Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

I'm not into them.

For every colossal riff to enjoy for a few minutes there's always a hours of dull indulgent sludge - and, though the recent gig showed some restraint, it still looks like the chaff was there in spades with the wheat still few and far between.

Apart from the megaton riffage though, what have you got? The songs themselves are pretty poor constructions, usually somebody else's uncredited construction, the lyric suck.

Their attempts at ska were even more embarrassing than The beatles, and doing a Rosie and the originals 'tribute' is never a good idea.

I wonder how all those critics reclaiming them would have felt if they'd had to sit through moby dick and then have it followed by a structureless 25 minute dazed and confused. It's notable that none of the critics seemed to have been aware of the band in the 70s or make comparisons with 70s rock - to claim that somehow punk failed because one or two of these dinosaurs are still around misses the point that its only one or two and they've shaped up a fair bit.

Nicole OTM.

In my high school, LZ were seen as "alternative".

oh, it's just I have no enthusiasm for Zep. If I had a CD of theirs, it'd just never get played in preference to *anything* else. And it's not even because of ubiquity, I'd say I know about three of their songs anything like "well". I did hear "Kashmir" and thought it fine. "Whole lotta" is OK, "STairway" I can live without, "Rock & roll" is funny, and umm, oh that jamaica one, come ON now!

Anyroad, from up there:

And this is a nice thing to say:

And Page - Mephistophelean with his black frock coat and explosion of white hair - is an equally commanding presence, an incongruous gardening accident which forced the show to be rescheduled notwithstanding.

No it's not, its awful. Try saying it! It's clunky and you have to read it three times to work out where the inflections are! (nothing to do with the content stated there)

Apart from the megaton riffage though, what have you got

Well quite a lot actually. Limiting LZ to megaton riffage is like dismissing the entire Beatles catalogue because you didn't like Sgt.Peppers. Sure, lots of people think of Whole Lotta Love, Black Dog, Immigrant Song, Heartbreaker as typical LZ, but there's plenty of folk and raga chucked in to the standard blues-based riffing. Maybe it kinda gets levelled out in concert, I dunno.

one or two of these dinosaurs are still around misses the point that its only one or two and they've shaped up a fair bit

erm aren't they ALL still around? Genesis, ELP, Yes, Pink Floyd have been, or are, still active in the 2000s.

I'm kind of on the fence about Zep, but I agree that Black Sabbath were streets ahead.

STILL around?

Reunioning after decades of inactivity does not count. Especially for *only a five song set"...

But 'around' means more than just gigging and recording. Actively promoting back catalogue/DVDs and shit is as much 'around' as someone making new music. Back in the 70's, when we rolled up the carpet behind us and even Beatles LPs would go out of print, I think people probably believed that, if killed off by something newer, 'old' stuff like the prog behemoths might simply go away for good.

which Beatles LPs went out of print?!?!!

Various. What I kind of meant was 'out of stock' - they were never officially unavailable, but there were periods when you couldn't find them anywhere. I seem to recall 'With The..' and 'For Sale'.

After Wish You Were Here came out the only Floyd recds you would routinely find in even quite large recd shops were WYWH, Dark Side Of The Moon, and the first two, packaged together as A Nice Pair. Stuff like Obscured By Clouds and Atom Heart Mother could be quite hard to get hold of. I guess the recd companies thought 'why would anyone want to buy an out-of-date recd when you can buy their NEW one?'.

i'd give blood to sit through "moby dick" and then have it followed by a structureless 25 minute "dazed and confused." same goes for sitting through a structureless 25 minutes of "halleluhweh" and then a half an hour of "augmn." i once sat through an hour of structureless jackie-o-motherfucker opening for an hour and a half long set of long trad gras och stoner structureless jams. i stood through the terrastock set ghost took fragments of to collage together the half hour structureless jam on their last studio album. i didn't mind at all

I kind of like the live versions of Dazed and Confused I've heard. It's kind of like their Dark Star.

I'm pro-Zep on this thread, I don't want to get into a Sabbath-Zep thing, because Sabbath is my musical ideal, and Zep will only suffer in comparison if I get into that.

Aside from which they had very little in common, aside from configuration and time/place.

yeah, i don't know. i listen to them both all the time and can't get how people could love one and hate the other. that seems like bullshit to me, but whatever, maybe it's like a beatles vs. stones thing

That was kind of what I was trying to say. This thread seemd to be headed there, and that discussion isn't necessary.

And I do think they had a lot in common, at least if you talk to the members of both bands. The Sab guys were influenced by Zep (compare communication breakdown and paranoid) and Bonham was a Sabbath fanatic. There is some tape that supposedly exists of them jamming together.

Are you serious? There's a Robert Plant interview from a couple of years ago where he totally disses them, and bristles at the fact that Zep gets mentioned in the same breath with them. As far as he's concerned the two bands didn't have much of anything in common, other than PLant and Bonham being from Birmingham.

there's plenty of interviews where plant disses zeppelin to and cringes at the mention of "stairway," the prickly bastard. the riffage, occultism, fantasy schtick, heaviness, screeching vocalists, the ballsy bluesiness all are pretty reasonably comparable

What about that boot with LZ and Fairport Convention laying it down at the Whiskey? that'd be dope to hear…

it's funny i would have totally agreed with sabbath being leagues ahead until i downloaded every ozzy era sabbath album to make my quiet fictional black sabbath album mixtape.

now i definitely thing that zeppelin was more successful albumwise on the whole.

also, a friend pointed out to me that bill ward is sort of awkward as a drummer sometimes, he was saying he sometimes wished ian paice from deep purple was in sabbath and now that bugs me abt sabbath.

but they are all GREAT BANDS so who cares, it's all good.

the only thing that i def. can see about zeppelin is i have friends that love them but wish hey had a different signer. i like plant but i can understand not liking him.

just like i think u.s. maple is like the greatest band, most important rock band in the world of the last 15 years but i dig that some people just don't like them.

I'm aware of the Plant interviews, which are retarded. The Sab dudes are gracious when they talk about Zep. Bonham was the best man at Iommi's wedding.

The best man?

I get where folks are coming from on the epics and noodling around and stuff - but all that's okay when a band gives me "Communication Breakdown" and "Black Dog" and "Rock'n'Roll" and "Whole Lotta Love" and etc..

Dunno, I wasn't there.

i like the epics and noodling!

re: Ward…love him, but those breaks on "fairies Wear Boots" are the ne plus ultra of trainwrecks…

could be that Sab was just too "brummie" for Plant…

Ward's work on Vol.4 (esp. Tomorrow's Dream and Supernaut) should more than make up for whatever his shortcomings as perceived by you on that song are. A fantastic drumming album all the way through. Ward's a fucking mensch.

Plant can fuck himself.

"just like i think u.s. maple is like the greatest band, most important rock band in the world of the last 15 years but i dig that some people just don't like them."

really? i've never even heard them. maybe i should.

i love them so much. but i'm a total fanboy of them, i'm not objective about them. also, part of it was seeing them live and how amazing it was for me at a certain point in my life. al johnson is one of a kind.

but you might like them, i'm kind of suprised you haven't heard them actually.

led zeppelin have, like, 2 or 3 songs on their studio albums that are more than ten minutes long. out of, like, 60+ songs. most are 3/4/5/6 minutes in length. their average song time is probably 4.5 or 5 minutes long. plenty of time for noodles. but they were actually fairly economical when it came to song-writing. they didn't overstay their welcome in most cases. live they could be bloated, but that's a different story.

i will check them out, matt. i like fanboy declarations. they make me curious.

It should be noted that the riff during "For Your Life" during the "Do it when you wanna!" section has always been amazing.

US Maple were very fun live when I saw them (granted that was like 10 years ago)

here's a trailer for a new US maple doc that this dude has been working on...some of it looks a little cheesy but still it's got some cool footage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX4Dm7c-8aU&feature=related

It should be noted that the riff during "For Your Life" during the "Do it when you wanna!" section has always been amazing.

I always liked the way Masters of Reality ripped off the riff during the "fake it with all your might" part for their "Kill The King". And 5ive Style rips off part of the main riff for the 1st song on their 1st album.

What about that boot with LZ and Fairport Convention laying it down at the Whiskey? that'd be dope to hear…

-- Veronica Moser

oh man, YSI??

"ONE NIGHT IN L.A. - The Legendary Jam
Between Fairport and Zeppelin, September 4, 1970"
By Hugh Jones

I am writing this on September 4, 1996-twenty six years to the day after Led Zeppelin and Fairport Convention both played concerts that are still regarded as some of the most exciting and enduring performances of their career. I've been listening to the music recorded on this day in 1970 all week, and there's no doubt that its endurance and reputation is deserved. Here are two innovative, young English bands caught at respective peaks, both early in their careers, and both caught up in the heady atmosphere of rock stars on tour in the vast, welcoming wilds of the United States.

For Led Zeppelin, it was on their sixth tour of North America in less than two years, and they faced a crowd of some 20,000 people at the Los Angeles Forum. In another part of the city, Fairport played the first evening of a three-night stand at Doug Weston's Troubadour club, to a far more intimate gathering of only a few hundred. It was only their second trip to America, but a return engagement in a club that had seen the triumphant culmination of their first tour earlier that year.

Both performances were captured for posterity on audio tape. At the Forum, not one but two bootleggers were in action, unbeknownst to the band or Peter Grant. Both were using high quality reel-to-reel tape decks-one stereo and the other mono. Both recordings have been circulated and released as bootleg albums and CDs over the years, and the better of the two-the stereo one-made rock and roll history as one of the first and most successful bootleg albums, Live On Blueberry Hill. It is still available today, now in a form vastly upgraded from the original, and it surely stands as one of the best selling and most widely known bootlegs in rock.

Over at the Troubadour, Fairport's performances were being captured on professional 8-track recording equipment by engineer John Wood, under the auspices of the band's producer and mentor Joe Boyd. The resulting recordings were eventually edited down to become the 1976 album Live At The L.A. Troubadour, released only in England, and then revamped for release in the USA in 1986 to create a second album-with some variations in material-called House Full.

Blueberry Hill and House Full stand right up among the very best recordings by both of these bands. What's ironic is that a unique combination of these musicians also occurred on the night of September 4, 1970, and this too was captured on tape by John Wood and Joe Boyd. The Night That Zeppelin Jammed With Fairport has been talked about for years, and the recording made-which has never seen the light of day, bootleg or otherwise-more or less constitutes the Holy Grail to collectors of both bands. While the tape supposedly resides deep in a vault and we may never get to hear it, our imaginations can be fueled with help from the various anecdotes related by eyewitnesses and participants in the event.

Following their triumphant two and a half hour show at the Forum, all four members of Led Zeppelin and Peter Grant showed up at the Troubadour in time to catch Fairport's second set. Though Joe Boyd does not recall Bonham being present, Fairport drummer Dave Mattacks has described Bonzo's trashing of his drum set at the Troubadour jam on more than one occasion, so we can assume that perhaps Boyd was so distracted by Peter Grant that he didn't realize Bonham was playing!

The musicians changed around a bit from song to song, Richard Thompson playing a Les Paul and Page using Simon Nicol's hollow body electric Gibson L5, strung with heavy gauge strings that caused him some consternation and prompted him to remark afterwards, ". . . it was like trying to play railway lines!" (Jimmy has always been known to use 'super slinky' light gauge strings).

Dave Mattacks not only got to hear how his drum kit sounded from the crowd, he had the dubious distinction of having to repair it and replace the heads after Bonzo gave it a sound thrashing! Simon Nicol recalls that "Mattack's bass drum had been totally solid the whole night, but I saw it jump forward three or four inches on Bonzo's first strike!"

Indulging in some tech-talk about drum tuning, Mattacks says, "When John played my drums there was very little distinction between my three toms. And although he was playing very hard, which does make a difference, my drums were (tuned) way too low. The drums just sounded soggy. I remember getting off stage, hearing him play and thinking, 'Oh, they don't sound very good.' He was beating the shit out of them; he played great but the drums didn't sound too hot. I got back up and it was my lovely Super Classics-heads all dented!"

With various combinations of musicians including Plant on vocals and Jones on bass, the heavy metal folk rock combo played a handful of tunes, including the jig that challenged Page and some blues. Common ground was found with then-popular rock chestnuts like "Hey Joe" and "Morning Dew," Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train" and "That's Alright Mama" and Fairport's own rendition of the traditional folk tune "Banks Of The Sweet Primroses."

And the mobile recording equipment was rolling the whole time, by some accounts capturing as much as three hours of music!

As legend has it, the party continued on even after the Fairport/Zeppelin jam. Nearby after hours bar Barney's Beanery was the site of a drinking contest involving Fairport's Dave Pegg, Bonham and Janis Joplin, who no doubt was found hanging out at Barneys.

misty mountain hop is way 2 fonkay

Reunion concert goodness:

http://walhallahereicome.blogspot.com/

OK THIS WOMAN I WORK WITH'S DAD IS THE HEAD OF MUSIK AT BESTBUY AND SHE WENT TO THE SHOW. SAT IN FRONT OF PAUL MCCARTNEY, IN THE SAME ROW AS DAVE GROHL.

HAD "HIGH TEA" AND THEN ATTENDED THE SHOW WITH FUCKING RICHARD COLE, WHO APPARENTLY IS A FRIEND OF HER STEPMOM'S

i'm a "little" jealous

"he was saying he sometimes wished ian paice from deep purple was in sabbath"

pretty much every drummer after Ward for Ozzy were, like, Paice's little bitch boys…

Ha -- so I'm searching ILM for a LZ thread (since I'm trying, unsuccessfully, to D/L some Zep via nefarious means), and after clicking over here I run headlong into M@tt H's spot-on love of US MAPLE just minutes after I finished writing about a CD featuring ex-Maples! (And only a month after the CD was released, too!)

Back on topic -- are they going to re-remaster the catalog, or are the latest versions of the albums otay? I ask because I currently own NOTHING by them -- dudes fell victim to my high-school anti-classic-rock phase 15+ years ago (sigh), and even after I thawed out (still thawing, BTW), never bothered to pay $$$ for any of their stuff, since up until recently I lived with folks that got the Led out all over the place.

I'll go ahead and say 'dud' again. Dud.

Also, dudleys should go soak in a pickle jar.

Not sure about a remastered catalog, but considering the louder sound of the Motherload set, I kind of hope they don't. My advice with Zep is to buy used vinyl and then download. Those packages are nice and the vinyl sounds great, plus since they solid a kajillion albums it's easy to find.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqrbqkyTu3k&feature=PlayList&p=7E0D857131F39E25&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1

Jimmy's gnarly solo

John's ridiculous drumming

Posted via the official FB page six hours ago. Any guesses?

https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc6/216964_379888095416968_776403993_n.jpg

hmmm

"Surprise! We recorded this in 1972 and have been holding for just the right time."

Lock thread.

Rumor has it they're releasing the 2007 reunion show.

BORING

I'm finally reading through that Uncut (or whatever) special that came out a couple of months back and has been floating around my bedroom ever since. Must get back to listening to some of the lps after reading overviews of them in there. I don't think I got around to getting the last couple and that makes at least Presence sound like it should be interesting.

Do love the first US tour live sets the most though I think.

Apart from 'Achilles Last Stand' and 'Nobody's Fault But Mine', Presence does very little for me. I've given that record so many chances over the years...