“Whole Lotta Love" is the opening track on the band's second album, Led Zeppelin II, and was released as a single in 1969. 

Led Zeppelin hadn’t release singles in the UK (where it was considered gauche) and in the United States they didn't issue any from their first album.  "Whole Lotta Love" was the first song they allowed as a US single, and it became their biggest hit, going to #4 despite a 5:33 running time.  Many of Zeppelin's most popular songs, including "Stairway To Heaven," were never released as singles.

Part of the song's lyrics were adapted from Willie Dixon's "You Need Love", recorded by Muddy Waters in 1962; originally uncredited to Dixon.  A lawsuit in 1985 was settled with a payment to Dixon and credit on subsequent releases.

Jimmy Page served as Led Zeppelin's producer, and on this song, he let loose in the studio, using all kinds of innovative techniques,

The massive drum sound in the song was the foundation of this track, so Page recorded it in the big room at Olympic Studios in London, which had 28-foot ceilings.  One of the engineers got the sound by putting the drums on a platform and setting up microphones in unusual places: a stereo boom eight feet above the kit, two distant side microphones, and a another placed two feet from the bass drum.  "For the song to work as this panoramic audio experience, I needed Bonzo to really stand out, so that every stick stroke sounded clear and you could really feel them," Page said in the Wall Street Journal.  "If the drums were recorded just right, we could lay in everything else."

In the instrumental section of the song, Page played a theremin, an electronic instrument he liked to experiment with consisting of a black box and antennae, famously heard on the 1966 Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations."  The sound is altered by moving one's hand closer to or farther from the antennae and was used to create the fuzz that alternates back and forth through the speakers.  Page decided to try theremin after hearing the group Spirit use one.

When this song became a hit in America, the UK division of the band's label, Atlantic Records, pressed copies of a shortened version of the song to release there, but Jimmy Page quashed that idea when he heard the 3:12 truncated edit ("I played it once, hated it and never listened to the short version again," he told the Wall Street Journal).  The American single is the same version as found on the album.

Various Sources