Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

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.

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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.)

I'm not a fan of Beck's music, but I do consider him something of a guitar genius. More of an eccentric weirdo virtuoso than traditional guitar hero though.

It began making sense to me once I took stock of his singles with the Yardbirds ca. 1965-1966. Everything else I can do without.

his stuff in Yardbirds is genius

The overwhelming majority of rock music that I'm interested in is either from 1953-59, or from 1969-74, and then stuff from 1975-present, but that middle decade, roughly 1960-68, is a fucking wasteland with a few tiny green shoots as far as I'm concerned.

Now there's a challop. I'd be a mite more sympathetic if 1967 was your cut-off point.

1967 was green shoots, like, I don't know, the first Doors album. But overall, 1960-68 belonged almost entirely to black artists: Stax, Motown, and Blue Note. My hatred of the Beatles is well documented, and the Stones weren't really worth a shit till Beggars Banquet — at its best, their first half-decade of material is fine, but Not For Me; at its worst, it’s disposable, or actively insulting to its source material.

I'm cool with your hatred of the Beatles, I find them hit-or-miss myself (mostly miss fwiw). But dispensing with 1967 means no The Doors, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, The Velvet Underground & Nico, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Forever Changes and Safe as Milk, and I need all of those.

Well, like I said, I like the Doors' debut, but I'd sacrifice Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love as long as I got to keep Electric Ladyland, and all the rest of the albums you listed (especially the Velvet Underground)? Forget it.

Unperson needs some 13th Floor Elevators.

That too. Or, I don't know, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's 'East-West' (the track more so than the album).

Getting back to Jeff Beck tho, Truth kind of created the 'Zep Formula', albeit with lesser material & production. Mickey Most was pretty anti-Hard Rock, and Terry Reid (also produced by Most) later pointed out that had he joined Zep, they would have been stuck w/Most as a producer, and probably wouldn't have had the career they had w/Plant & Bonham.

I like Blow By Blow.

I've been meaning to hear that one. It looks better on paper than most of his other projects.

Truth isn't bad. It is def the prototype for Zep and I could understand someone rating it over Zep I.xp

Truth kind of created the 'Zep Formula'

Yeah, this is absolutely true, although both Zep and Beck quickly transcended it, becoming much more interesting in the process. Beck developed a really remarkable level of technique... I actually prefer him as a soloist to Page, although the latter's abilities as a composer obviously make him the far greater talent of the two.

And Rod had a Cooke/Redding thing going on vocally back then that probably was more appealing to some than Plant's wailings.

wired, there and back, blown by blow, live with the Jan hammer band are all sick, Jeff necked rulez

blow not blown, beck not necked, you get the picture

In a pinch, I probably prefer Truth to LZI. There’s certainly tremendous stuff on the latter, but nothing at the level of “I Ain’t Superstitious.” And Keith Moon’s scream/entrance on “Beck’s Bolero” is the greatest moment either Page, Beck, or JPJ would be a part of in a recording studio.

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