Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (2005)

I was impressed with Erik Davis’s exegesis of the great Led Zeppelin album for the 33-1/3 series. It seems to me it’s a certain model of how these books should be done. It starts with a behemoth of not just rock or the ‘70s but of popular culture itself, and it meets the album on its own terms. And on ours as well—his treatment of the fatigue now associated with hearing “Stairway to Heaven” yet again is one of the best parts of his analysis of the iconic classic rock radio staple and of the book at large. Led Zeppelin IV came out while I was in high school and immediately changed the landscape. I paid little attention to the rumored strains of Aleister Crowley and J.R.R. Tolkien or any of that—I thought that was just part of the hype, if anything. Davis makes a strong and vaguely comical case for taking the various mystical vapors into account. He is often gently making fun of the band’s various Spinal Tap elements, even allowing that ultimately he still embraces it all. There is some kind of unholy allure to Led Zeppelin IV, we must admit. Davis consults born-again Christians gravely worried for souls lost to the band. Individual band members are an important part of this story too, of course. Davis gives them their full due. I had no idea, for example, how important John Paul Jones was beyond playing bass. I appreciated Davis’s fealty to John Bonham as one of the great drummers. For me, Jimmy Page has always been kind of a gnomic figure, both with Led Zeppelin and as a guitar player (not to mention producer). I need to get to more Zeppelin literature, but Davis clarified a lot for me about Page. And Robert Plant too, who I’ve always taken as the face of the band, even knowing he’s just the singer, gets fleshed out for me further here too. Davis doesn’t feel the need for a chapter on his personal experience, which is a bit refreshing for this series. He compresses his ardor into every line, although come to think of it he does open with a humorous personal anecdote. He’s funny too, matching Led Zeppelin’s cringiest gestures (e.g., the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven”) with his own self-conscious credulousness. I see now that I missed a lot of the faerie leitmotifs. But I never changed the station when any of the eight songs on Led Zeppelin IV played on the radio, at least until about 1977, when my responses were more sporadic than automatic. I mean, sometimes I changed the station. Led Zeppelin IV still holds up, as I saw the other day playing it through for the first time in a long while. I’m talking about even “Stairway to Heaven,” which Davis describes as less a song or a track and more a spell. Correct! And it can still work, although, yes, it is often plagued by the fatigue. I will say I got a little tired of Davis’s insistence on referring to the title as the four unpronounceable glyphs. But it’s all in the spirit. By any other name, the glorious Led Zeppelin IV!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Led Zeppelin III (1970)

As it happens, Led Zeppelin III is the only album by the band I never did own, which makes it slightly exotic (a friend had a copy so I had played with the turn-a-wheel cover design). Of course I know the one hit it spawned, the gloriously ridiculous "Immigrant Song," which peaked at #16 late in 1970. In case you were wondering, the subject of the song is not the immigrants that Donald Trump's ponyboys and ponygirls whinny about. No, they're white. They come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow. Among other things, more than 30 years later, "Immigrant Song" was the lunch theme when I worked with a notably rambunctious office crew. We piled into the car and snapped it on. Ahh-ahh AHHHHH-HHH ah! The Clash's "Know Your Rights" was the other mainstay staple of those lunch trips. Heads wildly bobbing to be sure. We were way too old for such behavior, but we were temps of a certain age. More recently, in an impossibly gorgeous song by Craig Finn, "God in Chicago," the soundtrack for a road trip is given as Prince's 1999 and Led Zeppelin III (on a wobbly tape deck). That also sounds about right. So, giving III some badly needed attention nigh 50 years on, I find it's a great companion, warm, rolling, easygoing, like a boat rocking down the slow river. In 1970, Rolling Stone magazine still did not like Led Zeppelin. This is back when things like "selling out" mattered like poison for RS, so they could and did shrug at leviathan sales. It's a little different now. This isn't your father's Perry Como Republican Party. Only Bridge Over Troubled Waters sold better than Led Zeppelin II in 1970. Lester Bangs got the honors for the takedown this time. He wanted to like them, yes, really wanted to like them, and even did like one song on III very much ("That's the Way"). But more generally he found the band "doesn't challenge anybody's intelligence or sensibilities." I would suggest that, in 1968 and even still, "Dazed and Confused," for one, poses challenges to intelligence and sensibilities. In fairness to Bangs and other contemporary naysayers, another big player at that moment (though sales did not match Zepp's) was Grand Funk Railroad with a I-II-III of On Time, Grand Funk, and Closer to Home. If you squint, it might look like all the same thing.

And I do think this is the weakest of Led Zeppelin's first three albums. It's not the one for newcomers—just slightly lazy, it presumes on previous good will to some extent. "Immigrant Song," for all its charm, does not match "Whole Lotta Love" or the aforementioned "Dazed and Confused" (or "Stairway to Heaven" or "Kashmir") as an album tent pole. But Led Zeppelin III is also a place where Robert Plant takes his shtick up another notch as a tireless unself-conscous imp and Jimmy Page gets to show off guitar chops maybe even more than purloined hooks. I just go by the numbers and tend to gravitate most to "Since I've Been Loving You" because it's the longest, at 7:25, an all-night slow burner for sure. Page's playing is lyrical in the showcase portion (the greatest guitar solo of all time, some on the internet will tell you), and then, finally, it wilts into a tender weeping number. And Bangs is right about "That's the Way"—also quite beautiful. Yes, it's a certain apotheosis of cock rock, but as an aural object it does not necessarily have to be toxic (aside from the personalities of band members, if they can be separated, which maybe they can't, I know). See again the Craig Finn song. And think of the Vikings. "Always sweep with, with threshing oar / Our only goal will be the western shore." Ahh-ahh AHHHHH-HHH ah!

Houses of the Holy (1973)

By the end of the '70s, under the sway of punk-rock and poor old beleaguered new wave pop music, I had come to loathe two bands above all others: the Eagles and Led Zeppelin. My distaste for Led Zeppelin had started in the aftermath of IV, which, paradoxically, perhaps I "loved too much" in its immediate moment. After the number of times I heard "Stairway to Heaven" on the radio began to approach approximately five figures the bloat and the exhaustion were unmistakable. And though I would later make a fetish of "Kashmir" for the most part I was done with them, their appeal for me on a long slow slide that would not bottom out until some point in the '80s. Thus I did not make the effort to acquaint myself with this until about 15 years after the fact, wondering at myself for even buying it at all the day I left the used record store with a copy. But lo and behold it struck like a lost treasure, full of pleasures great and small, and turned out to be one of the better purchases I made that day. I listened to it frequently for months. Listening again, I think a good deal of that was making my peace with a band I had loved, bitterly rejected for reasons good and bad, and come to rediscover. It sounds patchier to me now than I remember, and "The Crunge" very nearly torpedoes it. A kind of tribute to James Brown that can as well be heard as misplaced mockery, needless to say it's not in possession of even a fraction of Brown's funk power, no surprise from the anti-dance fancy-time-signatures Led Zeppelin, which raises questions about the decision to do it at all. A good deal of the bombast, the risk for which was ever the downside to their winning power equation, is replaced more often here by a decidedly softer side, gentle exercises in things that might almost be taken as ballads, except the power dynamics intrude on them, achieving a welcome balance, especially as the album opens and takes off: "The Song Remains the Same," "The Rain Song," and "Over the Hills and Far Away" are fine additions to their classic catalog. The second vinyl side loses its way some, though I think "Dancing Days" goes with their best, and I don't have the complaints about "D'yer Mak'er" that certain factions among the faithful do. "No Quarter" and "The Ocean" now suggest to me much of what was to come as the band left Atlantic and moved on to their own label: largely unfocused exercises with all too fleeting moments of clarion brilliance. I don't hate them any longer the way I did in 1979, but I haven't forgotten how I came to that position in the first place either.

Led Zeppelin IV (1971)

Arguably Led Zeppelin's defining album, with its thought-you'd-never-get-tired-of-it defining song "Stairway to Heaven," this all-time slab of classic rock opens with a song, "Black Dog," expressly intended to be very difficult or impossible to dance to, the better to stand or sit in one place and be bludgeoned by it. With jazz fusion in the air, Led Zeppelin's strategy, pursued across much of the rest of this album and indeed its career, was to switch things up, water down the blues strains, and attain its claims to musical sophistication via fancy time signatures. In "Black Dog," it's something like 5/4, or maybe that's 3/16. It doesn't matter. What matters is that paradoxically all the power is retained as forcefully as ever and you may as well stand or sit there and let yourself be bludgeoned by it. You probably don't have anything better to do anyway. I remember "Black Dog" ripping across the airwaves playing loud on car radios as we engaged in various late-adolescent antics, licit and otherwise, and I can still hear those times in it. The whole set, in fact, is virtually fried onto my brainstem at this point, "Rock and Roll" and "The Battle of Evermore" and of course the formidable "Stairway to Heaven"—which I almost can't hear anymore from hearing so much over the course of that decade, though I can certainly pick out what I used to like about it when I do happen to put it on and manage to actively notice it, such as the climactically lyrical guitar solo to which it builds. The four from the flip are equally iconic, and nearly as familiar: "Misty Mountain Hop," "Four Sticks," "Going to California," and "When the Levee Breaks." Is it any wonder this is a classic? As a result of a tendency, for whatever reasons, to listen vastly more often to the first vinyl LP side back in the day, I saved a little for myself, and now enjoy these latter four songs the most, particularly "When the Levee Breaks," which stretches out and goes places like a mighty river. And it is interesting to me to see this example of the long-term impact of overexposure and fatigue, how it affects the way I can hear these songs even today. Which means no matter how well I know, right down to my bones, that this is a timeless classic, I don't always hear it that way anymore when I play it. Better to surprise me with selections on the radio or in song mixes, and even then I've usually got you spotted. An article of faith, this one, but one that will go to my grave with me.

Led Zeppelin II (1969)

It's much easier for me to see now that this is likely the inferior album compared to the debut, if one of them has to be considered inferior. But it was the first Led Zeppelin album I acquired, in thrall to "Whole Lotta Love," and I had never before heard anything remotely like it. Once again the sound is just as big as it can be, colossal, a veritable sperm whale roaming the depths, breaching the surfaces bristling with guitar riffs and pyrotechnics, Robert Plant's unholy shrieking, and a drumkit as big as any room you play it in, as big as the inside of your head, pounding away relentlessly. I thought it was so good, in fact, that I started to wonder what the critics in "Rolling Stone" were complaining about so much. I still wonder, in many ways—not the same things I complain about now anyway, that's for sure. The songs are shorter; only one ranges over six minutes. I miss the willingness to take them out, not that the impulse is necessarily in short supply. Even the psychedelic passage of "Whole Lotta Love" satisfies the desire, and the pivots and turns are there all the way through this. But the most memorable song here after "Whole Lotta Love" may be "Heartbreaker" and very little else, even as the other shards and fragments of the skimmed cream of jam sessions serve their purposes. It's hardly unlistenable, and beyond "Moby Dick" it rarely feels padded out, put it that way. But as with eating empty calories the pleasures tend to be fleeting and the appetite not quite satisfied, even with a stomach painfully distended. I might have worn out my first copy of Led Zeppelin II, but it was as much about engaging with the ideas it suggested as with the sounds and tones actually set down. That and playing "Whole Lotta Love" until it was a grayish band of vinyl compared to the other tracks on the LP. Even as it remains a deeply ingrained favorite, I can see it's probably not the right place to start with Led Zeppelin. On the other hand, if you have three Led Zeppelin albums I can't see how this isn't one of them.

Led Zeppelin (1969)

I don't know what there is to say. I didn't expect it would all sound so fresh and so vital still. I mean, the gap between Iron Butterfly's signature LP and this first of an impressive run by Led Zeppelin feels positively galactic now. Iron Butterfly was just a clown car circus act by comparison, unpacking guitar, organ, drum, weird-noises passages stacked onto its dinky wheezy rickety chassis and chugging around the ring in circles. By comparison, this is Olympian-like and of the gods not just in its big thundering attack system (prototyped two songs in with the 6:41 "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You"), signaled in the first place by the brash and brisk opening of "Good Times Bad Times." And on to the good stuff, the rest of the original side 1: "You Shook Me," "Dazed and Confused." It's all the confidence. Here they are, busy at inventing a whole new architecture of rock 'n' roll, with guitar riffs, power chords, a crunchy bottom, a singer and lead guitar player who interact with one another as call and response unit, a prototype of metal singers who ply the higher registers (and may or may not wear leotards). This really is all business, even with four songs longer than six minutes each. It's funny to look at the "Rolling Stone" and various hippie-oriented reviewers of its time, who spoke as though cautiously down on them, vaguely disapproving, comparing them unfavorably to the Jeff Beck Group and Cream. They must have known on some level they had a tiger by the tail. Or perhaps the music was too big to sight clearly along the edges, overwhelming to the task of description. It couldn't be any more clear to anyone listening today, I think. This is theatrics but tight and controlled, and all strictly of the aural persuasion, the insinuating levels at play, the soaring and swooping and the plain gestures of strength, as when "Dazed and Confused" goes off a cliff. It's just so big, all of it, every moment, track to track. A total homerun. Also no accident I imagine that Page would know, from previous experience in the Yardbirds and a predisposition to it in the first place, how to root this so plainly and so persuasively in mid-century American Mississippi River musical blues forms and gestures and vocabulary. He did (and wasn't always exactly ethical about it), even if it was hard to see at the time. Just solid.

"Whole Lotta Love" (1969)

84. Led Zeppelin, "Whole Lotta Love" (Dec. 6, 1969, #4)

It's probably fair to say that hearing this for the first thousand or so times stands still as a life-changing experience. I had never heard anything like it ever in my life. I accomplished the number in about the first four months of owning the album, Led Zeppelin II. As a matter of fact, I was surprised to find this in the Billboard book, and at #4 no less, as I don't remember hearing it much on the AM stations I favored at the time. It could well be that this was among the first to mark the bifurcation between AM radio and FM radio, wherein the former was the usual teenybop product (which don't get me wrong I loved), eventually modulating into the now painfully familiar all-talk-all-the-time crap (which don't get me wrong I hate), while the latter I recall bearing the mystique of "underground." At any rate I acquired the album and couldn't get enough—of this song, specifically, so it was fortunate for me that it was the first one on the first side, which facilitated an easy and quick needle lift and drop operation. How do I love this thing? Let me count the ways. There's the pounding riff, which is thrilling. There's the way the drums are produced to ride along right out front of everything, after coming in late. There's that scraping, sliding sound guitarist Jimmy Page makes to respond to the nasal chorus chant of "wanna whole lotta love." There's the big spacy break a minute and a half in, where it feels like you must be floating around in space or something. "Ah ah ah ... ahhh ahhh ahhh," goes Robert Plant, owner of another of the great rock 'n' roll voices. Then there's the brilliant return from this break, which can still knock me over. There's wanting to hear it again every time it ends. There's never enough of it, or wasn't, anyway, for quite a long time.