Led Zeppelin FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time (Faq Series)

by George Case

  Page composed the soundtrack for the 1982 film Death Wish II.

  Author’s Collection

  webmaster Sam Rapallo, but such was his thoroughness and care with administering its information that it was remade as the formal Internet face of Led Zeppelin in 2007.

  Other sites do not have the sanction of group but are nonetheless full of worthwhile material. Each has a particular appeal: On some forums, trading of bootleg recordings between members is tolerated; some promote fan fiction and other community interaction; some highlight Zeppelin-related musical or technical details; and some disseminate news tidbits and rare video clips. Newbies are more tolerated on some forums than others, and nasty cyber-scraps have broken out between posters as they debate (for example) Robert Plant’s solo career, Jimmy Page’s history of drug abuse, or the color of John Paul Jones’s socks when he played Chicago in 1975 (the second show).

  Numerous individuals have built their own blogs to discuss their Zeppelin fandom and solicit contact with like-minded surfers, and several pages about the group are now on Facebook. Original or homemade video clips of Led Zeppelin musical performances, bootlegs, and interviews are all over YouTube. Whether or not the sixty-something Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones are themselves pointing and clicking away out there is unknown—asked once if he used e-mail or the Web, Page said, “I wouldn’t know how to turn on a computer.” Like so much on the Internet, the online Led Zeppelin data should be scrutinized carefully and double-

  Robert Plant’s post-1980 career took him far away from his Golden God Zeppelin persona.

  Courtesy of Len Ward / The Rad Zone

  checked before confirming any details as factual. The most useful and visited Zeppelin sites available in English are:

  • jimmypageonline.com Not affiliated with Page himself, this is a fan site with pictures, merchandise, and occasional news.

  • johnpauljones.com Run by Sam Rapallo, the website offers the multi-instrumentalist’s most recent news, itineraries, and pictures.

  • ledzeppelin.com Great-looking graphics and a very active forum make this the first stop in cyberspace for many Zeppelin buffs. Its official status, however, means bootleggers are unwelcome.

  • led-zeppelin.org Less flashy but still a commendable source of info, featuring tablature for guitarists, musical instrument analysis, song lyrics, interview transcriptions, and backstage secrets in an “Infrequently Murmured Trivia List.”

  • ledzeppelin-database.com An extremely thorough and navigable index to every single Led Zeppelin performance around the world between 1968 and 1980, offering fan photos, press coverage, set lists (with song timings and band members’ onstage comments), and sound clips from audience recordings.

  • ledzeppelinnews.com Steve Sauer posts the latest post-Zeppelin activities of the band members and their circle. Coverage is always timely and often exclusive.

  • planet-zeppelin.com Geared toward more casual fans who’re interested in meeting up and sharing stories online. Lots of interesting opinions, trivia, memories, and exchanges, and a friendlier tone among posters than in some other forums.

  • robertplant.com The solo singer’s official site features pictures, press clippings, a discography, videos, and interviews.

  • royal-orleans.com Hard-core collectors and musos gather here to dissect the fine points of Led Zeppelin’s official and bootlegged music; highly knowledgeable input concerning any and all technical aspects of the shows and the records can be found here.

  • tightbutloose.co.uk From England’s Dave Lewis, publisher of the long-running Tight but Loose fan magazine. This is the portal to the authoritative print journal, but the website also presents up-to-date news, diaries, and commentary (not all to do with Zeppelin) from Lewis; a very civilized place to go.

  Timeline

  1980

  May 19: Mt. St. Helens volcano erupts in US; 8 dead.

  June 10: Comedian Richard Pryor badly burned in freebase cocaine accident.

  June–July: Led Zeppelin tour Europe.

  September 20: Iran-Iraq war begins.

  September 25: John Bonham found dead.

  November 4: Ronald Reagan defeats Jimmy Carter in US presidential election.

  December 4: Press release announces the dissolution of Led Zeppelin.

  December 8: Ex-Beatle John Lennon killed, New York.

  Movies: Raging Bull; The Elephant Man.

  Music: Bob Marley and the Wailers, Uprising; AC/DC, Back in Black; U2, Boy; the Pretenders, “Brass in Pocket”; Devo, “Whip It”; Kool & the Gang, “Celebration.”

  27

  But in the Long Run

  Led Zeppelin in Overview

  If We Could Just Join Hands: Led Zeppelin as Supergroup

  Rock music’s unprecedented international success from the mid-1960s onward, in terms of economic impact, media notice, and critical respect, was marked by the growing numbers of acts comprised of members sprung from bands that had already enjoyed some measure of popularity. The term supergroup was first applied to Blind Faith in 1969, made up of Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker of Cream, Steve Winwood of Traffic, and Rick Grech of Family, all of them (especially Cream) with strong histories of record and ticket sales. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were another example of the phenomenon (they too debuted in ’69), as David Crosby had emerged from the chart-topping Byrds, Graham Nash from the Hollies with their own string of hits (“Bus Stop,” “Carrie-Anne”), and Stephen Stills and Neil Young from the Buffalo Springfield (“For What It’s Worth”). Later the “supergroup” label was put to various highly successful bands, but it was most accurately employed as a description of ensembles made up of musicians boasting proven backgrounds in the business: Beck, Bogert & Appice; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Asia; Damn Yankees; the Traveling Wilburys; and so on.

  By some standards, Led Zeppelin was a supergroup, but by most they were not. Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham were all full-time working players when they joined forces in 1968; Page and Jones had established solid reputations as session men, and Page had been a member of the world-touring Yardbirds; Plant had recorded and released songs under the CBS label; and by ’68 Bonham was drumming for the rising star Tim Rose as well as catching the ears of other comers such as Joe Cocker and Chris Farlowe. The 1968 Atlantic Records press release that announced the label’s signing of Led Zeppelin boasted that the group “consists of four of the most exciting musicians performing in Britain today,” portraying Plant as “one of England’s outstanding young blues singers” and claiming that Bonham “caused a sensation with his drum solos.” In contrast to previous generations of rock ’n’ roll groups, Zeppelin were not a gang of teenage friends who’d worked their way up together playing dances, parties, and clubs in their home town—they were adult veterans signed on into serious performing and recording commitments from the start, and they were expected to deliver.

  On the other hand, of all the men of Led Zeppelin only Page had been connected to a truly successful act, and it was his link to the Yardbirds that was put front and center in the group’s earliest publicity handouts. Though Jones would certainly have continued to have an access to the higher levels of music production and management had Zeppelin not taken off, and though Plant and Bonham might have eventually found their own footings in the British music scene had Page taken on Terry Reid and B. J. Wilson as vocalist and drummer, respectively, none of them would have had the star factor of genuine supergroup recruits. If anything, it was generous of Page and Peter Grant not to extract a Jimmy Page Group or a Jimmy Page and the Mad Dogs out of the defunct Yardbirds, although in the long run the equal billing would give the foursome more credibility. Groomed to be a lucrative project of seasoned experts, Zeppelin nevertheless can’t be properly put into the supergroup category. Surviving members have been involved in supergroups, though: Jones in Them Crooked Vultures, alongside Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age and Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, and Page in the
Firm, with Paul Rodgers of Bad Company.

  Have You Heard the News: Led Zeppelin as “Hype Band”

  Just as Zeppelin’s “supergroup” status may be confused by Page and Peter Grant’s registering their music publishing company as “Superhype,” so did the name virtually invite accusations that the band itself was no more than a product of corporate manipulation and capitalist greed. The charge is not without foundation, but neither is the way Led Zeppelin conclusively disproved it.

  Following the watershed impact of Sgt. Pepper and the groundbreaking attractions of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the record industry of 1968–69 had begun to codify some of the market trends observable during the era. Albums could be as lucrative as singles; artists didn’t need Top 40 hits to draw a steady audience; blues-based, improvisatory electric guitar workouts were followed reverently by college-age fans; sexual, chemical, or other countercultural references in the music and on the record covers could be more and more overt; talking up the “mind-blowing” potential of new acts was a valid sales strategy. Atlantic Records took all these into account when signing Led Zeppelin in 1968 for a trade-headline-grabbing $220,000, a huge amount at the time and a sum few new acts have been granted since. With Cream disbanding and Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Fleetwood Mac, the Who, and Vanilla Fudge more than demonstrating the continuing appeal of their heavy rock formula, Zeppelin looked and sounded like a good investment.

  From the point of view of many punters, however, and certainly of many of the youthful reviewers writing for US rock magazines like Rolling Stone, Creem, and Crawdaddy, Led Zeppelin seemed to be a calculated ploy—a deliberately packaged band whose sound and style were designed to resemble those of a roster of famous acts, touted in the pseudo-groovy language that was even then creeping into the lexicon of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and Hollywood. The aforementioned Atlantic press release, ascribed to Bob Rolontz of the label, told of the “hot new group” whose “pulsations” had caught the ears of “top English and American rock musicians,” prompting comparisons “to the best of Cream and Hendrix.” “Led Zeppelin is the eighth British group to be signed by Atlantic during the past 24 months,” the statement closed. “The others are Cream, Bee Gees, Julie Driscoll-Brian Auger & The Trinity, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, The Marbles, The Magic Lanterns, and Jimmy James & The Vagabonds.” Oh yes, the incomparable Marbles and Magic Lanterns. Led Zeppelin’s first promotional flyers and zeppelin-shaped giveaway balloons were replete with slogans like “The Only Way to Fly,” “Isn’t that a gas!” and “Led Zeppelin 2… Now Flying!”

  This was all hype—PR efforts to stimulate interest in a fresh act Atlantic Records had already wagered a lot of money on and which had to earn its keep. Around this time other big entertainment companies had tried to push the countercultural authenticity of their artists or movies and were met with suspicion by the hip youth market. There was MGM’s “Bosstown Sound” attempts to sell Boston-based bands like Ultimate Spinach, Kangaroo, and Chameleon Church, all of whom flopped; ditto “now” Hollywood films like Getting Straight and Zabriskie Point, attempting to cash in on 1967’s blockbusting The Graduate and 1969’s Easy Rider. In this climate, given the kind of promo motifs used to introduce Led Zeppelin to North America, listeners had a right to be skeptical. An early Creem review called the band “only redone joplinshake heavybody drughendrix,” while Rolling Stone dismissed the premier Led Zeppelin album as a template taken up in “the aftermath era of such successful British bluesmen as Cream and John Mayall.”

  Such criticism frustrated the four members of Led Zeppelin, and their intense run of touring and recording between 1969 and 1973 may be seen as an attempt to show how wrong the “hype” slander was. The untitled album usually designated Led Zeppelin IV was Jimmy Page’s bid to refute any notion that it was the hype itself that drew fans: “We wanted to demonstrate that it was the music that made Zeppelin popular; it had nothing to do with our name or image.” Ultimately they succeeded in winning over the rock intelligentsia through a respectably consistent career of albums and concerts, but their initial backing by a powerful media company, bragging of the potential they had yet to realize (let alone exceed), was not an uncommon problem for artists in the late 1960s. “All that stuff about us being a hyped band… ,” John Paul Jones has reflected. “That didn’t help us early on.” The point is not that Zeppelin were not enthusiastically pitched by Atlantic Records and its field agents—they were—but that for once the act was worthy of the enthusiasm. Whenever salesmen have tried to plug a cool new product to a cohort resistant to the very notions of salesmen and products, red flags are raised (similar populist scorn greeted many of the post-Nirvana “grunge” acts signed out of Seattle in the early 1990s). Truly, every mass-marketed assembly of musicians, from the Texas Playboys and the Ink Spots to U2 and Public Enemy, has been a “hype band,” even the ones that catered to the audience’s conceits of integrity and independence. Insofar as Led Zeppelin was hyped, the gambit was one that backfired, and the group ended up having to make its case through music alone—which it more than did.

  I Don’t Know, But I’ve Been Told: Led Zeppelin as Heavy Metal

  As late as the 1983 Rolling Stone review of Coda, Led Zeppelin was praised as “the greatest heavy metal band that ever strutted the boards.” Around the same time they were included with other “Great Heavy Metal Bands” in The Book of Rock Lists, alongside Thin Lizzy, Uriah Heep, Blue Cheer, Grand Funk Railroad, and AC/DC, and a 1982 Hit Parader article titled “Heavy Metal: The Hall of Fame” decreed that “[q]uite simply, Led Zeppelin is, was, and will always be the ultimate heavy metal masters.” The tag was stuck on the band early in their working life and they were saddled with it through the 1970s and beyond. Rock critics such as Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs included Zeppelin in their own definitions of the genre, and the average high school fan of 1974 would likely have classified the group’s music as heavy metal. One Zeppelin tune, “Trampled Underfoot,” actually uses the term in its lyrics, albeit as an automotive pun. Sociologist Donna Gaines’s Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (1991) reported on the alienation and aggression of the adolescent heavy metal cliques she interviewed in New Jersey, calling them “The Children of Zoso,” after Jimmy Page’s runic signature from Led Zeppelin IV. Even today, few scholarly or popular studies of heavy metal as a social or musical subculture will fail to mention the centrality of Led Zeppelin.

  This would not be such an issue if the members of Zeppelin themselves were not disappointed to be put into the company of Grand Funk Railroad and their ilk. “There was nothing heavy about that at all,” Robert Plant said of the Led Zeppelin album in Musician magazine. “It was ethereal.” To the New York Post in 1988 he also dismissed most of Zeppelin’s imitators: “It’s mindless, it’s not a reflection of something sociological. I don’t think Zeppelin was their inspiration—Tiny Tim was…. But this is some kind of demented dwarf giving strange hand signals as he walks out of a volcano onstage. It’s tacky.” Plant later told writer Chuck Klosterman that John Bonham had described acts like “Deep Sabbath” as “a conglomerate of English, sketchy, blues-based thud…. It was inane and no mystery to it at all.” The other survivors, Jones and Page, have made equally distancing remarks about the band’s relationship to the heavy metal format, Page pointing out the lack of “light and shade” dynamics in competitors like Black Sabbath, and Jones sneering at the “glowering, Satanic crap” of most metal acts. Page was quoted as saying, “I can’t relate [the heavy metal term] to us because the thing that comes to mind when people say heavy metal is riff-bashing, and I don’t think we ever just did riff-bashing at any point.” “No one ever compared us to Black Sabbath after this record,” was the bassist’s blunt conclusion of Led Zeppelin IV’s impact. Yet even pundits who concede “Zep was always too arty and eclectic to be considered a real metal band” (Guitar World’s “Top 50 Heavy Metal Albums”) allow that “[f]or sheer power chord mania and horny, guttural hoo-ha, it doesn’t get an
y better than ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or ‘Heartbreaker.’”

  Jimmy Page and his bandmates were not alone in rejecting whatever pigeonhole they were consigned to. Most rock musicians at some point have complained about industry or critical simplifications of their work, a protest which usually tends to enforce their reputations all the more. “You cannot classify anything,” Plant avowed to Chuck Klosterman. “Classification is a killer.” Most artists in any medium, indeed, will resist being slotted into some or other stereotype, saying that their work is only their self-expression and that any generalization will miss the personal subtleties they try to impart to it; yet the defense of artistic freedom on the part of the creator is about as predictable as the inclination to format and sort on the part of the spectator or listener. As Led Zeppelin’s players sought to demonstrate that they had more to offer than the one-dimensional boogie of Grand Funk—Led Zeppelin III was an early example of this—professional and amateur audiences strained to define their songs as something, and heavy metal was still the handiest option.

  The Zeppelin-as-heavy-metal controversy says more about the rapid evolution of rock ’n’ roll aesthetics over twenty or thirty years than any objective parameters of what the music itself sounds like. Critic Chuck Eddy’s Stairway to Hell compendium goes so far as to include Miles Davis’s Live Evil as one of “The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe,” in with records by Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and, inescapably, Led Zeppelin. The origins of the genre are usually traced back to the Steppenwolf song “Born to Be Wild” (1968), with its celebration of “heavy metal thunder,” although other histories document the influences of Iron Butterfly, Vanilla Fudge, Cream, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Yardbirds, and the pioneering distorted guitar chords heard in the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night” (both 1964). The very loud and sometimes deliberately primitive “acid rock” of the late 1960s, including the work of Blue Cheer, the Stooges, and the MC5 (Motor City 5), is also factored into some accounts. Of all the names linked to heavy metal’s inception, it’s notable that session man Jimmy Page played for two (the Kinks and the Who), was an official member of one (the Yardbirds), and that Led Zeppelin shared bills with two more (Iron Butterfly and Vanilla Fudge). Categorizing any music as heavy metal was perhaps no more than a convenient shorthand for fans and writers facing an expansive range of young people’s pop music from 1965 onward—a way to distinguish it from the sophisticated harmonies of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, the acoustic introspections of Bob Dylan and Donovan, the soulful grooves of James Brown and Marvin Gaye, the ebullient melodicism of the Supremes and the Four Tops, the country-flavored craft of Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Band, or the bubblegum confections of the Archies, the Monkees, or the Ohio Express.