The Thin Side of Led Zeppelin's Heavy

British Post-Blues Outfit's Peculiar Pretense Hampers Box Set

Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin: Remasters. Atlantic, 1990.

The Byrds, The Byrds. Columbia, 1990.

from: the Boston Phoenix, December 21, 1990

John Bonham (1948-1980) would have turned 76 at the end of this month (May 31). As a drummer he had chops beyond his years, and ears as big as any Page riff. When I covered Led Zeppelin’s mandatory box set release in 1990, it changed how I heard all those albums…

ALTHOUGH ITS WEAKNESS was the thematic long-form album concept, Led Zeppelin never paraded itself as a singles band (they released singles only in the US). Guitarist and producer Jimmy Page's enhanced studio sorcery lay in how he strung "album" tracks (a new idea) together into mixes that became larger arcs of sound and drew attention from the band's main flaw: they didn't really have many big thematic ideas. Theirs was the triumph of the aural disguised as the thoughtful.

Even now, after years of Zep-bashing by the critics—and years of undiminished sales—it still doesn't look like a bad trade-off. As cock rock goes, you can't pack more wrecking-ball ballast than Jimmy Page's chopper squadron of guitars, John Paul Jones' incomparably inventive (and invisible) ground support, and John Bonham's bottom-heavy drum patterns—he moved through songs like a wayward tank, firing at will.

But the new homonymous box set on Atlantic (four CDs, six LPs, four cassettes) turns the Zep's mere sleight of hand into a Trojan-horse routine. It's bad enough that what began as a fresh style of brazen, inventive aural assault has become heavy metal cliché. Now a series of impeccably produced, path-breaking individual albums has become a bloated box, the product of holiday corporate bingeing.

Led Zeppelin even turned the thumping they routinely took from critics into a kind of debauched pride. Now Zep get the last laugh by exposing their contempt for rock criticism via their own liner notes…

As the supposedly authoritative map to Zep's legend, this blockbuster killer-diller bombshell begs questions. What is the point of this stupendous, unforgettable, unassailable collection of work by rock's most dinosaur-like dinosaur? How to divvy up 54 "album" classics, pack in a couple of unreleased goodies, and come off with a hype that lures consumers away from the original, and superior, ten albums already on CD? Or, more to the point—how to sustain your Zep jones through four CDs that undermine this band's strengths rather than enriching them?

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more missing bridges

• “Zeppelin Rising… Slowly,” by Cameron Crowe (Rolling Stone cover, 1976)

• Consumer Guide entries on Led Zeppelin, by Robert Christgau (Village Voice, 1969-2003)

• "Led Zeppelin Redux," by Chris Salewicz (Creem, 1979)

• "When Giants Walked the Earth," by Mick Wall (book excerpt)

• “Jimmy Pages Talks to Nick Kent,” (New Musical Express, 1973)

• “Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts: The Led Zeppelin circus is back,” by Lisa Robinson (Creem, 1973)

• Joyce Millman goes to LiveAid (“…because Led Zeppelin”), (Boston Phoenix, 1985); always more Millman

• “Wreckers of Civilization,” by Jess Harvill (“…two studio-obsessed genius-hacks, along with two teenagers who lucked into a ride on Charlie Bucket’s golden ticket, one a Neanderthal lorry driver with Paul Bunyan-sized drumsticks, the other a praying mantis in a fright wig…”) (Seattle Weekly, 2006)

• Eddie Cochran encores, 1970

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standing Os

John McWhorter in the New York Times wrote about standing ovation ubiquity, which fetches editorials roughly every 10-15 years (“But the mundane problem is that if everybody around you stands up, then 1) you can’t see the curtain call and 2) you are facing a wall of butts…”) This problem proves more American than European, although it depends on the act. I’ve seen some very weak performances get raves and encores. Last month I heard Hilary Hahn play the Brahms Violin Concerto with the BSO at Symphony Hall, frustrating only because it had standing O merit, and won its Bach encore, but felt like routine exclamation. Ian Leslie, who writes The Ruffian, wrote his own essay on the same topic, so now we have a glut of standing ovations and a glut of essays on standing ovations.

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in the ear

Michaelangelo Matos favors the Ramones above the Stooges in his National Recording Registry list:

“For me, Ramones still tracks because (a) its sense of headrush was/is so screechingly headlong and unrelenting, whereas the Stooges had way more rhythmic give than Johnny-Joey-Dee Dee-Tommy; and (b) that was the literal thing that popped into mind when I heard it the first time, when it was playing at Let It Be Records in downtown Minneapolis. I’m not the only person I know who heard it that first time and was shocked that it was on a CD…”

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audio redeems film

“I would have expanded the Beatles and broken them and gotten their pants off and stopped them being God, but it didn’t work...”—John Lennon on Let It Be, remastered by Peter Jackson on Disney+, quoted in “Can You Hear Me Now?” truthdig, May 8, 2024

And this story about the “Abbey Road Reunion” from 2006 features Steve Albini on EMI (mp3)

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big in japan

Japanese musician Minako Ishikawa drums along with Ringo and many others on this Instagram account. Including “Funky Drummer.”

Minako Ishikawa

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playlist of the month

riley rock trailmix, June 2024

The original “Dazed and Confused” by Jake Holmes, “Something in the Air,” by Thunderclap Newman, produced by Pete Townsend, from Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, Mitch Ryder and Detroit Wheels cover Lou Reed’s “Rock’n’Roll,” Ken Boothe covers “Mustang Sally,” Judith Hill goes live, nationwide in “Flame,” Chapelle Roan’s “Hot to Go!” (OH YES), and The Drive-By Truckers cover “Moonlight Mile.” Also: Cindy Lee, Diamond Jubilee (zip file), see Pitchfork.

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noises off

• Plumb the archives for more on solo Beatles lists, Taylor Swift’s Multiplex, and Vernon Reid’s Living Colour.

• riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link