Icon: Led Zeppelin
They were the grandest example of rock become classic, both in the outreach of their many musical wanderings and the exemplary lifestyle they led while zepping the road, dominating the ’70s. The amazing thing, listened to 30 years on, is how truly strange their recorded work is, how it set the bar for skewed virtuosic guitar, vocal pyrotechniques, stolidity of beat and bass orchestrating like a keyboard, a band in the truest sense of the word. Lead guitarist Jimmy Page might have been the mastermind, but each personality squared the circle: or, as they put it on the album that gave us “Stairway” undenied, Z O S O (their substitute rune-ic initials). Their music is everywhere still, resonating from all their eras, the heavy to the heavenly, and their tale – in its alchemical excess and lurid mythology – is only backdrop to the breadth and magnificent edifice of their body of work.
From The Beginning
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They rose phoenix-like in 1968, from the ashes of the most sonically futuristic English "beat" band, the Yardbirds. Page had inherited the mantle of Yardbirds' guitarist from Jeff Beck, a third musketeer (starting with Clapton, and perhaps starring Pete Townshend as D'Artagnan) that positioned him well when the bluesbreaking tradition of Brit-rock. Even in the Yardbirds' closing stages, at a concert recorded (however badly, it remains a fascinating document) at New York's Anderson Theater in March, Jimmy can be heard trying his hand at future Led Zeppelin staples like "Dazed and Confused," (a transliteration of Jake Holmes's song of the same name) and the acoustic "White Summer."
more »He had met bassist John Paul Jones in the recording studios when both were sessioneers; Jimmy had been impressed with "his proper musical training," and Jones wondered if he could use a bass player in the group Jimmy was conceiving. The template was clear — Cream had just broken up, and Beck was finding favor with his new band, featuring the chest-heaving Rod Stewart on vocals. Page needed a romantic and several-octave'd foil, and considered Terry Reid, but he had just signed a solo deal. Terry recommended a singer from Birmingham, Robert Plant, then playing in a band called Hobbstweedle. Who knew Bonzo: John Bonham, he of the massive snare and weightier foot, putting the "heavy" ("metal" had yet to be added to the adjective, though this new group would be in the forefront of defining the sound) in the newly christened Led Zeppelin.
Their debut album came out in January, 1969. The material had been honed on a tour finishing out the Yardbirds' contractual obligations, and the album was cut in less than two weeks the previous October, with Glyn Johns engineering (Jimmy produced). The uncanny interplay on the opening cut, "Good Times, Bad Times," with Bonham's bass drum tattooing Page's bursts of cascading guitar licks, Jones running complicated routings between the two and Plant's howling, had a choreographic precision that showed the new band was intent on coming out of the gate full-steam. Somehow traditional — there's beautiful Bert Jansch-ish acoustic guitar ("Black Mountain Side," "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You"), along with Willie Dixon blues covers ("You Shook Me" and "I Can't Quit You Baby,") that showboat Robert and Jimmy's responsive mating calls to each other, it is also futuristic, with monstro riffs that would become the trademark of metal bands everywhere ("How Many More Times"), along with the frontal drive and teetering headlong lunge of "Communication Breakdown," surely a harbinger of punk. And then there was "Dazed and Confused," Jimmy bowing the E string of his guitar in a soon-to-be live showstopper. "Your Time is Gonna Come," predicted the Zep, opening side two, but already on extended tour in an America that seemed wet and willing for the band, the spilling of seed was about to begin.
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For an album that was literally recorded on the fly, born of riffs discovered in live improvisation and backstage dressing rooms during the group's nonstop bacchanal touring in their first heady year of taking rock 'n' roll by storm, the sophomore Led Zeppelin release has a remarkably unified feel. Eddie Kramer engineered, though Page was the one who held together the sessions that took place in numerous far-flung studios, tracks cut in one city overdubbed in another and the whole thing mixed in two days. Opening with "Whole Lotta Love," every inch of its psychedelic entwining guitar and ghostly Theremin and Plant's bemoaning and Bonzo's bashing framed by a crunching guitar figure, it proved Zeppelin was no pretty-boy fluke. Plant began to feel comfortable within the band — "The Lemon Song," an offshoot of Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor," showed he could meld his feminine onstage demeanor with ultra-masculine swagger — and his penned lyrics to "Ramble On" unveiled the band's fascination with Tolkien-esque fantasy myth and imagery. Bonham's "Moby Dick" drum solo befitted its leviathan title, a live staple, and both "Heartbreaker" and "Living Loving Maid (She's Just A Woman)" boasted power chordings that guaranteed that new dance step along Zep front rows known as headbanging. Page had switched guitars from a Telecaster to his now-signature Les Paul (currently available in a signed and limited replica edition from Gibson for a mere $25,882), and a generation of shredding guitarists, including the likes of Vai and Van Halen, watched in wonder. By the end of December, Led Zeppelin II had knocked the Beatles' Abbey Road from the No. 1 slot in America, and the band were poised to enter the '70s unchallenged.
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Megastars, worn from constant touring and its attendant depravities, onstage and off, the group retreated to a "small derelict cottage in South Snowdonia" in Wales to record an album that seemed a reaction to the mayhem surrounding them. In May of 1970 they settled themselves in with a mobile recording studio and attempted to reconcile their hard rockin' with some of the more acoustic modes of music both Page and Plant leaned toward. If "Immigrant Song" celebrated a Viking-scorched earth out of a Robert E. Howard "Conan" adventure, it was followed with "Friends," bearing a texture not unlike that new supergroup from So. California, Crosby, Stills & Nash. By the time you got to the second side, leading off with "Gallows Pole," the feel had become distinctly pastoral and, in retrospect, III does seem as if the group is catching its collective breath. That said, Page is a superior acoustic guitarist, and once originally conceived of Zeppelin as more in the Fairport Convention vein; his unamplified prowess is assured and graced with same sense of invention as his more electric work. "Since I've Been Loving You" is bedrock blues for the faithful, but it's in "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp" that you can hear the good time they had out of the spotlight, skiffle-ing along, catching their breath for the next leap up the misty mountain.
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Hop. And choose your own font while you're at it. The Zeppelin mid-period masterpiece was hard to spot at first. Its cover seemed overtly rural, a bent man carrying a bundle of sticks seen through a frame on a weathered wall; and perhaps it would continue the scaled-down evolution of III. But the transformation begun at Bron-y-Aur would find new complexities: in particular, a song called "Stairway to Heaven." They began conceptual work in November, 1970, when Page began thinking of a track that combined and built through sections, an opus. The song begins simply and over the course of each new section, climbs that very stairway, a beautiful metaphor made manifest by Robert's lyrics, written as the band ran through the song's metamorphosis. Critics had been noticeably myopic on Led Zeppelin; a mixture of snobbery and positioning against the overtly populist, and certainly missed the group's staying power, not to mention appeal to the female hard rock audience, who did like and respond to the band's flirtatious manner. But this streak of English romantique, allusioning Byron and Wilde and Crowley and Celtic outcroppings in British history and the land of Faery and Mississippi floodplain (which, despite all, my choice of masterpiece on the record is their cataclysmic reading of Memphis Minnie's "When The Levee Breaks"), makes the epic that is "Stairway" all the more totemic. There is no trace of self-conscious pilgrimagic in its spiritual quest, even as Robert intones the line about "bustle in your hedgerow." Each section comes on as if by free association, so natural and unexpected and fulfilling does it appear. All this, along with Sandy Denny's guest appearance on "The Battle of Evermore" as the Queen of Light (Robert dueted as the Prince of Peace, and hey, these were druidic times) and, to remind and ground us, the flat-out unleashing joy that is "Rock And Roll."
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Last night, while in the midst of scribing the Zep saga, I went out for a cold Yuengling in my town, and there, as if bidden, "The Ocean" came on the jukebox. This is not unusual. Any random journey with the radio on is likely to produce a Zeppelin song being played somewhere. But listening to it in a crowded bar on a Saturday night, visualizing Robert looking out "singing to an ocean, I can hear the oceans roar," and imagining the vast wave-like crowds that became their birthright, is to appreciate the sway their mythos held over their fans and themselves. By 1973, the group was an established first-rank attraction, and rather than rest on their arena laurels, Houses of the Holy has a global reach, an expansion of their music rather than contraction. They had visited Asia, taking in the modes and scales and drones of other cultures. While this would not become an overt influence, it did make for an album more densely layered and jigsawed than previously, guitars entangled and rhythms sliced-and-diced. The beat of "The Ocean" seems to double-back on itself, a guitar figure counterpoint to each drum wallop. Bonham is especially precise on this album, and for those who dwell on his reputation as a brawler and wild man, a seat from the vantage of his drum throne can only reveal a snap and deft mastery of the kit. In "The Crunge," Zep's James Brown tribute, and "D'yer Mak'er," Zep's take on a reggae just starting to make worldwide impact (with a bit of doo-wop "Angel Baby" thrown in), his sense of timing and punctuation match the depth of sonic space given his drum sound. There is no bass drum more resonant in rock and roll. Page's often-underrated strength as a rhythm guitarist finds firm footing with Bonzo and Jones, and the foundation they give Jimmy to sail off into his solos is remarkable: the frenetic vamp of "The Song Remains The Same" or the binary electric-acoustic split of "Over The Hills and Far Away." "The Rain Song" veers dangerously close to dreaded easy listening in its mellotronica, but Plant's precipitous vocal allows the sweetness to unfold. Jones' "No Quarter" is a textural change from the usual Zep approach, with grand piano and synthesized bass, and though generally a team player, it's interesting to surmise what John Paul might have done had he taken more of a frontal role in the band (see In Through The Out Door).
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The first release on the band's own label, Swan Song, gave them the freedom to stretch out. When material for what would become Physical Graffiti lengthened past the aural limits of a 33 1/3 LP (usually about 20 minutes a side), the decision was made to include songs originally recorded for earlier albums. "Bron-yr-aur" and "Down By The Seaside" dated back as early as sessions for Led Zeppelin III, "Houses of the Holy" had never made it onto the album of the same name, the Southern boogie of "The Rover" and a jam with Ian Stewart ("Boogie With Stu") were not so much filler as fill 'er up! The newer material, a plaintive "In My Time of Dying" with Page's slide-guitar embellishments, the Eastern shimmer of "In the Light," and most provocatively, "Trampled Underfoot" with its underlying clavinet evoking Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" would prove popular additions to the Zep canon. But it is with "Kashmir," its arabesque orchestrations and cadenced rhythms, its relentless and sinuous guitar lines, its sense of destiny as it lifts itself to each new level of tension and release, that the lighter-than-air miracle of flotation that is Led Zeppelin rises to their occasion, as Robert invokes the "father of the four winds, fill my sails…" and the great airship takes celestial wing.
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Because of his stature as guitarist/songwriter for Led Zeppelin, Page's considerable duties as a producer are sometimes underplayed; but the truth is, aside from being in the band, coming up with riffs, playing and layering, he had to oversee recording, mixage and completion. He had quite a task ahead of him with three days remaining before the Rolling Stones were booked to take over Munich's Musicland Studio. Mick Jagger stopped in to see Jimmy at that point, and said he'd be lucky to sketch out the overdubbed guitar parts, let alone mix the thing. But 18 days after Led Zeppelin had begun the album, Presence was finished, all the more remarkable for the bleak mood the band had been in following Robert's devastating car accident on Rhodes with his family, where he'd severely injured his leg. Perhaps that makes the Olympian gallop and Hellenic allusions of "Achilles Last Stand" all too real, but Page — with the 11th hour pressure of deadline upon him — piled on the guitars, sticking closely to blues and rock and forgoing the acoustics, giving the album a back-to-basics immediacy. "Nobody's Fault But Mine," might be the New Yardbirds for its unvarnished, roughshod rave-up, and "Candy Store Rock" pulls out all the rockabilly stops and go-cat-goes.
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Filming their shows at Madison Square Garden during a three-night stand at the end of July, 1973, the resulting movie, not released until 1976, and consequent soundtrack is a faithful representation of Zeppelin live. While you don't get the phantasmagorical fantasy sequences or backstage footage of manager Peter Grant in guard-dog action, the updated concert performances (remixed and with bonus tracks) do show the way songs would elasticize and morph during a typical concert, often leaving their recorded versions in the dust. From a rip-roaring opening "Rock and Roll" to the nearly half hour of "Dazed and Confused" to a spiraling "Stairway" to a climactic "Whole Lotta Love," the band is in full strut, capturing a moment in time when they were at their live peak of pride and power.
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By 1978, Led Zeppelin was resembling, more and more, the flaming Graf that graced their debut album cover. Forced into becoming tax exiles from their native land, excoriated by the new generation of "punks" who regarded them as overblown and stegasaurian, beset by the tragedies of the sudden death of Robert Plant's son and the crippling substance abuse of Bonham and Page, they gathered at Abba's Polar Studios in Sweden at the end of the year to make what would be their final present-tense studio album, though no one knew it at the time. By default, the reliable John Paul Jones assumed the helm and along with Robert, saw the album through to its conclusion, which accounts for its keyboard-heavy feel ("Carouselambra," another lengthy Zep epic, is built upon a synth bedding) and somewhat sober, restrained atmosphere. The surprising AOR hit "All My Love" is pretty and affecting, but a far cry from the raunch and sense of danger that propelled the group to stratosopheric heights; "A Fool in the Rain" has a rolling rhythm and indelible chordal hook. In Through The Out Door is the sound of a band in transition, but unfortunately, with the alcohol-related death of John Bonham in 1980, there would be nowhere left to go.
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In through the outtakes, with quasi-live tracks mixed with cuts that didn't make it onto the official Zep releases. The pickings range from "We're Gonna Groove," a leftover from Led Zeppelin II, to three tracks from the Out Door sessions, with the highlight being the group's response to the frenzy of punk, "Wearing And Tearing." "I Can't Quit You Baby" derives from a live soundcheck in 1970, "Poor Tom" would have fit nicely on Led Zeppelin III, "Walter's Walk" is a stroll around a could-be from Houses of the Holy, and "Bonzo's Montreaux" is yet another solo excursion by John Bonham that shows why the group could simply not go on without him.
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This 2007 culling from eight studio albums is nigh-inclusive, a can't-go-wrong greatest hits from a greatest band. Though Zeppelin made albums meant to be listened to from start to finish, each release its own character and place within their solar system, Mothership provides an excellent retrospective and chronological overview of the band's evolution during its decade as a creative unit. For those who don't want to cherry-pick the best known essential songs from the group's catalogue, or if you simply want all-the-best-and-later-for-the-rest, this is definitive, rewarding, and still astonishing in its mastery of the arcane art of rock and roll.
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Led Zeppelin always expressed a measure of disappointment that the "only" live recording in their catalog was the film soundtrack tied to Song Remains the Same. The release of these California concerts from June 1972 does much to fill out and enhance the reputation of the band as a stellar live attraction. As their numerous bootlegs show, despite the arena scale and special effects (Pagey's laser bow, Bonham's mega-gong, Plant's unbuttoned shirt), they were a band that relied very much on the moment, the sudden soar of collective exhilaration. They had their showstoppers and set pieces, but this was not scripted theater; depending on mood, the band veered between dazzling and erratic, running on the adrenaline of the hysteria surrounding them. In a California which seemed to them a spiritual and sybaritic Eden, all pleasures of Blake's heaven and hell combined, these shows, from the Los Angeles Forum and the Long Beach Arena, capture the group's lightning-in-a-bottle, electricity generated like the spark that lights the hydrogen in a dirigible hovering over an airfield in New Jersey, the moment before explosion.
