Have You Heard

Graffiti, Physical and Otherwise

For our amusement this Wednesday night, we tried doing something that Zeppelin never did: playing “The Rover” live. During the pre-recording drinking, however, Patrick brought up the uncomfortable fact that Physical Graffiti is twice as long as it should be — and that the records which follow, Presence and In Through The Out Door, are very far from being brilliant.

I’m a devoted student of Jimmy Page and his band, having read most of the available books on the topic and having a lifelong interest in Led Zeppelin’s music. Did you know, for example, that Robert Plant was the third singer Page asked to join the group? The first one, Rod Stewart, had secured a gig with Jeff Beck just weeks before; the second one, Steve Winwood, didn’t think much of Page’s vision.

Can you imagine Led Zeppelin with Steve Winwood as the lead singer?

No… it had to be Robert Plant, otherwise Zep would have been another Jeff Beck Group. It’s worth noting that in the early Seventies, Beck and Rod Stewart were considered to be a much bigger deal than Page and Plant. It’s simple to understand why. Truth was the logical progression from Bluesbreakers, but Led Zeppelin I was something else entirely. Page simply saw farther than everybody else. He saw the next kind of rock-and-roll before his contemporaries could, and he therefore was able to create it.

When you think about it, the pace of change in rock music was fairly terrifying in the Sixties and Seventies. There’s a twelve-year span between “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and the formation of Iron Maiden. In between, you have more or less the entire working career of Led Zeppelin. By the time they were done with Physical Graffiti, which is about half “new” music and half stuff that didn’t make it onto the previous records, they were considered to be over the hill. The last two records could be legitimately described as John Paul Jones solo efforts, since he was the only one sober enough to work in the studio every day. Robert Plant’s son was dead, Bonzo had disappeared into a bottle of liquor, and Jimmy Page was strung out on heroin and occult idiocy. A friend of mine who saw their final American performances said Page’s teeth were so bad from drug use you could see the rot from the cheap seats.

Had John Bonham not died, it’s possible that Led Zeppelin might have become Aerosmith, which is to say a completely irrelevant group of sobered-up rockers doing cover versions of their own music and writing crap that nobody wants. Or they could have continued without him and become The Who, which is to say a band without a soul. Instead, Page closed up shop and everybody had the decency to disappear for a while before reappearing as Americana singers/Nashville producers/white-haired gentlemen speaking in posh accents about Les Pauls.

When I was in the hospital in 1988, my high school English teacher, Scott Weber, brought me two CDs: the unnamed fourth Led Zeppelin album and Robert Plant’s Now and Zen. It’s funny how the latter now sounds older and less well-thought-out than the former. The first six — well, the first five and a half — Zep albums are unlikely to ever be surpassed as an oeuvre by any bands that succeed them. You can argue that there were better rock bands before Jimmy Page took his third-choice singer and a few Willie Dixon standards into the studio, but who, other than a deliberate controversialist, would argue for the supremacy of any band to follow?

Tagged with: led zeppelin, the rover

Categorised as: Music