I had so much fun re-listening to the first third of Led Zeppelin’s discography for last week’s column that this week I wanted to finish it up. Here’s a pointlessly numbered list of random thoughts about the great Led Zeppelin:
1.) John Paul Jones is the best swingman in rock & roll. His keyboard and organ playing is as important to the band as his stellar bass playing – and it was from the beginning. “Your Time is Gonna Come” off Zeppelin I opens with a winding organ passage that sets a much different tone than the raunchy blues rock that precedes it. Even as the band’s songwriting started tailing off at the end of the 1970s, Jones’s experiments with synthesizers and clavinet kept Zeppelin records full of fresh sounds. Also, he could hop onto a pedal steel or mandolin if the session required it. Man’s a Swiss Army knife of a musician.
What’s truly remarkable, though, about Jones is that he may be the fourth most important band member in Zeppelin. Usually when you have a multi-instrumentalist in a band, they are either the star (Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Prince) or they incorrectly see themselves as the costar (Brian Jones, Jay Bennett). Jones had no illusions about his role. He knew the gig, and just wanted to be a professional. Jones didn’t grow up with his bandmates. They weren’t his friends. And he didn’t party with them. Thank Odin. The last thing Zeppelin needed was another party monster. It needed a glue guy. And JPJ was the best.
2.) I think so many guitarists identify with Jimmy Page because so many Led Zeppelin songs feel like they evolved from solo guitar jams. An hour of freeform guitar practice feels like “In My Time of Dying.” You’ve one riff, and then you try a variation of it, and then you tag on a chorus or bridge part that ultimately isn’t too much different than the original riff, and then you bring everything down real low, and then you rock it the fuck out. Why can’t that be a song? If you’re Jimmy Page it can be. It’s a really organic way to write, much closer to funk than, say, the structured Brill Building formalism of the chart-topping songs of the 1960s. Most would-be Jimmy Pages probably never leave their bedrooms.
3.) In Robert Plant, Page found his perfect foil. Where most guitarists support the vocalist, Plant embellishes the guitar. During the bridge of “Communication Breakdown,” Page saws on his guitar with a violin bow as Plant backs him up by making humping noises. Point/counterpoint. If Plant never enunciated a single lyric, I think Zeppelin would’ve still kicked ass.
4.) Despite his honkin’ harp, Robert Plant revealed himself to be less of a down-bad bluesman, and more of a free-love hippie and fantasy dork once he started writing his own lyrics. After jumping out of the nerd closet with 1969’s “Ramble On” (which references The Lord of the Rings’ Mordor, Gollum, and the Evil One), there was no turning back. “Battle of Evermore” the lead-in to “Stairway to Heaven,” one of rock’s biggest songs, is straight up LotR fanfic.
Besides being a book nerd, he’s also a groovy guy. In “Dancing Days” he says, “I got my flower, I got my power / I got a woman who knows.” Here’s a boy who wants to get fucked up and have a good time. Plant started his career in a group called the Band of Joy (which he would reconvene in the 2000s). It betrays that he was never the cynical woman-hater that early Zep songs made him pretend to be.
I think Plant never truly became himself until the band left its blues roots behind. The band’s imperial era, from IV to Presence shows us Plant in his fully evolved form. This is Robert Plant as a Golden God. In songs like “Kashmir” and “Achilles Last Stand,” he goes full-on space cowboy, matching Page’s epic riffs with his own, citing “travelers of both time and space” and “the mighty arms of Atlas hold[ing] the heavens from the earth.” From its inception, metal was for dorks, by dorks.
5.) John Fucking Bonham. When it comes to rock drummers, Bonham is Wayne Gretzky. This isn’t a Jordan/LeBron situation. Bonham is universally acknowledged as the GOAT for his power, speed, stomp, and groove. (Neil Peart is Guy Lafleur.) Even when Zeppelin started going off the rails (Presence, In Through the Out Door), as long as you focused on Bonham’s kit, you would hear something earth-rattling or booty-shaking. I think Zep had a broader appeal with women over say, Black Sabbath, because they worked as well as a dance band as they did as a hard rock band. Cue up “When the Levee Breaks.” Rock doesn’t get better than its first ten seconds. Goosebumps, baby.
6.) This week’s Heck Record is Zep’s fifth, the underrated album Houses of the Holy. Released after the universally acclaimed IV, Houses received lukewarm reviews in 1973. I understand why. Where IV fused early Zep’s monster blues and folky whimsy into a perfect stew, Houses is a gumbo, featuring a bunch of ingredients that Zep never used before.
For years I underrated the album because I found their James Brown homage/parody “The Crunge” so bad that I figured it tainted the rest of the tracks. While I still think “The Crunge” is a confounding goof (Brits should leave funk the fuck alone), the track is the only dead spot on an otherwise excellent album. Hell, even their other take on “ethnic” music, the hard rock reggae of “D’yer Mak’er” is very good. Plant may not have the necessary clipped bark for funk, but he can work the sensual groove of reggae. .
The rest of the band’s experiments on Houses all work. “No Quarter” is a paranoid acid trip par excellence. “The Song Remains the Same” is the most orchestrated thing they had recorded to that point. They do the Who better than the Who. “The Rain Song” may be the prettiest thing they ever recorded. It’s descending lick tinkles like raindrops. So good.
But even when the band returned to their old stomping grounds, they hit home runs. “Over the Hill and Far Away” begins like a bucolic acoustic track before blooming into an electric rock-out just like “Stairway to Heaven,” but unlike “Stairway,” it hasn’t been played to fucking death. It’s a sleeper pick for their greatest song. “The Ocean” gives us another deathless Page riff, and a full dose of Plant’s high end before he would become a little too screechy. It’s a solid, satisfying closer.
7.) While the members of Zeppelin all get their own equally sized runes on the cover of their untitled fourth album (usually called IV), live there was no question who the band belonged to. Jimmy Page stretches out every song with solo upon solo, lead upon lead. He reinvents the songs, tweaking their melodies, as if showcasing alternative riffs and solos.
While no one would accuse Zep of brevity on their studio albums – their average song lengths jumped from four minutes to six over their career – live they could stretch them up to 20-minutes (and once took “Dazed and Confused” to 44). I’m sure the real heads will argue that’s where all the good shit’s at, but I bet that’s only because that’s when their edibles kick in.
8.) I don’t really know where Zeppelin’s legacy exists nowadays. In the ‘90s when I grew up, it seemed like I had missed the heyday of rock (as in ROCK!), but I still had these nine (increasingly less) perfect albums, transmissions from the past, the Age of the Gods. Now, I imagine this all seems a little silly. I mean…a 44-minute version of “Dazed and Confused.” What the fuck is that? I got Tiks to Tok.
9.) CODA: I went back and forth about including this one because it is such a bummer, but…here we go. Zeppelin ended on December 4, 1980 about a month an a half after the death of John Bonham. Up until that point, members of the band had weathered a car accident, the death of a child, heroin addiction, and enough teenage groupie drama to fill both a CW show and one of those HBO shows about rich teenagers that scare the shit out of their parents.
Led Zeppelin ceased to function because a heavy drinker rolled over onto his back during the middle of the night and asphyxiated on his vomit. Bonham’s autopsy showed that in the past 24 hours, he had consumed about 40 shots worth of vodka. While that seems like a staggering amount of alcohol to me, it’s apparently a pretty standard amount for someone who was born in Great Britain. Okay, no more joking around.
I’m trying to say that Bonham drank like that every day, and on that one particular day, it killed him. His liver didn’t give out after a lifetime of the poison; he was alive when he went to bed at night and dead before the morning, and dead in the same way that killed fellow rock stars Jimi Hendrix and Bon Scott before him.
On what would’ve been his 70th birthday, his hometown of Redditch, England unveiled a two-ton statue of him. There’s no reason he couldn’t have been there. For fuck’s sake, his fellow bandmates are all still with us, and thriving apparently. Hell, Page looks like an 18th century duke. And he has spent the last ten years banging a 20-year-old, which, unlike heroin, seems like something he never grew out of.
Bonham’s death is the perfect example of risk normalization. If you do something that’s dangerous long enough and get away with it, eventually you’ll take it less seriously than you should. Drinking a handle of vodka a day counts as a dangerous thing. So…probably don’t do that. You might get away with driving 120 MPH with your eyes closed or choking yourself with a belt while you beat off, but you won’t get away with it for very long. Be careful out there, folks. Living is serious shit.
