Boomer Box

Reviews for baby boomers that still listen to music

Needle Drops

By Mark Fogarty

You Boomers will remember what a needle drop is (as well as you hip hop scratchers). Back in the days of vinyl, if you didn’t want to hear a side in the order it came on the LP, you grabbed the arm before the automatic device got it and dropped the needle on the track you wanted to hear (causing many scratches, by the way!). I was a champion needle dropper in my day, but alas with age I find my hand-eye coordination not up to the job anymore.

But maybe this will work out if I only drop the needle on track one of each side of a vinyl disk. (Obviously CDs are much less clumsy to use but you do lose something, what Bruce Springsteen called the strategic “four corners” of a record. CDs have but two corners.) And this way, I’ll be able to give my reflections on an entire record track by track.

Better make it a good one, then! Top 20 all-time, if possible! So I went to the old record collection and pulled out one of my remembered favorites of all time, the first Led Zeppelin record.

Before I put it on, a few words about this amazing band’s history. First off, it was kind of late to the game. By the time Led Zeppelin dropped in 1969, Cream had come and gone, the Beatles were in the crapper, the Jeff Beck Group had recorded its two magnificent records, and Brian Jones was gone from the Stones. The band, which arose out of the ashes of the old Yardbirds (or the new Yardbirds, depending), needed to hit the ground running. Boy, did they ever!

Zep didn’t invent blues-based rock. Nor was their lineup particularly imaginative, being a rather blatant copy of The Who—flamboyant guitarist, screechy blonde lead singer, bombastic drummer. But the band put their shoulders to the wheel and made a new combination of blues rock, one that has spun off thousands of rock and metal descendants.

Let’s look at the 12-inch package first. Pointillist rendition of the Hindenberg crashing, mildly shocking in its day. On the back, the four lads in an orangey-blur (to show you how recently they had separated from the Yardbirds fold, Yardbird Chris Dreja took the group photo!). Song credits, in type big enough to read (unlike CD insert cards).

Okay! Needle drop accomplished without making a new scratch. Here’s where the miraculous nature of Zeppelin becomes clear—they are themselves, fully mature, from the first notes of the first track. It’s as if they are born, fully grown, out of the forehead of Zeus. “Good Times Bad Times” isn’t a classic rock and roll song, but it is classic Zeppelin. Right from the break, in which Jimmy Page on guitar and the redoubtable John Bonham on drums chase each other playfully, daring each other to greatness, this is Led Zeppelin in all its might and glory. Page even styles on the fade, in an excess of rock zeal that is touching and memorable.

Now, for something completely different. The first great Zeppelin performance is next, the brooding, acoustic “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.” This is a thrilling performance, recorded crystal clear and loud. Page’s crisp acoustic work is brave and memorable, slowly unfolding and building over six minutes and forty seconds of time and framing some sublime rock riffs underscored by the thunderous Bonham and a trippy, aural synthesizer wash. The song is attributed to “traditional,” but I’ve never heard another version of it before or since, so I’m going to attribute it to Zeppelin tradition unless I hear otherwise.

This actually brings up an important point as we come to the third track on the side, Willie Dixon’s “You Shook Me.” This is a slow blues but zepped up with a longish keyboard vamp followed by harmonica, playing against traditional blues format but right at home in sixties blues rock. (There was a guy named Lee Michaels who did a whole album, Heavy, where the keyboard was the only instrument besides the drums, played by “Frosty,” Bartholomew Smith-Frost.) Plant’s yowly vocals make the song, and at the end he does some fine call and response scatwork with Page’s guitar.

Dixon is one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, having played bass in Howlin’ Wolf’s blues band and then practically inventing rock bass behind Chuck Berry on many of Chuck’s “great 28.” While Zep properly credited Dixon here (and for “I Can’t Quit You Baby” on side 2), they were accused back in the day of misappropriating songwriter credits from old bluesmen. While the charges were settled, this seems beyond the pale especially considering those old masters were still alive back then.

Ending side one, the second of the four corners of the LP (a poetic trope since records of course were round) would anchor any record, anytime. It is “Dazed and Confused,” an absolutely giddy exercise in blues-rock abandonment, featuring a wonderful keening sound from Page and speed-up tempo changes for the breaks driven by who else, the impassioned Bonzo. Zeppelin’s embellished soundscapes are like the painter’s wash that lies underneath his masterpiece. And to listen to Page and Bonzo chase each other down these measures is to capture some of rock’s essence in a bottle. Plant’s vocals go over the top, for the first time but definitely not the last. What, is the side over already?

Okay, there’s going to be a slight delay between sides as I discover the sound isn’t coming through one speaker and I have been listening to a new mix, added to my memories of the original. I have to hunker down and try to remember some ancient wirings, finding an unconnected ground wire and realizing there’s no place to attach it to on the head—I can remember a lot of time when I was young messing around with wires and I’m too old for it now. So after losing the sound in both speakers, I settle for just one and resume listening after the needle drop for side two. Then I figure it out, and play the side again!

I realize now that side two is set up similarly to side one. We start off with the semi-acoustic “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” another crisp acoustic performance by Page snuggled into an electric arrangement, and another memorable riff. Maybe he got this style from Pete Townshend of the Who but Page makes remarkable use of the acoustic guitar as a lead hard rock instrument, outdoing Pete’s rocket strumming to open “Pinball Wizard,” say.

Then even more remarkably, an acoustic spotlight for Page is next, on “Black Mountain Side.” I used to think this song was a sorbet, a palate cleanser between killer rock riffs, but listening to it now it is quite remarkable, showing Zep’s first foray into Eastern modes. At times as pretty as a Nick Drake composition, but at times an edgy rock riff, the notes beating against Viram Jasani’s tabla accompaniment. It is a remarkable song all on its own. I also hear some pops from the forty-year old vinyl, there’s something I can do without!

With an emphatic bang the music shifts from eastern modality to western rock and roll, as the jackhammer riff that opens “Communication Breakdown” blares out. Simplicity itself, this riff becomes classic through the speed and sync it’s delivered by the three players. Plant is howling like a banshee on this one, completely vanquishing his original mantle as a Daltry look-alike. Every hard rock singer since him has listened to Robert Plant sing and either imitated him or made his own accommodation with the man’s greatness.

“I Can’t Quit You Babe” is another Dixon slow blues, this one also informed by Plant’s soaring dog whistle of a voice. As with “You Shook Me” on side one, it is a slow setup for a kicking closer for the fourth corner of the record, “How Many More Times.”

As a kid I used to pore over record covers, even down to the time clockings. This one is marked at 3:30, and though I’ve never put a stopwatch to it the song seems much longer than that. It has three distinct sections to it (not unlike some Jimi Hendrix songs), weird and hypnotic guitar effects, another energized Plant vocal performance, and Bonzo goes to town with some thunderous rides and splashes at the end. Wow! By the end of your first listen back in 1969, you knew you were in the presence of greatness.

Give some credit to the understated John Paul Jones on bass, as well. Unlike his counterpart in the Who, John Entwistle, Jones knows enough to stay out of the space between Page and Bonham while fully articulating the bottom clef for the band. Zep didn’t need a fourth virtuoso (I add Plant into the list) and Jones complemented rather than trying to outshine.

To my mind this record and Fresh Cream are the two best records from the British blues-rock playbook. Cream and Zep brought some bombastic electricity and showoff virtuosity to take a second look at a classic American idiom.

I was fully along for the Zeppelin ride through the fantastic follow-up record, the decent third and the terrific fourth album, which delightfully was called by different names and included “Rock and Roll” and “Stairway to Heaven,” which is a song I can say I have never tired of over the years. But after that, as they drifted into more Eastern music, dabbled in the occult, and followed the path of excess toward that rarest of things, the palace of wisdom, I lost my affinity for Zep. I will admit I was wrong about “Kashmir,” which is a great, great song though I hated it as a kid for making me dizzy. But as Page got more indulgent and Bonzo’s thunderous turned toward ponderous, I left Led Zeppelin behind.

Still, I count them among the greatest of all rock bands. Certainly their influence, on both good and bad bands, is surpassed only by the Beatles and the Stones, so they are in august company indeed. And at their best they were grand stylists, who knew that rock should be loud and wild and fast and occasionally irritating. Maybe they got to that palace of rock wisdom after all, just beyond Kashmir and to the left of the Mississippi Delta.

Copyright 2008 Mark F. Fogarty

More Boomer Box columns by Mark Fogarty