Date: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 18:44:22 -0500
From: "Mark S. Nyhus"
To: zeppelin-l@cornell.edu
Subject: Good Reviews (long)
Message-ID:
On November 15, 1994, the _Village Voice_ ran a story entitled "To the
Misty Mountain." It contains the memories and reviews of several
writers, most of which are positive. (Make what you will of the Emily
XYZ piece.)
A style revived still bears its original surface, but at its
center are different meanings, cultivated in the atmosphere of now, constantly
responding to the familiar form they occupy. The skin remains the same. But
for the revival to transcend nostalgia, it must hold some kind of new creature
inside.
Jimmy Page and Robert Plant didn't become the world's foremost
monster rockers on dumb luck--these two have a knack for making music big
enough for any number of fans to live inside at once. The songs they
built as Led Zeppelin had specific, often esoteric, connotations. But
most of all, what the very strangeness of the lyrics, the open harmonies of
Page's guitar, and the thundering rhythms concocted by bassist John Paul
Jones and drummer John Bonham provided was room--for whatever fantasy or
urge the music stimulated, whether it belonged to the epic egos producing
it, or the striving kids who embraced them. This is why people hated
them: they took up so much space. And it's why people
loved them: that space could swallow you up, take you in.
So in this season of yet another Frankenstein movie, it's a big
corpse Page and Plant have wired up for the recharge. To their credit (and the
beast's), they've managed to find a new way for it to breathe. In its heyday,
Led Zeppelin invented its own far-flung lands; on their new collaboration, No
Quarter, Page and Plant venture into real ones and find the fit between
their old imaginings and those of the same ''exotic'' cultures they once
treated like astral planes. Reworkings of Zep favorites like ''Four
Sticks,'' which gains depth from a collaboration with an Egyptian
percussion and string ensemble, or ''Battle of Evermore,'' with ghazali
singer Najma Akhtar replacing Sandy Denny's smoky-forest vocal with a
high, trancey wail, reinterpret Zep's fantasyland as a blend of Eastern
and Western folk styles, with rock's custom of self-creation by
appropriation nourishing the mix. Unlike the prudish colonialism of
Peter Gabriel or David Byrne's giddy surrender, Page and Plant act like
the seasoned travellers they are, unsurprised by the common ground they discover
as they go. Plant's singing, particularly, has gained depth from his journey:
the yowl still rears its ugly head, but he'll just as likely try
something like a North African chant pattern--a different expression of
manliness and spiritual wayfaring.
These are the best moments on No Quarter, although some of the
new material proves that the spark that first carried these two off on their
time travels still fires the machine. True, Page and Plant can't wrestle with
the gods anymore--no amount of new ethnic clothing can replicate Bonham's
balls and Jones's four-cylinder heart. And one must admit that the feeling
here is, for better and worse, more mature; more respectful of forces beyond the
self, little weary, a lot more reasonable. But give it up to Page and
Plant for copping to the way their aptitudes have changed, and still going
beyond the cash-in. And remember, revivals feed the listener's blood too.
Here, Zep fans and foes consider the course the mighty ship still cuts through
their consciousness. (Ann Powers)
Quiet as its kept, critics didn't hate Led Zeppelin. That was
just the old-hippie singer-songwriter stronghold Rolling Stone, where Jon
Landau and John Mendelsohn convinced four preening assholes that the
Establishment was against them. Most of us recognized what would soon be
obvious to Teen Planet--the irreducible whomp of ''Whole Lotta Love'' and
''Immigrant Song'' and Led Zeppelin IV. But we committed what seems to me
the pardonable error of not dreaming that the fools who created these
sounds might comprise the greatest band in the known universe. Partly
this was our heedless appetite for content--defined in part (oh, the
shame of it!) as verbal content. Partly it was our occupational
resistance to pomp. And partly it was the inconvenient paradox
of good music happening to bad people. Moralizing by omission--it's
a hazard of our trade, and sometimes it gets us in trouble.
I still don't know whether Led Zeppelin were the greatest band
in the known universe, but I can certainly see that they might have been. They
invented metal as surely as Hendrix invented electric guitar, yet like Hendrix
they still tower over everything they influenced--often imitated, never
duplicated, rarely if ever approached. And as with Hendrix, their triumph was
preeminently sonic. Hendrix and Zeppelin are the great flowering of late
psychedelic culture. Immersed in a grandiose mysticism that spurned the frontier
folkieness, blues-boy grime, homespun doper wit, and Wild West local color of
the original California strain, they bought the myth of the '60s as it is now
misremembered, then sold it back with a coherence and vision that rolls
right over such competing art-school wankers as Cream, King Crimson, and Pink
Floyd. They weren't just dumb, they were genius dumb. And so it is only
appropriate that what made Led Zeppelin classic were two of the three
dumbest things about them. I still won't give it up to their Aryan,
wild-man-of-the-north mythopoeia. But they sure could shriek. And hey,
give the drummer some.
These days it is taken for granted that vocalists can function
parallel to guitarists, and drums can be mixed as lead instruments. And for
better or worse, that knowledge begins with Robert Plant's vanity-of-vanity
histrionics and John Bonham's Sasquatchian tub thumping. Was Plant soulful?
Did Bonhamswing? You might as well ask whether Aleister Crowley stuffed shark
snouts up groupies' rectums. It wasn't about such corny values as soul and
swing, whichis one reason it was only marginally about the blues they raided so
pitilessly at the outset. It was about their own corny values--their sense of
scale,their addiction to power, their lust for a sound humongous enough to
match their egos. Jimmy Page was the known virtuoso, John Paul Jones the
stabilizer every movable madhouse needs. But Plant's inhuman vocalizations and
Bonham's two-fisted clubfoot were the spirit and ground of their aural reality.
Maybe we were right to moralize. Maybe when we immerse in this
reality we're reveling in romantic individualism at its most trivial and
self-serving. On the other hand, maybe the pleasure we take in Led
Zeppelin is just r&r--not rock and roll, dummy, rest and recuperation, a
fantasyland grand enough to blot out a world that remains too big and
uncontrollable no matter how much
anyone moralizes about it. But either way it's amazing music. And either
way it stands to remind us that one of the many differences between art and life
is that in art, morality rarely means shit in the end. (Robert Christgau)
Over the Hills and Far Away, in the longago pubescent dawn, my
world was a half-dreamt thing built as much from Tolkien, Lovecraft, and Hunter
S. Thompson as from the concrete chunks of reality that the usual suspects
doled out daily. At an age when desire and imagination have yet to become
estranged from one another, just to see and feel is to breed fetishes. Mine were
occult: astral dreams, D&D poesy, illustrations ripped from library books about
the supernatural. Girls I knew wanted pop stars; I wanted wizardry, the
invisible rebellion of the internal life. And no one offered a better
soundtrack for my escape into shadow than Led Zeppelin.
For a kid with a map of Middle Earth on his wall, Zep's
hackneyed flower-child allusions to The Lord of the Rings were a secret wink,
an affirmation that between the cracks of what I already suspected was
going to turn out to be a dull world nestled some resplendent other. If only
I could decode those sigils on the nameless fourth record, or turn that
dumb wheel on the cover of Led Zeppelin III in just the right way! Then these
figures would tell their tales: the Queen of Light, the Keepers of the Gloom,
the Black Dog, the guy named (Roy) Harper. But who exactly was going to receive
the offering of that nude girlchild held aloft inside the gatefold of
Houses of the Holy?
The born-again surfers in my typing class knew: Satan. And while
I wasn't ready to go that far, it wasn't clear what side Zep was on: Mordor
or Middle Earth? ''Let the music be your master/Can you heed the master's
call?'' Plant sang. And it's true what they say about ''Stairway to Heaven''--if
you play a section of it backward, you'll hear the demonic invocation ''myee
sweeth Saythengg.'' But as a bud buddie pointed out, who needs backward
masking when you have a line like ''your shadows taller than your soul''? And we
already knew Page trafficked with beasts: Aleister Crowley to be specific, the
trickster magician and darkside renegade of the 19th-century occult society
the Golden Dawn. Page lived in the man's Loch Ness mansion, and while Zep
never tipped their hats as explicitly as others, Page was immersed in Crowley's
uniform of imagery: the silk threads emblazoned with dragons and magus stars,
the SS cap, the slit puffy eyelids that marked his face with a stoner
Orientalism, the Les Paul slung so low it seemed plugged into his primal
chakra.
But all this would have been mere costume if Page hadn't manifested the
language of shade in his playing and production. Integrating folk
atmospheres into hard rock like no other before or since, Zeppelin turned metal
into a moody scrying stone: you could see Faerie in the shimmering keyboards,
the moors in the acoustic breaks, and the Viking hordes when the band's
thunderous sludge kicked in. There's a witchiness I still can hear in Page's
fretwork, something pale and willowy that haunts even his sleaziest
wucka-wucka blues. I remember playing his quicksilver solo in ''The
Rover'' over and over again like it would take me somewhere, burning the
melodies into my brain where they lingered like some druid rune. Physical
graffitti.
In September 1980, when John Bonham's boozy death squelched the Zep
American tour I was dying for, the morning rock jock said something about
kids wearing black armbands to school. I'd just started high school, and I
didn't want to look lame, but I tied on up some ripped fabric anyway. I was not
alone that day: sullen, stony-faced, we were servants of the swan song.
(Erik Davis)
I loved Led Zeppelin in high school. Not because I played
Dungeons and Dragons or took wood-shop courses, but because I was a normal,
happy dude who had friends, played sports, dated girls, liked to party and loved
to listen to bitchen (not bitchin') tunes with the headphones on. I was so into
Zep, in fact, that I traveled to England in the summer of '79 expressly to see
them perform at the Knebworth Festival, which of course was fucking
awesome. I'd gotten to the concert site 24 hours early, camped out in the
front row and waited in the rain through Chas and Dave, Commander Cody, Todd
Rundgren's Utopia andsome other dicks before Zeppelin came on at way past
midnight. They started off with ''The Song Remains the Same,'' which made me
scream like a girl for theBeatles. By far the highlight was when they played
''Kashmir,'' ''Trampled Under Foot'' and ''Achilles Last Stand'' back to
back. I've yet to see anything even approaching that kind of power,
except maybe the Jane's Addiction one-off at the Garden.
Certainly the flaccid Unledded video didn't come close. First of all, the
decision to supplant John Paul Jones with the NBC orchestra and a bunch
of hired ethnic guns is almost as unforgivable as lettin' that gumba get
behind the drum kit and butcher the late Bonzo's battery. But second of all, the
only thing that remains the same (i.e., good) are the songs themselves, which
try to retain their dignity despite all the treacly retreatments. The once
stately ''Kashmir'' is inflated here with absolutely, positively no
oomph, like Plant's aged pecker after yet another shag. Seriously,
Schooly D's version was better. By the time you get to ''Nobody's Fault
But Mine'' (the unintentional Dread Zep version) and what appears to be a
few precious new pieces recorded in Marrakesh (where Plant sits on his
ass in short pants and bare feet), I was literally watching through
my fingers as if it were a scary movie. OK, so maybe I should have
taken acid and watched it with my old girlfriend (the first plan), instead of
watching it with my friend Mike, who hated Led Zeppelin in high school because
he knew they'd grow up to do something cringe-worthy like this. But in the
end I think I've done the manly thing. For 15 years now, ever since those magic
moments at Knebworth, I've lived my life in the past lane, pining for either
Zep to reform or a new generation to do the same kind of thing in their own new
way. But now that both of these events have come to pass, I can definitely say
to the youth of today: be careful what you wish for because it just might come
true. (Bob Mack)
If you went to Coolidge in the mid '70s, you'll know what I mean
when I say Led Zeppelin, David Bowie and Kiss were the gangsta rap of the day.
Thanks to Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, all the hooligans were into the
spectacle of glam and crotch-rock. Passive-aggressive bohemian-nationalist
types like myself preferred Hendrix, Miles and Funkadelic, but the smartest of
thehard rocks were buying that stairway to heaven like any old negro could be
a spider from Mars. Up in Mrs. Slaughter's music class was where I had to draw
the line when brothers would try to tell me that Jimmy Page was a badder
guitarist than Hendrix. Page never meant shit to me; simple and plain I
thought he was lame, though like everybody else I gave it up to him (and
still do) on the songwriting tip. Watching him and Plant do ''Kashmir''
on MTV's Unledded, with all the North African and Middle Eastern string and
percussion cats, I felt happy watching them finally realize a sound that's
been in their heads trying to get out for two decades. Even the filthy rich
must still have dreams. (Greg Tate)
Born the year that Led Zep IV came out, I never gave Led Zeppelin much
thought, because I thought I knew the whole story already. Obsessive-compulsive
airplay on our local AOR station (the only gig in town, not counting the
college station 50 miles away, from which a fuzzy Pixies tune could
sometimes be discerned with enough knob twiddling) carved songs from Led
Zeppelin to Presence indelibly into my brain, where they ricocheted with all the
anonymous familiarity of white noise. In my '80s high school world, Zeppelin
mostly served as a dividing line--between the burnouts, who still fetishized
'70s culture's corroded pleasures and complacent privilege, and the ascetic
punks. My Zep-head friends smelled of spilled bongwater, followed the
Grateful Dead, and sat in a circle musing, ''Shit, I'm sooo baked.'' Not
like the punks, whose rejection of anything tainted by mass culture I
idolized, for whom ''no'' was an infinitely more sensible answer than ''yes.''
Years later, in a college dorm, I rang a friend and got her
machine, which replied with the babbling brook guitars of ''Over the
Hills and Far Away.'' Here was a Led Zep song that had somehow missed me,
and when Cybele ID'd what so turned me on, I gagged. Gagged, and then
stole her copy of Houses of the Holy. In the thick of those long,
bountiful songs I began to hear what my resentment at Led Zeppelin's hegemonic
encroachment on my young life had kept from me. The lazy, rockin' skeeze I
suddenly loved pointed out a middle ground where I could have my cake and eat
it too. To Led Zeppelin, I imagined, punks would get mystical and burnouts
would grow an edge. It made me realize: sometimes, maybe
always, yes is a better answer than no. (Natasha Stovell)
A formual exists for the interchangeability of sex (S) and rock
and roll (RNR), which is: S=RNRC. C equals name recognition (''cred''),
increased exponentially by hype. According to this formula, the creation of
pure sex out of rock and roll is simply a matter of multiplying any amount of
rock and roll by fame raised to the level of hysteria. Some bands execute this
conversion with such finality that it can be burned into plastic and sold
forever. Obviously this is a magical, even godlike, process. Which brings me
to Led Zeppelin.
If ever a band generated SEX on a grand, gothic scale, it was
Zeppelin. So high was their net efficiency that by 1979 it was determined they
had added something like 40 per cent to the world's proven reserves of
Uncontrollable and Insatiable Lust. In fact, there is nothing in their music
but sex, all of it unequivocally male. Jimmy Page's insistent guitar is the
voice ofa man bent on seduction, whose goal is not pleasure but absolute
domination; if you want to know what a real predator sounds like, put Snoop
Doggy Dogg back in the bin and get a load of this megalomaniac. The
rapaciousness with which he plays is guaranteed to lift you out of your
clothes. And Plant is his flip side: regular guy as victim of coldhearted
sorceress, kicked in the balls by the little schoolgirl he worships, shrieking
in flamboyant misery and animal frustration--in a word, PUSSY-WHIPPED. Makes
my cock hard just to think about it, and I don't even have a cock.
And face it, ladies, there's something about seeing some macho
prick squirm that brings out the, well, carnivore in even (especially) the most
saintly of us. Who among us has not, at one time or another, taken the
opportunity-- deny it to the heavens though you may--to fry some pathetically
willing dweeb over a couple of kilowatt-hours of sexual heat, only to dump him
out the next day like so much leftover fat? Or make nice with a two-timing
fuck just long enough to get him into a corner and blast him with a Glock
wrapped in his favorite pair of your panties?
This is the promise of Led Zeppelin. Jimmy Page the two-timing
fuck and Robert Plant the pathetic dweeb made soundtracks for the
edification of young women everywhere, all with the same moral: sex is power.
Love may be democracy, but sex is autocracy, maybe even dictatorship. Sex is
a force of nature, an absolute. They were convinced of this, and their
conviction carried everybody else along, male, female, and shark alike.
Besides, a lot of us like our men on the domineering side. And
while I may stop a few hundred yards shy of sheer bloodthirstiness, I'm not
going to sit here and tell you I wouldn't wear a fur coat, I wouldn't attend an
execution, I wouldn't fall in love with a two-timing fuck--I would, and I'd
happily torture him for being one. So would Jimmy Page, so would Robert Plant.
Suffice it to say that Led Zeppelin's music does not so much
describe sex as raise its spirit. I defy you, dear reader, to listen out one
whole Zeppelin album (with the possible exception of Coda) and not see yourself
and the object of your obsession meeting by fate and fucking all night, chased
by the same demons that drove all those old blues guys mad. How many more
times? As many as you can take. (Emily XYZ)
