Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

“tea for one”? are you shitting me

people who hate “tea for one” should have their opinions removed

Presence is such a weird one for me. Asides from Nobody's Fault and Achilles I honestly can't remember what any of these songs sound like, and I've listened to this album hundreds of times. I know one of them has the "co-ca-co-ca-cocaine" chorus, but with a gun to my head I couldn't tell you which one. I remember like Royal Orleans a lot as a kid, but again, I could not hum it to you now for the life of me. And the slow one is just interminable. DON'T DO DRUGS, KIDS. Out Door is a better album.

^ low grade challops

I often have trouble remembering the other tracks not "Hots On for Nowhere," "Tea For One," and "Achilles..." So I suppose ITTOD is the superior album. Which shows how meaningless memory is.

"Tea For One" has a great intro and then collapses into a low-grade revamp of "Since I've Been Loving You". As a song and a sentiment of despair it might be fine, as a performance it is a real let-down.

Needs more bass drum pedal squeak.

...plus they're ripping off Irving Berlin.

They improve on "Since..." imo.

Not hard to do imo

And I don't know if I agree - Since has peaks that are sort of worth the ascent, the misery of Tea For One just sort of pools in an ungainly fashion, meant only for wallowing

Our Marcello wrote one of the sharper reappraisals.

I like "Presence," but I feel like it should have been named "More!" Like, you spend all your time with Led Zeppelin, all those great songs that you've heard so many times in so many places, and then you hit a lull, take a breather, and bam - but wait, there's "More!" Like an entire album of deep cuts, for the real heads.

...plus they're ripping off Irving Berlin.

Correction, he didn't write "Tea For Two"! I meant Randy California.

Presence ...an entire album of deep cuts, for the real heads.

I met a woman who had all the Zeppelin CDs except for this. When I said, "Oh, you don't have Presence, she hadn't even heard of it.

Like an entire album of deep cuts, for the real heads.

This is such a '76 thing: you could say the same about The Royal Scam, Tejas, or Black and Blue.

xp

Why "Presence" figures so largely in my Zeppelin love is because I found out about it after I was sure that I had purchased their entire catalogue, including Coda. I was a kid who obsessed over Zeppelin, so when I stumbled across it in a music store, i thought it was some type of obscene joke.

― J. Grizzle (trainsmoke), Wednesday, August 9, 2006

Marcello's piece is great, and makes me want to listen to all of Presence again, when usually I oly want to hear Achilles and Fault

yes on "The Lemon Song."

Crazy talk! Zep at its most fonky.

The first time I really heard LZ (other than classic rock radio in the car) was when my friend gave me a tape with "IV" on one side and "Presence" on the other, I had no real frame of reference for the band or even an idea of when the albums came out or what the album covers looked like, I probably owned like ten cassettes total at that point, so to me "Presence" was always just a LZ record and I loved it.

Obv as an adult I'm like "what a weird entry point" and I understand why it doesn't have the same standing in their catalog as other records, but deep down to me it is an unimpeachable classic.

The long-gone online reviewer Capn Marvel had one of my all-time favourite lines in his review of Presence:

these guys were trying to keep afloat amidst punk rock? They sound like they all weigh 400 pounds and eat gold dubloons for breakfast.

that's praise, right?

man, "walter's walk" is what you put on when you wanna hear how mean that band could be but not be reminded of shitty classic rock radio… and I think "Hot's on" and "royal Orleans" are where you hear how much they liked the Meters…

Jeez, CapnMarvel, that’s a name I haven’t heard in 20 years. He was great!

Could have put this on the obituary thread but fuck giving this repulsive creep any kind of respect.

https://www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/1530552/Richard-Cole-dead-death-Led-Zeppelin-tour-manager-Robert-Plant-instagram-tribute-news

His own Zeppelin book is one of the most repulsive things I've ever read. I don't think I got more than a quarter of the way in.

Speaking of, new bio out.

Calling that an "obituary" is giving it a bit too much credit. It's roughly two sentences on the man's life followed by this:

_sha_nizzle typed: “Very sorry to read this..

“May he rest in peace.”

groupieplant added: “It can't be!

“I do not believe."

_bella_jenn_ said: “Condolences for your loss. R.I.P. Richard”

https://i.imgur.com/o2LxA5w.jpg

Always blastin’ HotH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVWmI69wu44

facial hair experiment phase

https://www.loudersound.com/news/led-zeppelin-fans-are-losing-their-minds-over-this-new-footage-of-a-legendary-1970-gig

first I've heard of the 'becoming LZ' documentary

It's a shame they didn't stick with the Cavalier and Master Dahlia Gardener look. I hope Page is wearing rain boots.

“Just goin out in mah wellies for a wee bit of tendin’ to the old flower patch it is, then playing with the band around 1700”

I read that Page somehow never saw Hendrix perform live. Part of me thinks that’s plausible — certain things just never aligned schedule/timing-wise — and part of me thinks that, with his arrogance, Page purposely avoided the guitarist that shocked and stunned all of his contemporaries into reevaluating their approaches.

Between the radio and being a professional musician I imagine it was impossible for page to avoid hearing Hendrix in the late 60s

Oh, I’m sure Page heard Hendrix on records and/or radio. But all of his musician peers (not limited to guitarists) saw him live. I can easily imagine Page wanting to sidestep an (ahem) experience so overwhelming as to make him possibly question his abilities.

Lemmy used to claim that early Hendrix UK shows were performed with a foot of water in front of the stage because all the preeminent guitar players came down to see him and cried through the whole set knowing they'd never be that good.

i was never a fan but i like the yardbirds alot!

A guitarist friend once commented to me that Page didn’t sound like he had any idea what he was going to play would sound like. And notwithstanding all the session work Page did (in which there was likely very little improvisation), I am inclined to agree. It’s been a while since I played it but you can’t listen to something like that solo in “Heartbreaker” and hear it as anything other than Page kind of fumbling his way from one series of licks and hand motions to the next. It gets by on sheer energy and has some charm but it almost falls apart about 5 times and at no point does Page sound even close to as in control as most of his contemporaries.

Incredible producer and songwriter. Innovator and iconic rock star. But pretty overrated as a soloist.

Yes and no... in live recordings, he sometimes sounds downright hamfisted. And yet, in the studio, he was often an absolute master of the form. His solos for songs like "Good Times, Bad Times", "Whole Lotta Love", "Black Dog" and "Stairway" certainly don't lack virtuosity or excitement.

Yeah come on, there are plenty of concise, well-crafted guitar melodies there, e.g. "Thank You", "Tangerine", "The Rover".

Youtube comments definitely show that a lot of people hear the "Heartbreaker" solo as something other than what you described btw! The second part, after the rhythm section joins, sounds like pretty tight blues-rock playing to me. The first unaccompanied section mostly sounds like it's about relative levels of space and activity - like Eliot Fisk, he sounds like he's pushing his technique past the point where he has total control in order to prioritize the level of intensity he's going for, which I kind of appreciate.

That's also what a lot of the live playing seems like to me.

I think the thing I would say about Page is that he is an extremely _sloppy_ player. And quite honestly, I don't think in this he's particularly different than Hendrix could be. You hear Hendrix at an event like... well, you can talk about the Winter Festival for Peace, or the notorious Scene Club '68 performance, but even something like Woodstock - Woodstock was an _extremely_ uneven gig for him. There were spontaneous moments of absolute brilliance and transcendence, like Villanova Junction, but there was also a lot of mediocrity packed into that set. I think that when you're constantly pushing yourself to the limit of what's possible, what happens is that you do wind up failing catastrophically, a lot of the time.

Also both of them were constantly high as fuck, which made it hard for them to perform consistently.

"I’m not a guitarist as far as a technician goes, I just pick it up and play it. Technique doesn’t come into it. "
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-durable-led-zeppelin-36209/

"Failing catastrophically a lot of the time" is an overstatement though imo (wrt both Page and Hendrix).

xp It's been a while since I've read up on Hendrix, but IIRC what was expected of him (like long and over-the-top jams) was a bit frustrating - like he didn't feel the need to do that all the time, but later on he did more of that knowing that's what a lot of concert-goers wanted to see, and he didn't think it made his concert performances all that consistent. I think breaking in new groups (Woodstock, New Year's at the Fillmore) probably contributed to the unevenness of those sets too, and it's implied Hendrix was fully aware this - it's a new group, he's consciously trying new things, it's not going to be an immaculate concert performance.

That's interesting - he felt commercial/social pressure to play long instrumental improvisations instead of shorter songs?

"Failing catastrophically a lot of the time" is an overstatement though imo (wrt both Page and Hendrix).

I guess it would depend on what you think their intentions were.

"Failing catastrophically a lot of the time" is an overstatement though imo (wrt both Page and Hendrix).

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r)

Admittedly I'm holding them both to a lot higher standards than their audiences of the day did. But God, on audience Zep tapes of the day you can occasionally hear audience members muttering about how fucking bored they are when Page would decide to take the next 45 minutes to solo. He also had a nasty habit not knowing when to quit digging - witness the solo on Stairway at Led Zeppelin's last concert before Bonham's death. It's the longest Stairway solo on record, and it spends most of that time begging to be put out of its misery. Hendrix never bottomed out like that, but Hendrix also died really fucking young...