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.
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