Good god, man, what are you hanging around here for, when you should be making up for lost time with Funhouse - go! do it! now!
Hands up if you don't 'get' Led Zep?
- Thread starter Gabba Flamenco Crossover
- Start date
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, there's this series of little books (all by different authors, I think) about classic albums, and I bought the one about Zeppelin's #4 - it's pretty good, the guy talks extensively about the band's sorcerous, primordial sound, Page's obsession with Crowley-ana offstage and sonic thaumaturgy onstage, all that stuff. There's a great line about how the fourth album is "almost Lovecraftian in its namelessness", about how the band as a whole were like HPL to Black Sabbath's Robert E. Howard, and a very cool psychoanalysis of the music, lyrics and production (with about equal importance attached to each) on When the Levee Breaks, with reference to the events that inspired the Memphis Minnie original.
Plus there's quite a funny bit about some bloke who used to be a massive Zeppelin fan but saw them once when he was really stoned and thought that Page was "summoning demons" with his Theremin in the solo to Whole Lotta Love, then wrote this HUGE book about how Led Zeppelin were "the most dangerous group of Satanists active today" and had it self-published at huge personal expense. Now there's not many bands that have inspired THAT!
Plus there's quite a funny bit about some bloke who used to be a massive Zeppelin fan but saw them once when he was really stoned and thought that Page was "summoning demons" with his Theremin in the solo to Whole Lotta Love, then wrote this HUGE book about how Led Zeppelin were "the most dangerous group of Satanists active today" and had it self-published at huge personal expense. Now there's not many bands that have inspired THAT!
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mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
@ 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)?
I mean, what do they make you want to do? That's what I mean by glamour. What exactly does the sound of Led Zeppelin make you want to do? Go to university?
Yes, brown is apt. They sound brown. Led Zeppelin sound brown.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I think a large part of my dislike for them stems from my first exposure to them - Song remains the same. All that tolkien bullshit, what a load of twaddle.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Haha, oh dear! I think you'd be hard-pressed to find even a diehard Zep fan (and I count myself one) who regards that film as anything other than a really terrible, unintentional joke.
Mr. Plant, I repeat, put DOWN the sword and step AWAY from the toadstool...
Gabba Flamenco Crossover
High Sierra Skullfuck
I was thinking something similar yesterday. Led Zep are profoundly and very consciously anti-pop in a way that Sabbath and the Who aren't - Sabbath had thier cartoonishness (cf. Ironman) and Pete Townsend never quite lost his pop art sense of juxtaposition even when the Who were at thier heaviest (he canned Lifehouse because it was too long and it didn't make sense - so no progger at heart then).
But Zep were not about pitching thier music at the fans level - in the sense that they made such an issue of thier virtuosity, they were about process, not about end product (and Tea's anecdote about Jones's basslines is the perfect illustration of this).
This is homing in on what I find most offputting about Zep. There's a dishonesty here, because their virtuosity isn't a genuine competitiveness with other musicians, it's about building a wall between them and thier fans - in essence, making a spectacle out of the fact that they aren't about spectacle. Hence Zep are the ultimate middle-brow dad rock band, for music fans who distain the idea of 'fans' but still can't do without thier idols.
They do sound brown. There's a real mustiness about their music. Go to one of those 2nd hand clothing shops on Camden High Street, stick your face in the corderoy rack and get a good lungful of that smell. Thats the smell of Led Zep.
mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
"Led Zeppelin will be the headline act at the gig, with a diverse range of performers including Pete Townshend, Bill Wyman And The Rhythm Kings, Foreigner and Paolo Nutini"
God don't you just wish you coulda been there. It's like a paedophile convention.
God don't you just wish you coulda been there. It's like a paedophile convention.
mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
reminds me of my favourite headline this week
http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.6095/title.beyonces-little-sister-ready-to-blow
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Don't you mean "Glitter had good sweets"?
Boring...
Misread this thread title as "Hands up if you don't 'get' Zapp?" which I think would be a more intriguing topic.
I guess Gabba Flamenco Crossover did compare them to other big rock snob favourites, at least, but it seems like a pretty safe topic to take a stab at a 70s rock behemoth on dissensus.
How about this? Kraftwerk got worse and worse post Radioactivity.
Misread this thread title as "Hands up if you don't 'get' Zapp?" which I think would be a more intriguing topic.
I guess Gabba Flamenco Crossover did compare them to other big rock snob favourites, at least, but it seems like a pretty safe topic to take a stab at a 70s rock behemoth on dissensus.
How about this? Kraftwerk got worse and worse post Radioactivity.
Going down now
I got the "Mothership" collection for Christmas, having long since chucked all my old tapes. The live stuff I now find just pummelling (I'm not 14 any more), but the studio recordings can still be rewarding.
The whole virtuoso "we can play this and you can't" thing was part of the appeal for me as a teenage guitar fiend; it was taken further still by thrash/speed metal bands like Megadeth. There's an aspirational dimension to it - if your enjoyment of music is enhanced by practising to become technically skilful enough to reproduce it yourself, which I appreciate many people's isn't, then Zeppelin have a lot to offer.
Part of the commercial genius of Metallica was that for the most part even the fastest, twiddliest bits were within reach given a bit of practice - Kirk Hammett almost never plays anything that's seriously beyond the grasp of a 17-year-old who's been playing for 3 years. That kind of attainable virtuosity is very attractive to a certain sort of teenage boy. As is seemingly unattainable virtuosity: I used to idolize Dave Mustaine because he played things that seemed totally beyond me (I was convinced initially that all the soloes on Megadeth's first LP were recorded slow and then speeded up - they were just so impossibly high, fast and twiddly). Nowadays I reckon I could about nail almost any Megadeth solo, even the very technical Chris Poland or Marty Friedman ones, given a bit of time and effort. But it's taken a lot longer than 3 years to get to that point, and in the meantime I've sort of stopped caring...
I got the "Mothership" collection for Christmas, having long since chucked all my old tapes. The live stuff I now find just pummelling (I'm not 14 any more), but the studio recordings can still be rewarding.
The whole virtuoso "we can play this and you can't" thing was part of the appeal for me as a teenage guitar fiend; it was taken further still by thrash/speed metal bands like Megadeth. There's an aspirational dimension to it - if your enjoyment of music is enhanced by practising to become technically skilful enough to reproduce it yourself, which I appreciate many people's isn't, then Zeppelin have a lot to offer.
Part of the commercial genius of Metallica was that for the most part even the fastest, twiddliest bits were within reach given a bit of practice - Kirk Hammett almost never plays anything that's seriously beyond the grasp of a 17-year-old who's been playing for 3 years. That kind of attainable virtuosity is very attractive to a certain sort of teenage boy. As is seemingly unattainable virtuosity: I used to idolize Dave Mustaine because he played things that seemed totally beyond me (I was convinced initially that all the soloes on Megadeth's first LP were recorded slow and then speeded up - they were just so impossibly high, fast and twiddly). Nowadays I reckon I could about nail almost any Megadeth solo, even the very technical Chris Poland or Marty Friedman ones, given a bit of time and effort. But it's taken a lot longer than 3 years to get to that point, and in the meantime I've sort of stopped caring...
i'm not sure why everyones talking about virtuosity and musicianship, they're clearly rock gods, guitars are axes and they're mystical creatures, with their own olde symbols etc.
they never did singles or anything, their albums are clearly magical journeys into their rock god world. They openly encouraged idolatry, like naughty pagan gods they were.
And as far as virtuosity - for gods sake alot of their records are classic guitar shop fodder.
There are loads of weird parallels and juxtapositions with roxy music i reckon, similar lines of enquiry vs complete contrasts and opposites.
they never did singles or anything, their albums are clearly magical journeys into their rock god world. They openly encouraged idolatry, like naughty pagan gods they were.
And as far as virtuosity - for gods sake alot of their records are classic guitar shop fodder.
There are loads of weird parallels and juxtapositions with roxy music i reckon, similar lines of enquiry vs complete contrasts and opposites.
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
spooky girlfriend
Wild Horses
dispensing with all the 70's posturing 'gods of rock' nonsense, Zep were what they were, products of a generation of white suburban blues/jazz fans that inherited those scenes' propensity for drug intake. Mid 60's, Page was in the Yardbirds, and they just amplified everything and pushed the electric guitar lead to the fore = Led Zeppelin. If the sound of it doesn't agree with you (never been a massive fan, I personally get tired of them after 'IV', in the late 60's they were 'out there' but not psychedelic) then you might prefer Black Sabbath's more prescient-of-heavy-metal approach.
I think these bands made their mark as far as the mid-70's and then got shit.
Let's not forget the endless lyrical cliches and mysoginistic machismo with Led. Unless I'm stoned I've tended to appreciate that music in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way; but these guys were good at what they did, as long as you appreciate them as musicians first, 'icons' second.
I think these bands made their mark as far as the mid-70's and then got shit.
Let's not forget the endless lyrical cliches and mysoginistic machismo with Led. Unless I'm stoned I've tended to appreciate that music in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way; but these guys were good at what they did, as long as you appreciate them as musicians first, 'icons' second.
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
I don't have it anymore but I've got a bit of an urge to hear Presence again. A few of the tracks on there are really groovy / funky in a rolling kind of way. Always liked some of the stuff on Houses Of The Holy too, might find it a bit hard to take now.