Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

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.

Xpost never said Plant was strung out? He did coke and stuff but by the end mostly abstained.

I mean... Outside of Syd Barret, has any living rock icon done LESS than Page? Even Brian Wilson has outpaced him by now...I mean... All there is is:

Deathwish soundtrack (awful)
Outrider (mediocre if you're feeling charitable)
Coverdale/Page (barf)
Unledded (cool zep nostalgia but still zep basically)
Page/Plant - pretty solid
Black Crowed/Page (less interesting Zep nostalgia)
Celebration Day (zep)

Six albums in 35 years, unless I'm forgetting something...
2 are live albums relying heavily on Zep stuff, one is a one off reunion gig... I mean that's pathetic for one of the most talented guys in rock history

And of the original stuff, 1 is with Plant and 1 with a bargain bin Plant

Dang dude, you forgot his biggest hit!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd8WUJ9uT3o

Townshend and Plant both had interesting if uneven solo careers.

Oops shit The Firm! A pox on my house

ha, was just trying to post a youtube of "Radioactive", such a great track

plant's been pretty incredible lately between celebration day and plant/krauss and band of joy.

he is happy, healthy, and creatively inspired.

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

ahem LIVE AT LEEDS ahem

― it definitely wasn't designed to be a pants pocket player (stevie), Thursday, May 29, 2014 8:55 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Live at Leeds kills anything Zeppelin ever did.

there's a 25 minute no quarter, heavy on the keyboard excursion, on the boot Bringing The House Down, and it's pretty wonderful.

For a band that wrote rock operas, the Who were remarkably not indulgent the way Zep was live.

Hey is that unused Page soundtrack to Kenneth Anger's "Lucifer Rising" awesome? Worth hunting down?

Yeah it's kind of unsettling and great imo

Xpost never said Plant was strung out? He did coke and stuff but by the end mostly abstained.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, May 29, 2014 9:43 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

With 70s rock bands I always assume the "straight" members of the bands did what we would consider a shitload of drugs but it was just a normal 70s amount of drugs, like taking a multivitamin

yeah you're right re: Daltrey wearing down Towmshend. but it truly surprises me that you dug EW: daltrey sounded so so tired and geriatric. Now that I think of it, like Page being hung up on the LZ template, Townshend can't seem to make solo records that are not limned to a concept/storyline. Only Empty Glass and Chinese eyes are records with, yknow, songs unburdened by that conceit. I remember hearing Iron Man and Psychoderelict (last Townshend solo album was 21 years ago) and thinking "why does everything have to burdened by some dumb concept?" I would listen to a Townshend solo record, and surely lots or folks would too.

I listened to Lucifer rising recently on YT and yeah very cool, eerie. To me, "Satisfaction guaranteed" is the best thing Paul rodgers has ever done full stop. Unledded is excellent with the orchestral embellishment emphasizing the Oum Kalthoum aspect, and Walking through Clarksdale is terrific.

xp haha, totally. like i think of neil young as "clean" b/c he never fucked around w/ heroin but there were garbage trucks full of weed, booze, and coke running through his system through the 70s

Page should do a new smart horror movie soundtrack or something dark like a Lars Von Trier soundtrack, all minimal style like Neil Young did for Dead Man.

I've said for years that, Honeydrippers excepted, Plant is the only boomer with an unembarrassing and often surprising solo career.

yeah there's a ring of truth to that recent Plant interview where he says the Eagles and the other Zep guys like reunion tours not for the money but because "they're bored. i'm not bored."

yeah you're right re: Daltrey wearing down Towmshend. but it truly surprises me that you dug EW: daltrey sounded so so tired and geriatric. Now that I think of it, like Page being hung up on the LZ template, Townshend can't seem to make solo records that are not limned to a concept/storyline. Only Empty Glass and Chinese eyes are records with, yknow, songs unburdened by that conceit. I remember hearing Iron Man and Psychoderelict (last Townshend solo album was 21 years ago) and thinking "why does everything have to burdened by some dumb concept?" I would listen to a Townshend solo record, and surely lots or folks would too.

I wouldn't compare Townshend's need for a storyline to Page's need for Zep, but Townshend's continued revisiting of the Lifehouse material might be a better comparison -- his ultimate project, never seen through to a satisfactory resolution. I don't mind the concepts, but I honestly couldn't tell you if they made the records (Iron Man and Psychoderelict) better or worse -- I didn't like either very much, give or take a few tunes. But I'll take Townshend spectacularly falling on his face over another pseudo-Zep rehash any day.

As for Daltrey's voice, it doesn't sound tired on EW to me, but I kept up with him/them through the years. 2006 Daltrey wasn't a shock to me -- I thought he worked with/around his limitations exceptionally well -- but I can see how it would be to someone who last heard him on, say, "You Better, You Bet."

more into genre fiction like fantasy and horror than the class consciousness social satire of the Beatles

except the beatles planned on filming 'the lord of the rings'

http://whatculture.com/film/best-films-never-made-1-the-beatles-lord-of-the-rings.php

using an interest in tolkien to beat up on 70s bands is as stale as the snot on johnny rotten's "i hate pink floyd" tshirt