Musical Russian Roulette also yielded one uniformly excellent tape: Led Zeppelin. I've not seriously listened to them in quite a few years; well over ten I think. I even fell into what I now realize was kind of an unfair prejudice. A friend would mention them and I'd be dismissive, wondering to myself why anyone would want to listen to old dinosaur rock. This, of a band I worshipped when I was a kid. I owned every album, and pored over Page's guitar work; learning song after song note for note.
Well, I was reminded why I felt like that then, even as it's plainer than ever that they could sometimes slip into a dangerous kind of bloated pomposity. Yeah, some of the songs could have used some serious editorial work and it wouldn't have hurt if now and then the poses were a little less arch, but the magic in the band is still undeniable.
The tape has about fifty percent of the first album, and a number of other tracks from "III," "Presence," and "Physical Graffiti."
Aside from the inevitable wave of nostalgia, a couple of things stood out this time; things that were always known but are now apparent with a new, shining intensity: John Bonham's drumming is peerless, and Jimmy Page got more sounds out of a guitar than almost all other rock guitarists combined.
Page was preternaturally adept at mating different guitar tones to different effects, and at exploring different ways of playing the guitar. There's the famous violin bow of course, but there are also little touches like the way he gently slaps the strings of an acoustic guitar with an open right hand on a short breakdown in "Your time is gonna come."
On a more general level, the musicianship of the whole band is fiercely great, and the production years ahead of most of their contemporaries. A lot of the latter is again a credit to Jimmy Page. I've been listening to these songs so closely this time and I'm astonished with Page's creativity and skill. Although there's a lot less mystery in it now than when I was a kid, there are still moments in which I have to stop and think carefully about how he might have gotten this or that to sound the way it does.
Put Page's production skills together with Bonham's drumming, a few albums under their belts, and a willingness to break the accepted rules of studio recording and you end up with the landmark sound of those monstrously huge drums on tracks like "When the Levee Breaks" and "Kashmir." But they didn't stop there. Page dials in subtle layers of flange on some of Bonham's fills; see the end of "Kashmir" for especially good examples of this. They weren't the first to place effects on drums, but they were the first to do it so selectively, and so subtlely. This too before mix automation. It all had to be done manually, live, during the final mix, which, in the case of those flanged fills, meant that someone either had to unmute and then again mute an effect return (usually a toggle switch), or manually raise the level of an effect send (a pot) and then zero it back at the end of the fill--in time to the music of course. With some of these dense arrangements and detailed effects, I have to wonder how many hands were actually choreographed across the top of the desk. Surely there are moments where Page and the engineer just couldn't do it all themselves.
There are so many details that pop out of these songs. Plant's vocals are masterfully written into the songs, even if he is admittedly not the finest of technical singers. He doesn't so much sing over the songs or to the songs as he inhabits them. I'm particularly taken with some of the doubling and tripling of his main lines, sometimes in unison, often doubled with a third harmony over the top, but pulled back in the mix. The reverb will be subtlely but distinctly different on each track. Page employs similar tricks with his guitars: when the harmonized main guitar line enters on "Dazed and Confused," the effect is awesome. For many years, as a kid and as a less-than-critical listener, all of these textures and sounds registered, but were I asked to explain or understand how they were made, I'd have been at a loss. Well, it all makes sense now, but it's almost more impressive now when I realize how thoughtful and labor intensive it all was...and how for the mid 70s, it was pretty heady studio wizardry.
Oh...right...now I get it: THAT's what that guy in the gatefold of "IV" was all about!
[sorry...very bad joke]
