Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

I also get why Sabbath kind of unfairly got labeled the "big dumb metal band" by many critics

If Lester Bangs was alive today (meaning, if he was the same age in 2020 that he was in 1969) he'd be the ideal Pitchfork writer - a dorky, semi-coherent twentysomething working through his personal life issues using record reviews as a frame.

Oh, completely. Bangs had a very explicit aesthetic, and you can see how he would love the pulpy stuff like WLL and Immigrant Song and be turned off by Since I've Been Loving You (which was always a firm skip for me, especially when I'd just started to dig Zeppelin as a teenager). We don't have to choose between Plant or Iggy, but it's no surprise where Bangs fell on that dichotomy, or that he preferred what Iggy did with his limited pallette.

I'd definitely say Bangs on III seems more qualified-ly positive than most rock crits of that era on Zep.

(xxxp to sund4r)

I also get why Sabbath kind of unfairly got labeled the "big dumb metal band" by many critics

Bangs was a fan, tho. He identified them as a Christian-rock band, ie scared shitless of the devil.

Bangs was a fan, tho. He identified them as a Christian-rock band, ie scared shitless of the devil.

Yeah, he wrote a really great story on them that's included in the second anthology of his work, Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste.

Some of my favourite pieces of his are in that second volume - that piece he wrote about electric-era Miles music being all about pain.

The Zep III review specifically reads like an assignment that was foisted upon him. Like, maybe Mendelsohn absolutely refused to go back to that well, so they just thought at the last minute, eh, give it to Bangs. And Bangs probably hadn't thought that much about Zeppelin at the time, and possibly didn't even have that long to listen to this one, so crafted a snide review in keeping with the magazine's disdain, but at the same time was forced to concede its attributes, however much in passing and replete with backhanded undercutting, because Bangs, for all his faults, nonetheless had a pair of ears, and could recognize that III, of all albums, couldn't be dismissed the same way or quite as easily as its predecessors.

Xgau, for his own snide part, def. seemed to recognize that III was a big step forward (even if he is still fixated on The Blues):

"Led Zeppelin III [Atlantic, 1970]
If the great blues guitarists can make their instruments cry out like human voices, it's only fitting that Robert Plant should make his voice galvanize like an electric guitar. I've always approved theoretically of the formula that pits the untiring freak intensity of that voice against Jimmy Page's repeated low-register fuzz riffs, and here they really whip it into shape. Plant is overpowering even when Page goes to his acoustic, as he does to great effect on several surprisingly folky (not to mention folk bluesy) cuts. No drum solos, either. Heavy. B+"

I can't imagine putting on LZ III and not being just struck dumb by Immigrant Song and not mention it in a review

Just some anonymous blues rock, pat visceral impact, nbd, dime a dozen in 1970.

You shoulda heard Son House's songs about Norway...

Foghat's "Leif Eriksson Bop" was better

I challenge you to seriously distinguish between LZ and The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation.

lol

FWIW, since it's always worth revisiting, here's Lenny Kaye's review of the fourth album:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/led-zeppelin-iv-101608/

Needless to say, he also misses the mark with III, suggesting that IV somehow loses "the leaden acoustic moves that seemed to weigh down their third," but he at seems to at least get it.

It might seem a bit incongruous to say that Led Zeppelin — a band never particularly known for its tendency to understate matters — has produced an album which is remarkable for its low-keyed and tasteful subtlety, but that’s just the case here. The march of the dinosaurs that broke the ground for their first epic release has apparently vanished, taking along with it the splattering electronics of their second effort and the leaden acoustic moves that seemed to weigh down their third. What’s been saved is the pumping adrenaline drive that held the key to such classics as “Communication Breakdown” and “Whole Lotta Love,” the incredibly sharp and precise vocal dynamism of Robert Plant, and some of the tightest arranging and producing Jimmy Page has yet seen his way toward doing. If this thing with the semi-metaphysical title isn’t quite their best to date, since the very chances that the others took meant they would visit some outrageous highs as well as some overbearing lows, it certainly comes off as their most consistently good.

it is funny how that crew had sussed out the primordial stooges/glam/alice cooper/etc etc primordial ooze from which punk was going to spring, but they all seemed nearly blind to what was happening with hard rock and metal...seems like there was this conventional wisdom that "yawn Cream did it first" and everything that was happening in heavy rock was just a heavy blues ripoff

Yeah, I long wondered about the biases of rock critics and where they came from (something significant did change at the turn of the millennium, whatever words we want to use to talk about it) - is it just as simple as that heavy rock/'metal' and prog had a much more mainstream audience, and with a demographic that 20something writers wanted to distance themselves from?

I mean, there's also the stuff upthread about the unsavoury context of that mainstream-ness.

Didn’t Bangs also think kick out the jams was bogus but did a total 180 a few years later?

Here's his negative 1969 review: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/kick-out-the-jams-252641/

Can't tell whether Bangs was the OG rockist or the OG anti-rockist.

whynotboth.gif

I would say this from the Bangs MC5 review is an extremely fair observation:

these boys, so the line ran, could play their guitars like John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders played sax!

Well, the album is out now and we can all judge for ourselves. For my money they come on more like Blue Cheer than Trane and Sanders

otm.

Yeah, that perfectly encapsulates my own disappointment with Kick Out the Jams when I heard it for the first time. I've warmed up to it since, but it's a record that's more notable for what it promises than for the actual delivery.

Bangs later said something to the effect that he was really reviewing the hype around the 5 and he came around on the music after meeting them and hearing Back In The USA.

Also remember too how in his long review of Fun House that he initially hated it.

Bangs never really came around on Zeppelin tho, frequently dissing them in other pieces over the years.

Wayne Kramer:

My entire motivation was a knee jerk reaction to the criticism I got from Lester Bangs. His review in Rolling Stone fucked me up. I was on acid, I read the review on acid, and I’m young and creative and believing the hype, and my heart sank. He was a young writer, trying to make his bones, so he thought he’d say something provocative and contrary to the current consensus, as people were loving the MC5. And he was going to come out and say 'these guys talk a good game, but they can’t tune their own guitars.' Writers had been coming out on junkets and then writing glowing reviews about us, hired by the record label. It was paid for. Like most people, I thought you got in the paper on merit. That isn’t how it really works in the world. So I’m on acid, and I’m reading the review, and the guy is just ripping us apart. It got to me because I knew there were great weaknesses in the band and the music, the rhythm section in particular. The bass playing and the drumming.

Bangs dissing them pretty much defines "punching up." Anyway, Zeppelin to me epitomizes one of my favorite Simpsons gags:

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

Zeppelin is like one of those giant beers. Awesome songs, awesome sound, awesome musicians, diverse songwriting, everything from hard rock to folk to arty experiments, and yet there's this contingent whose response would be "other than that, what else do they really have going for them?"

I have a hunch much of this contingent called Cream "The Cream," btw.

XP I don't remember it exactly, but Kramer mentioned in the Jim Dero book that when he finally met Lester, he wanted to kick his ass, but Bangs opened with, "Hey, you guys are great" and they got wasted together.

XP and The Pink Floyd and The Free and The Taste!

I'm struggling with the idea that people aren't allowed to simply not like Led Zeppelin very much. This is moving towards US Beatles derangement territory.

Anyone can not like anything. But to not like Zeppelin because they are anonymous blues rock is pretty silly. I don't listen to the Beatles that much and never have, but I would never say "bah, there's nothing going on there, what an empty void, snooze" or whatever.

Zeppelin was one of the original poptimist bands: critics didn't get them, but the public sent them to the top of the charts.

Pulled the Armageddon album off the shelf. Blows my mind that Keith Relf finally decided he really wanted to be in Led Zeppelin...and Black Sabbath...and, idk, King Crimson or something...and it all worked!

that’s a hell of an album

kick out the jams rocks I don’t have anything bad to say about it

I would say this from the Bangs MC5 review is an extremely fair observation:

these boys, so the line ran, could play their guitars like John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders played sax!

Well, the album is out now and we can all judge for ourselves. For my money they come on more like Blue Cheer than Trane and Sanders

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, July 30, 2020 5:38 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Was that really said about Kick out the Jams? By whom? It feels like a bit of an easy setup to knock down.

Haha, I wondered the same thing.

“The free-jazz movement, the music of Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Sun Ra – that's what originally inspired me and the MC5,” Kramer told Rolling Stone in 2014. “What the most advanced jazz musicians were doing was pushing the music forward, and that was my goal as a rock player in the MC5. I needed a source of inspiration that was unorthodox and provocative on every level. I had reached a point where I could play the guitar okay. I could play Chuck Berry solos and Rolling Stones songs. Sun Ra showed me where to go from there.”

In a Red Bull Music Academy piece on Sanders:

Drawing on his travels through Japan with Coltrane’s group, as well as his reading about ancient Egypt, Tauhid balanced the incendiary sax shredding of Sanders’ years with Coltrane with a newfound lyricism and patience, letting each song unfold at a natural pace. And with the guitar of Sonny Sharrock adding both furious noise and nimble R&B chording that gave the sidelong “Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt” its melodic hook, Sanders’ work began to resonate beyond jazz as the Stooges and MC5 incorporated the spirit of Sanders into their proto-punk sound.

From a Spin guide to alternative music of the '60s:

Sanders continued to develop his "spiritual jazz" on albums like 1969's Karma (which features acid-jazz touchstone "The Creator Has a Master Plan"), but Tauhid was a crucial influence on both the MC5 and the Stooges in their initial tickets to sonic reduction.

Of course these are all recent, in hindsight and tinged with maybe a bit of hipster revisionism. Or maybe just focusing on Sonny Sharrock's guitar. Why Bangs mentioned it in his review at the time? Who knows.

Yeah, if Kramer is saying those were his influences now, he probably said it then too. I'm not an expert on the MC5 and honestly didn't know they were talked about in those terms.

John Sinclair was a big Jazz not Rock guy who took the garage band MC5 (who still might have been the Bounty Hunters then) under his wing and introduced them to Coltrane, Sanders etc. which they would fuse into Rock for their "High Energy Sound". Alot of the hype Bangs--himself a Jazz snob of note--was rallied against came directly from Sinclair and his svengali-ing of the band.

Basically what Sinclair was pitching w/the MC5 was Jazz Fusion--not the definitive kind ala Miles or, like say Santana--but a more abstract concept of Rock music played with the hothouse intensity and high improvisation of Free Jazz.

...and, you know, dope guns fucking in the streets.

Yeah, if Kramer is saying those were his influences now, he probably said it then too. I'm not an expert on the MC5 and honestly didn't know they were talked about in those terms.

Final track on "Kick Out the Jams"?

8. "Starship" (MC5, Sun Ra)

Also they used to cover Upper Egypt by Pharoah Sanders

Yeah I dunno, I had read so much about MC5 before I heard them and initially it was just so much more regular rock than I expected

I've come to appreciate them a lot more on their own terms but honestly I don't personally hear the avant garde jazz in them

pretty sure there's an MC5 thread in the archives that does a deep dive into how they are the archetypical "sounds incredible on paper, notsomuch on record" band.

Has another (i.e. not the MC5) band lived up to the MC5’s promise?

What was their promise? A free jazz infused radical politics rock band? The biggest issue is that essentially *none* of the rock bands of the era or beyond had the free chops of Coltrane or Coleman or Sanders or Miles or whomever. It's not particularly political, but the Stooges "Fun House" (the song and album) is jazzier and more dangerous and less conventional than anything I've ever heard from the MC5.

Fun House is one of the GOATs in my book, and I agree, but it's not as improvisationally 'loose' (heh) as I imagine that promise to have been.

Band of Gypsys manages that on occasion but I'm still not sold on the album as a whole (for the usual reasons).

I think the closest you can get to maybe the free/loose/improvised rock thing is, I dunno, some later No Wave stuff? Or Dog Faced Hermans or the Ex? Here are the Hermans covering Ornette:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LBd9SnMn6o