by George Case
The common denominators of heavy metal are distorted electric guitars, keening vocals, and a powerful rhythmic base, which would certainly encompass the typical Led Zeppelin tune. But the popular Zeppelin numbers “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” “Going to California,” and “All My Love” can’t qualify by these standards. Conversely, the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” meets the metal criteria, as do David Bowie’s “Panic in Detroit”; Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Change It”; Funkadelic’s “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?”; Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”; the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”; and Pantera’s “Cemetery Gates.” Heavy metal has changed over the decades, too: In 1971, it meant Alice Cooper and Mountain; in 1978 it meant Van Halen and UFO; by 1987 it was Exodus and Megadeth; in 1995 it was Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson; by 2010 it was Converge, Mastodon, and
BBC Sessions was a successful 1998 release of the band’s live radio appearances.
Author’s Collection
Every Time I Die. Possibly the one constant in heavy metal is that most of its musicians are white males with very long hair.
Where Led Zeppelin fits in with any of these, let alone with Motörhead, Kiss, Godflesh, Venom, Judas Priest, or Iron Maiden, is the crucial question. Each successive generation of heavy metal artists seemed to take one element of a prior group’s material and emphasize it, such that every few years someone emerged who looked and sounded like a cartoon version of someone else: louder, darker, faster, and more debased, but no less derivative. Who was Marilyn Manson if not Alice Cooper updated for the 1990s? Who did Guns N’ Roses resemble more than a souped-up Aerosmith? In a mid-’70s Rolling Stone essay, Lester Bangs reduced Black Sabbath to a “sub-Zeppelin kozmic behemoth.” The point is that, pace Page, Plant, and Jones, every heavy metal band from 1970 onward was consciously or unconsciously inspired by the Led Zeppelin of 1969–71. Rock author Charles Shaar Murray has written that Jimmy Page and Zeppelin “professionalized” the hard electric blues timbres explored more haphazardly by Cream or Jimi Hendrix, and if by this he means that Page patented the sonic formula for the group’s loudest and most propulsive riffs (“Communication Breakdown,” “How Many More Times,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Heartbreaker,” “Immigrant Song,” “Black Dog,” et al), then there is no question that the patent was copied by a great many performers, among them the certifiably metallic.
In today’s digitized, atomized music universe, the heavy metal appellation is largely obsolete, even after being broken up into subunits like death metal, speed metal, grindcore, and nu-metal. As with the “plagiarist” slur, calling Led Zeppelin a metal group is as indicative of the listener as the listened. To someone raised on the bright, catchy rock songs of the early British Invasion, Led Zeppelin was heavy metal; to a Deadhead, a New Waver, or a spandex-clad headbanger, they were hard rock; to rappers and hip-hoppers they might be an oldies act. Most remaining music retailers today find Led Zeppelin CDs between Lenny Kravitz and John Lennon in the mainstream “Rock / Pop” shelves, while their immediate followers and rivals Black Sabbath go in with Biohazard and Cannibal Corpse in the narrower “metal” aisle. In the family tree of rock genealogy, Led Zeppelin is at the root of several branches. Ultimately, Zeppelin began to transcend their characterization as a mere metal band only a few years into their active career and to an even greater degree thereafter, when critics and fans were forced to admit that their legacy had forever pervaded the whole field of rock ’n’ roll.
Mama, Let Me Pump Your Gas: Led Zeppelin as Cock Rock
One of the more heated Led Zeppelin debates stems from their lyrical and visual representations of male and female identities. The term cock rock emerged out of the feminist movement in the 1970s, as progressive and newly politicized women (and men) began to question the traditional gender roles portrayed everywhere from classic novels and paintings to television and pop music. During the Rolling Stones’ 1972 North American tour, handmade flyers decrying the Stones’ swaggering masculinity were distributed among concertgoers, as covered by writer Terry Southern: “If you are male,” the broadsheets read, “this concert is yours…. The Stones are tough men—hard and powerful. They’re the kind of men we’re supposed to imitate, never crying, always strong, keeping women in their place (under our thumbs). In Vietnam, to save honor (which means preserving our manhood), our brothers have killed and raped millions of people in the name of this ideal…. We resent the image the Stones present to males as examples we should imitate….” In 1978, British critics Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie’s article “Rock and Sexuality” was published in the book On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, where they named Mick Jagger, the Who’s Roger Daltrey, and Zeppelin’s Robert Plant as prime exponents of the style: “Cock rock performers are aggressive, dominating, and boastful, and they constantly seek to remind the audience of their prowess, their control…. In these performances mikes and guitars are phallic symbols; the music is loud, rhythmically insistent, built around techniques of arousal and climax; the lyrics are assertive and arrogant, though the exact words are less significant than the vocal styles involved, the shouting and the screaming.”
As much as they embodied personas as long-haired, dope-smoking outlaws, male rock stars of the 1960s and 1970s were no advocates of Women’s Liberation, and the cock rock charge was an important corrective to their supposedly “revolutionary” values. Many Led Zeppelin songs—“Dazed and Confused,” “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” “How Many More Times,” “Heartbreaker,” “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman),” “The Lemon Song,” “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” “Black Dog,” “Custard Pie,” “Trampled Underfoot,” and others—depict women as crudely and as chauvinistically as any leering hard-hat or patronizing business executive of the same time. Likewise, the sexual or martial boasting of “Good Times Bad Times,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Ramble On,” “Immigrant Song,” and “No Quarter” cast the singer and his ensemble as conquering, untamable bad boys never to be tied down by any domestic conventions. Add to these the live performances of the band, their amplifiers cranked, their shirts open, and their pants bulging, and Led Zeppelin does seem like a prime example of cock rock at its hardest, loudest, and most offensive.
There are several reasons, if not excuses, for Zeppelin’s macho exaggerations. Given that the band was an all-male act of individuals in their early to mid-twenties, of course there was bound to be a surfeit of testosterone flowing around onstage and in the studio. Many of their songs were taken directly or indirectly from blues or blues-rock antecedents, and the blues was rife with blaring declamations of male dominance and sexual power, Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man,” Howlin’ Wolf’s “Back Door Man,” B. B. King’s “Ain’t Nobody Home,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Stone Free,” and Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues” being only the most memorable examples. This posture itself was something of a façade, a way for otherwise poor and disenfranchised men to assert their authority over anyone at all, their wives and lovers often being the closest people they could turn to for validation. Blues-based music could reverse the received structures of male-female relationships, as it became the men who could sing of being done wrong by a cheating partner (e.g., “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” “Black Dog”), or of being hopelessly, romantically in love with a woman who rejects their affection (“Dazed and Confused,” “The Lemon Song”), an appealing pretense for rock stars who were themselves usually doing the cheating and rejecting. In time the bluesy brag would degenerate into the bathroom-wall dreck of Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name,” Mötley Crüe’s “Looks That Kill,” and AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love into You.”
The stark truth is that Led Zeppelin’s cock rock—and that of most other rock ’n’ roll bands of the period—was borne of the musicians’ experiences in the real world of touring and giving shows. Male entertainers have always held special attractiveness to female followers, and the uninhibited years of the sexual revolution allowed them to take Dionysian advantage of this. Nubile young
women came to their concerts, worked their way backstage, and convened at their hotels and barrooms; by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant especially, their attentions were taken for granted. Lyrics like those of “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman),” though not deeply thought out, were accurate reflections of the players’ feelings toward their most devoted admirers—the girls were at best disposable and at worst nuisances. Page’s much-repeated remarks to journalist Ellen Sander in 1969 (“Girls come around and pose like starlets, teasing and acting haughty…. I haven’t got time to deal with it”) were, for better or worse, his summary of casual sex as an occupational hazard rather than an emotional commitment or personal responsibility. His approving reference to Aleister Crowley (“Crowley didn’t have a very high opinion of women and I don’t think he was wrong”) is scarcely more sensitive. Writer and Zeppelin supporter Cameron Crowe, describing the real-life milieu that inspired his 2000 film Almost Famous, remembered how the 1970s rock ’n’ rollers he covered regarded their female followers as “trinkets,” and Bebe Buell, who had a fling with Page in 1974, overheard the guitarist say of her to Plant and Peter Grant, “She’s not a coke whore,” which other women around them presumably were. With such disdainful if not misogynistic impressions, it was inevitable that a jaded, imperial arrogance would seep into Led Zeppelin’s music.
What the cock rock indictment significantly overlooks is that many women were Zeppelin fans, found the male musicians attractive, and responded to the sexual overtones of the songs as much as any boy or man buying the records or attending the concerts. Though Led Zeppelin had never been a teenybopper act of winsome youngsters like their contemporaries the Osmonds or the Bay City Rollers, teenyboppers had older sisters and in time grew up themselves, and chaste fantasies of doe-eyed Donny or Woody evolved into more explicit ones of sweaty Robert or mysterious Jimmy. Cock rock worked both ways: the performers expressed it (Mick Jagger rode an inflatable oversize phallus during the Rolling Stones’ 1975 US tour), and both sexes in the audience encouraged it. Though there were probably many women put off by Led Zeppelin’s overt machismo and crushing rhythms, preferring the sensitive tones of a James Taylor or a Van Morrison, or instead identifying with the lyrics of a Joni Mitchell or a Carole King, there were still plenty happy to find in Zeppelin a larger-than-life eroticism the musicians could not help but convey. For a term intended as a rebuke, Zeppelin’s “cock rock” was sometimes exactly what listeners wanted to see and hear.
Airwaves to Heaven: Led Zeppelin as AOR Band
The band was one, but not intentionally. The group’s debut in 1968 was in part planned around the rise of “free-form” FM radio in North America, stations that broadcast music far removed from the sanctioned two-minute ditties of their AM rivals. In the 1960s the coolest FM outlets might play extended sides of jazzer Sun Ra, avant-gardist Captain Beefheart, or sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar; or choose from among the best new tracks by Iron Butterfly, the Band, or Jimi Hendrix; it was these stations that the young baby boomers turned to when seeking out the most progressive sounds. FM came through in stereo, as well, adding a new dimension to the already expanding home sound systems proliferating in the basements, dorm rooms, and campus pubs of the era. At the time of Led Zeppelin’s appearance such stations were considered “underground,” but into the next decade the format was popular enough to be reconfigured into “Album-Oriented Radio” or “Album-Oriented Rock.” “FM radio was just beginning to have a huge influence,” John Paul Jones acknowledged of Zeppelin’s initial marketing mediums. “They weren’t afraid to play longer tracks or even whole albums. We went around to a lot of radio stations to plug the record.” Publicist Danny Goldberg added that “rock stations like WCBN in Boston, KMET in LA, and KSAN in San Francisco really made Zeppelin very big, very fast.”
AOR was both the expression and the basis of a music industry whose prime product had become the long-playing 33?-rpm record. Audiences were now affluent enough to afford the discs in large numbers, competing with (though not completely eliminating) the market for 45-rpm singles. Both rock artists and rock audiences came to revere the album format as a more personal or serious art, less constricted by the time and content regulations of AM, and the most important rock albums were compared to the most important novels, plays, or films of older generations. To Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin, AOR was the perfect complement to their strategy of album-only releases, where the quartet’s AM-friendliest singles (“Communication Breakdown” or “Immigrant Song”) were no more helpful to the bottom line than the longer album cuts featured on FM (“Dazed and Confused,” “Stairway to Heaven,” or “Kashmir”).
But from the middle of the 1970s onward, AOR became synonymous with a smug and cynical business culture that was a natural product of rock’s billion-dollar revenues. Staple AOR acts such as Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles were derided as spoiled prima donnas disconnected from the day-to-day lives of their middle-class fans, and fresh AOR additions like Boston, Styx, Journey, Kansas, and Supertramp seemed to have been specifically crafted for the highbrow pretensions of listeners raised on Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon, or Tommy. Drug-based corruption was endemic between record labels and disc jockeys, with cocaine replacing payola as the standard currency of greased palms; AOR playlists shrank to almost exclusively white rosters, the occasional exception being a song from Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Wonder (some called it Apartheid-Oriented Radio). “Through AOR,” noted 1995’s Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, “FM radio became almost as, and some would argue substantially more, conservative than the AM radio of the Sixties to which FM had been an alternative…. AOR music, which is now termed ‘classic rock,’ is played all the time because it’s popular; it remains popular because it’s played all the time.”
As anyone who has listened to a local classic rock radio station for an hour or so will confirm, Led Zeppelin was an early pillar of AOR airplay and has been ever since. This was a good thing for the band while they were making records, but since their demise the prevalence of the fistful of Zeppelin cuts in heavy rotation on FM radio—“Whole Lotta Love,” “Ramble On,” “Black Dog,” “Over the Hills and Far Away,” and, notoriously, “Stairway to Heaven”—has misrepresented their overall canon and gotten them lumped them in with a range of other acts and tracks whose familiarity has muted their original appeal. Today the inescapable AOR classic “Stairway to Heaven” is reviled as much as it’s revered, in company with the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” plus Boston, Styx, Kansas, Journey, Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, and the Eagles. On their own, all of these are fine works and fine musicians whose continued fame is justified, but repeated ad infinitum on AOR they have suffered grievous overexposure. What began as a trade term subsequently became a derogatory epithet, and Led Zeppelin and other artists have been tarred by association.
A Minute Seems like a Lifetime: How “Classic Rock” Radio Represents Led Zeppelin
Since the early 1980s Album-Oriented Radio has been transformed into classic rock, a programming format devoted to the rock music of roughly 1966 to 1980—AOR frozen in time. Just as it was in the 1970s, Led Zeppelin has been prominent on classic rock stations, and the broadcasters have played a large part in the band’s continued popularity with generations too young to remember them from their heyday. Whereas many of Zeppelin’s onetime peers on the charts and tour circuits have been relegated to the oldies, “soft favorites,” or “where are they now” categories (say, Three Dog Night, Paul Simon, Stealers Wheel, or Van Morrison), Zeppelin are thriving on classic rock stations, where the children and perhaps even grandchildren of their original fans can still catch their hits at all hours of the day. Because of classic rock radio, Led Zeppelin’s posthumous releases, such as the box sets of 1990 and 1993, the BBC Sessions of 1997, and the Mothership collection of 2007, have all found ready markets. By maintaining Zeppelin’s favored status on its airwaves (and offering syndicated shows like Get
the Led Out and other Zep-focused program blocks), classic rock has been the group’s best marketing vehicle for some thirty years.
Like the earlier AOR, however, classic rock broadcasting has tended to adhere to rigidly controlled selections of songs and an entrenched mythology that has had the unfortunate effect of making the music less and less interesting. Even Led Zeppelin’s boosters admit that the band’s place in the classic rock system has harmed the group as much as it has helped them: in his liner notes to the 1990 Zeppelin four-CD box set, critic Robert Palmer wrote, “The preponderance of ‘Led Clones’ on American FM radio, and continuing frequent airplay for the original recordings, have kept the band’s legacy alive. They have also done our memories of the band a great disservice by carrying on as if ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and a few crunching, blues-based riff tunes… represented the entire scope of the Led Zeppelin heritage.” As the years go on, defenders of Zeppelin have had to distinguish the true richness of classic rock, the genre, from its caricature in classic rock, the sales pitch.
