Led Zeppelin supposedly got their name from The Who's drummer Keith Moon, who joked that Jimmy Page's burgeoning band would go over like a lead balloon — although this account is steeped in myth, like most everything else Zeppelin ever did. This wasn't the case at first, as Zep's seminal first album immediately established them as a raucous new voice in rock 'n' roll, blueprinting their future success as well as the success of three generations of imitators. By the time Led Zeppelin II arrived in 1969, the band was one of the biggest acts in rock, topping the charts in the U.S. and the U.K.
At the height of their prowess in 1971, Zeppelin released their masterful fourth album, a moody blend of impossibly heavy rock, mystical pageantry and barely contained primal urges. It was a financial success as well; at 23 million copies sold in the U.S. alone, it's one of the biggest albums of all time.
Although the following albums — Houses Of The Holy, Physical Graffiti, Presence and In Through the Out Door — all sold well, none could match the lasting impact achieved by IV. And besides 1982's collection of outtakes, Coda, reissues and new releases have emphasized the band's first five albums.
Most recently, the three-disc compilation of live recordings How The West Was Won sold more than 150,000 copies the week of its release in 2003, besting 50 Cent for the top spot on the Billboard charts with material recorded 35 years earlier.
While it's true that Zeppelin's later works don't offer the instant gratification celebrated in their biggest hits, the hidden gems are even more intriguing in terms of musicality. Not content to repeat themselves endlessly (though such glorious redundancy would have pleased their legions of fans to no end), the band worked to refine new sounds with each album.
Physical Graffiti was an ambitious departure from the rock behemoth of IV and Houses Of The Holy, giving free reign to Page and Plant's obsession with English folk, Celtic mythology and eastern music. The band cited influences as diverse as Moroccan battle music, and the best-known track, the Eastern-flavored "Kashmir," has its roots in a car trip across North Africa.
But one of the best — yet most underrated — tracks on the album is the bluesy "In My Time Of Dying," Zep's update of "Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed" by Blind Willie Nelson, who makes several appearances in the Zeppelin cannon. The tune alternates effortlessly between funeral dirge and up-tempo stomp, as Plant groans over the top of Page's surprisingly dexterous slide-guitar playing. Much like with "When The Levee Breaks," another revamped old blues song off of IV, it is the echo-laden slide guitar that drives the tune with a gravity few other bands could muster.
Another lesser-known song is the face-meltingly heavy "Sick Again," pure Zeppelin heft as Bonham gleefully bashes away behind yet another grinding, overdriven riff. The band is starting to incorporate new rhythmic ideas with a stuttering mid-verse turnaround that nearly seems to go out of time, a problem only reconciled by Bonham's brute force.
The new riffage of "Sick Again" neatly forecasts the band's next album, the unforgiving Presence. Known mostly for its anthemic metal-guitar symphony, "Achilles Last Stand," the album was recorded shortly after Plant and his family suffered a car accident that left the singer shaken and debilitated. This gloomier tone pervades the album, settling in amongst even the happier-sounding tracks. In "Achilles Last Stand," you can feel the bright lights of the hospital ward beating down upon Plant as he yearns for past glories both mythical and personal over Page's almost prog-metal stylings.
Similar virtuosity comes into play on the syncopated "For Your Life," which features funk-rock riffs that seem to directly predict the thickly distorted nü-metal of early Incubus. Bonham's steady percussion parts bring to mind Get Behind Me Satan-era White Stripes (an album title the occult-obsessed Page would have approved of), while the tricky, offbeat bass and guitar jibe is reminiscent of Tool. None of which is surprising, considering that Zeppelin is a major influence behind almost every rock artist of the past 30 years, from Jack White's white-man blues to Tool's darker-than-dark hard rock.
But there's no obvious successor to such offbeat tracks as In Through the Out Door's pop-samba "Fool In The Rain." Along with "D'yer Mak'er," this song is such a radical departure from the normal Zeppelin fare it scarcely seems like it belongs on any album. But if a bunch of pale, skinny Brits can steal Delta blues and somehow make them their own, then why not Latin music as well? A blast of sunshine pop from under the dark shadow of the Zeppelin, "Fool In The Rain" also features an uncharacteristically melodic fuzzed-out guitar solo from Page, as well as some deft acoustic picking, both of which belie his increasing dependency on cocaine.
On Presence and In Through the Out Door, Led Zeppelin is almost an entirely instrumental band. Plant plays his voice, barely bothering to enunciate the words of each song, and his new style fits his lyrical material, which has been scaled down since the pompous troubadouring of "Stairway To Heaven." Page's guitar playing has gone from power-chord bombast to spidery jitters, leaving more room for John Paul Jones' mellotron synth-strings on songs like "All My Love."
The melodramatic arena pop of "All My Love," however, is a failed experiment for Zeppelin, trading their balls-out primordial rock for something more subdued. It's more interesting than elemental, which in Zeppelin's case was a death-knell.
If not for John Bonham's death in 1980, the band would have become elder statesmen of rock in the manner of The Rolling Stones, embarking on occasional world tours to refill the coffers drained by British tax authorities and recording hit-or-miss albums. It's best they stopped when they did, since their later albums were inconsistent, presenting these standout tracks alongside incomprehensible throwbacks and sterile experiments in sound. Instead of descending slowly into old age, the Zeppelin burned out in a blaze of past glory, kept intact in these lost songs from the latter days of their career.
Alec Luhn is a sophomore intending to major in journalism. Send your music questions or comments to [email protected].
