I won't beat around the bush here. For the better part of the past decade, I hated Led Zeppelin. If you have even a passing familiarity with this whole, crazy rock music thing the kids have been on about for, oh, the past sixty years, you'll understand why this was such a controversial position for me to take. Led Zeppelin are not merely a rock band. They are The Rock Band, a mythological force of might and justice. The Beatles may be considered the most important band in history, but, in the popular imagination, no one can really compete with Zep when it comes to sheer power and weight. They didn't have a singer; a Golden God graced their (unworthy) microphones. Jimmy Page wasn't just a guitarist. He was a black magician, who harnessed nothing less than the power of sweet, sweet Satan through his six-stringed worship. Hell, sometimes one guitar wasn't enough and Page brought out the dreaded double-necked guitar to pay homage to his Dark Lord. And if this wasn't enough, their drummer was the drummer who essentially ended all other drummers. John Bonham pummeled his way into the psyche of entire generations of stickmen. You want to know how important Bonham was? Watch the episode of Freaks & Geeks where Jason Segal's character learns Bonham died. Now multiply that for every aspiring hard rock musician of the seventies. Heavy shit, right? (Editors note: I guess John Paul Jones was in this band as well. Ho hum.)So yes. This was the band I hated. Whenever I think about Zeppelin these days, I think of Drive-By Truckers frontman Patterson Hood, who declares that he "grew up rebellin' against the music of my high school parking lot" on DBT's masterful 2001 album Southern Rock Opera. Mind you, Hood is talking about Lynyrd Skynyrd and his parking lot happened to be in Alabama, but I know that feeling. When you're removed from the apparent baseline for high school culture (sports, beer and house parties), the lunk-headed soundtrack to those activities takes on a certain negative light. For me, Zep always represented the most conservative approach to music fandom possible. After all, that's what classic rock is, at least in this day and age. Any danger or rebellion that was once present has been steamrolled out through excessive play on radio, television, film and every other medium imaginable. The Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Zeppelin... these aren't primal rock bands any more. They're the soundtrack to our daily lives. They are firmly established chunks of America's cultural history. To listen to their music today isn't a provocative action. In fact, it's expected of you.
Enter high-school-Simon, an awkward theater kid with a voracious appetite for music. After the Red Hot Chili Peppers broke down the dam of popular music for me, it didn't take me long to see through the mainstream veneer of classic rock and zero in on the more bizarre stuff. The jarring politicism of Rage Against the Machine hit more more than other radio rock. The depressive bombast of Alice in Chains was always a bigger draw than fellow local heroes Nirvana. And then I discovered Radiohead and there was no turning back. The irony, of course, is that all of these groups were massive, internationally successful acts, but at the time, such distinctions were important. They set me on a course that I still feel I'm following, searching deeper and deeper into the history of music to find sounds that appeal to me.
There was no room in my pantheon of musical greats for Led Zeppelin. For years, when I heard Zep songs, I heard conformity. I associated the band with guys who were in Youth Republicans groups, who drank beer at house parties with their bros and were destined to become respectable, white-collar corporate employees. I went to college, where my stereotypical associations with Zeppelin were reinforced. The people who liked Zep weren't rebels or iconoclasts or people who truly "rocked." There were the folks who just liked to party a bit, all within the carefully defined historical expectations of partying. Getting drunk, randomly making out with a few girls and listening to Zeppelin have been ingrained into the traditional college experience.
In college, I did none of those things. I didn't get drunk, any making out was most definitely planned and Zeppelin stayed far away from my laptop speakers (although the RIAA did try to take me to court for supposedly downloading "Over the Hills and Far Away"... ironic, considering that I downloaded every other song known to man). Even as I gained academic appreciations for many other bands under the classic rock banner, Zep still sounded like overly libidinous English guys masturbating with their guitars all over the legacies of dozens of unheralded blues musicians. The band remained one of the few bands I could confidently say I had no taste for, whatsoever.
So, how did I get where I am right now, typing away on my blog while "Trampled Under Foot" plays merrily from my iTunes library? About a month ago, two events conspired to forever change my view of Plant, Page and their gang of hooligans. The first, as goofy as it may be, was the release of the trailer for David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. If you haven't seen it yet, do so now (oh look! A link!). Besides being a startlingly well-edited trailer, the soundtrack immediately captured my attention. That's Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O covering Zep's "Immigrant Song." Suddenly, I saw Zep in new light, as a forceful, driving and slightly desperate-sounding band, with songs full of unresolved tension. I like songs with unresolved tension. Now that I think about it, that's just about all I listen to.
The second major event in my rediscovering of Zeppelin was reading Erik Davis' contribution to the glorious 33 1/3 book series, each of which features an author tackling a specific album. Davis chose Led Zeppelin IV, but instead of delivering the expected sermon on the band's unmitigated awesomeness, he hypothetically explored their mythology as if it were fact. Yes, Page really did make a deal with the devil for the riff to "Kashmir" and yes, Bonham really was part caveman. But one passage stuck out for me, when Davis discussed how the endless forward motion of the most rockin' of Zeppelin songs was the musical equivalent of unresolved sexual energy. In Davis' opinion, this positioned Zeppelin against the bands of the 60s, which, if we're being completely honest, were coming to musical climax all over the place.
With these key influences informing my listening, I revisited Zep's catalog. And lo and behold, I heard exactly what Davis was talking about. Or at least, I did across six songs: "Dazed and Confused," "Immigrant Song," "Trampled Under Foot," "Kashmir," "When the Levee Breaks" and, most importantly, "Whole Lotta Love." These six songs represent my reclamation of Zeppelin, away from the beer-soaked hands of my high school parking lot. These six songs allowed me to personally reconceptualize the band as the dangerous, ferocious force that I'd been promised for so long. These are songs driven by monstrous riffs, full of guitar grit and experimental structures. Hell, on "Trampled Under Foot," even the usually insufferable Plant sounds like his vocal chords are being destroyed with sandpaper. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that's awesome!
I'm still not a big Zeppelin fan. Their slow, bluesy songs still do nothing for me, especially now that my college-educated self has a firm understanding of copyright law. Don't even get me talking about the unmitigated disaster that is "Stairway to Heaven." But finally, at long last, I've found my window, however tiny, into something that so many people seem to have been hearing for years. The paths we take to discover music aren't always particularly straight or predictable, but I savor those moments when, after years of being lost in the maze, I finally find the figurative door that leads me into an exciting new musical world. A land of ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow. AhhhhhEEEEEHHHHAAAAaaaaHHH!
