LED ZEPPELIN

important work in bold black

1968: (in UK): Led Zeppelin. 1969: Led Zeppelin II. 1970: Led Zeppelin III. 1971: Untitled. 1973: Houses of the Holy. 1975: Physical Graffiti. 1976: Presence * The Song Remains the Same. 1979: In Through The Out Door. 1982: Coda. 1990: Led Zeppelin. 1997: BBC Sessions.

When Led Zeppelin’s first two albums were originally released, John Mendelsohn in Rolling Stone Magazine met them with ferocious reviews. Mendelsohn, who was not an unkind reviewer in the manner of later devolved critics, got his ire up over the Led Zeppelin assault. In retrospect, Mendelsohn seemed unnecessarily critical of the sheer intensity of the band at its loudest. A number of other things bothered him as well. He called the rhythm section "competent." He cited Jimmy Page as "a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative material." He called "Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You" a four chord progression, when it’s actually slightly more complicated than that and doesn’t make much difference anyway considering the expertise dancing all around those four chords. He said John Bonham smashed his cymbals on every beat on this song though Bonham is barely present on the verses, is reserved on the choruses and meets Mendelsohn’s description, to good effect, in only a few, brief, up-tempo passages. Regarding Led Zeppelin II, the editors allowed Mendelsohn to go completely over the top by sarcastically claiming he had listened to it "eight hundred times" under the influence of "mescaline, some old Romilar, novocain" and finally understood why "Jimmy Page is the absolute number-one heaviest white blues guitarist between 5’4" and 5’8" in the world."

Lester Bangs claimed a "love-hate attitude" toward Zeppelin in his Rolling Stone review of Led Zeppelin III: he wrote, "nobody that crass can be all that bad." He cited "Whole Lotta Love" as a pulp classic, but said he could find nothing on Led Zeppelin III that equaled it, though he was moved by "That’s the Way." Bangs noted the professionalism of the production. By the time Lenny Kaye reviewed Led Zeppelin’s forth album, Page and the band were starting to get credit. Kaye called the songs "some of the tightest arranging and producing Jimmy Page has yet seen his way toward doing," and lamented the fact that Page didn’t do more guitar solos (his solos had often been shrugged aside as overkill in the past). In all four of these reviews, John Paul Jones is not mentioned; John Bonham is not mentioned in the reviews of III and IV.

The criticism was all well meant and the negativity hinted at some of the failings of the Zeppelin approach, even if it missed the main attraction. Mendelsohn was writing at a time when well-rounded pop songs and intelligent lyrics were still state-of-the-art endeavors. Economy, precision and a certain amount of literary ambition hadn’t been thoroughly challenged by over-the-top endeavors like Zeppelin. Page’s and Plant’s lyrics are never remotely intellectual and run the gamut from marginally sexist to goofy to imbecile. Plant’s vocabulary contained few words with more than one syllable. By 1976 their reputation as hedonistic party boys negated any possible forays into subtle emotionalism and perhaps it’s a tribute to their savvy that they seldom attempted any. The stripped sex down to its lowest and most unyielding common denominator. There isn’t a hint of character behind the cock’s and cunt’s. Never has a band this good been so stupid at heart, and crated so much excitement in pursuit of such idiotic themes. Robert Plant’s performance style crossed over to high camp on the live The Song Remains the Same where his inept ad-libs (I.e. "Does anybody remember laughter?" from "Stairway to Heaven"" are hilariously out of place. "Stairway" itself has to be the most overrated songs of all time with it’s summation "to be a rock and not to roll" as meaningless as Procol Harum’s "Life is a beanstalk, isn’t it" from "In Held In Twas I." Only, of course, Zep wasn’t attempting parody. As they tried to vary their approach into the realm of fairy tales and other exotic terrain, text was still meaningless, intellect never rising above Robert Plant’s bellybutton.

The outrageous glory of the first four albums lies in the extremities of the sonic assault. Without being straightjacketed attempts at blues, rock and roll, funk, or even rock, emotional musical sparks derived from all these sources are present. There is pop ingenuity in the way these songs ebb and flow, in the way hooks rise and fall through riffs and power chords and finger-picked acoustic runs and screams and moans and those heavy-anchored, bass/drum lines, behind the lurching staccato time signatures and the rolling frenzy of the pull-out-the-stops solos. Jimmy Page eventually turned all of the band member’s deficiencies into pure musical power. He cherished sound – you can hear it on every one of the albums, and through him Zeppelin scratched up their own particular musical kingdom. Page was/is and excellent, underrated producer, his work with Zeppelin as inspired as Roy Wood’s with the Move, Lindsey Buckingham’s with Fleetwood Mac, Eddie Offord’s with Yes – though Page is seldom as credited.

As a transition, Houses of the Holy was Zeppelin’s first false step: not only were the lyrical ideas vague, flowery and irritating, but Zeppelin’s musical contrivances, which usually seemed carefully put together without quite being overworked, clattered and meandered and stalled in staccato bumps and grinds. The band’s peculiar style turns "The Crunge" into a one-shot joke and turns the Jamaican influenced "D’yer Maker" into a queasily unmelodic bubblegum travesty. "No Quarter," a song that isn’t as scary as it thinks it is, continued Zeppelin’s string of fantasy/fairytale failures that were mandatory in order to hide the band’s primarily infantile approach ("Stairway to Heaven," "Misty Mountain Hop," "Ramble On," "The Battle of Evermore" are other, better, examples).

With Physical Graffiti, Page turned Zeppelin into highly abstract musical sculpture as arty and singular as work by Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel and King Crimson. Plant’s vocals are thankfully buried, and his inane moans, screams, whines and yeah-yeahs ("Talking ‘bout yeah, talking ‘bout yeah-yeah," for example) supply a vaguely human element without actually having to be listened to, too closely. Physical Graffiti was too long to totally sustain interest, but five of the first six songs offer a slice of Zeppelin heaven. Jones and Bonham never sounded better and some of the Bonzo’s drumming, with it’s quirky, lumbering unpredictability, seems to work against all probability as it bangs your head around. The albums that followed – Presence, In Through the Out Door and Coda – are short on melody but huge on rhythm and hooks.

Led Zeppelin are perhaps rock’s best example of the line that separates the story-telling part of the brain from that Just-as-vital part that creates music this uniquely compelling.