Massive powerchords tell us someone is knocking. The drums begin, hesitant and stuttering but take strength form the guitar. The bass joins with the first full riff but by that time the mighty call of the vocals, a barely controlled scream brings everyone in to centre stage. Led Zeppelin have arrived.
"In the days of my youth I was told what it means to be a man....."
This is album is waterlogged by controversy over the attribution of the songs. The controversy is not a storm in a teacup and has a complicated history. There is no consideration of this album in 2019 without being aware of it. It's fun. It's great storming joyous fun as the most articulate monster group to be given the label heavy metal take their place and hold it tight. But there's controversy.
(Note: I've already reviewed this one here. This is about other issues related to the record.)
Quickly: Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You is a song by Anne Bredon, Willie Dixon has two numbers You Shook Me and I Can't Quit You, Baby, Dazed and Confused was originally by Jake Holmes and titled I'm Confused, How Many More Times takes a number of Howlin' Wolf lines an riffs. Unlike the more recently tested case of Stairway to Heaven (which is a bullshit case) these ones were not seriously contested by the band and settlements were made and attribution on the cover art altered. My copy of the album, reissued in the late '70s clearly stated Dixon's and Bredon's tracks but not Bert Jansch's arrangement (note, not composition) of Black Mountain Side. The epic side closers Dazed and Confused and How Many More Times were not attributed to people outside the band membership. The former had done service in Jimmy Page's former band The Yardbirds. Is that bad? You betcha!
Page knew his blues from his elbow and knew the sources of his inspiration. The management might have done the misdeed but really, the band allowed the world to think that these were their songs. Subsequent releases have featured corrections to all of these. My current copies of all the most recent Led Zep albums were downloads without more than the front covers without a syllable of attribution. Now, for anyone only just getting into the band by this method, all songs might as well be by them.
What does that mean for the music? Nothing. The music soars and grind and growls and slinks through the lightless depths of carnality the way it always did. The marriage of Robert Plant's gigantic vocals with acoustic guitars still astonishes today. The singer, guitarist duel at the end of You Shook Me still stuns. Dazed and Confused still knocks you over rudely and sexily. All of that remains and much of it is the point of what Led Zeppelin did with the songs that it variously wrote or appropriated: it altered them forever. Jake Holmes's I'm Confused sounds like a plaintive hippy with poor grammar (I'm being choosed?) but Zep's take is a massive storm of creepy and horrifying landscapes and anger. The Bredon song was done more in the style of someone else who covered it (Joan Baez) and so was already removed. How Many More Times was a demonstration of how far the band could digress from their riff based beginnings and still come back, stronger if torn and scarred. The point of the first Led Zeppelin album was transformation. The band changed the songs it wrote (there are genuinely original songs on the album, by the way, like the opening of each side) beyond their origins and took their audiences with them.
If you want an indication of this I refer you to the Albert Hall footage in the Led Zeppelin DVD. It is extraordinary what a quartet of great players can do.
What does that mean to the question of attribution? Nothing. The songs are still their author's songs and not Led Zeppelin's. When most of the album was initially issued with this false attribution it does indeed make a difference. Time, lawsuits and settlements have set the record straight (so to speak) but the fact that the deed was done will (and should) hang over this and at least the next album. The pity of this is that this set of songs that was the result of rushing into the studio before the band could settle into songwriting was almost all lifted from other sources and then misattributed.
What I like is that the opening song, that introduction to the world of that force is an original. Anyone else hear Keith Relf singing Good Times Bad Times? Change the range from Valhallan to normal human and you're there. The album is as powerful as ever. The filter of hearing it through some bad practice must be on the listener. That is unfair. Early Rolling Stones albums (almost entirely composed of covers) put the right names beside the songs why couldn't this lot? They should have. My advice is to know this when you listen and, if you pursue the band to their later development and flourishing, get ready to glory in some of the most forceful and eloquent music of its era. Recall the taint but enjoy the getting of wisdom. Then go back and hear this and hear how wondrous and thunderous they were.
Ok, this is a PS. I was out walking through a particularly lovely midsummer evening, thinking about what I'd written here and wondering if I'd been even handed and I realised I'd left something important out. It has to do with the decades since the '60s, the more recent ones in which I've witnessed rock music, the music that used to be innovative simply by trying something unexpected and going with it, ceased to be innovative and began to plunder earlier decades for its style and too often lift whole songs without attribution. The taint on Led Zeppelin for doing this remains and can conceivably be invoked by people who celebrate plagiarists of newer vintage. Who's wrong? Everyone. So, here's something to do.
Let's pretend that Led Zeppelin's debut album was released with all the songs' bylines correct. There'd still be a few originals but most of the album would be considered covers from the get go. Imagine that. A band whose live shows (in which who wrote what took an easy second place to performance) made them the world's biggest drawcard in rock outside of the Rolling Stones in the first months of their existence has released this great record of old blues tunes that will blow you head off. Willie Dixon's You Shook Me sounds like a great black condor soaring under storm clouds. And do you remember that whiny little song I'm Confused by Jake Holmes, that guy who claimed to be straight and a hippy? It now sounds like nothing on earth before it, going from a doom-laden bass riff to godlike scream then down into weird valleys of lightless horror before coming back for a second attack.
You see what I mean? The album wouldn't be "it's good but they got a away with robbery" it would be "wow, and look where they went after that!" And that, finally, would be right.
But we are, of course, just pretending.
Listening notes: I've heard my brother's original pressing and my first copy was a late '70s rerelease but as soon as I bought a CD player in the '90s I started restocking old favourites including this one and got the superb (if loudness war influenced) contemporary remaster and finally I have the deluxe high resolution download from an online retailer. My verdict is for the latter, the biggest and clearest representation with a good dynamic range. I've bored too many people on how little I care for vinyl but these really do smash the rest. Anyway...
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