Led Zeppelin: a personal history: LED ZEPPELIN III

If you can't be new be personal. From most angles there's not much point to writing anything about Led Zeppelin thirty-five years after they ceased to exist. I don't remember them as a series of events in the greater world; they'd released most of their albums by the time I listened to any of them. I remember the name as one you needed to know in the seventies. And I recall the way I met the albums as I heard them: from blinding joy to mumbled indifference, they were part of my teens and if anything is part of your teens the fun is in holding back the nostalgia and getting to the raw nerves of memory. I can't entirely promise the latter as some memories related to LZ are for my sealed section but I'll go as far as I'm able.

This began as a single post and a series of pithy recollections and descriptions but as the memories emerged each one demanded its own entry (and out door).

The first day of school holidays, 1975. The whole week was overcast and muggy but it was exciting to have made it through the first year of high school. My brother came home from uni with his usual campaign forces of girlfriends, hangers on and every single record he'd bought that year. Even at thirteen it was buzzy being around him. Even his arrival felt central: the van or station wagon he was travelling in spluttered into the large driveway and went coughing into the grounds, stopping underneath the African tulip tree. The doors opened and the group emerged, jaded from travel and cramped. They might as well have been returning from service in the Crimea. Michael, then a cross between a Cossack and George Harrison from the cover of Let it Be, loosed his bags and cases from the straps on the roof and the back and distributed these among his fellows to carry in. I took the guitar in its case and left it in the rumpus room.

After some untidy planning the whole party slammed back into the van and headed somewhere better for their by now shared nervous system. I went into the rumpus room and looked at the records. On top was this. The big balloony writing of the band and album number was set amid the clutter of what looked like a kid's scrapbook. Faces peered through the die cut holes in the cardboard and when you saw that there was a wheel inside this front part of the sleeve and turned it you could see other faces. Inside was the same collage of odd pictures and on the back a high contrast group photo, also a collage. It seemed to be about all the ideas that went through the minds of the band while they thought up and played this music.

Hearing a song on the radio was different to listening on the stereo because the DJs always talked over the start and end. You heard everything on a record. I had heard The Immigrant Song on the radio and remembered it for the piercing berserker scream that started it. But it didn't start that way. Just before the music is a strange sound like breath getting faster and faster. It sounds electric, like the sound in the speakers before the sound is put through them. It was as though the speakers themselves were getting excited by the music before it started. And then the band comes in with that octave riff and it's like touching electricity. I made my way to the couch, lay down and closed my eyes with the berserker scream cutting through the fading evening light. The chugging of the guitar and bass in unison are so powerful that they become confused with Viking longships and weapons in my head. The smashing tremolo chords that lead to the first lines of the verse about coming from the land of the ice and snow are like the tides torn the longship bows. Repeat. We end on a kind of looped assault of the octave riff with a descending wordless vocal pattern which sounds like the winds of Thor. Ok, I wouldn't think that now but at thirteen...

Distant speech and a false start on an acoustic guitar. Then the guitar starts and sounds bright and rubbery at the same time (I'd soon find out it's tuned weirdly down to a very slack C chord) and a strange riff that plays between the major and minor third before a breathless staccato open chord figure. And then massive dark clouds obscure the sun as the strings appear. Plant comes in with a sheet metal cutter voice as the mournful eastern string section (is it a mellotron?) grinds around him like the hurdgy gurdy of the apocalypse. It seems to be about the value of friendship in a life wasted "looking for what you knew" or the ideal love. The setting makes it one of the heaviest songs on the album yet there's not even a clean electric guitar and the bass is all in the string section and the only drums are tablas. As I listen for the first time the overcast day that it's been seems to have become the way the sky will be forever. And then with a pained downward falling scream from Plant a synthesiser wows down like a plane in freefall.

A frenetic guitar figure starts over the crossfade. Plant comes in half talking: "her face is cracked from smiling from all the fears that she's been hiding and it seems that pretty soon everybody's gonna know." The band and riff kick in under the last word and Plant comes back in in full high workshop scream. It always struck me as being about a village victimising a woman as an outsider or witch. The joyful chorus sounds like one of the lynch mob gleefully celebrating being in the promised land. I've only recently found out that Plant was writing his impressions of New York City but, boy, does it sound dark to me. The restless force of the band under the vocal only intensifies this. None of this lets up, smouldering all through the fade as the train it mentions pulls out of the station and the ostracising mob keep rejoicing.

Listening again now (to the 2014 remaster on the better-than-vinyl high resolution download) I marvel at how Page's arrangement and production could get. The busy funk-rock guitar figure is heard simultaneously dirty and clean as he played through two mic-ed up amps one running cool and the other hot. The result is that you can hear every note of the riff and also feel the disorder of it in overdrive; something's wrong but something's right. When the other full band driving riff comes in it is a very hot clean signal. Again, everything is audible in the mix and, odd for a rock record from 1970, the bass is allowed a huge presence which helps both ground and drive the song. While this might seem fairly standard now, the idea of taking pieces away rather than piling them on - less is more, in effect - could make for a heavier rock song was fairly novel at that time. Compare it to a contemporary Black Sabbath album. Big riffs and dark tritonal melodics but none of the power of this one song that kept itself the right side of mud.

After the calm between tracks comes a gentle clean electric guitar noodles around the minor. When the bass, organ and drums come in they swing heavily but keep their peace until Page sets fire to it, slams into overdrive for a screaming solo which tears at the air until it falls back down exhausted. This is going to be a song about pain. Plant comes in quietly and wearily with a line about working from seven to eleven every night. It didn't occur to me that if those hours were all contained in the set "every night" then that's only a four hour day so what's he whinging about? I just assumed he meant seven in the morning and finished just before midnight. A long day. He calls it a drag and the rest of the song is about that and the fact that since he's been loving her he's started to lose his mind. Well, it's a blues, it doesn't have to be John Donne.

This is another example of Jimmy Page keeping a tight rein on how a song turned out as, while there is a lot of improv throughout there are clear stages of development from the tragic opening which starts as a gentle sadness before bursting into tears, the vocal which does the same kind of thing, the next verse in which the vocal is louder but also more distant and the final assault which is all out. The constant sense of dynamics, the shifting of the intensity and volume which enhance the anger and sadness of the piece, is the result of a band at the height of its powers as a live act and a producer's ear for making it work in the studio. Go and look at how breathtaking they were on stage in the Albert Hall concert on the Led Zeppelin DVD and you won't wonder so much at finding out that the essence of this album track was recorded in a single take. That Page gave it polish here but let it burst into refulgence there is a testament to his skill as a producer.

The song ends in a collapsing improv around the last chord and features Page alternating between two frets as though he wanted a whammy bar. That's not a cheap shot, really, as it sounds like something that's rocking back and forth after it's been hit. I'll just register my fandom of Page as a Les Paul player. This album, which features the highest acoustic:electric song ratio of the band's career is virtually an ad for the Gibson Les Paul. The emotional range is entirely in the player, of course (I have a Les Paul and I don't sound like this) but the tonal spectrum, even with the range of amps and mic-ing techniques on show, is really what Gibson's flagship is all about, ease of touch for maximum output.

I'm making a point about this because it's not always to be expected. If you go into any music shop with a lot of guitars on the walls you'll see a lot of teenagers plugging this kind of humbucker guitar into a pedal and then an amp and going all wheedly wheedly on the air around them, note perfect renditions delivered  with tone perfect pedal settings available as presets on the equipment. But guitarist/producers like Jimmy Page understood that a clean electric guitar singal can sound bigger than a distorted one and a careful blend of the two can add drama and dynamics. So, Since I've Been Loving You can start out like B.B. King at one in the morning and catch fire in a stadium-scaled burst of napalm a few seconds later before catching its breath again. A lot of Les Paul players on the carpet at the shop seem to think it's an extension of a pedal. Very few LP-slingers seem to know how rangey and emotive this axe can get.

Take Out on the Tiles, for example. The last track on side one starts with a riff that feels like an avalanche. Again, we've got a few amps going at once, some hotter than others but the articulation of the cleaner signal is the one that bears the power. The bass is the thing that is slightly distorted, if anything. The guitar is set to the honking sound of the combined pickups on the Les Paul which is more noticeable clean than driven and clear here. It sounds like a tsunami through a drainpipe. Strangely, Bonzo's drums, while tight, are light and playful, never filling the gaps in the riff and singing the same way twice. Plant screams about going about happy-go-lucky and that all he needs is all his girl's love. But with rock music this big and pummeling you don't care that much about the words. A similar stuttering figure to the one in Immigrant song plays under the fade. End of side one.

I had dozed through some of this the first time. I had a whole year of high school on my feet and needed the rest but all of it kind of got through because when I listened to it again I knew all of it. The dozing state birthed a lot of dreamlike imagery and from the notion of the vikings in Immigrant Song, the shot down plane at the end of Friends and the outcast images of Celebration Day I remember a whole movie's worth of

That year a mix of peer group pressure and an admission of what it was doing to my body I traded my old classical affinity in for rock music. Michael's boxes of discs were like a big porn stash. I took one out and put it on and listened, dozing on the couch. Not a lot of dozing. The Immigrant Song smacks out with its spiky engine, the berserker scream soars above it and it's on. Through the strange acoustic but heavy Friends, the frenetic Celebration Day, Since I've Been Loving You's epic pain and Out On the Tiles big bruising riff and scream of intimidating joy, side one completely had me. I couldn't follow it, not even with side two until the next day.

We didn't see Michael again until later the next day. First day of holidays, I ran down to the rumpus room -

I might have mentioned this elsewhere but what we called the rumpus room was actually a separate building to the house, about the size of a backyard bungalow with the main dining table, piano, two organs and four speaker (but not quadrophonic) hi fi system as well as the tv, two recliners and two three seater couches and you could still see the carpet. I would bet Mum had wanted to call it the dining room or whatever one called the large public area of the house (living room, lounge but I suspect she had wanted more formality to it). I remember being babysat in there which suggests that I don't remember it being named. It wasn't, at any rate, a little room littered with toys and cushions for the kids to play in.

 - ran down to the rumpus room to listen to side one again and then side two and do some drawing. I think everybody discovers at some point the value of listening to new music while doing something else. It really sinks in and the varying levels of concentration can bring details out that would not be so discernible with dedicated attention. Also, if it's something like drawing that you're doing you allow yourself to get influenced by the moods you're getting from the sound.

Side one ran the range from brash to frightening to tragic to thunderous, all feeling even stronger than the first time. Side two was different. I had to start a new drawing, something in the eighteenth century. Gallows Pole starts with a rainy day acoustic strumming of A to A minor. Plant comes in dramatically crushed and weary: "Hangman, Hangman, hold it a little while..." He asks his friends to bribe the hangman to keep him from the gallows pole. The friends speak in his scream. First chorus bursts into life with an G-A-G-A pattern, bright mandolins and a banjo at a galloping pace. He asks his sister. Nothing works. The hangman laughs and pulls the lever. End. Well, not quite. What the band does with this folk song (it rightly gets a "traditional arr." credit to Page and Plant) is a very genuine trademarking. The folk roots are audible throughout the song but the drumming and Plant's extraordinary vocal playing are pure Zeppelin. And then at the fade out (or final freak out as it goes for what feels like half the track) we get Page playing what frequently sounds like a country fiddle on the Les Paul through a fuzz box, an intensified metalgrass vamp on the chord progression and, just as we're about to fade out completely, a high and screaming note on a real fiddle that turns out to be Plant's voice. That last bit still gets me even after decades. Perhaps that's what falling through the scaffold into Hell sounds like.

Tangerine's whispered sad twelve-string acoustic strums are a false start. A slight count-in and the real progression begins, a gorgeous minor mode with the vocal melody packed into it. Plant sings with a choked sadness about summer days and how the hours bring him pain. A brief bedroom guitarist's C-G-A minor arpeggio (which we'll also hear in Stairway to Heaven) and the drums and bass come in under the chorus. And there, through Plant's silvery self harmonising, is a pedal steel lacing through the words like sobs. We end the chorus on a lovely unresolved 4th. the second verse feels even sadder and can't even go on beyond the thought that even if she doesn't remember days like these he does. Then the world explodes into a howling wind of pain as Page's Jeff Beck-ed Les Paul through a fuzz box, played with a slide takes over the galaxy. Giant waves of grief howl out through the light of the stars. It grows bigger and gets higher and bursts like a supernova at the highest note it can reach. I catch my breath as the pre-chorus chords sound out beneath this blinding light and the chorus returns. Same luscious shining fourth at the end but instead of another verse or a repeat of the chorus unto a fade we get a rhythmic strum around D on the guitar which insists until the drums, bass and pedal steel play around it and leads to a soft falling modal cadence, resolving in a major, creamed up with a steel chord.

Michael, introducing me to playing Zeppelin guitar by going along with the record, played the solo on his acoustic without a slide and broke the high E string at the last note. He laughed a young man's laugh but I just saw the event.

That's the Way keeps the acoustic guitars to a whisper all the way through. They're tuned to a G chord and the riffs depend on that. John Paul Jones's mandolin keeps the accents low on the song's horizon. Another very beautiful pedal steel chorus wails and cries in the distance. Plant sings a heartfelt song about the end of childhood friendship and all that the parting means as the song's narrator moves on to join the grown up world and leaves his friend the dreamer behind. Towards the end of this song we also get a more developed Plant and Plant choir forming intervals as folky as the guitars.

Some time that year I was visited on a Saturday afternoon by someone I hadn't seen for years. Raymond and I were the fastest friends of anyone we knew for two years. Too many memories but two I'll not forget for their power in my memory: when I got him around to Nana's for her pikelets with cumquat marmalade and Russian tea she paid him too much attention the tone of which I knew, even at eleven, was patronising and then when we left hissed at me never to bring him around again (Raymond was Chinese Australian) and; he was sent home from the huge and miasmic celebration my parents held for my brother Greg's wedding (a member each from one big Russian family and one big German family) but that was a family issue rather than racism.

Still, that kind of thing (along with all the explosive emotional events that childhood friends are prey to) stays in the mind. I can't remember how or why we drifted (a change in schools will usually do it) but by high school, by the time he came around again, we had nothing but memories. By that I mean that the sight of him drew a kind of embarrassment from me reserved for cousins from the bad side of the family. He asked if I still made model planes and I tried to answer nicely but it came out as something like, "what? No, not for ages."

I have something far more cringing to admit, here. Instead of explaining that I was more into music I almost asked him if he liked the George Baker Selection whose hit La Paloma Blanca might well have been on the Countdown repeat that Raymond's visit interrupted. I thought to ask the question because the bass player in the band was Asian. I'm cringing as I type this and to this day cannot listen to that song. I think I did ask him if he liked Skyhooks but he didn't know what I meant.

He glanced at the ground and smiled and said, "I'd better go." I said, "ok," and off he went. What this reminds me of now is the visit I talk about in the post on Peter Gabriel III only not creepy. It was sad. I felt no compulsion to reach out to this other who for a short time had been the most important person in my life that I wasn't related to. There was nothing there. This song still reminds me of Raymond and the sad memory always comes first. As the last chords play, they are preceded by a reverse reverb which feels like it's sweeping dust from the doorstep.

Bron-Y-Aur begins with a tickling figure on the acousitc which streamlines into a blues chord riff before Bonzo clods in with a giant thump, supported by Jonesy on the double bass. Plant harmonises with himself a jaunty jig about his pet dog. The feel is natural and this song always gets left on unlike In Through the Out Door's excruciatingly forced Hot Dog. This is fun.

Then came the last track which I was warned about. None of the Zeppelin scholars who bore my surname spoke of it with anything but distaste. After a startling repetitive wail that sounds like a car alarm from the steam eon but is probably a distorted loop of a fraction of one of Plant's screams. It's immediately followed by an acoustic slide playing a coarse cut blues riff that ends in an octave wail. Plant screams about a no-good woman in a voice far too big for the guitar which makes him sound like he's yelling from down the road. Eventually, he's heard in calmer voice through a tremolo. Eventually he ends, Page ends and the song whimpers in closing. I had no scholarship regarding the blues. That was about to change but I have never quite warmed to it as music. This might be because the seventies I grew up in was dominated by bastardisations and dilutions of it and all I could hear through that filthy veil was crap like The Bump or Life in the Fast Lane. These days I can hear more experimentation in this track and the intensity calling through. Then, I raced to lift the needle before it started.

Repeat at least daily for a week. Fill up a new sketchpad.

I probably stopped drawing historical scenes around then. In fact, while I didn't stop drawing I drew less for the hell of it. I got more into writing and once I'd started on guitar took that up more or less permanently. Everything seemed to be changing. I missed out on seeing Monty Python and the Holy Grail when it came out in December (but saw it in time to quote it at school) but did see Ken Russell's Lisztomania which features a scene I had as a trump card for anyone who'd seen Jaws. The appeal of Lisztomania was to do with Tommy. It was Ken Russell's follow up and carried Roger Daltrey from the former film to this one. A highly stylised biography of the Hungarian composer reset as a 19th century rock star one scene features Daltrey crawling through the vagina of his Russian patroness with an erection the size of a torpedo with faeries of the forest dancing around it. That was both difficult and triumphant to describe to the girls in art class and reminded me of a detail I've left out here from hearing Immigrant Song in full for the first time. Grade 9 was good.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: LED ZEPPELIN II

It rained all summer and it stank. The house I grew up in had been a homestead and, though a most of the land had been sold, it was surrounded by a green belt at least fifty metres from house to hedge, most of which was vegetation. Everything grows on everything in Townsville and then, it's seed dispatched, dies and rots. And then it stinks. The stink was so unstoppable it had to be mentally and emotionally filed under X for Xmas holidays. That way it became a pleasant pungency.

I  gazed up at the thick grey sky, hoped there wouldn't be a cyclone and did stuff. I played piano, drew, and started teaching myself guitar. Nita gave me her old nylon string after I'd started splanging away at Michael's steel string. The nylon string was easy on the fingers but Led Zeppelin III had taken its toll and just as long track morning joggers imagine themselves running marathons I pretended I was playing a big Les Paul plugged into a stack of Marshall Amps as I rasped my fingernails on a Zep riff.

I still drew to III but the Zeppelin songbook got me exploring and I found Michael's copy of II and sat down in front of the stereo in the rumpus room, put the big bulgy seventies headphones on, and dropped the needle.

A cough followed by the harshest guitar riff I've ever heard. It stutters and then holds its thrusting pattern for a little too long when the bass  comes in and it's the biggest, toughest and most engorged riff in the known universe. I can't believe music can be this powerful. Plant enters in full scream: you need coo-ool-in'! And then only at the end of the first verse do the drums come in with a deliberate stumble for chorus. Wanna whole lotta love. Each line of the chorus is followed by a thick descending slide on the guitar which sounds like another Stuka peeling off the squadron for its deadly dive. They could do this for a fortnight non stop, as far as I'm concerned but what happens is strange. Everything falls into a big bright space of whispering ride cymbals, what sounds like a cello through a fuzzbox (it's a theremin through a fuzz box) and Plant in the distance screaming in free fall as orgasmic uhs bloom around him. they seem to bear him up as he returns with a gigantic scream: LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE! The drums re-enter with a life or death urgency and BAM BAM! Page's guitar solo would sound tiny out of context, it's so thin and scratchy but here it just feels like scratches. And then after some more wildcat action Bonzo brings to the home stretch with the same quavers on the snare and the full riff thrusts back in and then stops again for Robert to blast forth with: "You neeeeeeeed yeah ...." And the cry builds from a quiet whine to a gigantic wail: LOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE! Back in the riff which seems to be bigger every time you hear it. Wanna whole lotta love? Stukas peel off, bank and dive. Wanna whole lotta love? Badambam Ungh Ungh Ungh! Plant screams close and distantly about back doors and hey and oh and hey and yeah before Plant dives into the sea and resurfaces with a whale cry through a fuzzbox. More orgasmic ohs before the scream of a dying planet signals the end of the fade. Done.

As a dictionary reader I knew the word orgasm and its meaning. I also knew the thing (I was still only thirteen but, then again, I was thirteen) but didn't know it as the score in a team sport. Nevertheless, the intensity and power of Whole Lotta Love roughs up the first timer and arrests the experienced.

Can they follow that with something even bigger? No need. The need is relief. The drawback and cloudy exhalation comes in the form of a gentle Plant vocal: "and if I say to you tomorrow". It's an early morning, groggy croon over a light jazz group. Then suddenly it's tight, heavy and hard as the floor as the band from the last song kicks in with a slicing riff a screaming vocal. Repeat. Calm with choir. Page on a steel guitar plays a cool island ditty before the chorus kicks and he makes that steel scream. Verse and chorus, in more psychedelic mode and slicing chorus. Calm. Page bashes out some chords through an echo and Plant improvs another chorus s the new riff barks beneath. Fade.

The Lemon Song doesn't sound like a flavour. I had almost no musical scholarship outside of classical and only a vague understanding of the roots of rock music. I had an idea of what blues was because it related to jazz and I was acquainted with jazz because in the winter of the year I turned twelve I was obsessed by the theme from the movie The Sting and could kind of play it (Greg said that he retired one night to the sounds of my meat tenderiser on ivory version of it and woke to the same the next morning). There was enough blues on III to give me an idea of what it sounded like and Michael was informative. So....

The riff has slid out from under a gong and slithers up the scale before being hissed back down by some scratchy wildcat guitar. The drums whisper and breathe below and between them one of John Paul Jones's best bass improvs simmers and sidles. Plant comes in with operatic pain: "I should have quit you, long time ago!"And it grinds on that way, all lordy woman and hey and oh until it breaks into the big bright chord based solo before sleazing down again and then Plant gets into the reason that quitting hasn't happened. Thirteen year olds might be ignorant of the great buffet of sexual practice but all of them have a sexual response, however frustrated or self-medicating. And all of them will understand something of what Plant is on about when he intones: "the way you squeeze my lemon I'll fall right out of bed." While I enjoyed the power and the nuance of this one it was a track I left on as atmosphere rather than enjoyed. I was unaware of the generous plundering of the blues catalogue it was and probably wouldn't have cared if I had. There's a lot of Killing Floor in this track. There's also a mass of added material added by the band. Howlin' Wolf/Chester Burnett's publishers threw a lawyer at them and now he is co-credited with authorship. Made it your own, boys, but still not nice.

Thank You floats in from the golden horizon on a blanket of electric twelve string. The drums kick in as an announcement and then a calm. Plant almost whispers the devotion to his lover as Jones gently plays church-like organ chords below. Drums. Acoustic and more twelve string for the chorus and then a bigger acoustic force for the middle eight about little drops of rain. A lovely acousitc solo. Back to the organ and verse with added light twelve string cascades. After a reprise of the opening lines we end on a calm and beautiful fade led by the organ and supported by subtle twelve string chords. It returns briefly from the vanishing point to end on a lovely golden chord. I loved this song. I have since hard many like it and curbed my excitement whenever I've stumbled on the chord pattern. This song at least adds a lot of different material like a much needed minor key section and a middle eight that doesn't rely on the verse. But all that is obscured by decades of songs that should have broken this template by at least one out of place chord. But no.

Side two starts with a riff that feels like it was just made up when they rolled the tape. There's a note too many but as soon as the band kicks in it hardens to order. A big, dark riff of bends and stutters on the Gibson. A very front and centre distorted bass that for once sounds big rather than the trebley blech you usually get and a big screamed vocal from Plant. She done him wrong. Doesn't pretend to be Desiderata. In the middle there's a great shredding solo in Page's best scratchy Les Paul. It's really solo; It's just him. A lovely little glitch as he gets really fiddly and scratchy. The high hats get impatient behind him and he finds a chord riff to break back in and when everyone else joins the solo is more conventional but no less sweet for its rapid fire and raunch. Plant does another iron foundry vocal verse and ends on his screaming the title Heartbreaker until the entire force is suddenly cut off, in the middle of the word. Silence. Inertia.

Plant starts the next one: "with a purple umb-er-ella and a fifty cent hat." Page brings in a delicious riff played on a very hot but clean twelve string that could have easily worked on a big distorted Lester but sounded better this way. Living Loving Maid rollicks on with clever shifts in when the expected riff comes in and a solo that gets away with being cheeky without being goofy. Fun.

Ramble On starts with feather light acoustics, fretless bass and pedal steel as Plant croons a tale of restless travel. this is broken by a big rocky chorus. A beautiful short multitracked guitar solo gives way to the last verse which nods to the band's relationship with J.R.R. Tolkein. We end on the rocking chorus and a lot of double tracked improv from Plant to the fade.

Moby Dick starts with a beautiful scratchy twelve bar riff with some tasty wildcat scratches from Page in the gaps. Then it stops for an extended drum solo that sounds like someone pottering around in the kitchen until you bring the cup of tea you've just brewed back into the room for the recap of the riff and the end. Sorry, Bonzo is one of my favourite drummers but I've only ever listened to this entire track once and that's because I was distracted. There are very very few cases of overlong soloing on the Zeppelin studio albums. There are plenty of epics live but that was the arena and they were welcomed by the thousands who came to witness. This is as close as Zep got to the kind of Emerson Lake and Palmer bullshit that so many seventies bands got into. Listen to Bonzo's Montreaux on the posthumous Coda album and you can hear the same drummer work through real ideas in a percussion only track (not even a riff) after a decade of world leading musicianship. This, though, is and will only ever be filler.

Bring it On Home sounds like but isn't another wholesale lift from a bluesman. Over an acoustic 6th strum Plant sings in a bizarre blackface before the thing kicks into a violent guitar riff and the band bashes into something more typically Zeppelin. The end is similar to the begining. A few lines about bringing it on home to you over the acoustic and a final cheeky harmonica tweet and we're done. The publisher of the Sonny Boy Williamson song of the same name (you can't copyright titles, by the way) saw dollars falling from the sky because of the last two lines of lyrics. Lyrics. Look, fine, if they take someone else's stuff and attribute it to themselves then fair cop but boy does the bullshit flow once it's started.

In any case, I seldom made it to this part of the album at the time and seldom do now. Led Zeppelin II ends for me with Living Loving Maid. I did like the lines about Golem and Mordor in Ramble On but this thing sounded so formless to me at that age. I loved the force and scale of the bigger numbers and the dynamics of all of it. That things like Thank You could come between The cock o' the walk Lemon Song and the cockier o' the walkier Heartbreaker and that What is and What Should Never Be, Ramble On and Bring it on Home had such startling changes mid song with all of this still sounding like the same band impressed me. The mid-seventies pop on the radio had none of these qualities. Only anomalies like ABBA's SOS or the soon to be heard Bohemian Rhapsody seemed audible after this.

So what is often written off as ball walking at the stadium level still expresses the original intention of blends of light and heavy, light and dark, hard and soft, violent and tender. If II still feels a little incomplete for me it's because I was beyond comprehending it on those Xmas Holidays when I overplayed it while drawing murder scenes in period costume in the rumpus room.

Only a year had seen the casting off of my squadrons of Airfix models and shelves of war comics. I still read, voraciously, but it was the strain of novel devouring I'd started at ten that I kept up. There were a few I had on the go during those hols but at their centre was Dumas' The Three Musketeers unabridged. At night the ABC had started showing the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes and the atmosphere of these while it stormed outside was strong and dark. I roasted peanuts as a kind of olde worlde thing to go with the Musketeers but this kind of thing was giving way to the gravity of everything at the core of things like Led Zeppelin II. Those hols also brought me the later Beatles albums and I thrilled at Magical Mystery Tour and listened with a shiver to Strawberry Fields Forever. I still do but then, lurking over their shoulder with a knowing smirk was The Lemon Song, unfocussed as yet but present, odorous and waiting.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: FOURTH ALBUM/ZoSo/LED ZEPPELIN VI/FOUR/UNTITLED

Whatever you end up calling it (most people say Led Zeppelin four as it's easiest and still accurate) this is the hardest one to approach as it is such an icon of its age and for hard rock records throughout the era. So, I'll begin with how I came to know it.

My sister went to a folk club on Sunday nights. She joined things. If it wasn't a roomful of people older than her growling, "er-lye in the mornin'" then it was the anti-pollution gang who held pickets and protests and made banners. If it wasn't either of those it was something as it had been ballet or horse riding and would be theatre groups at uni. Nita was popular and liked belonging. For a while this looked ok to me, as well, as it seemed to offer a short cut to a kind of fame, extreme locality notwithstanding. But, as time has demanded I admit, joining is not my forte. I think Nita liked the leadership opportunities. She got to know just enough about medieval and Renaissance culture to buy just enough of the right records to be able to settle into a world of unicorn headdresses and armour while drawing those very things in pen and ink in the rumpus room.

I was happy to join in these sessions as I drew compulsively (my scenes were from the eighteenth century or The Great War) and I came to know and enjoy Pentangle and the more scholarly early music group records she found and bought. This extended my classical-only tastes and I was soon allowing things like The Incredible String Band or the more orchestral Moody Blues albums in. And then one day Nita thought I might get along with one particular song. It started as an instantly appealing acoustic guitar apreggio and then a recorder section, a sound I had grown to adore, played a beautiful accompaniment which rose and flew like a choir. And then between the clicks of the well played groove the vocals started and I was heading for my room until the song was over. I had fled.

Some context: I was afraid of rock music. It was on the radio all the time and there was plenty on tv. There were two strains to this. The first is forgivable considering my age: I thought of it as an inevitable gateway to a blueskinned death from a heroin overdose. Yes, there were stations to this but that was at the end of all of them. This terrified me. The second was that I thought of rock music as a reduction of musical form to the level of the boofhead; the music of the mob and the sport; it was the din of joining, the kind of belonging I had already witnessed in the nightmarish drawings of Kathe Kollwitz and Georg Grosz. Not for me.

Later, when the rumpus room was clear I went down and found the record which was only a few covers down from the top of the stack Nita had left out. I am compulsively attracted to that which I fear. At this age (about eleven) I also inhale ghost stories. I didn't believe in ghosts but the stories gave me nightmares. I'd swear off them until I found another anthology. Similarly, I had at least to hear the introduction of that song again. It wasn't hard to find by the needle dipping method whereby you sample tiny amounts of LP tracks by dropping the needle on them for seconds at a time before, the tone arm handle still in your hand, you whip it back off and try another. Then again, the guitar arpeggio shining out of the dark of the vinyl surface made brighter by the pure white light of the recorders. The click click of the surface damage heralded the entrance of the vocals and, grimacing, I let it go on for a few lines before the needle came off again. I went away to think about all of this.

If you only know one Led Zeppelin song you will have worked out I am writing about Stairway to Heaven. I didn't meet it as a rock classic but as an object of terror.

It didn't convert me, I would have washed it away with Mozart that afternoon, but it was there if ever I needed it. The very name Led Zeppelin carried a kind of horror for me as I imagined bombing raids, death and mayhem. I put the strange ripped looking cover back in the vertical shelves under the turntable and left it there.

High school meant a lot of changes including a circumstantial enforcement of the need to negotiate with the herd. Seeing how my affection for classical music changed my social status from aloof twit to leper I started listening to 4TO and watching Countdown. Most of it was passable and some risible and dire but Sherbert's Life is for Living with its octave leaping chromatic riff mixed with vocal harmonies caught me as did Fox on the Run's hard front and suggestion of something creepy under its stiff choruses. Hush looked like hippos in tutus and ACDC was footballer music (still is, as far as I'm concerned). I had changed one obsession for another and rather than one of the gang I was a know-it-all twit but I could live with that as it meant that the leprosy cleared up.

There was so little I actually liked in the charts at the time that I had to reach back a generation and a half to the 60s. Beatles, then Stones, then Who, then Yardbirds came to me. Wayne Fallon, the other most musical kid at school, and I formed a cabal around the Beatles. This was great because the friendship was a strong one and he was both popular and aloof, the association proved fruitful. I was promoted to having my retorts to the herd heard. They didn't always win the moment but they met the air.

When the Beatles waned a tad (it took months) the next step for me was Zeppelin. I'd already immersed myself in II and III and it was long past time to get that grey green sleeve out from under the turntable and blast the rumpus room walls with it. Well, that copy really had been loved. I got a fresh one from Chandler's and put that on.

I didn't rush to Stairway to Heaven. The thing that really drove me to it was hearing not it but the final track played in full on the radio one night. I sat back from my homework and let it bellow through from my brother's room. After that I had to have it.

Needle on side one. The dull click of the drop and the low frequency presence that precedes the sound. Black Dog. There's a strange clucking sound like a machine warming up. Plant opens with a scream: "Hey hey, Mama, said the way you move. Gonna make you sweat. Gonna make you groove." Less than a breath later the band crashes in with one of rock's most iconic barnstormer riffs. A few more of these and a strange calm wordless harmony the middle 8 kicks in with solid chords and a screaming vocal that seems too high and aggressive to be true. When the voice and band response kick back in there's a shift to the fifth that gets stuck and then goes back to the tonic with a timing glitch that is very hard to work out. It doesn't seem to be about anything but a screaming concupiscent id but that's not such a bed job if you can get it. Decades later a flatmate shared her altered lyrics to this one: "I don't know but I been told, a three legged woman aint got no hole." I struggle not to hear that now.

Rock and Roll. Every band in the seventies had a song called Rock and Roll. There was meant to be a distinction between Rock and Roll and Rock. Rock was meant to be the progressive heavier end of Guitar Band World. A seventies band called a song Rock and Roll to do a fifties style twelve bar with seventies style excess. It was a joke but, if done well, it could also be listenable. Zeppelin's take is blistering. A huffing drum intro is broken by a guitar riff on the third and seventh and when Plant comes screaming in with, "Been a long time since I rock and rolled," you know it's not going to let up. Page and Jones provide a huge sustained power figure between the drums and the vocals and the stop start end of every verse gets funnier and tenser each time. Goofy made strong.

After this loud start we fade into the light tinkle of mandolins for The Battle of Evermore, a folky evocation of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. Plant's in his very appealing head voice register and sings a lovely modal tune about the Queen of Light. Then fading in from under his voice is the pure light of Sandy Denny's, clear and cooling: "dance in the dark of night..." There is a constant interplay between the voices with Plant easily matching Denny's notes and blending them as enjoyably as he did decades later with Alison Kraus. If you were lulled into thinking that this would be a limping acoustic number you would be surprised and delighted to hear the way Plant incorporates his signature scream and how Denny matches that without breaking a sweat. I don't love this song but I'll leave it on if its starts if only for the vocal interplay.

Then the acoustic arpeggio starts and we're back at the stairway. I had heard it before this new copy and at that stage loved it, feeling it transcended its hippy dippy beginnings to form a contemporary paean to nature and life in the universe. Also, I loved the clever way that the vocal melody stayed essentially the same even though the chords under it went from a melancholy minor key progression to an epic major key one. I loved the electric twelve string that played through most of it up to the fanfare that turned into the solo that gave way to the hard screaming rock of the coda which left the solo plaintive voice for the song's final phrase. Now for some elephant shooting.

There is a lawsuit being brought by the survivors of Randy California to claim co-credit and of course money from Led Zeppelin. This stems from a perceived similarity between the opening minor chords of the first section of Stairway to Heaven and a song by Spirit called Taurus.

Here are some facts:

Zeppelin shared a bill with Spirit in the late 60s while touring America and while not definite it is quite likely that Page heard the Spirit track.

Both songs feature a progression in A minor that features a descent by semitones from A to F. The tempo and scansion of the changes is the same up to a point though the arpeggios are not.

Both songs feature a section that ventures into the relative major key of C.

However:

The two songs use of the A minor descent resolve completely differently. Page goes from F major to A minor. Spirit goes from A minor down the scale to F, D major, A minor G major. Thus.

Spirit's venture into C takes an appealing but very basic route and does not resemble Stairway to Heaven's major key sections to any damning extent.

Most of Stairway to Heaven is in the progression that starts with C major.

Taurus is an instrumental but contains none of the material that comprises Plant's vocal melody.

The contested section accounts for seven seconds of a ten second sequence. The sequence is played five times in the space of two and a quarter minutes and is never repeated after that in Stairway to Heaven which then goes to the major key sequence, the fanfare and coda which account for the six remaining minutes. So eight minutes plus for the whole thing and the incompletely similar progression times five adds up to thirty-five seconds ... out of eight minutes.

Sorry, there's more: descending by semitones while a single minor chord is playing is an old composition technique which was not invented by Randy California. Go and listen to My Funny Valentine or a very large number of songs from the jazz age to hear what I mean. Led Zeppelin are charged with lifting a song that only resembles theirs in a seconds-long section that many other people had also used before. I cry bullshit.

If you can, load both pieces into a multitrack sound editor (Audacity is free), line them up so the minor chord progressions start at the same time and see how quickly it gets discordant. If you still think, after hearing that, that there's plagiarism going on it's probably because you like the idea.

The problem is complicated by the history of this band who wrongly attributed other people's songs to themselves from their very first album. In most of those cases what they added was immense but in all cases where the derivation is substantial the act of claiming the music was wrong. There are details here and there on other albums but these thin to insignificance as soon as the band begins writing for itself full time and establishing its compositional personality. Really, when you get down to accusations of plagiarism based on the use of a few well worn blues phrases you're at the bottom of the barrel.

Oh, the guy at the centre of this who had decades to bring his own lawsuit died in 1997. May he rest in peace, if his old bandmates will let him.

Here's the thing about this for me. While I can live through this song with pleasure these days I really have no remaining affection for it. Some pleasant textures and tones come through but it isn't the anthem it was.

Side two.

A thick sounding Fender Rhodes piano plays a bell like phrase long enough to absorb before Page reinforces it with a fuzzed up Les Paul and Bonzo smashes in. The vocals are a multitracked Plant in odd harmony. A kind of  brighter chorus section ensues with some fine screamy vocals. The forward motion is deliciously relentless. Page takes a multitracked guitar solo that is both joyful and brief. It seems to be about a drug bust or maybe just the kind of post-hippy culture the band found in America in the late 60s. Plant ends over the verse groove through a tremolo and fadeout with a lovely phrase in high scream: "I really don't o-ow o-ow o-ow...."

Four Sticks has elements that I really like: experimental song structure; a textural mix going from metal riffing to sudden string sections and open chord acoustic guitar. A screaming Plant is mixed low and grabs of strange lyrics like crying pines and owls and rivers running dry. There's a dark panic running through the entire piece. The mix of rock riff and eastern sounding washes creates a tension. Something strange and horrifying has befallen the song's narrator and the forces of a dark nature are on his tail. I just wish I liked it better.

Going to California couldn't be more different from this or the song that follows it. A gentle arpeggio guitar starts before a bright and folky mandolin comes in with a major key figure. Plant folds himself out of the music with a tail of travel both physical and metaphyiscal. He ends one verse with the lowest note I've heard from him. Then the bridge turns minor and pained as Plant's vocal shoots several octaves up to deliver a kind of nightmare sequence where the wrath of the gods has nose bleed that floods the land and he cries out for a lifeline. Back in folky major key land (though on a tuned-down acoustic guitar which makes it sound a little strange) and he's still on his quest for a woman who's never been born. He tells himself it's not as hard, hard, hard as it seems in a pained high voice. Fade out in a light choral sunset. I like rather than love but I leave it on and enjoy it if I hear it.

The next song is the last and the one I knew warranted the purchase of my own copy, a fresh and crackle free one. When the Levee Breaks starts with the biggest drum sound in history. If you set a film of a levee breaking in slow motion you would want this music to go with it. The power and destructive force are only widened and worsened when the bluesy grind comes in after two bars. The giant drums continue beneath it like the cracking earth. A harmonica wails in pain overhead like a bird witnessing the end of the world. The blues grind gives way to a major mode but equally strong upward progression. After a breath's pause, Plant comes in with a low scream about the levee breaking and life ending. Suddenly, a complete change happens when all the chords all turn major and Page comes in with a thick and enormous slide figure before Plant in a beautiful scream delivers
a soaring and oddly jubilant middle eight which then plummets back to the grind again. After another pause he starts the last verse with despair: "Cryin' won't help ya, prayin' won't do ya no good..." When we get back to the major figure it very strangely fits in with the bluesy grind. Bonzo's rolls and crashes get more apocalyptic and powerful as the inundation gorges on, Plant screaming from the sky above and the harmonica wailing in futile prayer. As the destruction moves forward there is an unbalancing shift in the panning of major instrument streams as they flow from left to right and back again like the tide that is consuming the land, glacial, stoppable. Finally, we end with a straining metal slide and harmonica wail before a single babble on electric guitar (similar to the opening warm up sounds) and it's just us and the flooded land. Man, if Kashmir weren't so great this would be my favourite Zeppelin song.

I read someone on an ol' time usenet group say that when he listened to Levee he wanted to become the music and I know what he meant. The force coupled with the huge textural banquet make this an irresistible piece. But that goes for the entire album because the main feature of this album is range: we start and end with maximum force but between those points we take a long and eventful journey through landscapes urban and distant, identifiable and mystical. All the way to the apocalypse it's a fun ride that might well have served as a last album of a band that reached a peak unmatched by any of their rivals.

John Paul Jones said that after this album no one compared them to Black Sabbath. Many consider it to be the band's apex. For me it's one peak before the next two albums which form their own peaks. After that, the band's problems mounted and affected its output with increasing impact resulting in two mediocre discs and an outdated and sloppy live double. For most of the first year of my being into rock music of any sort this was the latest Zeppelin album known to me. I hadn't heard the earliest but from II to III to IV there was a clear line of progress in the sound and sophistication of the music and presentation. On that...

Led Zeppelin II has a jokey confidence to its cover which well compliments the contents and the brash mix of cock rock and exploration. Led Zeppelin features a heavily treated image of the exploding Hindenberg and the music is appropriately massive and incendiary. The second album's cover art repeats the image but it's highly abstracted, a white negative image of the shape emerging in the background from a fiery golden explosion. III blended pop idolatry with a kind of folky utility which is what you got inside.

IV's cover is a gatefold. The image on the front is of a wall with the paper cracked and peeling. In the centre is a framed picture of an old man bending severely under the weight of a huge bundle of sticks. Folding it out reveals that the wall is from a party demolished house and the view past it is of a lush garden, houses of a similar era to the one at the front and in the distance a massive towerblock which bears a sinister character as though everyone's future will be marching toward the veiwers and crushing them if they don't join it. The greenish khaki overcast affecting the whole image adds to the sickness of the thought.

The reverse view, folded out, is a drawing of a hermit holding a lantern at the top of a rocky peak. In the distance is a village and, when you find him far below, is a young pilgrim climbing toward the sage. The Jimmy Page fantasy sequence from The Song Remains the Same film is an enactment of this scene (possibly why it's the only one that works). It's an intriguing picture. It has little direct relevance to anything on the album but makes sense if you know the band's career by this third year of existence into the top spot globally, largely through American tours might point to a kind of pilgrimage. The band were right to leave it unexplained though. They had nothing if not mystique.

Inside is a khaki paper sleeve. On one side is a track list and acknowledgements as well as four odd looking symbols. The font is very olde worlde, all alchemy and candle wax. On the other side the lyric of Stairway to Heaven is printed in that font. There is an old engraving in the lower left corner of a Durer-like image of a scholar with a book. Neither title nor attribution appear here. When you take the record out of the sleeve the Atlantic label bears only the name of the band and the four symbols from the inner sleeve.

In a few of these posts I've gone on about all the Hipgnosis cover art and how dated I find it but in this case there's a real thing going on. After the third album's Led Zep for teens scrapbook wheel and the ever hostile music press chided them for sailing on hype the band decided to package the next one with no hype at all. No mug shots, no band name, no title, just a mysterious sleeve, strange centrepiece drawing, a quartet of symbols and the name only on the record label. No hype at all.

Well, the record company made sure that no one walked past it and plastered the media with the fact of the cover's plainness and low profile approach until that built into its own hype and the band were slugged with a charge of arrogant pretension. Can't win. Then again, I bet they felt like abject losers when the sales figures rolled in and the next mega tour of the USA started. But both are true: it's very daring and very hypey. The sense of solid mystique crafting is impossible to ignore.

Ok, so it's grade nine and I'm still thirteen. Wayne Fallon, Peter Broadstock and I have made it through the school gate undetected. We're not wagging it, it's lunch time, but you're meant to stay on the grounds. We're heading to the milk bar a few blocks away for hot chips. Wayne smirks when I call the guy behind the counter "sir" as though he was a teacher. We stroll back to school, heading for the cover of the trees near J-Block. But when we reach the gate something's different. I can't remember when it started or what stopped it but for a while we were allowed to play records in the music room and put them through the PA. Mostly this was girl crap like Billy Don't Be a Hero or Afternoon Delight but today its: "hey hey, mama, said the way you move ..." It's Black Dog. It's BIG BAD BLOODY BLACK DOG. The riff kicks in with the drums and guitars and screaming voice and it's like the stone tablets of the elders falling to the ground. It's like - It's like nothing I can form a thought about because we're already running towards it. It's so loud. It's like they're playing live. The whole eastern oval is being assaulted by this giant music. When we get to the music block we get a good position right between the tannoys. The big black tide of sound hits us. I notice without gawping that Dora Earl and her friend Jan Carstairs are here, too. They're sitting on the steps of H-Block and can see us. And there we are, dipping our hands into our paper parcels, eating contraband chips that everyone can see as the biggest music in the solar system is turning the air into stone. None of us know it but this is almost as good as girls.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: PRESENCE

When I told two acquaintances at school assembly that I had bought Presence they weren't unimpressed but uncomprehending. They thought I'd said presents. There had been a high profile campaign about the album which included a competition for a very limited number of sculptures of The Object used on the cover art. Local radio 4TO ran a special on it with a track by track DJ commentary and a history through interview snippets. Everybody heard that. Ok, no, they didn't.

The intense learning program I worked through in the previous year was equivalent to a few months Googling. Every book or retrospective in rock rags I could find I read. Everything. Four of my many siblings had first hand fan experience and happily plugged into this opportunity of sudden importance. I learned a lot. I was what would be called in the following decade a nerd (the word came to popular breath from Happy Days but no one on earth was owning it in the seventies). When those two misheard me, however innocently, I physically backed away and went to speak to someone else.

Oddly though, the packaging and sell-job on this album and the idea that I would get to buy a Zeppelin album while it was still living ran so high in my imagination that I could be nothing but disappointed when the needle hit the groove. And so I was. Just not all at once.

Achilles Last Stand opens with an otherworldly twelve-string grind, phased to sound like it was revolving in light. Once it has reached us from the horizon and stands shining in our eyes everything kicks in. Then it explodes into a constantly flashing gallop with frenetic drums, chugging bass and guitar and huge clashing power chords tied together by strange staccato figures on the guitar. Page used six guitar tracks, mostly doing different parts (but occasionally reinforced each other). Plant narrates a tale of something that sounds serious and epic, here with a conspiratorial schauspiel and there with a clean full throated caterwaul that describes size rather berserker frenzy. Page takes a solo and it's not a milllion-note parlour trick but grave and beautiful, witness to big events. The song drives to the end with a double tracked Plant in unison with himself singing a tidal rise through a minor mode. Then suddenly everything stops and the flaming golden twelve-string figure swirls in front of us again and flies back to the horizon.

For Your Life is a grinding funk piece with a low key bellow from Plant. The gloom is broken by a sudden chiming twelve string descending arpeggio and then resumes. The mood is huge but it meant exactly nothing to me. Funk still fails to inspire me I think of it as musical constipation and that's all I can hear from this song. Royal Orleans (miscalled on the radio special as New Orleans Street) is a little funk piece that is over before it begins and I still struggle to recall it.

Side two starts with a nasty variant of the swirling golden flame of the guitar figure from Achilles Last Stand. It's minor and played on slide and sounds like, and yep - BAM - there it is, turns into a big blues number. This belts along like an older Zeppelin shouter with a ripping guitar and then thrilling harmonica solo. There is a mature worldliness to this one that stops short of cock rock and almost assumes a cautionary tone. But everything goes on for too long and the point lies sunken somewhere back in the second verse, unsalvageable and easily forgotten.

Candy Store Rock tries a joke which was tried back then of a heavy band playing a fifties number. It works for the first few lines and then bogs down in repetition and mess. It's like your drunk uncle at Christmas spoiling his own jokes but insisting on getting to the punchline anyway. Hots on for Nowhere feels like fun. It's happy and bright with a joyful burst of twelve-string heaven a couple of times. The lyric seems a kind of easy come easy go thing which fits. Tea for One is a rewrite of Since I've Been Loving You that has its charms but too few to really move to. And then it's over.

I didn't have to like any album in full. I remember judging albums as songs rather than albums and didn't really care about the duds. But Achilles, Nobody's Fault and Hots On were the only songs I'd revisit with this one. I liked feeling disturbed by the cover art with its clean cut cold war Americans seemingly under the spell of this black horrible looking object and this could momentarily influence my listening to the album but more so it aided my daydreams of a kind of sci fi horror world that felt good to walk through.

Later I learned that this album had been made under great pressure in very little time. Robert Plant was recovering from a car accident and sang his vocals from a wheelchair. He wanted to be with his family but felt pressured to be there in a claustrophobic basement studio. His voice betrays this. There is no cock of the walk screaming or strutting here, just regret and personal desolation. Achilles is a retelling of the accident. For Your Life is a testimony of exhaustion on the other side of Babylon where the sex and the drugs are calling for their due (one nervous system in full, please). There is more to it and it's interesting listening with the history in mind. But when I read one commentator talking about its "neon guitars" everything I felt about the album fell into place.

While I shall never love this album as a whole I do owe it something important. No one outside of a very few people at school had even heard of it. None of my brothers, sisters or their friends who had been among the first fans of the band had heard it and when they did had little to say. I had an import copy. The pressing was deep and the packaging was that notch noticeably superior to the local ones I saw in the other shops. I knew and treasured its gems and was easy with the rest of it. Dig? I felt like its keeper, that I alone knew its value and made no effort to sell that to anyone. If the rest of the crowd were uncaring I bore the flame. It felt legendary, epic and important.

This was 1976 and my world was about to change when I found myself to be the only one in the room not ridiculing a Weekend Magazine story about punk rock in London. All of rock music past present and future changed in those few minutes but the sense that it no longer had to be a thing of mass involvement but was just as strong as a secret was a familiar feeling. Respecting Presence made it easy to accept punk which felt like home. Any ridicule just looked like hicksville, all the kids who never questioned their parents' values and the parents themselves who mistook punk's vigour and cultural violence for something alien and new rather than just the new version. It wasn't the mediocrity of Presence that made punk familiar but the compelling might of its exceptions and I didn't care who knew that because I did.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: PHYSICAL GRAFFITI

When Paul Simonon of the Clash said that he only had to look at the record covers of Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin to know he hated them I knew what he was talking about. If there was a symptom of what the seventies did to extend the corporatisation of rock music it was in the packaging of the albums. Of all the firms that put this sheen on the decade the UK outfit Hipgnosis led the game. Their tableaux de enigma rendered in bold pallets in high def were so heavily individual that they turned in a few years to into a kind of advertising awards blandness when taken altogether. Imagine a record shop where the only cover art is by Magritte and you'll get the idea. Whether clever or astoundingly irrelevant to the music they were supposed to represent, Hipgnosis covers and those of their copyists became a mark of a band's entrance into the international penthouse. So, Paul was saying a mouthful back there.

All of Zep's albums had Hipgnosis cover art. At first this was a mutual thing as both the firm and the band were starting out and grew mega within months. After that the increasingly remote connection between the music and the covers spoke only of the celestial fame the band had attained. By the milestone IV even the scapbook scaled mugshots of the band members had been replaced with high enigma. The band name only appears on the disc label which has no title beyond the four symbols that represent each band member. By the time we get to the sixth album here we get to somewhere even stranger than before.

The two discs are in card stock sleeves like album covers in their own right. The sleeves are mocked up like the side of a New York brownstone whose windows can be filled with anything from the band members in drag to the lantern jawed profile of Marcel Duchamp. The band had been grumpy over the teenybopper wheel that packaged songs like Since I've Been Loving You or That's the Way on the third album so here, almost in penance, the pictures are both more intimate and more distant; the very act of looking over them feels voyeuristic; the fan is both welcomed into the inner sanctum and barred from crossing into the room itself.

These two discs are folded into a large card which also has windows, some with letters spelling out the title but most with closed drapes. No song lyrics but the titles are collaged mix and match fonts. This might retrospectively remind us of punk cover art of only a year after but they strike me more as the kind of decontextualised retro look of the late sixties (Rock n Roll Circus, Mad Dogs and Englishmen etc); no one's sending a ransome note here, they know they already have your money. Along with the titles are song credits and occasional notes like "guitar lost courtesy of ...".

All of this is housed in an uber sleeve which looks like the building itself. The album title peers through the windows. The band name, absent from the previous two album covers, is worked into the building itself which suggests both the architectural strength and the opulence of a band that toured the US in an airliner emblazoned with its logo. Written in stone and not going anywhere, this band was both tradition and cheek; a Byzantine emperor with a bent for exploration.

As a thirteen year old I had no way of understanding any of this, it just looked mysterious. As I had done with the Beatles' White Album that same summer, I did a quick drop-needle tour of each of the four sides and out of those seconds per song samples I could not get a handle on what this album sounded like. If you think that's too skimpy a test try doing it with any of the Led Zeppelin albums before this one and see if you don't get a solid idea of the sound of it. It felt wrong. Whenever I heard Plant's voice it seemed different, changed, lower and more raucous rather than the Viking scream of Immigrant Song. Mixed low under guitar forces that felt too big. I chanced upon the end of Night Flight which featured a puzzling old style rock vamping on the 6th which stopped and started as Plant hurled nauseously. None of it made sense. None of it welcomed me. I replaced the discs in their ostentatious package and put the thing back in the pile.

Cut to a year later. I've started buying rock records for myself with pocket money at Ken Hurford's local import shop (yep, outer suburb of Townsville but we had an import shop) and I keep seeing the US pressing of this album and I keep passing it by as other records demand more attention. The tall Scot David Hunter, who can never make his mind up about whether he wants to be part of the herd or break free from its press, tells me in twilight mode that he heard a Led Zeppelin track on the radio last night that was slow and heavy. He turned it off before they announced it. He's making a point and it's a tiresome one. I know what he thinks of them and I care not. But he's also telling me because there's something pleasant about his memory of it. The only album I haven't heard is this one. The way he's describing it sounds a little like When the Levee Breaks but we both know that one. This, he says, is a recent track. Unless the great monoliths themselves have released a near unprecedented single or brought out a second album in the same year it has to be from Graffiti.

So it was on an afternoon with a sky as dark as lead I wagged it with Les Pedder and took one of the few bus rides I ever took in Townsville and got off at the shopping strip. As soon as Les saw I was only going to buy and listen to a record he went his own way. A massive $9.99 later I had this strange thing in my hand while walking the suddenly endless two hundred metres to home. Without a big song or hit to seek out first as a guide I put side one on and lowered the needle.

Cats! Big cats! Leopards and Jaguars! The snarling riff and territorial rasp of Plant's vocal tear the air. "Chewin' a piece of your custard pie." Like a lot of what follows this is some of Bonzo's heaviest and best recorded drumming. The song doesn't really do much but it's compelling. My severely limited sexual experience (still fourteen) didn't extend to informing me of why this is such a hard sexual song. It falls back on the knowledge of the listener rather than incites the neophyte. The big drum intro to The Rover starts, stops and sharply inhales before Page's power chords and sticky riffing kick in. Before you know it this odd rocker starts feeling epic like a waking monster rising and crushing the landscape. Phrases end with thunderous crunches rather than the smooth transitions they promise. The verse gives way to a kind of chorus figure about distance and joining hands. The guitar orchestration turns melancholy, if no less forceful. The solo is big but aching rather than aggressive. This strange song is both granite hard and saddening and it's an instant hit with me.

I get to the end of the opening slower verses of In My Time of Dying with its snaking slide figure and grim I-III-IV smash. Plant comes in with an agonising whining vocal that falls into crooning here and there. The jamming section starts and I lose interest. But then after the mess of the improv and pain comes the acapella giant's scream: O my Jesus! O my Jesus! O my Jesus! O my Jeeeeeeeesus! O my Jesus! and the band grinds back in. And on to the end. There's something about the harshness of the tone and the mix that gives it an informal feel, a rehearsal rather than a recording. That's what it, in fact, was with a few guitar overdubs here and there. The grimness of the opening is lost in improv that just sounds like a lot of banging about. It ends with Plant descending through the word dying which reminds me of the Icarus figure on the Swansong label. Someone coughs. Plant sings, "cough," through a smirk. Someone else (Bonham) yells, "that's gotta be the one." End of side one.

Side two kicks off with the cyberman sound of a Les Paul through a ring modulator. It's an impressive alienating effect and the song is pleasant enough but I forget it as soon as the funky clavinet of Trampled Underfoot sparks in. One iteration of the riff and then the band crashes in through a near relentless more rock than funk workout about cars n girls n canoodlin' maximus. There's a breakdown here and there but there's also always a comeback. I listen to it for the force but don't enjoy it much. After this is Kashmir.

Kashmir explodes to life with cavernous drums holding up a tough rising guitar riff that doesn't seem to be in any key and restarts halfway through a phrase, doubled by a string section. Over these giant steps Plant comes in with a bright vocal, edged with sandy experience, about being a traveller of both time and space, stars and sand. This is music I could listen to unchanging for a very long time. If the hard punching breakdown at its centre were not rendered aloft by Plant's sublime screaming improv I'd resent it. but I don't get the chance, anyway, as a brass fanfare and Bonzo snare bash and cymbal crash push us over the canyon edge to an Arabic middle 8 and I'm in full flight. The sheer beauty of this section is weightless and leaden at the same time. Plant's voice gravels up for the melancholic exit phrase which falls into a abyss of reverb and trills over the resumption of the main riff and last verse. More space in this one. Sometimes the fanfares returns only to wordless vocals. Then BASH! the middle eight's back and we're on the magic carpet again, high above the night oceans and mountains. Plant's voice soars and finds a bitterwseet motif as the string section finds a new ascending figure that goes from a minor chord to the major third of the one above it. Fade out. Get off the floor after minutes.

Kashmir is my favourite Led Zeppelin song. It combines pretty much everything I love about their more exotically influenced side, uncelebrated emotional subtlety and sheer bloody power. This is in an eight minute song that a band like Yes would have turned into a whole side with a lot of soloing. Here it's a dream travelogue needing only its own force to move and take us with it.

Side three begins with the dawn of time on what I only recently found out were bowed acoustic guitars but sound like the birth of an epic, a dark drone hums up to power as others around it also wake and rise. Then the sun comes up or a troubling imagining of the sun. John Paul Jones plays a reed voice on a synthesiser using the pitch wheel sliding up to the note. The scale is eastern and could be minor or major. The pace is slow, patient, waiting for a slow ceremony. It's possible that it's meant to be an evocation of the sun rising but to me it's more like light emerging in complete darkness. The bright, bending synth notes are like snakes of blinding light appearing from the dark and slithering in an increasing mass of writhing brilliance. This assumes a stillness.

Plant comes in with a choir made only of himself in strange middle European folk harmony. Grindly slow phrases about will sinking low and finding the road in the light. BAM! A riff the size of a planet descends through the space. This changes to another giant figure leaping in stretches which switches time signatures a few times per iteration and Plant, much closer, seems to be gives advice to someone off-song about keeping to the road and not straying. This gives way to a clavinet playing a sweet major key figure. Plant sreams that everybody needs the light before a brightly descending cascade of happiness. Back to opening drone. Repeat. Fade.

Bron-Yr-Aur fades in as a pretty and calm solo acoustic guitar piece, with some lovely reverse reverb, which fades out again leaving only the impression of a light in the dark of the vinyl. Actually ....

That's what this record makes me think: light and textures coming out of the black sheen of the vinyl of the disc. Every record was like a starless night, a black silence from which the sounds of others' imagination emerged to create light in varying shades, intensities and colours. Records were these dark slices covered in unreadable scripture broke or oozed into the air when the needle moved in their grooves.Whether as bright as a Queen megaballad or as murky as a Sabbath grinder, it came from the same oil-thick space. No, this wasn't a literal belief, it was fanciful but once thought it held. It carried to CD versions bought to replace old vinyl (99% given away) but didn't extend to anything I bought on CD for the first time, regardless of its vintage. A thumbnail of the cover art on a downloaded new album aids the impression but doesn't revive it. I don't miss the effect of this.

From that dark followed Down By the Seaside, a Neil Young/Rolling Stones vibe that could be lived with but not missed if omitted. After this the strange Ten Years Gone which begins as a lush chord-tuned guitar figure which turns into a spikey and strong riff before sliding down to a plaintive and low profile Plant vocal about a lost love. It's like the previous track which was a leftover from a previous album but without the force. A lazy solo ends in a compelling middle eight and then proceeds to more of the same. There is a real beauty to the guitar tone here and the riff has a powerful cinema to it but I wouldn't care if Led Zeppelin hadn't recorded it and if it had been left off the album and presented as one of the extras I would have listened a few times and let it go,

Night Flight delights from the first; a few high hat clicks lead into a cocky Plant vocal over a shimmering guitar wash (a borderline overdriven Les Paul in the combined pickup position! yum!) before a big chorus with leslied organ takes over. The big young Plant scream is there and the rock textures are tight. It's not surprising that this is a reject from the fourth album with its forward drive and stadium filling joy. The end bothered me as the band that didn't need any lift from the basic chord chord+6th boogie ends with a deliberate groove in just that under Plant sounding like he's vomiting. It did my head in.

The Wanton Song's combination of title, weird hard funk and Leslied guitar solo, desperate sounding lower voiced Plant scream and odd lyric made this song come across as a frightening admission that their power was not above that of the sexual swell attracted by their fame. It's all crawling away at dawn and hiding by the light of day stuff. The funk turned me off but I think there's more to it, now.

The pointless but enjoyable Boogie With Stu from the fourth album sessions and the rambling but enjoyable Black Country Woman (rejected from Houses of the Holy) are  different but feel like twins. It's easy to leave them on but you wouldn't miss them if they hadn't been chosen.

Sick Again comes across like a Stones or Slade cock rock celebration of the groupies with a hint of the exhaustion that would plague the next album's For Your Life. A boogie groove that shifts from a Stones-like strut mixed with a dirty minded diving riff ends in a bluesy guitar voice and harmonica riff that resolves in a strange upward bend. End of album.

So why is this my favourite Led Zeppelin album if so much of it feels like filler? Really, the songs I like best are all on sides 2 and 3 of the LP. It's just that putting it on at Custard Pie and letting it go to Sick Again works. You could mentally wander off and then rejoin the earth for the highlights. They might sound like filler to me but I don't dislike any of the songs on this album and the tension between the sound and style of the tracks taken from earlier years and those recorded for this album varies quite pleasantly. The Rover was from Houses of the Holy but sits perfectly between the 1974 Custard Pie and In My Time of Dying. Side four's mix and match of songs from three different years, even with dramatic changes in Plant's vocal range sits neatly. The heaving end of Night Flight doesn't have time to breathe or the listener to shift before The Wanton Song's aggressive funk kicks in. It's like the joke about Melbourne weather: if you don't like it wait a few minutes.

For me this album is all about the exposure and solution of a mystery. From the time I made my first baffled inspection of the packaging and did a needle dip test that revealed nothing but further questions to putting it on for the first time as an album I'd bought for real and began to move through like new territory. None of my Zep-savvy siblings commented on this one or had even heard it. Strange to say that the biggest rock act of the seventies did not engender the brand loyalty that others did. With my family and this band the affection stops short of the oft ridiculed Houses of the Holy and ventured no further. I felt I was flying solo over these dark coastlines and jungles that lay within the grooves. This feeling was more intense than with Houses (which I heard later) as it had no reputation at all among the opinions of my familial guides. Michael had his copy but never mentioned it nor played it. It was as though the band matured but their fans hadn't waited for them. And there I was a generation later hearing how well they'd grown up. It made us friends, that album and I, and we so remain.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME

I wonder if the seventies was the last decade in which the live album could become iconic. If they were from contractual obligation Hot August Night and Woodstock cast gigantic shadows o'er the record stacks o' living rooms of the greater first world. Frampton Comes Alive felt like a debut album; no one seemed to have heard of him until that moment and his first hit single in Australia was a live track. I hated The Who's Live at Leeds for wasting a whole side on covers of the campiest old early rock songs but it retains a legendary status. Enough bands played the Budokan in Tokyo and released an album whose title ended with "at the Budokan" for the avid collector to create a series of them. Cheap Trick scored a hit from theirs with I Want You to Want Me, screaming fans only heightening the neo bubblegum to infection.  And so on with big album chart bullets from Wings, The Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Bob Seeger, ACDC and many more. It seemed that a band's discography required a live album. Who better than the decade's no. 1 ticket (no rivals) but when it came out The Song Remains the Same didn't feel quite right.

First, it was sold as a soundtrack. The concert film would come out a year after the record and there were infuriating discrepancies in the set lists of the two media.

Second, because of the above, it came to us well past its time. The gigs were from 1973, in promotion of the then new Houses of the Holy album which, along with the rest of the set, sounded dated in the time of Physical Graffiti and Presence.

Third, the playing and singing are nowhere near as powerful as on the studio albums. Plant's voice has had its post IV drop and he can't scream things like Rock and Roll with that searing angle grinder force. But there isn't much in the way of post IV material here.

Dazed and Confused goes for a side of vinyl. It's infamous around the school. Even the girls know about it. It sounds like a mess. Decades later, hearing it on cd I realise why to a detail I didn't at the time I listened on my cassette. The edits in the mammoth track to get it down to fit on to an LP side are clunky and unignorable.

The big celebration that seventies live albums were didn't touch this record. It was old and sub standard. Nevertheless, we lapped it up and cried out "does anyone remember laughter?" as Plant ad libs in Stairway to Heaven at any opportunity. That was actually an interesting thing to try with teachers and it was telling to see which ones recognised it (disappointingly, three PE teachers and a maths teacher and not the hip Mr Symonds who took us for English).

I could doze to it very pleasantly afterschool. I'll admit to liking the extension to Whole Lotta Love with the rockabilly incursions and Plant's cheekiness. But I got closest to two songs I didn't know from albums because they (along with one other) were from Houses of the Holy. The title track is a barnstormer and features some forceful and thrilling rhythm guitar on the 12 string from Page who remains an unsung master of both. The Rain Song goes on but it really is moving and as with Song Remains the Same, Plant's vocal is very strong. The big section toward the end really thunders here. I'll go into more detail on this and its importance in the blog on Houses of the Holy but this was as close to having the thrill of new material as we could get until the last albums came out.

Also, it would have to do until the film came out. As a fourteen year old I loved the movie and, though I saw it a few times, didn't really notice how goofy the fantasy sequences were. Page's is the only one that feels like a real movie. It happens during the dark and psychedelic instrumental section of Dazed and Confused and, though it doesn't really seem to mean more than a very little, it does offer the non live footage moments a feel of the mystique surrounding the band. I'd add John Paul Jones's section as well but after an intriguing start of a sinister of horsemen in eighteenth century dress and warped masks riding through a foggy night it just goes nowhere.

This can be enjoyable still to leave on but the sense of compromise that is often audible and the strange and often embarrassing film that came of it cannot elevate it beyond this. It sits back there in the seventies along with my school uniform and the RAM magazine reprint of the 1977 US tour that lumbered with excess.

Page later went through the best of the live material he could find and put it together from as few shows in the same era that he could find and produced How the West Was Won. I bought that on DVD-Audio. It does feel like a live album and plays through everything the band was capable of and presented in high force. It's a masterpiece. Add to this the Led Zeppelin DV, which gathers some great rarities as well as some richly rendered concerts as completely as possible. The band's most celebrated incarnation (as a live act) has now been served perfectly. The Song Remains the Same received a more respectful treatment with the addition of some missing songs and a few that weren't on the LP or the film. It can't compete with the later releases but I'll still smile to think of this oddity that was both of and below its time.

One recollection from the time is of Wayne and I missing out on seeing Star Wars and deciding on what to do instead. We were being chaffeured by his sister Carol and her friend (name unremembered but female). When I suggested we all go and see Song Remains the Same at the Warrina. The two women showed instant disgust and eventually they drove us to my place and dropped us off there to pick Wayne up after they came back from wherever they went. I did eventually see Star Wars and the story of my galloping disappointment with it is known to all who know me. And as silly as Song Remains the Same gets I would still rather sit down in front of it than watch Star Wars again. But all of that was moot as that year saw me slowly closing the door on this side of music as lifestyle and going through another. And it wasn't the Out Door.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: LED ZEPPELIN

There is a pachyderm by the sideboard. Led Zeppelin (I) is often attacked as an act of plagiarism. There is some mud here and the case on both sides gets into a little special pleading and confirmation bias. I'm going to try to present a case that takes a little from both. Let's see what happens.

The facts are that a number of the songs on this record owe more or less direct debts to other songs. In some of these cases the song was attributed to the band when it should have gone to the original author. My copy from the mid seventies accredited two Willie Dixon songs correctly as well as another as traditional but arranged by Jimmy Page. One song, one of the monumental numbers from the band's canon, Dazed and Confused is a flat out appropriation of a song by Jake Holmes and yet the attribution is to Page alone. He'd brought it from his time in the Yardbirds. While the Zeppelin and Yardbirds versions took the song from a whining tale of a trip or love gone wrong and into rock greatness, the lack of attribution is disturbing.

Why the appropriation happened is not mysterious. The newly formed band recorded the album after a few live dates in Scandinavia and the set was made up of jammed versions of blues standards and anything else they could use to fill a set. The wrongdoing here is not the lifting but the claim. Holmes should at least received a co-credit (the changes made by Zeppelin were profound and not foreseeable from a listen to the original and they do involve a lot of new material). There are quotes in songs like How Many More Times but none of them constitues plagiarism any more than Beethoven quoting a folk tune in a symphony.

While it's clear that there was misappropriation the sadder fact in the case is that those who hear about it don't know where to stop and end up tunnelling into their own fundaments. I've seen Good Times Bad Times mentioned for its use of a Rolling Stones title. Care to knock on Justin Timberlake's door and ask him why he named Cry Me a River after a jazz standard he could never hope to equal? Elsewhere, there are many bone-pointings to lyrics taken from other sources but, boy, that's a barrel-bottom-scrape. If you listen to any live Zeppelin you will know that Plant was not an imaginative ad libber with lyrics. His strength was in his voice and its power. And when most of your lyrics are she done me wrong you're not setting them up for originality. If you keep the charges to substantial musical material wrongly claimed, you'll have a better case.

I begin that way as I can now no longer listen to this album without knowing any of this. The Zeppelin-stole-this industry has burgeoned and become as absurd as Ufology or 911 "truthism". Nevertheless, when I hear the great industrial BAM BAM power chord beginning of the opening track I'm flashed back to the mid seventies when I first fell into the great dark well of this music.

The punching chords are joined by a few percussive fills as though its more sober friend is pulling it away from a fight. Plant enters with a mighty vocal about the days of his youth and for the next few minutes of crunching, screaming, bubbling bass and big drums Led Zeppelin are announcing their arrival. The solo is particularly telling. After a big guitar crunch and a pause Page plays one of his million note solos which eventually gets taken over by the chorus and a return to the seductive opening theme as Plant ad libs over that and more lightning fingered Pageism. It's an incredible first statement that incorporates pretty much everything that early Zeppelin was: large scale, uncompromising, flashy and screamingly emotive.

Babe I'm Gonna Leave You follows with a gentle acoustic minor key finger pick with a descending bass and a near whispered melancholy vocal from Plant. This builds to a fuller voice, continuing the sorry confession of abandonment until Plant screams and the odd acoustic rock descent kicks in. It ends on a dramatic F-E-F block before returning to the plaintive textures with added Telecaster and electric bass. Repeat. A beautiful and affecting piece, this is directly taken from first Joan Baez's cover version and then to the original by Anne Bredon. Page repeated Baez's incorrect "traditional" attribution but it's Bredon's song.

The correctly attributed You Shook Me from Willie Dixon follows with an eerie curlew call of muted and distorted slide guitar playing a bluesy wail that could almost be an air raid siren or a lost soul wandering in the night sky. Drums, bass and blues harp kick in and the dark and grinding song begins. This is not like the purest blues of John Mayall or even Cream, it's from the lightless depths of a dangerous mood. Dixon's original has a darkness to it but the blues melody is significantly different enough for the band to have claimed it but for the lyrics. These are not particularly unique thoughts for an old R&B number but Plant's lack of invention when it came to the words had him sing Dixon's words over the top of the huge swampy groove and that was what drove the correct attribution on the record label. A strong organ solo is followed by blistering harmonica turn before the sky opens for Page's giant gliding solo which soars high and bright. One last verse and Plant circles around a wordless ad lib which Page starts matching and this turns into a brief shout out before Plant closes with a final iteration of the theme and Page finishes it off with a bright flourish.

Dazed and Confused starts without a gap after You Shook Me. A brooding bass descent is descanted with a psychedelic guitar harmonic. Plant's screamed opening verse is delivered with such force and control it stops time. At its conclusion the entire band plus overdubs replays the theme about ten times bigger than at first (extra guitar and harmonica but boy does it sound huge). The next verse ends with a bamming chord riff a tone above and then a section of Plant trading wordless phrases with Page playing his Telecaster with a violin bow through some big delay and amp tremolo. A sudden kick into double time brings a chromatic vocal and harmonica duet followed by a blistering guitar solo. Back into the bamming chord riff and we return to the big bad brood of the verse. Same as the first but it's a good same. The next bam chords start insisting on a single chord as the band lumbers on to the intense finish with Plant repeating a wordless vocal descant. The last chord lingers, an evil semitone above the key. End of side one.

Jake Holmes's original (youtube it) was lifted by the Yardbirds when Jimmy Page was on lead guitar in their home stretch period. The lyrics in this version are still very close to Holmes's original but the song now has the basic structure of the Zeppelin iteration. The Zeppelin version retains the basic scansion of the vocal and, unmistakably, the bass line. What's added are (for once) completely different lyrics and a treasure trove of new material which is substantially by Page. This is a different case to the flimsy one of Spirit's Taurus and Stairway to Heaven as all that's really similar is the scansion of the first few chords of the opening progression; Spirit most definitely didn't invent that descending figure. But the bass line in Dazed and Confused is the same and distinctive; that is where it came from. Yet Page took sole credit on the album label and only after a long legal case and decades does it now read Jimmy Page inspired by Jake Holmes. That's actually quite accurate but still...

Side two begins with a massive Bachian organ piece which ends in an oddly jaunty four chord arpeggio. The drums kick in with acoustic guitar and Plant comes in with a you-done-me-wrong lyric and the chorus is the title: Your Time is Gonna Come. Page adds a pedal steel which is off pitch but still quite lovely. The song is quite lovely. Then it ends in a fade which is interrupted by Page's acoustic tuned-to-a-chord instrumental Black Mountain Slide which borrows heavily from Bert Jansch's Black Water Slide without the vocals. It's a lift but of an arrangement rather than a composition and taken further into other territory by Page. Not a criminal act but annoying. Moot to me, in any case as I always skip it.

There is no gap from this to the equally skippable Communication Breakdown. It's a fast and crashing rock song with an intense screaming chorus and a blazing guitar solo and I've never heard the appeal in it. I will mention the attempt made by the car wreck voyeur style accusers of plagiarism who tried to claim this was an Eddie Cochran rip off because of the early rocker's song Nervous Breakdown. As fun as Eddie's song is (and it is) the sole link is the word Breakdown in the title. That's it. If you are serious about accusing anyone of ripping off other people's material you really should stick to the facts.

I Can't Quit You Baby is an avowed cover version of Willie Dixon's original. It's expert and not interesting to this blues-indifferent listener.

Finally comes How Many More Times which is what I'd skip to when I flipped sides. A big bass shuffle ends in a Bonzo roll and kicks into a delicious unison riff from Page's overdriven Tele. Pow-wer! Plant comes in with another done-me-wrong rants as the business surges below his scream. This breaks down to an even more sinister violin bowed guitar figure than the one in Dazed and Plant screams out a nightmarish resentment of his character's fall into fatherhood as though it's a terminal disease. This picks up with a lift from Albert King's The Hunter (uncredited but it isn't that long a quote) and then back in with a nod to Page's involvement in Jeff Beck's Beck's Bolero. And then it's BAM back into the verse at full speed with a more gradual but also more traditional blues rock finish. This track is a hell of a lot of fun.

At the beginning of 1977 when I first heard this the sound and mystique of it were thrilling. I associate it with the grey skies of early Autumn in the tropics which was the weather on the weekend I bought it and heard it god knows how many times. While I only knew about the lifting later I had already heard the dipping into improv and quoting in the live version of Whole Lotta Love and let that context forgive the band. Mostly, it felt like finally reading that book you heard about so long and having it come to the same life it had for all those other people.

Never my favourite Zep album but one with some of the seminal moments of inspiration that led the band to its best even if beginning from the nadir of plagiarism. But that is less about the music than the claim. Still wrong but also still misrepresented even now when the talented but uninspired bands of the last two decades lift whole phrases, guitar sounds or substantial chunks of other songs and get praised for it. Zeppelin made it to the world's top spot within a year of their formation and were seen as plunderers of the underdog. It's not surprising then to find forgiveness afforded the like of the Black Lips for Drive By Buddy (19th Nervous Breakdown) or the Flaming Lips' Fight Test (Cat Stevens' Father to Son). Such is life.