’d done before. As such, Zep used Houses Of The Holy, the follow-up album they released in 1973, as an opportunity to take their stylistic wanderlust to new extremes.

Hence, the album contains the sauntering orchestral ballad “The Rain Song”. It delivers the sneering funk of “The Crunge”. And it offers “D’yer Mak’er”, an attempt at a reggae homage that, when filtered through the band’s sensibilities, turned into a creation all its own.

Jamaica Say You Will

The idea was to put the song to a dub beat. But drummer John Bonham ended up going off on his own tangent that separated somewhat from the typical rhythmic approach of that reggae offshoot. Jimmy Page later explained that there were elements of doo-wop that drifted into his mind as well while he was writing the music for the song.

And then there was the title. If you try to pronounce it phonetically, you might end up with “Dire Maker”. Or “Deer Maker”. But in actuality, the title refers to an oft-told joke about how the phrase “Did you make her?”, when said with a thick British accent, comes out sounding like “Jamaica.”

Robert Plant thought that the song was so off-the-wall that it would be the perfect way for the band to break their policy of not releasing singles in England. The other three members of Zep voted him down. But Plant might have been onto something, as “D’yer Mak’er” did hit the Top 20 in the US in 1973.

Behind the Lyrics of “D’yer Mak’er”

The lyrics of “D’yer Mak’er” are a simple and repetitive plea to a girl. Sample couplet: “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh/You don’t have to go.” Maybe that direct approach is why the song worked so well at radio.

Later, Plant expands ever so slightly on the narrator’s malaise. “When I read the letter you wrote me, it made me sad, sad, sad/When I read the words that it told me, it made me mad, mad, mad.” About as poetic as Plant gets is when he complains, “You hurt me to my soul.”

Some hardcore Zep fans find the song annoying, an opinion shared with John Paul Jones, the band’s bassist. Yet it was the gateway song for many fans who only listened to pop radio to discover the band. Whatever your opinion on “D’yer Mak’er”, you can’t deny it’s one-of-a-kind in the Led Zeppelin catalog.

(Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images)

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