Good Times Bad Times

"Good Times Bad Times" is a song by the English rock band Led Zeppelin, featured as the opening track on their 1969 debut album Led Zeppelin.

For the lead guitar solo, guitarist Jimmy Page passed his Fender Telecaster guitar through a Leslie speaker to create a swirling effect. This type of speaker contains a rotating paddle and was designed for a Hammond organ. However, guitars could be used with it. George Harrison and Eric Clapton employed this technique on the Cream song "Badge", and Harrison used it in several of The Beatles' recordings. In an interview he gave to Guitar World magazine in 1993, Page explained that:

I do remember using the board to overdrive a Leslie cabinet for the main riff in "How Many More Times". It doesn't sound like a Leslie because I wasn't employing the rotating speakers. Surprisingly, that sound has real weight. The guitar is going through the board, then through an amp which was driving the Leslie cabinet. It was a very successful experiment.

Page, also the band's producer, placed microphones all over the recording studio to capture a live sound when this song was recorded.

This song is also notable for drummer John Bonham's repeated use of a series of two sixteenth-note triplets on a single bass drum, an effect many subsequent rock drummers have imitated, and as well as keeping the hi-hat playing quarter notes throughout almost the entire song with his left foot. Bonham had reportedly developed this technique after listening to Vanilla Fudge. He was unaware that drummer Carmine Appice was actually playing on a double bass set. As Page has stated:

The most stunning thing about the track, of course, is Bonzo's amazing kick drum. It's superhuman when you realize he was not playing with double kick. That's one kick drum! That's when people started understanding what he was all about.

Bass guitarist John Paul Jones has also remarked on his own contribution to the track:

Usually anything with lots of notes was mine and anything with chunky chords was Page's. Things like "Good Times Bad Times", those are my sort of riffs, they're quite busy.

Jones says that the riff he wrote for this song was the most difficult one he ever wrote.

"Good Times Bad Times" was rarely played live at Led Zeppelin concerts in its entirety. In a few instances in 1969 it was used as an introduction to "Communication Breakdown". It also appeared in almost complete form within the "Communication Breakdown" medley performed at the LA Forum on 4 September 1970, where it included a bass solo by Jones (as can be heard on the Led Zeppelin bootleg recording Live on Blueberry Hill), and several Whole Lotta Love medleys in 1971. It was also the opening song for Led Zeppelin's reunion show at the O2 Arena, London on 10 December 2007.

The TV & Radio presenter Fearne Cotton has said that this is her favourite song of all time.

The song is played in the film The Fighter. This is one of the rare occasions where the band's songs are used in films.