1969@50: LED ZEPPELIN II - Revisited

A cough then BADAH BADAH DUH! The biggest riff in recorded history so far stutters and crunches. Then it's made even bigger with a bass the size of a skyscraper. Then the song lifts off with Plant's vocal screaming in bewilderment about his girl. We haven't heard a single snare hit yet and it's already spanning oceans. Then Bonzo slams another stuttering figure leading to the chorus which is augmented only by a slide with backwards reverb. Another verse with the full band and then the great weird chasm of cymbals, distorted theremin squeals and screams, distant wails and orgasmic uhs. Soon enough this forms from the primeval mist with some dinosaur thuds and a scratchy solo that seems to lose control of itself until the drums bring us into the last verse which breaks for a giant scream and an upward wail of looooooove before the riff returns with all hands on deck rising back to the clouds with its engines crunching and the of its voice screaming into the heavens.

I'm aware of the hyperbole in that description and how silly it might read today. The thing is that Led Zeppelin at their most fulfilled inspired and continued to inspire hyperbole as new younger listeners find their way to them. That's what I heard as a second generation fan: it was big and powerful and the obviously sexual tone of the mid section carried a special cache, once you got over playing it where adults could hear you listening (it was a headphone song). But that's the last you'll hear of that tone here. I've already written enough about this album here. What I'll do instead is pay mind to its context at the time of its release, what it meant to me and how it sounds now.

1969: release
LZ II sounds as vital and airier than the debut for two reasons: it was done at its own pace, not that of the self-funded budget of the first; it was done after the band had become a real live band. The rapidity of the band's success in the world's biggest market meant that they could pick and choose when and where to record and as they were the type of band to improvise new material on stage the great love feedback from their growing numbers of fans forged enough new songs to suggest a new album only months after the release of the first. Extra time and tight time plus a lot of affirmation from their public.

There was an increase in original material but the light-fingered practices of the first album were still in force. It's not hard to see where this comes from: the band had a massive stock of blues numbers to choose from and if the rest of them started up a groove in rehearsal or on stage the singer had better find something to do. Unfortunately, until the break that led to the third album Plant's invention was inferior to his ability to put something familiar over the new instrumental material. I deal with this further below. Otherwise, Songs like the What is and What Should Never Be, Thank You, Heartbreaker and Living Loving Maid demonstrate that a little more concern for detail in Whole Lotta Love or Lemon Song would have gone a long way.

1975: first listen
My acquaintance with this one began with the visit of my brother's entourage mentioned here. I was knocked over by the power of this album and listened to it daily over the break between grades eight and nine during a particularly wet monsoon in Townsville.

After that, after punk and the whole minimisation of rock into anti-rock the band and their legend were rendered the stuff of jokes, relics of their time like tie-dye flares or incense. I gave all my Zep records (including a few deep dish US import copies) to my brother who warned me that I was giving away a stock of good ideas. Then, years later in a different city, I picked up a copy I found at a Salvos and again thrilled at the force of it. I got the rest, as well, and then on CD when that happened and again more recently as his-res downloads of the remastered albums (which are so far the pinnacle of any presentation of the band, no contest). It's still good. It has problems but it's still good.

Plagiarism?
This issue plagues this band and with good reason. Whole Lotta Love's verse lyrics and melody are too close to Willie Dixon's You Need Love to ignore. Is it a rip-off? Take the vocal away and there's NO resemblance. But you need the vocal. They not only used it but allowed themselves to be credited for the song. See also the Lemon Song. They added a riff but the song is Willie Dixon's Killing Floor. Bring it on Home isn't just lifted from Howlin' Wolf the acoustic frame is sung in blackface. These have since been publicly attributed to the correct artists as shared credit but only after law suits or by settlements. It was wrong to publish without proper credit (and whether they did it or let it happen amounts to the same thing). They were found out and paid for it. But the other side of this is that once people start doing this they don't stop so in a very few steps you start getting absurd comparisons that are claimed to be plagiarism. The lesson of this is that no one should be too big to escape the charge, it is NOT tall poppyism: if you expect giants like Led Zeppelin to play it straight do so, yourself, and think before you accuse: there's a good reason why the Stairway to Heaven case found in favour of Led Zep and if you still don't know why after listening with honesty to the two guitar figures you are not qualified to make the call.

Today
I listened to this again yesterday evening and was again taken by the power and confidence of the record. It is a successful exercise in scale and texture variation. From the stadium-sized riff of the opening track to the understated slide guitar in the pre-chorus of Ramble On and much more this is the statement of a band spoiling to get bigger and better. That they did.

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.