Hands up if you don't 'get' Led Zep?

[Gabba Flamenco Crossover]

Sabbath and The Stooges are much more specialist prospects. The Stones are too pop, Zeppelin are definitive heavy rock.

The Stooges maybe but Sabbath have sold shedloads of records. Their 70s sales in the US weren't far behind Zeps.

And I disagree about twiddly. Jimmy Page is constantly itching to get his solo on, you can hear it in his playing. Even their most immediate albums have passages of tedious twiddling on them.

 

[noel emits]

For the most part I think it's quite purposeful soloing. 'Since I Been Loving You' drags a bit but on the whole Page's solo's are fairly tearing. Things like 'Good Times, Bad Times and 'Ramble On' rule, and they're not even very long.

 

[noel emits]

Led Zeppelin, yesterday:
He doesn't play a solo for the whole eight and a half minutes of Kashmir, now that's restraint!

Also, they seem to not have a bass player.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Sabbath and The Stooges are much more specialist prospects. The Stones are too pop, Zeppelin are definitive heavy rock.

Yeah, Sabbath dug their groove very deep, but it wasn't half as wide a groove as Zeppelin's, if you get me (heh, even thinking about these guys gets me talking like it's 1971 ). Led Zep had such a huge range of moods as well as genres and influences. I don't think the Stooges are a particularly good comparison because although they had their experimental moments (I'm thinking of that really long, slow track on their first album) they didn't go in for the jazzy-proggy-psychedelic angle that you hear in a lot of Led Zep, their production values are the exact opposite of studio trickery and while they undoubtedly rocked very fucking hard indeed, I wouldn't say they had very much 'funk' to them, which Zeppelin had in spades.

So yeah, as someone said a few posts ago, two very different kinds of greatness.

Edit:

Also, they seem to not have a bass player.

There's no bass in the original; Jonesy did the string arrangements and here he's playing those parts on a synth.

 

[gumdrops]

i dont like the reediness of plants voice very much, esp when he seems to be trying to power sing. it sounds a bit embarassing, sort of like when you hear some weedy british emcee trying to imitate the machismo of american rappers perhaps. but i do like his voice on folkier songs like ramble on, and when hes not trying to come off as some sort of sex god - ie rock n roll, communication breakdown etc. those are generally their songs i like the most, the uptempo hard-rocking songs, and well, pretty much everything they did except the generic blues dirges they made. those are too bloated and leaden for me. if i hear another person go on about how they played 'the bloooze' i might have to kill them. its blues rock people, blues ROCK! and not all that interesting blues rock either. but for things like immigrant song and black dog, i love led zep.

i dont know if its just me but i barely ever notice the bass in their records either. its not hard to see why jack white thought dropping the bass in the white stripes was such a good/obvious idea.

 

[noel emits]

There's no bass in the original; Jonesy did the string arrangements and here he's playing those parts on a synth.

Doh! I lose 2 rock cred points.

i dont know if its just me but i barely ever notice the bass in their records either. its not hard to see why jack white thought dropping the bass in the white stripes was such a good idea.

That's part of their riffing hard-rock style though isn't it. Where the bass follows the guitar quite closely, it's tightly integrated.

 

[gumdrops]

fair enough but the bass-nut in me says the bass just needs to be louder on their records.

i also find the production of their albums sometimes has 'too' much clarity if there can be such a thing.

 

[noel emits]

I don't know why I'm defending them so vehemently but...the first three albums at least are really not about slick production values at all. It just happens that 70s gear sounds nice but I think they were recorded pretty roughly by the standards of the day.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I can't believe anyone with ears can't 'notice' the bass in LZ - John Paul Jones is a really outstanding bassist, it's just that his style is less ostentatious than Page's (imagine how cluttered and messy the music would sound if it weren't!) but if you listen for it, especially on decent headphones, you'll realise how simultaneously powerful and subtle it is. Perhaps it's just a function of how well integrated it is with the rest of the music that people don't feel it stands out, but if you lend it your ear you'll find all sorts of unexpected funkiness going on.

 

[Woebot]

oh c'mon! 1-4 is the business.

doubters might want to read "hammer of the gods" as an antidote to any q/mojo/uncut infection.

i wonder what that O2 gig was <i>really</i> like though. i suspect it was pretty horrible,

 

[audiofelch]

i saw Page and Plant in some iffy early/mid 90s colab when i was 12/13.. even then and to my innocent ears it didn't quite cut it... Plant's voice must be completely shot, I mean, it was by the mid 70s wasn't it?

I never really got sabbath, give me a ruined Plant over Ozzy any day. Always thought Zep riffs had a lot more funk to them, and they explored many more avenues, pretty successfully too.

Page's solo's are often a load of scratchy nonsense though, 90% of the 'blues' tracks are tedious as hell.

As for John Bonham's bass inadequacies, I disagree, ok, there's obv. no sub on their records, but go and listen to 'Heartbreaker' or something : MONSTER TONE!

Can't say I've touched their records since i was 15/16, and they've spawned a lot of shit, but I don't know if all bands can be judged on that legacy. I think they were a great, fun, sonically powerful bad, and pushed the blues rock thing into much more dynamic and imaginative (and excessive!) territory.

 

[petergunn]

As for John Bonham's bass inadequacies, I disagree, ok, there's obv. no sub on their records, but go and listen to 'Heartbreaker' or something : MONSTER TONE!

 

[Gabba Flamenco Crossover]

the Stooges... didn't go in for the jazzy-proggy-psychedelic angle

LA Blues, mate. LA Blues...

while they undoubtedly rocked very fucking hard indeed, I wouldn't say they had very much 'funk' to them, which Zeppelin had in spades.

See, I don't think Zep had anything like the amount of raw swing to them that the Stooges had. John Bonham rocks without a doubt, but the other three always have this undercurrent of virtuosity running through what they do. In Zep, one of the musicians always doing something unneccessarily complicated - if it's not the guitar it's the bassline, or Plant is yodelling superflously.

Also I realised when I was listening to LZII last night (research, you understand) that I don't like the sound of the guitars - the distortion is really fizzy.

Also played Black Sabbath 4 and Who's Next last night, and I just like both of them way more than LZII. Better sound, more of a pop sensibility, more energy.

Yeah, Sabbath dug their groove very deep, but it wasn't half as wide a groove as Zeppelin's, if you get me

I like your blues-rock-as-landscape-gardening motif here, definitely one to develop

 

[gumdrops]

i wonder what that O2 gig was <i>really</i> like though. i suspect it was pretty horrible,

theres a clip on youtube from newsnight. looked okay. but the 02 is such a horrible, corporate atmos-less venue with nasty acoustics, i cant imagine it being half as mesmerising as everyone seems to be saying (not for me anyway).

andy gills review in the independent *seems* like its probably the most accurate.

 

[mistersloane]

I never understood or could see the glamour within their music, I could care less about their back story, the music has zero glamour for me, it puts me off, repels me, it sounds disgusting.

I read that thing with Bobby talking about never getting Sabbath - OMM I think - and it's a shame, but not surprising. I can go with occasional moments of Zeppelin - openings of some of the songs, but then they just degenerate, the striptease is great, the fuck is awful.

And check out the celebrities who went to see them

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7138311.stm

 

[noel emits]

I would actually suggest that those that don't like Zep go and listen to Flower Travellin' Band, especially 'Satori'. In 1971 they successfully assimilated and synthesized all the best bits of Sabbath and Zeppelin and totally improved on the blueprint, making the music simultaneously more deranged and more controlled. Also their vocalist was a true rock god and not a complete nob like Plant.


>>

 

[Alfons]

theres a clip on youtube from newsnight. looked okay. but the 02 is such a horrible, corporate atmos-less venue with nasty acoustics, i cant imagine it being half as mesmerising as everyone seems to be saying (not for me anyway).

andy gills review in the independent *seems* like its probably the most accurate.

Im assuming no one on here went and could give a good opinion?:slanted:

 

[Dunninger]

I don't think I ever listened to a complete Led Zeppelin album

 

[Mr. Tea]

Is L.A. Blues on the second record? I've only got the first one and Raw Power (good candidate for Most Aptly Titled Album Ever).

I like your blues-rock-as-landscape-gardening motif here, definitely one to develop

Arf.

I can see why excessive 'virtuosity' might put some people off, but I actually really like the complicatedness of the music; the very arrogance of it can be endearing, like the way Jones wrote the riff/time sig to Black Dog specifically to be so difficult that covers bands up and down the country, for whom Zeppelin songs had already become a staple, wouldn't be able to play it. I guess that's just the sort of attitude that pisses so many people off, though.

 

[dHarry]

They go on a fair bit, Plant was always preposterous, but they ROCKED, like, totally, with the HUGE measures of added blooze and funk just swelling the whole thing out to overwhelming proportions. They also had a kinetic propulsiveness that seemed to transcend mere repetition and bludgeoning; something sinister and primeval about their rhythmic drive and the earthy-wooden quality to the sound that undercut the virtuosity... Even the sheer ambition and majestic, effortless execution of Stairway ("that bloody wedding song" - Plant) redeems the folk-whimsy lyrical doggerel and pretension (and check out some gorgeous bass beneath the neo-medieval mellotron flutes, acoustic fingerstyling, and later page-rotechnics), turning it into some immense meaningless requiem for the death of the hippy dream, or a neo-Buddhist spiritual reassurance for the god-is-dead postmodern condition, or something.

@ mistersloane - quite a reaction! What exactly do you find disgusting about them? Non-glamourous... hmm... even the production seemed to imbue the sound with some kind of earthy, mossy, fungal, ancient quality (maybe something like what Eddie Van Halen meant when he described the distorted guitar sound he wanted as "brown"?). And isn't Stairway pure rock-gasm (if you can stomach the removal of pixie-boots and Robin Hood costumes)?