Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

I also had the revelation that the seemingly off-beat intro is actually in straight 4/4 time.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, July 15, 2020 9:56 AM (four minutes ago)

except that it's not, there's definitely some shifts of the beat happening going on, let me see what I can dig up...

https://i.imgur.com/5ZadE.png

check out how it "swings" from 9/8 to 7/8, that is exactly creating the off-beatness that you've picked up on.

nope, wrong. 9 + 7 = 16. I mean, it's probably easier to count it in 9 and 7, but it washes out to measures of 4.

I actually prefer counting it in 4, since the pickup figure always lands on 4 that way.

lol if that's how you think a beat is measured then ok, I guess you know all you need to know haha.

xp

This is me. I love LZ in high school and the first year or so of college, then got swept up by alternative and then indie and other music. I came back to them when I started buying records in the early 00s and found them to be even greater than I remembered (or I was able to appreciate what made them great more as an adult).

I actually have to keep myself from playing them too much because I don't ever want to tire of them again.

love=loved

"The older I get and the more music I hear the better Led Zeppelin gets." ― Hadrian VIII

^^^ YES.

― jaybabcock, Monday, August 23, 2010 5:43 PM (nine years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Also 9/8 usually implies compound triple metre (i.e. 3 groups of 3 to me). Maybe if I heard a stronger accent on the open D, I could see the justification for breaking it down as 9+7. xps

I think that song is particularly confusing because maybe the "one" isn't where you think it is, or where it should be. I was just talking to someone about the bass break in Bob Marley's "Lively Up Yourself," which sounds like it's in a totally different time signature but I think is mainly just starting on an off beat.

xxxp same here basically. had a friend who discovered them a couple years ago and so I heard them a lot when I was around her, then I'd pull up youtube concert footage when we'd be hanging out at my place, and the love was rekindled. maturing and having heard a ton of other music in the interim provided a different appreciation than I had as a kid; songs that were my favorites then aren't now (though I don't dislike them), and vice versa.

who knew you could age in to a band who named a song "Moby Dick"

Sick burn on H. Melville, dude

weird, yeah I liked zep ok (mainly just “whole lotta love”) but I REALLY REALLY got into them around the time the last remasters came out.

I didn't get into them / actively disliked them for decades - even as a teen, after receiving the box set as a gift (and gamely giving it a shot) - then something clicked a few years back, and now I recognize them as Among the Very Best. There are several factors that played into that, but it took me that long to get there.

(I think the songs played most often classic rock radio, and that box set, are probably a bad way to get into them.)

“Push, push” - bob plant

Over the Hills is in 4/4. Listen to the vocal phrases. It has nothing to do with 9/8 or 7/8

I'd call it (the intro) 4/8 but the guitar is playing some odd tuplets at times so it's polyrhythmic.

I mean it's easier for me to count 4/8 over it than 4/4 without getting thrown.

if i had the opportunity to interview jimmy page, one of the things i'd most want ask is whether he'd a) written notation for "over the hills and far away" and, if so, b) what that notation looked like.

he learned as a teenager to read and notate music but, as he's explained, he's self-taught and i think the lack of formal education might have led him to notate things in unconventional ways. i am not jimmy page, but i did teach myself how to read and notate music, and i've certainly notated my own music for others e.g. horn players who, with their educations, thought it was weird or off-putting that i would phrase things the way i did. i think a lot of it has to do with "tradition" and the subtleties of accentuation according to where the down beat is, how measures are theoretically divided up (so thinking in terms of internal pulses within a measure), things like this. i'm not a scholar, i don't know.

it's certainly true that you can divide things up in myriad ways and the end result is, to a degree, effectively the same. so sometimes i just think it comes down to the utility of how the way you count it allows you to conceptualize it and not fuck it up, so you're locked in.

another good example of a jimmy riff sort of fucking with your sense of where the downbeat is "black dog"

OTM.

Also, the intro riff to Over the Hills is one of the first riffs I ever learned and it will never not be magical.

By just counting in your head and being QED amazed that the intro conveniently resolves to an easy even meter is esp. lazy (even for ILM). That intro 100% shifts meter as displayed in the "official sheet music"*, but don't disparage that you heard it right ("off beat") initially as it truly is.

*(I know, i know, you guys obviously know better)

The first line of Al B's transcription is how I hear it. The quarter note on open G is a p obvious downbeat imo. The one beat of material in the pickup there is the part that recurs in each bar, it's the anchor, so it makes sense to count so it lands in the same place each time, as a pickup to what comes next. As man alive notes, the vocal phrasing makes this even clearer when it comes in. It is a little easier to pick out the beat if you count eighth notes but I don't see how the phrasing supports counting a metre of 4/8. "Black Dog" is much trickier imo bc the guitar and drums are basically playing in different metres. I did a transciption once.2xp

makes you wonder if Bonham and Page (or anyone else in the band) discussed this

Sheet music for these things is after the fact transcriptions by guys like us, generally. Page didn't compose it on paper afaik. Fwiw, any sheet music (Musicnotes, Sheetmusicdirect, etc) I can view online notates it in 4/4 like your 1st line.

Black Dog is a JPJ riff

Was referring to Over the Hills there tbc

but that does help explain "Black Dog". I'll look for my transcription tomorrow.

https://www.musicnotes.com/images/productimages/large/mtd/MN0048699.gif
https://s3.amazonaws.com/halleonard-pagepreviews/HL_DDS_0000000000568946.png
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0017/6760/4339/products/277f51ea8f263ada285a8cbcfaf667f7_1024x.png?v=1591821823

Over the Hills always sounds like "It's summer! You're still alive!" which seems to mean more to me the older I get.

I mean tbf the way I learned to play over the hills, and I suspect the way many people learn to play it, is just as a series of connected phrases, each with their own intuitive rhythm. I don’t recall ever counting it at all. Which is one of the cool things about the riff.

I mean, I didn't even learn "Smoke on the Water" by counting it against a 4/4 grid. Doesn't mean there isn't one!

There are so many better books out now that actually do that and teach fairly sophisticated syncopation pretty early on using these kinds of songs.

The timing of "Over the Hills" is kind of like the notorious break in "Stairway," when the drums come back in but there's a tiny shift in the rhythm that means they come in on the off beat, or however it works out.

My favorite examples of songs in 4/4 that nonetheless sound super complicated are Van Halen's "Unchained" and "Jump." Both feature really oddly syncopated b-sections that sound like a jumble of signatures but are just intricately worked out over the 4/4 base.

"Black Dog," I want to say JPJ composed it to make it all but impossible to dance to, as an in-joke.

I always assumed The Crunge was sort of a similar joke, like "what if we made James Brown undanceable?"

Plant couldn't even find the bridge on that one.

Ugh

I reread RS's original reviews of the first five albums recently, all negative except for Lenny Kaye's review of IV, during a discussion on the origin and shifting definitions of the term "heavy metal" (in a musical context). Notable that the Houses review was the first where they used the term "heavy metal" and, there, it was because Gordon Fletcher was criticizing the album for not being heavy enough, for being 'safe heavy metal'. (Ironic since the earlier reviews criticized them for being too heavy.) On "Over the Hills", he had this to say:

“Over the Hills and Far Away” is cut from the same mold as “Stairway To Heaven,” but without that song’s torrid guitar solo it languishes in Dullsville — just like the first five minutes of “Stairway.” The whole premise of “graduated heaviness” (upon which both songs were built) really goes to show just how puerile and rudimentary this group can get when forced to scrounge for its own material. One would think that the group that stole “Whole Lotta Love,” et al., might acquire an idea or two along the way, but evidently they weren’t looking. Let’s hear it for androids!

Interesting that while Kaye was overall positive about IV, he only mentioned "Stairway" v briefly once, in passing. "Rock n Roll" and "Levee" were the standouts for him. (Later in the Houses review, Fletcher also referred to that song as "inferior tripe".)

For reference:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/led-zeppelin-i-187298/
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/led-zeppelin-ii-182340/
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/led-zeppelin-iii-112284/
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/led-zeppelin-iv-101608/
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/houses-of-the-holy-2-250354/

Critics really just wanted them to be a heavy blues band forever, huh?

Yeah, seriously. All the shit Zep got, even from its peers, I think was from people who considered Page a traitor to the bloooze.

Tbf, Mendelsohn ridiculed the first two albums for being heavy blues-rock albums, although it mostly seems like he thought they weren't as good as Cream or the Jeff Beck Group.

This (from the Zep I review) made me lol:

“Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” alternates between prissy Robert Plant’s howled vocals fronting an acoustic guitar and driving choruses of the band running down a four-chord progression while John Bonham smashes his cymbals on every beat. The song is very dull in places (especially on the vocal passages), very redundant, and certainly not worth the six-and-a-half minutes the Zeppelin gives it.

“over the hills” is cut from the same cloth as “ramble on” imo

Definitely think of those two together, which means I'm always surprised to remember "Over the Hills" is in Houses.

I mean, Sabbath vs. Zeppelin is a debate.

I cannot even begin to fathom thinking Jeff Beck Group or Cream is better than Led Zeppelin. (I'm a JBG fan too)

was gonna say, I like Cream fine, but I don't return to them anywhere near as frequently

I mean, Sabbath vs. Zeppelin is a debate.

pour one out for bill magill

he's lifting right now

Jeff Beck — easily the most critically overpraised 60s/70s guitarist. I've tried a dozen times or more to understand what people hear in that fucker's boring-ass music. (I mostly hate Rod Stewart too, with and without the Faces.)