by George Case
Like all the famous “quiet ones”—cf. George Harrison, Bill Wyman, John Entwistle, et al—Jones received less credit for his group’s success than he might have claimed, both for specific pieces like “Stairway to Heaven” and “Kashmir,” and for a general elevation of its all-round sonic identity. He was no lyricist, however, and it may be significant that the album where his stamp is most audible, In Through the Out Door, is also Zeppelin’s least powerful. Though his role as a unobtrusive, behind-the-scenes fixer was an asset during the first years of the quartet, his detachment and willingness to avoid the spotlight may have put undue pressure on the already stressed Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Bonham from 1975 onward (although he did agree to try singing Sandy Denny’s parts on “The Battle of Evermore” during the 1977 tour). Some of his concert solo turns on keyboard, where he would drop in snatches of Miles Davis, Sergey Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, embodied the self-indulgent, virtuosity-for-its-own-sake pretensions punk rockers sought to puncture, and his droll, family-man persona (however authentic) made him the squarest personality among some otherwise notoriously colorful characters. Though known to enjoy a joint and to be an occasionally remote or difficult interview subject, he carried little of Page’s enigma or Bonham’s danger and less of Plant’s charisma. Still, John Paul Jones’s preference for the challenges of high-quality rock music over the rewards of high-living rock stardom was his singular, inimitable value in Led Zeppelin.
Robert Plant
Plant, along with Jimmy Page, was the public face of the band, and as chief wordsmith the man who gave Led Zeppelin a large share of their mystical, countercultural dimension. With his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure lines and phrasings it was R&B buff Plant who first placed the group in its class as a high-powered blues meltdown, and it was the literate and sensitive Plant who eventually took them beyond the language of Chicago or the Mississippi Delta to the visionary ranges of “Ramble On,” “Immigrant Song,” “That’s the Way,” “The Rover,” “Kashmir,” “Achilles Last Stand,” and above all “Stairway to Heaven.” A sincere proponent of the transformative potential of music, Robert Plant also lifted Zeppelin up from merely a faithful, dilettante’s exhibition of amplified folk idioms to achieve something like mass catharsis—in their Houses of the Holy, Plant was what their biographer Stephen Davis called a “high priest of rock communion and a true believer.” His leonine hair, bare chest, tall frame, and confident stage moves—so confident he could even pose as a radiant feminine other to Page’s dark wizard—secured his stature as the act’s prime sex symbol, a conquering hippie Viking whose image thousands of female fans still find irresistible.
But Robert Plant’s most tangible ability was as a vocalist, and this is where his influence may be widest. Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham were all heroes on their instruments, but no more than Plant was with his voice. His devastating work on Led Zeppelin and its three sequels was an unprecedented display of range, control, and projection, melding the blues affectations of Joe Cocker or (especially) Janis Joplin with the technical effects of Enrico Caruso. By the climactic bars of “Good Times Bad Times,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Heartbreaker,” “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” “Stairway to Heaven,” and “When the Levee Breaks” he is hitting and sustaining notes few pop singers before him dared to aim for. Although certainly untutored, Plant’s quasi-operatic moans were taken up by many front men in other hard rock bands of later years: Journey’s Steve Perry, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, Foghat’s Dave Peverett, Boston’s Brad Delp, Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe, Klaus Meine of the Scorpions, Paul Stanley of Kiss, Ronnie James Dio, Sammy Hagar, Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, and the blatant David Coverdale. Not until the grunge reactions of Nirvana and Pearl Jam did the standard male rock vocalist’s repertoire drop from Plant’s exuberant octaves to the mumbled, mangled phrasings of today.
Precisely because Plant had no formal training as a singer, however, his high wails were gradually grounded over the course of Led Zeppelin’s flight, and neither did he do his instrument any favors as a regular smoker of tobacco and cannabis. His bouts of tonsillitis and other throat woes forced cancellation of some Led Zeppelin concerts and subdued performances in others, and he was quietly sidelined with throat surgery around 1973 or 1974, after which some contend he never sounded the same. By Zeppelin’s later tours he was relying on an electronic harmonizer effect to cover some of his strained melismata, and at the band’s 2007 reunion several songs were played in lower keys than the original to preserve Plant’s pipes, although this may have been an inevitable nod to his fifty-nine years. Moreover, the singer’s surreal experiences as a twenty-one-year-old rock star and his tragic misfortunes as an individual have left him with a conspicuously embarrassed perspective on his Led Zeppelin career. While acknowledging his pride in having been a part of the band, and crediting Zeppelin as the basis for his four decades as a prominent and highly respected artist, Plant has always
With worldwide sales of almost 40 million units, Led Zeppelin IV is the band’s most successful record.
Courtesy of Robert Rodriguez
tended to downplay the more extravagant aspects of Zeppelin’s music and mythos (refusing to sing “Stairway to Heaven,” for example), citing them as the exaggerated or juvenile follies of someone too young to be forever held accountable to them. To many fans, Plant’s maturity and humility have allowed Led Zeppelin to maintain their dignity, in contrast to the graceless aging of Rolling Stone Sir Mick Jagger, but others complain he has been a holdout in blocking a reunion of the surviving members and in unduly dismissing the group’s greatest work. For all his efforts to outgrow it, and for better or worse, Robert Plant will be always be tied to the majestically romantic role he played and sang so well as part of Led Zeppelin.
John Bonham
Bonham was the true source of Led Zeppelin’s heavy sound and the member who truly lived and died the rock ’n’ roll excess with which the band has always been linked. His drumming has been imitated by countless other percussionists in rock and other fields, and his recorded work has been frequently sampled for use in later artists’ digital creations. Many of Zeppelin’s classic tunes are virtually defined by his beat: the bass triplets on “Good Times Bad Times” (which prompted no less a listener than Jimi Hendrix to compare the dexterity of Bonham’s pedal action to a castanet player’s), the explosive snare on “Whole Lotta Love,” the eruptive hi-hats on “Rock and Roll,” the cascading entry in “Stairway to Heaven,” the cavernous meter of “When the Levee Breaks,” the relentless groove of “Kashmir”—it is a list that can encompass most of the songs in the band’s canon. But for his combination of Motown taste and industrial-strength authority, Led Zeppelin would have had lost much of its audio hallmark and been more like a watery Jimmy Page Group or Robert Plant Blues Explosion. Bonham remains one of the symbols of pop music performance at its most overwhelming and pop music lifestyle at its most decadent. (He and the Who’s Keith Moon were the likely archetypes for the feral drummer Animal on The Muppet Show, a staple of US television in the late ’70s.) Arguably the Zeppelin member with the best command of his instrument and by many accounts the most consistent of the four musicians in concert, he is the only man from the group to be remembered in not one but two biographies. John Bonham is an inspiration, a titan, a legend, and finally a tragedy.
Some of this reputation has only come posthumously. In 1984’s The Book of Rock Lists his name is nowhere to be found on “The 25 Greatest Rock and Roll Drummers,” although he is included in “Rock and Roll Hell: A List of Probable Inductees.” During the 1970s his playing was, along with Led Zeppelin’s generally, relegated to a category of mere “heavy metal,” meaning loud, hard, and simple, and it is also the case that other rock drummers of the era—Stewart Copeland of the Police, Carl Palmer of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Bill Bruford of Yes and King Crimson, Alan White of Yes, Neil Peart of Rush—were playing with more subtlety and fine
sse than Bonham usually displayed. Bonham’s drums were recorded by Jimmy Page in a way that would have magnified anyone’s talents, adding to his larger-than-life sound: The Herculean intro to “When the Levee Breaks,” for instance, was recorded in a naturally echoing stairwell and slowed down in the final mix for a deeper, more plodding cadence. His heavyweight physical stature was an advantage when generating the driving meters of “Dazed and Confused,” “Immigrant Song,” “The Wanton Song,” “Achilles Last Stand,” or his solo “Moby Dick,” but in other numbers it gives a leadenness to material that might better be timed to a lighter touch, like the ballads “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” “Tangerine,” or the attempted reggae of “D’yer Mak’er.” Just thirty-two when he died, he might have started to suffer long-term manual or carpal damage had he grown older, owing to his hard-hitting overhand “match grip” percussion (never mind his solo spots where he played with his hands alone). Bonham’s recorded legacy is well considered by Chris Welch and Geoff Nicholls in John Bonham, A Thunder of Drums: The Powerhouse Behind Led Zeppelin and the Godfather of Heavy Rock Drumming, whose title implies that, for all his immortal licks, rolls, and fills, his influence is still mostly felt as an especially aggressive musician more than an especially imaginative one.
John Bonham’s fatal deficiency, really, lay not in any limitations as a percussionist (though the unassuming “Bonzo” was always the first to admit that he had them), but in his penchant for violence and self-destruction. Had he never joined Led Zeppelin, the likeable and homey lad from the Midlands might have lived out a happier life as a husband and father, perhaps jamming with some mates in local bands and hitting his favorite pub every Saturday night, closing down a busy work week as a building contractor or lorry driver. Instead, swept up into one of the most popular rock acts in the world at the age of twenty-one and sent to the far corners of the earth to perform, he lost much of his inherent modesty and grounding—the provincial, working-class drummer of truncated education was turned loose in the fleshpots of America, Europe, and Asia and afforded the opportunity to behave far more recklessly than he ever would in his English hometown. Stories of Bonham vandalizing hotels and dressing rooms, and bullying or assaulting bystanders and hangers-on, have become fixtures of Led Zeppelin lore, scarcely alleviated by survivors’ apologies that he was a nice guy when sober, that he was a down-to-earth chap who just missed his family, that deep down he meant no harm. If all the men of Led Zeppelin were to varying extents caught up in the chaotic licentiousness around them, John Bonham was the one least able to deal with it. Coming before an era when interventions and rehabilitation clinics were regular retreats, and before anger management and chemical dependency were known concepts, Bonham’s Zeppelin stardom was well deserved but still came too soon. It is to the band’s credit that they deemed him irreplaceable after he died, but it is to the band’s shame that his sad and sordid death had to happen at all.
Jimmy Page
Page is one of the most famous rock musicians ever, both for his enduring music and his still-shadowy private predilections. He was the founder and producer of Led Zeppelin; the main or collaborative composer of almost all the quartet’s songs; the man who selected the other three players for membership; the final authority on Zeppelin’s official recorded output, tour schedules, and set lists; a guitar hero; a star concert attraction (considering he took no lead vocals and rarely spoke to the attendees); the curator of the band’s post-breakup archives; and the key figure in Zeppelin’s occult legendry. His skills on electric and acoustic guitar led many other professional and amateur players to emulate (or further) his techniques, and his ingenuity and improvisations in the studio are some of the most crucial developments in the science of recorded pop music. Photographs of Page as the long-haired, open-shirted instrumentalist with his Les Paul slung to his thighs; as the backstage emperor guzzling Jack Daniel’s whiskey; as the spotlit soloist triumphantly hoisting his double-neck; or as the black-, white-, or SS-uniformed rock ’n’ roller taking adulatory center stage are some of the most iconic visions in popular culture. To sum up the artistic and intellectual ideal of “rock star,” it would be hard to find a better illustration than Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page.
It is ironic, then, that Page was perhaps the least proficient musician of the group and the remaining member with the least adventurous track record after 1980. Though obviously a talented guitarist and a dynamic live performer, his actual playing from cut to cut and from concert to concert was erratic; though he instigated many of Led Zeppelin’s most indelible songs, they were immeasurably improved by the others, in some examples far beyond Page’s initial ideas. For a shrewd and sensitive industry professional, he, too, like the naïve Brum John Bonham, suffered badly from overindulgence in drugs and alcohol through the Zeppelin years, and the group’s final records and shows reflect the depths of his personal decline. His offstage pursuits of esoteric religions and sexual kinks, though verified well enough, have been repeated and exaggerated to the point where they have taken on a mystique disproportionate to Page’s substantive involvement with either. Strip away the fable and urban legend, and Jimmy Page emerges as a good but seldom brilliant artist smart and lucky enough to have placed himself in the middle of phenomena that have added to his renown more by passive association than deliberate action.
As an electric guitarist, Page had a knack for creating memorable sounds that was superior to his actual agility at playing, and many of his signature riffs—“Communication Breakdown,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Immigrant Song,” “The Ocean,” “The Wanton Song,” “In the Evening”—are marked more by their infectious hooks than by any fingerboard complexity (beginning players can get the hang of them with little difficulty). He was in fact
Popular releases of bootleg Led Zeppelin music, such as Physically Present, are difficult to factor in to the band’s official sales figures.
Courtesy of Duane Roy
a more advanced acoustic player, inventing a range of unusual tunings and demonstrating some quite delicate finger-style work on “Black Mountain Side,” “Bron-y-Aur Stomp,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “The Rain Song,” “Over the Hills and Far Away,” and “Bron-yr-Aur.” This diversity of ability, moving from idiosyncratic acoustic strumming on “Black Mountain Side” to solid electric boogie on “Communication Breakdown,” or from distorted guitar on “Rock and Roll” to pretty mandolin on “The Battle of Evermore,” helped Page sound more accomplished than he would have had he confined himself to any single genre—the songs and the styles change before his shortcomings become apparent. More than anything, Page’s strength was in isolating and perfecting (abetted by Jones and Bonham) the progressions or rhythmic figures he hit upon by chance, with his training as a session player instilling in him the ear and control required to go over tryout performances and shape them into something more striking or monolithic. Contemporaries such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck; later hard rock heroes including Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore, Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, and AC/DC’s Angus Young; and virtuosi such as Eddie Van Halen, Al Di Meola, and Leo Kottke were better than Page at executing their own parts than he was at his, but Page was the master of recognizing effective notes when he heard them and then maximizing their impact.
Many critics today assert that Page was more influential as a producer than a guitar player. In interviews, to be sure, he has spoken volubly about his use of Altair tube limiters, EMT plate reverbs, urei compressors, the art of microphone placement, and other studio trickery, while only vaguely recalling his choice of guitars or guitar lines: “I really don’t like showing people how I play things…. It’s a little embarrassing because it always looks so simple to me.” His careful orchestrations of guitar, bass, drums, and voice; finely tuned monitoring of volume levels, stereo spacing, and ambient sound; canny choices of album packaging and design; and inspired song-by-song album sequencing have proven to have the longest and broadest reverberation in pop music from his own time; his song
writing and playing are uniquely his but therefore harder to replicate. Typecast as the bow-wielding Sorcerer or the laser-bathed Hermit of stadium gigs, Page enjoyed his finest moments at the mixing desk with a mere handful of accomplices. Though he is now a wealthy and justly lauded musician whose achievements in his field are unsurpassed, his intriguing but unspectacular early career and fitful latter-day record have shown that his highest capacities were expended during the few years he was in command of Led Zeppelin.
Any appraisal of the Led Zeppelin musicians’ respective attributes must note that they, like their contemporaries in other famous rock groups, were working in a very exclusive field. They were not just craftsmen but entertainers, demonstrating their skills nightly to thousands of people who had come to see and hear them—their popular titles of Best Rock Guitarist or Greatest Rock Drummer should come with the addendum, “who was widely known.” Becoming Led Zeppelin, international pop music sensation, required a crucial flamboyance and showmanship (even on the part of the usually retiring John Paul Jones) beyond mere facility, and there were almost certainly other players of the band’s time who were more technically capable or creatively inventive who, for whatever reasons, never connected with a large audience. Led Zeppelin’s millions of records and tickets sold were not flukes but the consequence of determined effort and deliberate self-promotion.