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InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
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Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin took the blues, gave it a lobotomy, ran about 40 million volts of current through it, and then set it loose on an unsuspecting public. The Frankenstein monster that the group created lives on in the much more frightening guise of heavy metal, but age has rendered this monster as harmless and pointless as a toothless dog. The legion of headbangers who have fallen under the spell of bone-crunching guitar riffs and ear-piercing howls can point to Led Zeppelin as being the great-granddaddy of the genre, but today the group’s material sounds infinitely more fresh than the avalanche of imitators who followed. Led Zeppelin was heavy, but it also had a subtlety that gave its songs staying power.
Robert Plant's blood-curdling and effeminate howl, when paired with his overtly sexual image and vaguely sensitive lyrics, gave him the image of a sex god from another time. Somehow, the band’s mostly male fans did not find this offensive and were thoroughly awed by the aura Plant exuded. John Paul Jones was a musician's musician who, besides providing rock-solid bass and keyboard work, also fleshed out the band's ideas in a manner that was almost always innovative and interesting. John Bonham was an animal. His thunderous drumming was so loud that it could shake calcium deposits from the ceiling. Thousands upon thousands of drummers have since attempted to imitate his power, but they usually miss his hair-trigger ability to shift tempo, play through sudden time changes, and turn a beat completely inside out. Lastly, of course, is the requisite guitar hero. When Led Zeppelin was in its prime, Jimmy Page's inventiveness knew no bounds. His approach was so thoroughly creative and technically proficient that it is all but impossible not to be awed by his playing. Arrangements would shift wildly in tempo and run through some truly bizarre time-signature changes, but always in service to the riffs he created, not vice-versa. His guitar ideas resembled nobody else's, but they immediately redefined the idiom and established the instrumental language for most hard rock guitarists who followed.
"Black Dog" is a definitive Led Zeppelin track. It had all the ingredients of their sound; an a cappella vocal break, a bastardized blues form, insanely difficult time shifts, a drum pattern that defies logic and a guitar part that defines it. They were not a singles band, by any stretch of the imagination, but "Black Dog" was unignorable, even on Top 40 radio. The fanatical loyalty of so many high-school and college-age males made them the album-oriented radio staple of the ‘70s and the classic-rock radio staple of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Their most well-known song, "Stairway To Heaven", is solely an album track. Even with little output as a singles band, they still managed to squeeze six songs onto the Top 40 ("Whole Lotta Love", "Immigrant Song", "Black Dog", "D'yer Mak'er", "Trampled Under Foot" and "Fool In The Rain").
An aspect of the Led Zeppelin legacy that was impossible to miss was their wholesale tendency to treat pre-existing blues songs as if they were part of the public domain. Depending on your perspective, their reworking of classic blues numbers, and then assuming writing credit (such as Willie Dixon's "You Need Love" becoming "Whole Lotta Love"), was either very imaginative or criminally suspect. Despite even the most hateful criticisms that painted Led Zeppelin as deranged plunderers of a traditional music form, it is impossible to deny that, for better or worse, they altered not only the blues, but the entire rock genre in a manner that has remained unsurpassed.
 
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