Led Zeppelin were never ones to step down from a musical challenge.

Although their sound was rooted in the simple three-chord structure of the blues, the band contained three of the most technically gifted musicians of all time, along with one of the most versatile vocalists ever. There wasn’t much that Led Zeppelin couldn’t handle.

You can hear as such on long structured tracks like ‘The Rain Song’ and ‘In My Time of Dying’, along with more ambitiously time signature-bending tracks like ‘Black Dog’ and ‘The Crunge’. Led Zeppelin were not a prog-rock band, but they could do epic-length excursions with the best of them. But there was one song where the arrangement was so arduous and confusing that the band only attempted it live a handful of times.

‘Four Sticks’ is perhaps the most obscure song on one of the biggest albums of all time, Led Zeppelin IV. Slotted between the slinky fun of ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ and the gorgeous folk of ‘Going to California’, ‘Four Sticks’ is a hard-hitting rocker that seems to go in circles around itself, creating a hypnotic trance. The song’s propulsive 5/4 main section lifts into a dreamy 6/8, tumbling back into its insistent main riff. It reveals two sides of Zeppelin that they melded perfectly: the ambitious experimentalists and the thunderous hard rockers.

While recording the track, John Bonham had difficulty wrapping his head around the changes and burned through a number of takes with increasing frustration. According to John Paul Jones, “It took him ages to get ‘Four Sticks.’ I seemed to be the only one who could actually count things in. Page would play something and [John would] say, ‘That’s great. Where’s the first beat? You know it, but you gotta tell us…’ He couldn’t actually count what he was playing. It would be a great phrase, but you couldn’t relate it to a count. If you think of ‘one’ being in the wrong place, you are completely screwed”.

Jones’ strict musical training had equipped him to handle such situations, but Bonham was completely self-taught and “felt” music more than he ever explicitly counted it. The results were always incredible, but occasionally it took a bit of time to get there. Bonham had similar difficulties counting in ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Rock and Roll’, keeping his sticks clicking during the a cappella portions of the former and borrowing the opening to Little Richards’ ‘Keep A-Knockin’ to kick off the latter.

In fact, the latter song was created during the recording of ‘Four Sticks’. After one particularly frustrating discarded take, Bonham began bashing away at ‘Keep A-Knockin’ just to blow off some steam. ‘Four Sticks’ was put on hold as the band began improvising around a classic rock and roll chord progression. After the spontaneous writing of ‘Rock and Roll’, the band returned to ‘Four Sticks’, eventually nailing the final version as it appears on the album.

Speaking of sticks clicking, the unique click-clack sound on ‘Four Sticks’ wasn’t an overdub: looking to change his approach to the pattern, Bonham grabbed an extra stick for each hand, hence the song’s title. The clattering of those four sticks in Bonham’s hands were picked up on the mics and provided a sort of clattering percussion to complement the song’s twists and turns.

That sense of controlled chaos is part of what gives ‘Four Sticks’ its enduring mystique among Zeppelin fans. While tracks like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Black Dog’ became staples of classic rock radio, ‘Four Sticks’ remained buried slightly deeper in the catalogue, almost functioning as a secret handshake between devoted listeners.

The arrangement feels restless throughout, constantly threatening to collapse under its own weight before snapping perfectly back into place, which only heightened the song’s reputation as one of the band’s most demanding studio creations.

It also served as another reminder of how much Led Zeppelin relied on instinct rather than rigid musicianship. Jones may have been the only member formally capable of counting the shifting rhythms, but the magic of the band rarely came from technical precision alone.

Bonham’s feel, Page’s loose phrasing and Robert Plant’s soaring vocal all pushed against the structure instead of sitting neatly inside it. That tension is exactly what makes ‘Four Sticks’ so compelling, even if it proved too unpredictable to become a permanent fixture of Zeppelin’s live show.

Even though they eventually got the result they were hoping for, the difficult birth of the song put the band off performing it live. ‘Four Sticks’ joined the ranks of other classic Zeppelin songs that never got to be played on stage, including an outtake from the sessions for Led Zeppelin IV, ‘Boogie With Stu’. That track was so improvisational and so reliant on Ian Stewart’s piano that it was never busted out live.

Those weren’t the only songs that never got played live by Zeppelin. ‘Living Loving Maid’, ‘D’yer Ma’ker’, ‘The Rover’, ‘Down By the Seaside’, ‘Night Flight’, and ‘In The Light’ were left out of the band’s live sets. Even a song explicitly written about the live Zeppelin experience, ‘Houses of the Holy’, was never given the live treatment, proving just how fickle Zeppelin was when it came to their live show.

When it came to ‘Four Sticks’, there’s only one verified take on the track from a 1971 concert in Copenhagen. You can check out that audio down below.