Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

Haha, clearly I didn't read that much about them. What I heard sounded like garage rock and I thought that's what people liked about them.

what did you all expect, bitchez brew or something?? Was it too heavy and rockin for ya??

I am so crabby today lol sorry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtvGR8UX1L0

what did you all expect, bitchez brew or something?? Was it too heavy and rockin for ya??

Honestly, I didn't know it at the time (because it was the early '90s and they didn't exist yet), but I was kind of expecting/hoping for...Earthless, basically.

“Kick out the jams” - great title, average tune

The biggest issue is that essentially *none* of the rock bands of the era or beyond had the free chops of Coltrane or Coleman or Sanders or Miles or whomever.

I could see people saying that about Ornette but hadn't Coltrane and Miles demonstrated ample chops by then, even by traditional standards?

Yeah I'm going to see the citation on Coltrane didn't have chops

People were critical of Coltrane’s multiphonics, among other aspects (another criticism was, “oh, he’s just running scales”), and Miles was unfavorably compared to Dizzy Gillespie and, particularly, Clifford Brown in some quarters.

I’ve heard the Miles criticism quite a few times, yeah. He was no Maynard Ferguson (O Canada!) either, apparently.

Yeah Miles I could see but I don't get not being impressed by Coltrane

But jazz beef is the bitchiest beef

Seems like there were various strains of Moldy Figs such as, say, Kingsley Amis, just to shoot one fish in one barrel, who didn’t ever get it

Never forget Philip Larkin calling Coltrane "anti-jazz."

The thing is, even the most strenuous — and, in many instances, racist — detractors of the new music of the ‘60s conceded that this was the next major development in the music after Parker, Gillespie, Monk, Clarke, Roach, et al. The tone in contemporary Down Beat writing is generally, “Yeah, I know this is the ‘new thing’ — that doesn’t mean I have to like it! I’m going to go listen to my Benny Goodman Trio records!”

Right, and someone — Ira Gitler, maybe? — characterized a Coltrane/Dolphy set as “hate music.”

xp

Those aren't necessarily the same as "have no chops", though. Obv lots of people hate and hated free jazz.

While we are at it, Slonimsky was some kind of Old World Wit who wrote all kinds of well-regarded Biographical Dictionaries and Compendiums of Anecdotes and Invective, but in one of his memoirs I came across some hateful bemusement on his part about the bump in sales of his Thesaurus due to purchases by “Ignorant Jazz Musicians” - I am mentally blocking on the the exact hateful wording- that made me see Redd.

Some people get overly attached to a particular aspect or quality of a music, and that aspect or quality also forms part of their identity and sensibility, and then when that genre of music departs from that quality, it offends their identity and sensibility. It creates a kind of narcissistic wound, almost like seeing a parent enter a midlife crisis while still a young child. Jazz critics dismissed Miles's psychedelic explorations because Miles's prior cool/cerebral approach flattered the cool cerebralness they wanted to see in themselves, and the psychedelic stuff shattered their little refuge from crass hippie culture, letting in exactly what they were trying to use jazz to keep out.

Wow

Bonhams zoso symbol is a worthy design target for beer glass condensation rings

He picked his symbol because it was the Ballentine Beer logo turned upside down!

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/stairwaytozeppelin/images/c/c0/SymbolBonham.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/340?cb=20120105073536

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/06/fe/73/06fe7315f7e1613959a79d16b9d8d367.jpg

purity
booty
flavor

missed the mc5 revive. i don't know what the mc5 were "supposed" to be but whatever it was they probably weren't? heard a gig of theirs from a '70 festival with the stooges. wouldn't say the stooges "blew them off the stage" - fun house-era stooges, from what i've heard, never quite seemed to live up to the album.

best i can say for the mc5 is that they did "skunk (sonically speaking)", which, once you get past that shit minute-long drum intro, is a fierce monster of... something. heard a tape of some mc5 remnants backing up iggy in '78, again, not bad at all but not epoch-defining. idk what the mc5's heritage is. i have a tape of guitar wolf doing "kick out the jams", and even though it's a recording and therefore listening to it does not cause chronic deafness, i find it worthy.

why are the zep knockoffs nobody's heard of so much better than the better-known ones? yesterday i was listening to mass temper's "grave digger", which is dead up what zep would sound like if the singing and production was black sabbath. if these unknowns could nail the zep sound so well, why can't greta van fleet?

that mass temper track is like somewhere between blue cheer and wicked lady

He picked his symbol because it was the Ballentine Beer logo turned upside down!

🖼

🖼

Ha, "Grave Digger" is not bad.

you know for some reason i'd not heard wicked lady before even though i was familiar with dark

looks like martin weaver is active again, doing some space rock stuff with a norwegian dude, pretty cool shit imo

https://doctorsofspace.bandcamp.com/album/ghouls-n-shit

Robert, Jimmy, Bonham and Jones

The Who, Surrey, United Kingdom, 1971 pic.twitter.com/KCzaix0wJT

— Barney Hurley (@barneyhurley1) August 22, 2020

That photo was taken at the press launch party for Who’s Next, held at Keith Moon’s house (“Tara”).

Fun fact: during the recording of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” John Bonham was sitting on the floor next to Moon’s kit.

A little later and elsewhere:

Robert Plant playing soccer in Encino 1977. pic.twitter.com/ZBXiGMN7A9

— The ICE Crusher (@EddieMarsAttack) August 21, 2020

percy otm

https://www.instagram.com/p/CAGTD5_hNCV/?igshid=xjenzejlu2rh

Robert Plant describes John’s frame of mind as they drove to their last rehearsal together: “On the very last day of his life, as we drove to the rehearsal, he was not quite as happy as he could be. He said, 'I’ve had it with playing drums. Everybody plays better than me.' We were driving in the car and he pulled off the sun visor and threw it out the window as he was talking. He said, 'I’ll tell you what, when we get to the rehearsal, you play the drums and I’ll sing.' And that was our last rehearsal.”

John Bonham was found dead Sept. 25, 1980

He had consumed an estimated 40 shots of vodka the day and night prior at rehearsals for the band’s upcoming North American tour which was announced exactly two weeks earlier and scheduled to kick off less than a month later. Put to bed just after midnight at Jimmy Page's house in the south England town of Windsor, Bonham would be found lifeless the next afternoon by sound engineer Benji LeFevre and John Paul Jones.

"It was like, ‘Let’s go up and look at Bonzo, see how he is,’” Jones said. “We tried to wake him up … it was terrible. Then I had to tell the other two … I had to break the news to Jimmy and Robert.”

still astonish sometimes tbh

https://www.instagram.com/p/CHdxupjMG4n/?igshid=1esgc9md6n6n5

Iommi and bonham

Per Wikipedia, "On the band's 1977 tour of the United States, [John Paul] Jones would sing lead vocals on "The Battle of Evermore," filling in for Sandy Denny"

This has blown my mind. Does anyone know of a quality bootleg in which one of these performances can be heard?

I have definitely heard that (on Destroyer??). It wasn't great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkLM7qd8q5g

Tbh, it doesn't sound as offensive as it did when I was 13, now that I've heard more male folk singers.

He sings backing vocals, though, not lead, obv.

I always found JPJ a puzzling choice—Bonham (even Page!) had a better voice, he did a lot of backing vox live and on record

JPJ doesn't sound like he wants to be singing, like he drew the short straw. Page was too fucked up into his heroin addiction to sing decently, I'm guessing. And the harmonizer dealie on Plant's voice was not a good idea, one that continued into the 1980 shows.

Thanks Sund4r. It didn't occur to me that it might have been filmed. The way the quote is phrased, I thought JPJ must have had a fantastic singing voice, unbeknownst to me all these years. That turns out to, uh, not be the case.

I think that by 77 Plant was opting for those effects out of necessity (?), he had a much harder time in the upper range

I can believe it. He (and Brian Johnson) sing really high, as anyone that has ever shredded their voice at karaoke night can attest.

Wasn't there a theory that Plant lost some of his range either due to a) walking to a show in the rain in the early '70s, or b) something to do with their tour of Japan?

I get that a kid in his early/mid 20s on tour with one of the biggest bands in the world doesn't want to take the necessary time to rest and care for his voice, but jeez, they were playing songs in lower keys (or retooling the melodies) that they'd only recorded months earlier.

The Kinks did this too, during their late '70s arena phase. Ray would either have Dave sing a song that Ray sang on the record, or it would be played in a different key from the (just-released) recording.

Didn't he have surgery on his vocal cords?

Hm, a bunch of sources say this but none I'd consider credible.