by George Case
Led Zeppelin stand out from all these. The closest to a continued revival staged by the band have been the Page and Plant concert tours of 1995-96 and 1998, along with the duo’s No Quarter and Walking into Clarksdale albums of 1994 and 1998; with John Paul Jones and John Bonham’s son Jason, a band billed as Led Zeppelin have played at the Atlantic Records fortieth-anniversary show in 1988, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1995, and at London’s O2 arena in 2007. In 1986 some fumbled private jams between Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and drummer Tony Thompson took place in England (after an unimpressive performance together at 1985’s Live Aid in Philadelphia), but personal and health issues, and Thompson’s injury in a car accident, brought this to a quick close. While Page has over the years made known a desire to participate in a permanent or semi-permanent Zeppelin reunion, and Jones has also expressed a willingness to join, the reluctance of Plant to be involved would seem to have squashed any possibility of such a project.
However disappointing the lack of a full-fledged resuscitation might be to some of Led Zeppelin’s musicians and millions of the group’s fans, much of the Zeppelin legend rests on their tragically shortened biography. Had John Bonham not died in 1980, or had he been soon replaced with another drummer, the quartet’s most powerful music would already have been ten years old or more and they might have declined into self-parody—as it was, their last two years of playing and recording are already regarded as their weakest—or have become merely irrelevant. While titans like the Rolling Stones, Metallica, or the Eagles might continue to top charts and fill stadiums, even their most loyal fans quietly concede that their contemporary incarnations “aren’t the same” and speculate wistfully about seeing them in better (thinner, younger, cheaper, more dangerous) days. Something similar would have happened to Led Zeppelin post-1980. Premature show business deaths have often been called good career moves by the cynical (think of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, or Zeppelin’s primordial inspiration Robert Johnson), but beyond the human loss of Bonham as friend, son, brother, husband, and father is the stark fact that his irreplaceable passing probably helped rather than hurt Led Zeppelin’s long-term popularity.
Everything Still Turns to Gold: Led Zeppelin’s Lasting Legacy to Popular Culture
Many rock historians have argued that, after the ascendancy of Bob Dylan and the Beatles-led British Invasion in the mid-1960s, the most important development in the genre was the punk explosion of the later ’70s, which finally shattered the complacency of the previous ten years’ run of supergroups, heavy metal, cock rock, and AOR bands. Robert Palmer wrote in 1983 that “the most popular of the younger groups and soloists were simply recycling the Sixties with an added layer of studio sheen that fooled a surprisingly large number of fans, kids and otherwise, into thinking they were hearing something new. There wasn’t much rock & roll around that was really worthy of the name—not until 1976 or so.” In that light, Led Zeppelin, in spite of their mammoth stadium concerts and string of multimillion-selling albums, were only a footnote to a broader story.
The most significant innovations in pop music during the later twentieth century predated Led Zeppelin: self-contained acts whose personnel both wrote and performed their own music; the shift to LPs from 45s as the medium’s favored format; introspective or “poetic” lyrics that transcended the conventions of boy-meets-girl; and artists incorporating into their own work a range of technical advances in sound recording. Zeppelin capitalized on these changes to powerful effect, to be sure, and accelerated their influence throughout the industry, but the band were not the ones who instigated them. Led Zeppelin’s true impact across the field of commercial entertainment came in three fundamental breakthroughs.
With the trademark heavy guitar riffs of their first four albums—“Dazed and Confused,” “Communication Breakdown,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Heartbreaker,” “Immigrant Song,” “Black Dog,” and “Rock and Roll”—Led Zeppelin completed the music’s transition from pop to rock, where the sonic weight of the records became as much a part of the listening experience as any appreciation of the words or the tunes. Jimmy Page’s guitars on these tracks are as percussive as they are melodic, and at times with John Paul Jones’s and John Bonham’s rhythm section the three sound like a single relentless timekeeping device: music as machine. Zeppelin’s attack was not the raw abandon “super hooligan music” Page had envisioned, but a precisely controlled sound whose very meticulousness gave it all the more impact.
Although other rock ’n’ rollers had used the studio or outboard effects as instruments unto themselves (e.g., the Beatles with Sgt. Pepper, the Rolling Stones with the fuzz-boxed intro to “Satisfaction,” plus Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and Cream), it was Led Zeppelin who made the effects do more of the
Mothership, released in 2007, coincided with the historic Zeppelin reunion show in London.
Author’s Collection
work, taking a minimum of harmonic variation and amplifying it into something as portentous as Led Zeppelin II. “[I]t seems as if it’s just one especially heavy song extended over the space of two whole sides,” ran Rolling Stone’s review of the 1969 sophomore disc, a more insightful observation than the writer likely knew. The band have many memorable songs, but they tend to be classics of performance and audio presentation more than of composition; transcribed as sheet music, “How Many More Times” or “Bring It On Home” don’t feature particularly brilliant arrangements or clever rhyme schemes. The unique acoustics of “Black Dog,” “When the Levee Breaks,” or “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper” are what define the cuts, not their underlying blues bases. Today the sheer sensory punch of popular music in all genres, with its intensities of loudness, terraced shifts in sound texture, and woofer-shredding bass frequencies, owes much to the formal experiments audible in Led Zeppelin. The difference is that modern pop is dependent on digitized recording equipment that boosts levels, edits takes, samples notes, and repeats rhythms at the push of a button, whereas the inhuman drive and force of Led Zeppelin’s best material was created by four human beings playing to and off each other in real time. Even the deafening sound projection in contemporary movie theaters and the clarity and richness of television soundtracks can be indirectly attributed to the way Zeppelin changed the audience’s expectations of volume, stereo dimensionality, and equalization. Love it or hate it, Led Zeppelin is one of the key shapers of the twenty-first century’s postindustrial sonic environment.
The second landmark creditable to the quartet is in the earning potential of popular musicians. Of course, singers and instrumentalists could become rich before Led Zeppelin; Elvis Presley had moved into his palatial Graceland before the band had even formed. But until Zeppelin it was more common for young pop sensations to lose as much wealth as they made. Peter Grant’s unyielding business savvy and Jimmy Page’s oversight of all aspects of the Zeppelin empire established an artistic and financial control over the group’s work that other acts—even those, like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who sold as many records and concert tickets—could only envy. Thus Page and his fabulous homes, John Bonham with his fleet of hot rods, and Robert Plant and John Paul Jones with their country estates became the benchmarks for how many entertainment dollars or pounds could be retained by the performers themselves, not just their agents, handlers, promoters, and label executives. “All the deals I did with [lighting company] Showco and the traveling and things like the deal I got to use the Starship… It all protected the profits,” Grant summed up to Dave Lewis. “I’m not saying we didn’t spend a lot individually because we all did, but as for the overall earnings we played it clever for a very long time.” In an decade when other rock and soul stars might still be forced into bankruptcy (Marvin Gaye in 1978, Tom Petty in 1979, to name two), the four players of Led Zeppelin and their manager enjoyed the security of knowing that every Zeppelin album, poster, or arena seat purchased anywhere in the world meant more money in their bank accounts. Today Metalli
ca, U2, Celine Dion, Madonna and others in the same stratospheric bracket are worth millions in part because of the business blueprint laid out by Led Zeppelin, whereby the talent rather than the backstage support take in the biggest slice of any transaction conducted in their name.
Finally, Led Zeppelin’s most distinctive cultural legacy is in the way they exemplified the mythology of rock music itself. The dry ice and lasers of their concerts, the arcane imagery of their album covers, the instrumental virtuosity and unknowable lyrics of their greatest songs, the whispered stories of the musicians’ private lives: all of these have defined the ideals of rock stardom for at least two generations. Though others have had a comparable mythology thrust upon them—Elvis the King, the Beatles the Fab Four, Dylan the Protest Bard, the Rolling Stones as the World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band—they were usually too modest, or their work was too erratic, to fully go along with it. Zeppelin was the exception. They willingly played up to their public image, or at least made little effort to disown it, and thus their music and performances took on the majesty and drama that is easily parodied in lesser bands but which was hugely impressive to the rock audience of the 1970s and is still striking today. As pretentious or as overblown as Zeppelin’s material or stage moves might appear in our contemporary media-glutted, irony-saturated climate, only the most self-conscious, tone-deaf, or perversely hip listener can fail to be moved by them.
Led Zeppelin’s working life coincided with the climactic wave of rock ’n’ roll as a social phenomenon, spanning the middle of the 1960s to the late 1970s. As were many of their peers, rivals, and inspirations, the four players in the group were taken aback to encounter the reception they did. They had not imagined that their music would become a giant business taking them around the world while they became idolized as a mass-marketed secular religion for millions of people. They never guessed that ballads or boogies dashed off in an hour or two would become hymnal observances four decades later, or that concerts they barely remember giving would be renowned as generational landmarks of community and ritual, or that their youthful indiscretions and misadventures would be upheld as timeless symbols of glamour, power, and decadence. For this reason some of the improvised or offhand gestures they made while members of Zeppelin have only been revealed as such long afterward; to different degrees the middle-aged Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones have been candid in explaining musical techniques, backstage issues, and creative muses that fans had assumed to be divinely (or diabolically) ordained. Other participants in their story, and outside researchers, have also been diligent in disabusing the public of its illusions as to what the quartet were really up to in the studio, on the stage, or on the Starship. Led Zeppelin’s mythology, like that of the Beatles, Dylan, the Stones, et al, was really something projected onto them by an economically and demographically dominant audience that wanted its entertainment to be more heroic or more meaningful than its makers at first intended. Yet long after the artists and their constituencies have admitted to acting out a collective fantasy mere mortals could never fulfill, the fact remains that Led Zeppelin, in the grandeur of their songs, in the scale of their shows, and in the richness of their mystique, did more than anyone to bring the fantasy to life.
Selected Bibliography
In order to make Led Zeppelin FAQ the comprehensive work I had intended it to be, a very wide range of source material was consulted in researching the names, numbers, dates, addresses, titles, and quotations featured in its pages. Core texts in my research include the Dave Lewis compendia A Celebration, Celebration II, and The Concert File, as well as Mick Wall’s When Giants Walked the Earth, Susan Fast’s In the Houses of the Holy, and Jon Bream’s Whole Lotta Led Zeppelin. Each of these is recommended for further reading.
However, to do Led Zeppelin justice I also took care to look further afield than the standard partisan studies of the group itself to consider general overviews of rock history, folk and blues music, guitar craft, the occult, the sex-and-drug cultural revolution, and other areas where the Zeppelin story is fit into a much wider perspective. Examples here would be Pamela Des Barres’ Let’s Spend the Night Together and I’m with the Band, Gary Herman’s Rock ’n’ Roll Babylon, Dave Marsh and Kevin Stein’s The Book of Rock Lists, Francis X. King’s Witchcraft and Demonology, Colin Larkin’s Virgin Encyclopedia of the Blues, Robert Walser’s Running with the Devil, and Michael Walker’s Laurel Canyon.
As well, many journal interviews provided contemporary and historic anecdotes and quips from individuals from within and outside Led Zeppelin. Key magazines (printed and electronic) were Rolling Stone, Guitar World, Goldmine, and Mojo.
Finally, Internet sites ledzeppelin.com, royal-orleans.com, led-zeppelin.org, and ledzeppelin-database.com were frequently checked for the latest confirmed details of (and ongoing debates over) Zeppelin’s discography, chronology, instrumentation, and itinerary.
Detailed information on various sources is indicated in this bibliography.
General Reference Works
Barry, Dave. Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs. Kansas City, MO: Andrews and McMeel, 1997.
Bream, Jon. Whole Lotta Led Zeppelin: The Illustrated History of the Heaviest Band of All Time. Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2008.
Case, George. Out of Our Heads: Rock ’n’ Roll Before the Drugs Wore Off. New York: Backbeat, 2010.
Coleman, Satis Naronna. Songs of American Folks. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968.
Crowe, Cameron. Led Zeppelin / Light and Shade (Led Zeppelin Box Set Notes). New York: Atlantic Records, 1990.
Crowley, Aleister. The Book of the Law. York Beach, ME: Samuel Wiser, Inc., 1976.
Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. Book Sales, 1992.
Dalton, David, ed. The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
Davis, Stephen. Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga. New York: Ballantine, 1986.
Des Barres, Pamela. Let’s Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008.
Fast, Susan. In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Godwin, Robert. Led Zeppelin: The Press Reports. Burlington, Ontario: Collector’s Guide, 2003.
Herman, Gary. Rock ’n’ Roll Babylon. London: Plexus, 1994.
King, Francis X. Witchcraft and Demonology. London: Hamlyn, 1987.
Klosterman, Chuck. Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. New York: Scribner, 2006.
Kureishi, Hanif, and Jon Savage, eds. The Faber Book of Pop. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.
Larkin, Colin. The Virgin Encyclopedia of the Blues. London: Virgin in Association with Muze UK Ltd., 1998.
Larkin, Colin. The Virgin Encyclopedia of Dance Music. London: Virgin Books, 1998.
Lewis, Dave. Led Zeppelin: A Celebration. London: Omnibus, 2003.
Lewis, Dave. Led Zeppelin: The Tight but Loose Files—Celebration II. London: Omnibus, 2003.
Lewis, Dave, and Simon Pallett. Led Zeppelin: The Concert File. London: Omnibus, 2005.
Loder, Kurt. The Rolling Stone Interviews: The 1980s. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
Lomax, Alan. The Folk Songs of North America in the English Language. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1960.
Marcus, Greil. Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. New York: Public Affairs, 2005.
Marsh, Dave, and Kevin Stein. The Book of Rock Lists. New York: Dell, 1984.
Menn, Don. Secrets of the Masters: Conversations with 40 Great Guitar Players. San Francisco: GPI Books, 1992.
Miller, Jim, ed. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. New York: Random House, 1976.
Palmer, Robert. Led Zeppelin: The Music (Led Zeppelin Box Set Notes). New York: Atlantic Records, 1990.
Palmer, Robert. The Rolling Stones. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1983.
Perry, Tim, and Ed
Glinert. Fodor’s Rock & Roll Traveler USA. New York: Fodor’s Travel Publications, 1996.
Robson, Peter. The Devil’s Own. New York: Ace, 1969.
Romanowski, Patricia, and Holly George-Warren, eds. The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll. New York: Fireside, 1995.
Rosen, Steven. Black Sabbath. London: Sanctuary, 2002.
Shadwick, Keith. Led Zeppelin: The Story of a Band and Their Music, 1968–1980. San Francisco: Backbeat, 2005.
Sherman, Dale. Urban Legends of Rock & Roll (You Never Can Tell). Burlington, Ontario: Collector’s Guide, 2003.
Silber, Irwin. Folksinger’s Workbook. New York: Oak Publications, 1973.
Simpson, Claude M. The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966.
Spence, Lewis. An Encyclopedia of Occultism. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960.
Spence, Lewis. The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999.
Walker, Michael. Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood. New York: Faber and Faber, 2006.
Wall, Mick. When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin. London: Orion Press, 2008.
Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993.
Wyman, Bill. Rolling with the Stones. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2002.
Yorke, Ritchie. Led Zeppelin: The Definitive Biography. Novato, CA: Underwood-Miller, 1993.
Memoirs and Biographies
Bockris, Victor. Keith Richards: The Biography. New York: Poseidon Press, 1992.
Booth, Martin. A Magic Life: The Biography of Aleister Crowley. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000.
Buell, Bebe, with Victor Bockris. Rebel Heart: An American Rock ’n’ Roll Journey. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
