Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

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.

They mashed his damaged vocal cords and used the resultant paste to create new vocal cords

I don't remember hearing that Plant had vocal cord surgery. Are you thinking of Daltrey? He sounded like varying degrees of garbage in '06-'09, but had two surgeries in 2010. They were apparently successful, as his voice was vastly improved on the '12, '15, and '16 shows I saw. He also sounds amazing on the new record, but there's quite a bit of autotune futzing.

huh JPJ is such an all around musical talent I just assumed he would be a good singer

I was thinking of Plant but it seems like this was just a rumour. Maybe it was in Hammer of the Gods or some other bullshit :
https://societyofrock.com/plants-best-performance-before-his-surgery-will-astonish-you/
https://forums.ledzeppelin.com/topic/14236-when-exactly-was-robert-plants-voice-operation/
https://www.wikidoc.org/index.php/Vocal_fold_nodule#Famous_nodule_sufferers

i am a big fan of the yardbirds but not of lz but i like the immigrant song and whatever the b side is!

huh JPJ is such an all around musical talent I just assumed he would be a good singer

Not near enough, apparently.

I don’t assume any correlation of musical ability and vocal capability. Mike mills and Michael Anthony are exceptions

...not the rule

He doesn't sound that bad here, although I wouldn't say great:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1m2RoapmkQ

Is that jpj on backing vox on the studio thank you ?

It’s always been credited to Page but some ppl insist it sounds like Bonham

The Led Zeppelin. Bonzo putting on his best BBC accent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0fqgq6ZMZY

I love how aggressive journos were at the time. Every single one of these interviews boils down to 'your music sucks – change my view'.

the interview parts of Don't Look Back are so amazing

When they play the clip of the intro to "The Lemon Song" the whole show should have suddenly turned into color like The Wizard of Oz.

Every single one of these interviews boils down to 'your music sucks – change my view'.

Is this a BBC approach more generally? It seemed to be what threw Ben Shapiro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E

That 1970 video is amazing. Surprising that they still seemed to be framing the Beatles as image-based teen idols at that point vs Zep as difficult musos who fail the whistle-a-tune test.

Yeah it seems to have been a conscious media strategy: "No, we're not as cute. And no, our music isn't catchy. And no, we didn't write a lot of it. And no, our audiences aren't as enthusiastic. But this is all by choice. We're REALER, maaaan."

I like both bands, and they both need to exist, but it's a rather silly position to take. Hard to know whether it's the box the interviewers were pushing them into, or something their manager / label wanted them to say, or how they really thought.

It is silly, of course, but Led Zeppelin >>> The Beatles.

That Ben Shapiro takedown never gets old, but I have no idea whether *bands* interviewed by the BBC are still subject to the same quizzical treatment half a century later.

The LZ interview is just old school Reithian disdain for popular culture, it's actually a regional news programme (albeit London) and yet the interviewer (Bob Langley) sounds posher than most minor royals. The Shapiro one is by Andrew Neil, who is one of those heavy-punching star interviewers that the British media likes to compliment themselves on producing - Robin Day, Jeremy Paxman etc - whose whole shtick is being tough and uncompromising and asking awkward questions. An idiot like Ben Shapiro is easy meat for someone like Neil but media-savvy British politicians have long since worked out their tactics when dealing with this type of interrogation. Generally more of a disdain for the human race going on from the likes of Paxman.

*subjected

xp yeah the performative elitism is just off the charts.

Well, it's hard to respond to "I don't think I could whistle one of your tunes" with "yes you could". I just think the framing (which seemed to be coming from BBC/Melody Maker first) was surprising given all the press in 1970 that was revering the Beatles as 'serious musicians' and deriding Zeppelin's "pat visceral impact".xp to YMP

Celebrities and pop stars are generally slobbered over and treated better than royalty by the BBC these days. Perish the thought that Jimmy Page would be treated like Prince Andrew!

I suspect the Stones had to play some of the same lame cards just because of how much cultural oxygen had been sucked up by the Beatles.

"Uh, we both play blues-based rock music, but they are the clean-cut good guys and we're the dangerous bad boys." Neither assertion was, strictly speaking, true, but once a media narrative develops you have to either work within it or work reactively against it.

Perhaps it was inevitable. The music press needed to understand everything through the lens of the Beatles so every question was "in what ways are you similar to / different from the band that dominates our mindset about pop/rock music?"

As several have noted there are gobs of class shit that I (as a USian) cannot really unravel. I will leave it to the Britishes from here on out

all the press in 1970 that was revering the Beatles as 'serious musicians' and deriding Zeppelin's "pat visceral impact".xp to YMP

although tbf a lot of this was coming from the rock press; this clip almost makes me wonder if Zep got comparatively more respect from high-culture outlets. You'd think they were some cerebral fusion group from this, which they sort of were in a way, but you wouldn't know it from Rolling Stone.

What were the class issues involved? Page and Plant came from middle- to upper middle-class families in the London area and West Midlands, while the Beatles were more working- to lower-middle class from the North aiui? Did this impact their reception?

Did I say Bob Langley? It was Bob Wellings - who is still alive! In fact he only 36 at the time of the interview! There's a little comment about Plant coming from Kidderminster, which might be entirely innocent but I can't help but think was a bit of regional jibe at these hairy West Midlands oiks. Plant's fairly well spoken anyway but I'm pretty sure Bonham was having to rein in his Midlands accent when faced with an interviewer who sounds like Prince Philip.

Ah

There was an article in The Guardian a week ago or so about a French bill aimed at combating accent-based discrimination and the tone was so baffled and amused that I couldn't help but wonder whether the author ever considered that it's no less pressing an issue in the UK (or so it seems to me, speaking as a foreign spy).

I would have thought more pressing but like several centuries too late.

But then that's the Guardian for you!

Ha, I only just got that "what's it like finally having money?" was a dig.

although tbf a lot of this was coming from the rock press; this clip almost makes me wonder if Zep got comparatively more respect from high-culture outlets.

why are these creeps not cancelled

The Power of Crowley