Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

I mean they were grandiose, they were lyrically pretentious yet not great writers, they were pretty obnoxiously showy, their shows were sprawling affairs, etc. Plus if you thought yourself a champion of real authentic blues and folk music and all that they probably came off a little like blues hammer.

RS review of LZI mostly talks about how much it tries (and fails, in John Mendelsohn's view) to beat Jeff Beck at his own game. Nothing was said about the audience.

In their willingness to waste their considerable talent on unworthy material the Zeppelin has produced an album which is sadly reminiscent of Truth. Like the Beck group they are also perfectly willing to make themselves a two- (or, more accurately, one-a-half) man show. It would seem that, if they're to help fill the void created by the demise of Cream, they will have to find a producer (and editor) and some material worthy of their collective attention.

I think I actually do rate Truth a little higher than the first Zep.

Zeppelin just didn't care about the things late 60s/early 70s critics cared about - whether it was politics, authenticity, or hit singles. it's no surprise they were completely passed over, they existed in a hermetically sealed mythology of their own making.

Zeppelin were definitely the lumpenprole house band in America

This was probably Grand Funk Railroad, actually. Even at the beginning, Led Zeppelin were slightly artier than just knuckle-walking stadium rock.

critics might've liked em more back then if they were more of a straight "heavy" band. it was probably their pretensions to anything else beyond that that put them off.

Critics hated AC/DC even more. Rock critics hated them some rock music!

I ignore the destruction and jump into his early history as a studio player; his influences; and how he achieved certain sounds on the Zeppelin albums. I know at that moment I’m doing my job—capturing on tape the thoughts and insights of the world’s most influential guitarist—and I feel like a king. From the second I had been granted access to the guitarist, I recognized the importance of this interview.

And at one point during the conversation, even Jimmy even interrupted himself mid-thought to reveal, “I know the importance of what we’re doing. It needs to be talked about.” He understood.

GMAFB

haha

ultimately though it's page the producer (and JPJ the arranger) that makes zeppelin stand so high for me....the records are just packed with great SOUNDS, guitar sounds, mellotron sounds, acoustic sounds, drum sounds, string sounds....

I like the layered guitar parts on "Ten Years Gone" a lot.

ten years gone is so understated. i think it might be my favourite zep song.

methinks its useful to remember that whatever critical orthodoxy persisted at a particular time (maybe even now, in the poptimist era that ILM-niks pat 'emselves on the back about) viscerally dislikes shit that pimply midwestern kids rep for.

I've been told by guys who were about 5 years younger than Christgau/Marsh/Paul Nelson and entered the critic field in the mid/late 70s that the singer songwriter mill-yer was the accepted thing to rally around. and yeah, you had to respect chicago/delta blues and be offended by LZ flattening that shit out for the lumpenproles, as well as investing an imperial arrogance (Page didn't like giving credit, partly cuz, as I imagine Hoskyn mentions, he was often called "Led wallet." and a lot of critics apparently felt a malaise from the absence of the beatles…like "when are they going to reunite, show these stupid kids what's up with REAL music (and implicitly make me feel like I did when I was a kid"). which of course has repeated many many times over…

a lot of critics apparently felt a malaise from the absence of the beatles

this is readily apparent in the press conference stuff on the LZ DVDs where they get understandably irritated at having to answer a bunch of questions about whether or not they are the "new Beatles"

I've been told by guys who were about 5 years younger than Christgau/Marsh/Paul Nelson and entered the critic field in the mid/late 70s that the singer songwriter mill-yer was the accepted thing to rally around.

fwiw, Marsh trashes the 70s singer-songwriter movement at every opportunity, and he and Christgau dug Zeppelin (no idea about Nelson).

it's tought to get an idea for old rockcrit cw cuz alot of the big names deliberately set themselves apart from it in alot of ways so you have to glean it from them either mocking the cw (lester bangs) or acknowledging it and either refining it or bucking it in passing (xgau).

MBJ/ttEG: you have probly noted my anti Marsh comments before. So I should mention that in Robert Draper's RS book from 1992, he was remembered by fellow staffers there as repping for 70s soul like Al Green and Gamble/Huff, which was considered to be like ultra commercial sell out ariana grande shit by the james taylor/linda ronstadt advocates at the mag at the time.

do not ever remember reading Marsh or Xgau big upping LZ, but do know that Marsh liked Jackson Browne, who was a major major RS totem, as well as an artist that Paul Nelson remained hung up over for the overwhelming portion of his life. I do know that Xgau sometime in the 90s was very very complimentary about some minor hendrix reissues that you would imagine only David Fricke and the likes of Dan Aquilante doing backflips over; at this time, he did not acknowledge that maybe "psychedelic uncle tom" remark was a bit over the top. has he ever?

I've read that Draper book, albeit maybe 20+ years ago, and while I don't remember that specific passage about Marsh, that sounds about right -- I'm glad he championed Philly soul, Green et al. RS certainly wasn't otherwise giving it the coverage it deserved.

Marsh has a couple of Zeppelin songs (I think just "Whole Lotta Love" and "Rock & Roll") in his 1001 singles book, and yep, I knew he was a huge Browne booster. I never got into Browne myself, but he always struck me as several cuts above someone like James Taylor.

Interestingly, Marsh and Harry Chapin were close friends:

And Harry and I just agreed that we didn’t agree about the quality of his music. And I miss him. He was a really good friend. It was funny, there was a record store about a block from my house, and I went down there to get something one day, this was in the summertime, and one of the clerks who knew me said, “Oh well, did you hear that Harry Chapin just died in a car accident out on Long Island? I’m sure that’s a great day in rock criticism for you,” or something. Totally legitimate thing for him to say. And I literally ran out of the store to go home and find out, could this be true?

the last couple years of the band go down in bad vibes like the end of goodfellas

Man, otm. So sad and tragic and sordid and scary and paranoid. It's really too bad, because they all sound like they were generally OK people, until the drugs and alcohol really took hold. In Bonzo's case he and his cohort were reduced to cavemen of the worst sort. Page just sort of checks out. Plant stays aloof. JPJ it seems has been in a different orbit all along. As the book points out, though, they were among the first to deal with this sort of mass success in this sort of environment. It's like they did for playing arenas what Black Flag did for DIY punk venues, pioneering the way it was done before anyone really knew what they were doing, albeit at far, far ends of the spectrum. There's a line (har har) in here about a band like U2 now having so much more going on in their lives than just the band, but back in the '70s, being in LZ was pretty much a full-time gig, and the notion you could have other interests or applications of your energies, let alone a life outside the bubble, was almost unheard of.

LOL at how little a shit I give about Bad Company, amazed they were ever players. Nice to read some cameo quotes from the Damned, Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe and others in the Stiff world, weird they have a role in this story at all, however tangential.

Per this last bit, btw, the book really highlights the excesses of LZ as much if not more than the standard prog usuals as prompting punk. 25 minute drum solos? I'd form a punk band, too.

The part where Peter Grant and Cole beat up Bill Grahams employee right in front of Graham was like what has this thing become?

Shouldve beat up bill graham imo

Paul Nelson, on the evidence of that collection published a few years ago, was an unrepentant male singer-songwriter auteurist (Browne, Zevon, etc).

The part where Peter Grant and Cole beat up Bill Grahams employee right in front of Graham was like what has this thing become?

yeah, that's the cold chill turning point, isn't it? grant has a kind of tragic villain thing going on throughout, but the rest of the road-crew just seem like really sleazy turds. attempted to read cole's own book last year, after finishing trampling underfoot, but it's just so unrelentingly unpleasant and rapey, i couldn't stomach it.

re: the absence of discussion of the music in trampled underfoot - i didn't notice it so much at the time, but i recently had to write about some zep songs and was researching the inspirations behind them and the details of when they were recorded/demo'd, and such information in trampled underfoot are scant or absent entirely. this isn't a complaint, btw - trampled underfoot works so well precisely because it's oral history.

i always assumed a lot of the animosity toward zeppelin was because of how gorgeous they were. sure bonzo was a slob and jpj a square but at plant/page's most beautiful they make duran duran look like motorhead roadies. how galling! not only is page one of the best guitarists anyone's ever heard (up there with hendrix, clapton, and beck), miles beyond the all-thumbs noodlings critics practiced in secret back home, but he's better looking than their girlfriends (if they have any). and then plant? glittery critical darlings back then like lou reed, iggy pop, marc bolan, and david bowie couldn't hold a candle to percy, the most beautiful white male rock singer since elvis presley. critics are nothing if not a jealous lot

I dreamed last night I went back in time to 1968 and was bummed out because I couldn't talk about Led Zeppelin since LZI hadn't been released yet. I kept hinting at their immanent arrival though.

Then I smoked a lot of opium, threw rocks at cars, and rode the bus in my pajamas by that's neither here nor there.

Then I smoked a lot of opium, threw rocks at cars, and rode the bus in my pajamas

kind of sums up the LZ listening experience for me

animosity toward zeppelin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTJywZoG_bw

much love to pete -- to me, zeppelin was more new who than new yardbirds. i know i'm not the first person to say this but with the exception of the guitarist and bass player singing occasionally, the parallels are remarkable between the band set-up in general and daltrey/plant, townsend/page, moon/bonham, and entwhistle/jones. zeppelin took that template and ran with it, and aside from 'the who sell out' and 'who's next' i'll take zeppelin any day of the week

i always assumed a lot of the animosity toward zeppelin was because of how gorgeous they were. sure bonzo was a slob and jpj a square but at plant/page's most beautiful they make duran duran look like motor head roadie

yeah no

to me young Page's face looked like a thumb with long pubes growing out of it.

au contraire. robert > simon; jimmy > john. nick rhodes doesn't count cuz zeppelin didn't have a full-time keyboardist

aside from 'the who sell out' and 'who's next' i'll take zeppelin any day of the week

ahem LIVE AT LEEDS ahem

the only cute member of Duran was Roger Taylor, with John a close second.

john looked like a runway model

LIVE AT LEEDS > the song remains the same . . . but never been a huge fan of live albums

at one point Moon/Entwistle were considering leaving The Who for the proposed lineup of Led Zeppelin (which Moon gave its name), and Page played guitar on the session of "I Can't Explain" (although there's some disagreement as to whether you can actual hear him on the final mix or if it's all Townshend), so i can see how LZ may have been modeled on The Who. certainly more than they were modeled on any other big 60s group.

Page didn't play on "I Can't Explain," but did play the droney fuzz guitar on its b-side, "Bald Headed Woman."

The Who were untamed, really. Zeppelin was this stranger beast, because the musicians, at least two of them formally, came from session player backgrounds, and they were sort of playing at being untamed. There were no live LZ disasters, at least not for the first several years. Also, unlike the Who, who famously hated one another, all the LZ guys were friends and pretty much stayed friends. The Who also never really was rooted in that British blues scene the way LZ was, or the folk scene. Or even psychedelic music. Very different bands.

The book does a good job showing how LZ was really just this island unto itself. They didn't socialize outside their circle much, didn't think of many other bands as peers, didn't try to intellectualize what they did the way Jagger or Townshend did, or rub shoulders with the elite/art world or whatever. They were just this barbarian horde roving the world, raping and pillaging, fronted by this neo-hippie, flanked by session guys, and driven by a bulldozer of a drummer. The more I read, the more I think if JPJ were not so reliable and relatively stable, the band never would have made it as far as it did. JPJ is the only one in the band who really considered quitting, and the only musician not strung out on something. Telling he is also the only one who didn't get his 30 minute solos. The book does a good job illustrating how he essentially treated LZ as one long hired gig.

Page-Plant were friends with Jonesy?

I think so. Or at least they could hang. Jones apparently kept to himself a lot, but that was the extent of it. When Page-Bonham were strung out, Plant/Jones got closer. But all four pretty much remained friends, unlike their famously fistfighting erstwhile peers.

That Springsteen 1975 quote in the book is pretty funny. "Not only aren't they doing anything new, they don't do the old stuff so good, either." Really, "Born to Run" is about as far from Zeppelin as you can get, and I can see why he (and lots of others) would be trying so hard to get away from them.

The "Goodfellas" section of the book is basically one long "how did we let something so good get so ugly and bad?" discussion.

waitaminnit! I often see references to Jones doing 30 min keyboard solos, incorporating rachmaninoff and shit?

always seemed to me, w/r/t to my frame of reference post 70s, that the Who appealed to the post-adolescent guy aspect: a drummer and bassist who were uninterested in powering a groove to an unprecedented degree, and Townshend's "oh what does it all mean/we're getting older/AARRGGHH" carrying on. Whereas JB-JPJ was all about a groove 100%, and there was a grown man, no angst confidence to the LZ worldview. Both of which contribute to the sense that women in my experience didn't particularly like the Who, but boy did they like LZ.

Huh, were there keyboard solos in Zep? Well, here's a 3-minute solo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biKTiCfjyQo

But did he have 30 minute epics? Book doesn't mention them.

Compare that to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqqksUbXTm0

The thing about live Zep is that they seemed to get winded pretty quickly. So much of their show seemed to be about giving someone in the band a chance to rest.

Jones would get space to solo on "No Quarter" but from all the live boots I've listened to I can't recall anything over the 10 minute (!) mark.

@ Josh - yeah he def. did keyboard solos. Got pretty jazzy towards their final tours.

But not really long solos, no? Like Page and Bonham had?

OTM about the band being winded, or, you know, "winded." I'm sure they all needed lots of "breaks" backstage.

The thing about Zep is that the band sounds awesome but watching this I can totally see why I would not want to be associated with it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebz8gcWvg5A

It sounds great, but it looks ridiculous.

memory serves, lengthy JPJ solo would have been in the middle of "no Quarter."

and what was Plant supposed to have been strung out on? Davis' Hammer of the Gods made no reference to that, but Hoskyns does?

re: Page being a schnook…it's kinda tragic that he can't think of anything to do when Plant sez he doesn't wanna go on tour. JPJ and Plant go out into the world and be musicians, but Page will just show up at someone else's show and play "Rock and Roll" or some shit and then remaster the albums for new formats, what, every five years or so? what's stopping him from doing whatever he wants, unless the only thing he wants to do is Zep? But he's said recently that he's gonna make a record, which put him over on Townshend, who has given up on doing anything other than trotting out Daltrey. God, those Endless Wire tunes were dire as dire can be…

xposts re: Pete

I think it's also timing - the new heavier crop of bands that came out around '68 - '70 seem like a distinctly different thing than the first wave of 60's Brit bands - less pop, more apolitical and zonked out, more macho and virtuosic, and more into genre fiction like fantasy and horror than the class consciousness social satire of the Beatles, Stones, and Kinks. Maybe more overtly escapist? Also just completely divorced from the Mod-era origins of those first wave bands. I can see how Led Zep and Cream and Sabbath turned Townshend off - even though his band had evolved musically in the same direction of the early proto-metal bands.

what's stopping him from doing whatever he wants, unless the only thing he wants to do is Zep?

I think that's it. Zep was his dream scenario. Everything he's done since has been an attempt to resurrect it in one form or another.

But he's said recently that he's gonna make a record, which put him over on Townshend, who has given up on doing anything other than trotting out Daltrey. God, those Endless Wire tunes were dire as dire can be…

Townshend at least had an interesting solo career post-Who. He doesn't trot out Daltrey; Daltrey wears Townshend down until Townshend agrees to tour or record. And Endless Wire was great, best thing they'd done since The Who By Numbers.