ALBUMS: Led Zeppelin IV (Stairway album 1971); Houses of the Holy (1973).
MVC Rating: Stairway 5.0/$$$$; Houses 4.5/$$$$
Robert Plant’s voice is/was a force of nature. No doubt about it.
If you were a parental unit at about the time Led Zeppelin hit maximum frenzy, you would describe that force of nature as the sound of a thousand feral cats f… ,um, fighting.
To a young boy/man feeling spunky and cocky and awkward all at the same time, Plant’s flying screeches were a magic carpet ride at 100 mph going through tunnels of Jimmy Page spun guitar scales and crying runs, halfway tamed by John Bonham’s dinosaur bone skin beating.
From thrash metal to lilting folk it was all featured in this Tolkien fantasy land where if you spark up the right mood you were transported and time flowed until it slowed to a drip.
Some influential critics, outing themselves as not-so-different- from the parental units, bashed Led Zeppelin. They literally made fun of them. What they failed to see was this was the artistic and commercial pinnacle of the electrification of blues absorbed by white British kids. New soul. Clapton Cream Yardbirds (from whom Jimmy Page came) had already turned up Robert Johnson’s amp tenfold but Led Zeppelin kept pushing the excess, no, pushing the word ‘excess’ beyond the bounds of its definition. Albert King and Muddy Waters set up the white boys with high lobs. Paged and brethren smashed it. Ace.
My two LZ albums (I have more on digital) are indeed classics. Critics came around. Like the Beatles, there will likely not be another band that created a sound so distinctly different (despite the plagiarism and blatant lifting of old blues lyrics and riffs.) They took it and made it their own, tho that’s certainly disputed by certain plaintiffs.
On Plant’s voice: The only other one in this era and genre who had a voice that could make thousands of black birds explode from the trees was: Janis Joplin.
The 4th album, Stairway, is the commercial peak and like Free Bird or Hotel California or Bohemian Rhapsody, the song is an epic game changer. Even if no one really knows what they are talking about.
Houses of the Holy was a perfectly executed escape from Stairway overkill. It had playful reggae D’yer Mak’er, a James Brown tribute, the Crunge, and a dance tune, ‘Dancing Days.’
There will not be another Led Zeppelin. (Did somebody mention Greta van Fleet?)
“Many times I’ve wondered how much there is to know.”