40 Years Since Led Zeppelin Rearranged My Brain

By ROB PATTERSON

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the self-titled debut album by the rock band Led Zeppelin. It was an event that truly changed rock’n’roll music.

I’ve been a bit irked by how writers from generations younger than mine are covering this occasion. A piece on The Daily Beast went on and on about the band’s “controversial legacy:” Underage groupies, song thievery and the legendary tale about the mud-shark and another groupie (I’ll spare you the details on that; the Internet can provide). It skipped over Zep guitarist and mastermind Jimmy Page’s heroin addiction and fixation with Satanism. And how drummer John Bonham died from drunkenness, plus the thuggery of their manager, Peter Grant.

Yeah, Zeppelin pioneered the bad boy rock star mold to previously unseen levels of debauchery and piratical abandon. But we wouldn’t even be talking about the anniversary of their emergence if it weren’t for one thing that story largely glossed over: the band’s music. As I said on Facebook after posting that article: “I want writers that can convey how Zeppelin peeled off the top of my skull and rearranged my brain.”

Sure, we now can’t have one (the music) without the other (the band’s controversial story). Times and subsequently perspectives have changed since the late 1960s. And, sure, judgement is due for the band’s behavior.

But one of the sad aspects of the times we now live in is how the legends can usurp the legacy – a twisted result of our complicated cultural relationship if not obsession with celebrity. Especially the baser and more provocative behaviors that fame can bring out in people.

I wish I could somehow express how it felt to a 15-year-old guy back in 1969 to hear Led Zeppelin for the first time within its rock music historical context. What came to be called hard rock barely existed at the time. Guitarist Jeff Beck, who like Page had left the band The Yardbirds to follow his muse to new places, had already released his album “Truth” by his Rod Stewart fronted Jeff Beck Group the year before, another disc that cracked open new musical possibilities. Led Zep was even part of Beck’s progression as Page and Zep bassist John Paul Jones played on his preceding single “Hi Ho Silver Lining” b/w “Beck’s Bolero.”

All of it had a crackling power and intensity that surpassed any of the prior inherent in rock’n’roll. Yes, Zeppelin was inspired by and borrowed and poached from the blues, as is the musical shorthand on the group. But that’s a highly reductive analysis of a revolutionary sound that drew from so much more to create something all their own..

Trying to recreate for myself that mind-blowing first listen, I played the track that opens that first album to yet again savor how it unfolds: two sharp Jimmy Page guitar chords repeated five times under an urgent John Bonham drum part that burgeons from basic into a niftily syncopated roll followed by the full band coming in. Especially arresting was the then-distinctive voice of Robert Plant that launched countless hard rock imitators of his keening high-range howls; the song’s bridge that he sings in a more normal range immediately proved him a far-richer singer than the cliche that others made of his howls.

When I recently saw the still creatively fertile and innovative Plant in concert, he included seven songs from the Zep catalog that underscored the timeless durability of what his former band created. Today there’s even a red-hot new young band, Greta Van Fleet, whose near carbon copy of the Zeppelin blueprint has evoked debate as to whether they are mere imitators or valid in their own right (time will tell).

Led Zeppelin has a worthy musical legacy that cannot be denied. I hope that the legend won’t tarnish that as time marches on.

Populist Picks

Documentary Film: “Bad Reputation” – I enjoyed this Joan Jett cinematic bio, but was rather disposed to do so, having written her first PR bio and counting her original Blackhearts backing band among my friends. As that band’s bassist Gary Moss (nee Ryan) – who also likes the film – noted to me, one main driving thread is her longtime relationship with her manager/producer/creative collaborator Kenny Laguna, a rarity in the music game. And there’s no denying how Jett was pivotal in kicking down walls and cracking open the glass ceiling for female rockers.

CD: “Rebirth” by Jimmy Cliff – I’m a bit late to this 2012 album by one of my favorite singers. But hearing his wonderful version of “The Guns of Brixton” that’s one of the set’s high points immediately pulled me into this aptly-named gem of a disc that bristles with the vitality of reggae in its ‘70s and ‘80s heyday (and which the genre has largely lost).

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2019

Populist.com