Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

i love zeppelin so much. we listened to song remains the same this last weekend and goddamn i forgot how nuts they were, there were parts of dazed and confused where you thought bonham and jones thought they were in james brown's band....page is also such a weird guitar player compared to all the other "guitar heros", he plays way more fucked up,sloppy, strange stuff than hendrix...

but yeah anyway they are sweet. glad to see presence get some love in the live set.

and zep had so much more variety and range than stoner rock bands...i mean it's not like QOTSA or wolfmother or whoever is going to have "in the light" or "down by the seaside" on their record.

Thanks Matt, that's a major part of the point I was trying to make, no matter how inartfully. I think those kinds of songs would sound good even released today. Plus, with Page's production I find something new in these songs each time I listen to them.

also that BBC thing is kind of full of shit, it's not my understanding that zep was the "key inspiration" for spinal tap, i thought it was those troggs studio outtakes ("sprinkle some fookin' feeery dooost onnit!" that started the whole thing.

and spinal tap was def. more metal as metal. i'd put it at bands like rainbow and deep purple morese than zep. although maybe when nigel plays the guitar w/the violin that's def. dazed and confused...but you can't really avoid zep.

i know that stonehenge was a direct rip on sabbath, when they toured w/a stonehenge set and had to end up leaving it out in the parking lot cuz they got downgraded to smaller venues and it wouldn't fit.

(bill those songs still sound awesome, and i can't believe i actually compared zep to fuckin' WOLFMOTHER of all things, jeez talk about a-squad vs. c-squad)

Probably right, I think the Spinal Tap guys were poking fun in admiration though, Gillan and Iommi would be the first to tell you the Stonehenge thing was ridiculous. And Harry Shearer spent time with the band Saxon to prep for his role, they must not have had too much trouble with it. When he gets stuck in that pod on stage it's fucking hilarious.

xpost

>>that said, i don't think anybody would confuse physical graffiti for >>something by a current stoner rock band

Most people simply don't listen to stoner rock bands. If you're in the genre and you can sell and/or giveaway 5,000 copies, you've gone platinum.

Interestingly, two all girl bands released Zep copy records this year. Lez Zeppelin, who even got Eddie Kramer to produce them, and Zepparella.
I have to laugh when I see the Lez Zep CDs right next to the new Led Zeppelin stuff at BestBuy.

And who can forget Dread Zeppelin?

I think Plant still has an amazing voice, but they should have just knocked Black Dog down a step for him, it was ridiculous. It reminds me of the Black Crowes tour for the Southern Harmony & Musical Companion when Robinson's voice was ALREADY shot out. Robinson still tried to hit the notes and mainly came up short - Plant's older and wiser so tries to kind of get around it but it doesn't seem like he thought about it that much.

Why do Page & Plant both look like they're kissing someone?

They're kissing "My Sweet Satan"

-- Alex in NYC, Tuesday, December 11, 2007 3:30 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Link

lol!

Spinal Tap is clearly an amalgam - there's direct references/parodies of at least a dozen specific bands (many already mentioned - but also David St. Hubbins clearly modelled on Sweet lead singer, and giant skeleton skull = Maiden/Eddy)

is it just me who thinks led zep's music is too perfectly produced and lacks bass?

wouldn't a perfectly produced album have adequate bass?

man. I'm rilly having a hard time finding "For Your Life" on YT. I wanna hear that BAD. WEA be wastin' no time…

Matt H: are you at all like me and wish that the band played only deep cuts, like "Four Sticks," "Walter's Walk," the two funk toonz on Presence, "South Bend Suarez" and the almighty "Carouselambra"?

"wouldn't a perfectly produced album have adequate bass?"

too pristinely produced then.

mr. x -- i guess i think those records sound great, not anteceptic but just great rock records, so yep the bass is fine for me.

veronica -- YES! but even doing a couple off presence is pretty bold in a way, so that's cool

"Stairway to Heaven"

the crowd went into ecstasy while the first notes were being played.

It's because they thought they were playing a cover of "Taurus" by Spirit.

-- Sara Sara Sara, Tuesday, December 11, 2007 2:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

woah I'd never heard that before, def. is the into riff to stairway, crazy...but i think it stands to Jay-Z's "You made it a hot line/ I made it a hot song" defense.

i mean it's not like QOTSA or wolfmother or whoever is going to have "in the light" or "down by the seaside" on their record.

god bless zep but i hope no one else has 'down by the seaside' on their record

I think Plant still has an amazing voice, but they should have just knocked Black Dog down a step for him, it was ridiculous.

they did. it's a full step below the original. maybe another step? two steps? that'd certainly sludge it up, and that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

"they are one of the very few bands that could make absofuckinglutely ANYTHING rock: calypso, english pussy folk, black magic, disco, cavestomp, whatever."

where kin i git summa that english pussy folk???????

Plant was doing "Black Dog" on his 2005 tour, and I think they played it slightly lower then too. and yeah, absolutely nothing wrong with that.

hahaha man .. this gig is all over YouTube now (although yeah, where the heck is "For Your Life"??) .. it is like a game of cat and mouse with Warners

dude I just watched the "Stairway" clip and got chills. I can't imagine what it would have been like to be at the gig.

worth saying again: some really strange zep hating up there.

no doubt. zeppelin is beyond classic and dud

who's surprised tho...

zep rules

zeppelin is beyond classic and dud

hay i fixed that for you, okay ^

funny funny. seriously, they're about the only band i can't relate to people not being into. i get why people don't like yes, i get why people don't like the velvet underground and de la soul and televison and joy division and the dead and whoever. zeppelin though? it's just so obvious they fucking rule

If you ask me they were the archetypal American teen boy fantasy band -- music for young lads to cruise around in battered pickup trucks smoking weed drinking beer and checking out the chicks. Or at least the soundtrack to which they *fantasize* about doing things like that...

All the while feeling vaguely smug and intellectual because of the Crowley and Tolkien references. Bleargh.

Fred's not totally wrong though -- the Zep had their occaisional moment, but they're still overrated beyond belief. Early Black Sabbath could have them for breakfast!

-- Nicole, Tuesday, September 26, 2000 7:00 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Link

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.