Bonham drummed with unmatched fury and intuitive rhythm. As that band lost steam, Page seized control, cleaned house, and reinvented the ensemble as an instrumental power trio, with fellow session whiz John Paul Jones on bass and keys and a pair of Midlands unknowns on drums and vocals. The author smartly builds his narrative around Page, a wunderkind London session guitarist who reinvented himself as a blues-rock star in the legendary Yardbirds.
LED ZEPLIN BOOK FULL
Those impulses reached full flower on the untitled fourth album, which, across its first side, wrestles with King Crimson-sized time signatures on “Black Dog,” rocks harder than ever on the aptly named “Rock and Roll,” and unfurls a full-sail folk epic on “The Battle of Evermore” before concluding with that multi-sectioned masterpiece, “Stairway to Heaven.” Spitz told me IV might be his favorite Zeppelin album, and I won’t argue. The third album revealed the full breadth of Page’s ambition: He sought to bridge heavy metal, progressive rock, and folk. The first two masterful LPs, thoughtfully titled I and II, show Led Zeppelin bursting forth and rocking harder than anyone else, and blessed with a leader, Page, who could write great songs adorned with brilliant guitar figures. Nowadays, Led Zeppelin seems to stand alone, its recordings ensconced as the crown jewels of hard rock. Arthouses staged double features of “The Song Remains the Same,” the band’s cheesy cult-classic concert film, and Floyd’s dystopian acid trip, “The Wall.” I recall them, in my own 1980s adolescence, as one of the two great stoner-rock bands of the 1970s, alongside Pink Floyd. In the years that followed, Led Zeppelin’s reputation gradually rose. The band disintegrated in 1980 following the untimely death of John Bonham, one of the great rock drummers, whose drinking had eclipsed his playing. Led Zeppelin couldn’t catch a break - except with record buyers and concert patrons, who made its members some of the wealthiest pop stars on the planet. But then punk hit, and critics pivoted from dismissing the Zep as sophomoric to interring the band as prog-metal dinosaurs. Led Zeppelin aged along with its fans, and the ice gradually thawed. Mostly boys between the ages of fifteen and twenty thronged the area in front of the stage, where Jimmy and Robert, aided by an army of Marshall stacks, whipped them into delirium.” Led Zeppelin’s audiences were different, older…somewhat. “The music took audiences to a place they’d never been before, a place similar to the hysteria-induced level where, years earlier, the Beatles had transported hordes of thirteen-year-old girls. Rolling Stone heaped similar scorn on contemporary acts as far-flung as Jethro Tull and Black Sabbath for their pimply minions. And nothing repulsed slightly older fans and critics like a band that courted adolescents. Juvenile delinquents, essentially, drove its album and concert sales.
Here, I think, lay the problem: From the beginning, Led Zeppelin appealed primarily to teenage boys. “He thought it was awful.” Rolling Stone, the bible of American rock ‘n’ roll, declared the album an “avalanche of drums and shouting.” The Los Angeles Times greeted an early show as “an exhibition of incredible self-indulgence.” The band grew to loathe the press.
When George Harrison first heard a test pressing of Led Zeppelin I, released in 1969, “It wasn’t just that he didn’t get it,” a friend recalled. Within this exhaustively researched account, Spitz unearths a trove of caustic reviews and bitter reflections to remind us how very often the world’s greatest live-rock band played dreadful gigs, and how thoroughly Led Zeppelin was reviled - by critics, adult music fans, and even fellow pop stars - for the better part of its life. Fifty years on, the entire Zeppelin oeuvre resonates with the distant echo of smoky adolescent bedrooms. He and chord-smith Jimmy Page nicked entire songs from great Black blues artists. It’s not for everyone: To modern ears, singer Robert Plant’s lyrics sound frequently vulgar and occasionally misogynistic. The quartet emerged from a crowded field with the era’s biggest sales, several of its finest LPs, and arguably its signature song, “Stairway to Heaven.”Īt its best, early on, Led Zeppelin gave mesmerizing concerts. History has anointed Led Zeppelin as the greatest hard-rock band of the 1970s. With Led Zeppelin, a revelatory new book by Bob Spitz, the legend becomes fact.
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