by George Case
“Whole Lotta Love”
Only one Led Zeppelin song rivals “Stairway to Heaven” in fame and influence, and it’s this one. Boasting a minimal riff sustained, amplified, and echoed to titanic scale, its opening twenty-five seconds are among the most suspenseful and dramatic fanfares in pop music, with its orgasmic fadeout marking perhaps Robert Plant’s finest moments as a vocalist. Combine these with a middle section that is quite likely the most recognizable snippet of abstract composition in the world—over and above anything by Philip Glass, Karlheinz Stockhausen, or John Cage—and it is both the crucial template for a thousand other imitative hard rock cuts and a singular, pioneering experiment in sonic architecture.
“Kashmir”
Rarely does any popular musician manage to create one magnum showstopper, let alone a second one that compares well with the first. This prime cut from Physical Graffiti has actually held up better than “Stairway to Heaven” in its richness of sound and meaning—Led Zeppelin’s most ambitious, ornate, and ominous number. A fully realized and fully successful divergence from their bluesy roots, “Kashmir” is also the piece that best belies the Zeppelin stereotype as dealers of one-dimensional heavy metal, and can quite possibly claim responsibility for opening the ears of millions of listeners to exotic non-Western tonalities. Its elephantine meter and chromatic ascension have been widely copied and sampled (including by Jimmy Page in tandem with rapper Puff Daddy), but the song remains in a class by itself.
“When the Levee Breaks”
The grand finale of Led Zeppelin IV is the quartet’s mightiest rearrangement of a blues song, yet it is in its way the most faithful to the blues spirit—Plant’s singing and harmonica, Page’s open-tuned guitars, and of course Bonham’s catastrophic drums give Memphis Minnie’s Mississippi Delta original the scope and melodrama of Richard Wagner. Like “Whole Lotta Love,” “Levee” is a landmark recording of no less than a landmark performance.
“Dazed and Confused”
Still synonymous with the druggy pleasures of headphone-wearing, couch-sprawled lethargy, “Dazed” was Led Zeppelin’s original calling card, the mainstay of their early sets and their choicest holdover from the Yardbirds. This was what Jimmy Page intended in 1968 when he was devising an improvisatory, psychedelic blues act that could begin where Cream and Iron Butterfly left off: built around his bowed Telecaster concert platforms, his roiling solo in the Yardbirds’ “Think About It,” and the basic structure of Jake Holmes’s freak-folk model. Acid rock doesn’t come any more acidic than this.
“Rock and Roll”
Employed as both a volcanic show opener and a celebratory encore, this elemental fanfare is the link between the heavy metal volume and attack of Zeppelin’s followers and the primeval boogie-woogie of their antecedents. Along with the song’s I-IV-V chord progression and rollicking lyric, its title alone makes it a perfect illustration of what it calls itself. Timeless.
“Thank You”
Led Zeppelin’s balladry always came as a departure, their gentler moments serving to emphasize the band’s trademark electric riffs, but this warm and moving love song is the one which perhaps best stands on its own. Page’s glistening twelve-string and Plant’s palpable devotion raise this from being a mere change of pace to an early indication of artistic range; taken up years later as a fan favorite of the reunited Page and Plant outings, it proved to be one of the pair’s most listenable and most positive collaborations.
“Achilles Last Stand”
Long, loud, and intentionally self-mythologizing, “Achilles” represents a late high point in Led Zeppelin’s epic constructions. The interplay between Page, Jones, and Bonham is particularly effective, and the introductory and concluding guitar figures are haunting brackets to an otherwise unstoppable rhythmic thrust. A devastator.
“Black Dog”
Led Zeppelin never wrote a more intricate or more memorable hook than they did for “Black Dog” (one of their few tracks put out as a single), which features just about the densest, darkest, and funkiest guitar run in rock music traded off with a virtual dictionary of blues phraseology. The cliffhanger punctuation of Plant’s a cappella verses with the serpentine cohesion of Page, Jones, and Bonham is a compelling device from an ensemble who knew how to wring every last drop of tension and release from their work.
“Immigrant Song”
Composed of yet another technically simple yet irreducible chord fragment from Page, coupled with Plant’s battle-horn howls and Norse god lyric atop Bonham and Jones’s maelstrom underlay, the heaviest Zeppelin song can still hold its own against the detuned nu-metalers of today. “Immigrant Song” has been widely copied for its breakneck speed, intense audio weight, and thematic invention (see Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Deep Purple, et al), but rarely duplicated.
The Worst
Few would wish to accuse Led Zeppelin of having made substandard music, but these are the most likely to get all but the least critical punters reaching for a guilty lift of the needle or touch of the fast-forward button. None are absolutely terrible songs, just rare faux pas from a usually very classy outfit.
“Carouselambra”
A lengthy and tedious swirl of synthesizer and guitar, “Carouselambra” wants to be big but just comes across as a muddle. Zeppelin at their most gaseous.
“The Crunge”
For a white rock act that could do very credible takes on soul and R&B modes, “The Crunge” is a real embarrassment, starting off with some nice drum work but soon deteriorating into an all-too-Caucasian hunt for a groove and the bridge. This is an outtake that never was but should have been.
“Hot Dog”
Another genre pastiche, this time of country music, “Hot Dog” is fine as a comic jam session, but the flop sweat starts to show after a few spins. The band whose serious moments were practically biblical in depth never seemed to do tongue-in-cheek humor well, and this is an obvious example.
“Hots On for Nowhere”
Murky vocals and a very fussy arrangement make this penultimate Presence number that album’s closest to a throwaway. The song is admirable for its swing-style bounce but too elaborate to enjoy much.
“Hats Off to (Roy) Harper”
Despite its titular salute to their folk singer friend, Page and Plant are just covering bluesman Bukka White’s “Shake ’Em On Down” here—complete with 78-rpm scratches and authentic slurring of vocals and acoustic guitars. A very accurate re-creation of country blues, sure, but accurate re-creations of country blues aren’t what we want from Led Zeppelin.
“Rock and Roll”: Zeppelin’s timeless tribute to their genre.
Courtesy of Robert Rodriguez
“Four Sticks”
There’s no doubt the musicians were masters of unusual timings and extra beats, but sometimes, as in this black sheep from Led Zeppelin IV, the audience can’t find the same rhythm. Although “Four Sticks” is well placed in Page and Plant’s 1994 No Quarter experiments, it’s significant that this is the one of eight tracks from its album that didn’t make it on to the 1990 box set.
“Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman)”
The lightweight on an album bristling with heavy riffs, “Living Loving Maid” is one of the group’s poppier tracks, down to its smiley backing harmonies and cute little guitar solo. Think of “Heartbreaker” or “Sick Again” remade for a G rating.
“Black Country Woman”
A leisurely afternoon outdoors with acoustic instruments, a half-written parody song, and an airplane buzzing overhead, but spoiled by the distracting presence of a tape recorder. “Black Country Woman” is Led Zeppelin’s lazy filler equivalent of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” or the Beatles’ “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).”
“Darlene”
Taken from the strained In Through the Out Door sessions and finally inserted on Coda, this is an expert approximation of piano-heavy good-time rockabilly—too expert. Here’s another case of talented players vamping away at
an older style without adding anything different or fresh.
“Dazed and Confused” (The Song Remains the Same)
Although this song could be a major mind-blower in Led Zeppelin’s concerts, the thirty-minute live version presented here is just far too long and wandering—an entire vinyl album side—when bereft of the visuals that accompanied the film. Snatches of Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair”) and other departures uplift the track, but only temporarily. Even Jimmy Page was lukewarm on the shows from which this was taped, and he was the guy in charge.
The Most Overlooked
It’s difficult to imagine any Zeppelin tracks that haven’t been heard a million times, especially as the band has been sanctified on North American FM radio for more than thirty years, but somehow—for reasons of duration, genre, or the popularity of adjacent cuts—these have never got the attention they deserve. Though these songs have been long known and loved by hard-core Led-heads, latecomers would do well to check these out along with the more familiar classics.
“The Rover”
An anthem for an imagined utopia and Robert Plant’s most idealistic vision, “The Rover” features grinding guitar passages and thudding drums that show Zeppelin at their swaggering supreme. Started as an acoustic song some years before its release on Physical Graffiti and seldom performed in its entirety in concert, only the long shadows of “Stairway to Heaven” and “Achilles Last Stand” keep this from being the group’s greatest epic.
“Tea for One”
The saddest piece in Zeppelin’s repertoire and a rock ’n’ roll torch song, “Tea for One” utilizes the chords of the well-liked “Since I’ve Been Loving You” slowed and stretched to an inconsolable tempo and pierced with one of Page’s most emotional solos. The party’s over, the bar’s closed, the lover’s gone—this is what that sounds like.
“I’m Gonna Crawl”
A third minor-key blues piece to stand beside “Tea for One” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” “I’m Gonna Crawl” reveals Led Zeppelin’s underrated feel for expressive slow soul. John Paul Jones’s synthesized string intro is a lush opening that almost portends a Frank Sinatra monologue, and Page again hits home with one of his most fluid solos.
“Poor Tom”
If there’s such a thing as heavy mellow or folk metal, this is it. Bonham’s dancing stomps drive the bittersweet outlaw ballad beneath Page’s droning acoustic guitar and Plant’s vivid storytelling: “Poor Tom” is outdoorsy country blues redone with real flair and a hard rock kick.
“Wearing and Tearing”
Made for but inexplicably left off of In Through the Out Door, this song is a blisteringly sped-up variation on “Train Kept A-Rollin’,” usually heard as Led Zeppelin’s affected stab at the raw motifs of punk rock. Except the four musicians chugging through this could have eaten the Sex Pistols for breakfast.
“Out On the Tiles”
Crowd-pleasing, mindless heavy rock à la Grand Funk Railroad, but with the incomparable Zeppelin instrumental chops. Listen for the raucous fade-out where Page throws Bonham’s extemporaneous drumming all over the stereo spectrum. This is the band having fun and hitting hard.
“Going to California”
Perhaps the loveliest of all the band’s acoustic songs and their most convincing take on the singer-songwriter genre, “Going to California” wafts on mandolin and open-tuned guitar to blissfully evoke the Laurel Canyon Eden Page and Plant had always dreamed of. It sounds even more ethereal when followed by “When the Levee Breaks.”
“Candy Store Rock”
A sparse, no-nonsense jukebox workout anchored by Jones and Bonham’s merciless lockstep, light in mood but dark in performance, “Candy Store Rock” is quintessential Zeppelin in its blend of 1950s R&B simplicity and 1970s stadium power.
“Bron-yr-Aur”
This unaccompanied pastoral is more melodic and more original than Jimmy Page’s other acoustic turns of “Black Mountain Side” and “White Summer,” yet rarely gets credit as such. Officially a Led Zeppelin song but actually a Page solo, it highlights the guitarist’s knack for alternate tunings, introverted fingerpicking, and bucolic mood-setters: the solitary, sunlit Welsh countryside rendered in sound.
“The Wanton Song”
Utilizing the same octave-jumping chord shape as “Immigrant Song” but in a tauter time, and featuring a nakedly hedonistic Plant, “The Wanton Song” describes Zeppelin’s nightly routs of the local groupie populations. The stop-start pace is augmented by Page’s inserts of vertiginous backward echo, and Bonham’s surprise fill in the last verse is heart-stopping.
4
Back to Schoolin’
The Roots of Led Zeppelin
The Days of My Youth: Zeppelin’s Prime Influences
The varied personal and professional histories of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham meant that the four had unusually diverse listening habits, which translated into the diversity of styles evident in Zeppelin’s music. “I’ve always said that Zeppelin was the space between the four individual musicians, and it was bigger than the sum of its parts,” Jones told Bass Player magazine in 2007. Though they were collectively happy with the work they made together, individually they each preferred sounds quite different from the others’ tastes; considering that they passed most of their twenties and early thirties in collaboration, their private choices had been set before then, and they all continued to evolve in different musical directions while pooling their talents in one of rock ’n’ roll’s most distinctive quartets. Make a sound collage from snatches of the following musicians’ output and you just might get something that sounds a little like Led Zeppelin.
Jimmy Page
Page had first been inspired by Elvis Presley’s original sideman Scotty Moore, as well as Cliff Gallup and Johnny Meeks, who provided similar services for Gene Vincent, and James Burton, who backed up teen idol Ricky Nelson. All were masters of rockabilly, a hybrid style that paired the chords and licks of blues music with the biting attack and galloping rhythms of country or bluegrass. Other of Page’s boyhood heroes were skiffle strummer Lonnie Donegan, twang experts Link Wray and Lonnie Mack, and the jazz-pop icon Les Paul, with his futuristic innovations. Discovering the real blues a little later, the young guitarist had his ears further opened by the authentic grit of Elmore James, B. B. King, Freddie King, Chuck Berry, Memphis Slim accompanist Matt Murphy and Howlin’ Wolf’s partner Hubert Sumlin.
Together with electric pioneers, Page has often cited as influences such jazz and classical players as Andrés Segovia, Django Reinhardt, Tal Farlow, and Manitas de Plata. He was also indebted—more directly than he might care to admit—to the great British folk guitarists of his own era: John Renbourn, Davey Graham, and especially Bert Jansch. During Led Zeppelin’s prime he also reported an admiration for unsung American rockers Amos Garrett (who played on Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis”) and Steely Dan’s Elliott Randall, no less than the obligatory Jimi Hendrix. Further out, he told of enjoying classical composers Gustav Mahler and Krzysztof Penderecki, and he was also struck by the unique tunings and structures favored by singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell.
Robert Plant
Plant began as a blues buff and remained Led Zeppelin’s in-house scholar of the genre. Like every young English singer, he couldn’t avoid coming under the spell of Elvis Presley, but he soon moved on to the giants of original country blues and city R&B, like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Snooks Eaglin, Bukka White, Peetie Wheatstraw, Sleepy John Estes, Tommy McClennan, Big Bill Broonzy, Charley Patton, Son House, and the magisterial Robert Johnson. Plant gradually expanded beyond hard blues to the West Coast psychedelia of the 1960s, naming such acts as Love, Kaleidoscope, Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, and the Jefferson Airplane as favorites; still later he took to the exotic tones of Arabic singer Om Khalthoum.
John Paul Jones
Possessing the mos
t thorough and disciplined musical education of the four, Jones naturally had the widest spectrum of musical interests—and the most highbrow. Among his first fixations he has named composers Sergey Rachmaninoff and Claude Debussy; jazz geniuses Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis; boogie giant Fats Waller; bluesman Big Bill Broonzy; rock ’n’ roller Jerry Lee Lewis; and the legendary soul singer and pianist Ray Charles. On his specialty of the bass, Jones was affected by earlier talents Phil Upchurch, Willie Weeks, Motown great James Jamerson, Stax Records anchor Donald “Duck” Dunn, and jazz notable Scott LaFaro. “I wasn’t really involved in the white group side,” he admitted of his
Scottish guitarist Bert Jansch was a major influence on Jimmy Page’s acoustic guitar style.
Redferns/Getty Images
allegiances as a behind-the-scenes session player in Swinging London, in Andrew Loog Oldham’s autobiography, Stoned. “We were into Otis Redding and the Mar-Keys, they were all into Chuck Berry and the Chess people…. As a musical scene they just didn’t rate, really—the Yardbirds, it was like ‘Oh dear,’ it was more punk than R&B.” Jones has also spoken of his fondness for soul godfather James Brown.