Led Zeppelin was just one of those groups.
I don’t know why or how it happens, but some bands and artists just command such esteem that even those listeners who can’t connect with them will never – would never, could never – talk smack about them or diminish them in any way at all. They are universally held to the best of the best… of the best. And it may have as much to do with their mystique, their public comportment, or their historical roles as it does with their musical brilliance and influence. They tower and we cower.
It’s a damn short list. I’m not even sure Elvis, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones make it, but I won’t start that spat here.
[ed. An artist’s death tends to give their status a boost, but it shouldn’t. So I’m not sure about Hendrix, Marley, Bowie, Cobain, and others. It might be argued that a band’s breakup is the group equivalent of a ‘death’, but, er, no: bands can always get back together, and their former members are still often generating output. When dudes die, dudes is dead.]
Stevie Wonder is on it. The Tragically Hip is on it (from even before Gord‘s death). I’m struggling to think of others.
Maroon 5 isn’t on it. Nuff sed.
But Led Zeppelin is. And in the forty years since drummer John Bonham‘s death and the band’s abrupt breakup in the immediate aftermath, their legacy has remained more solid than the hard rock they perfected. I’ll avoid the mindless drivel about ‘Greatest Rock Band of All Time’, but I will note, it’s very difficult to find listeners who wouldn’t even entertain that lofty label. And if they did, they wouldn’t kick up too much of a fuss about it.
Their fidelity to true, grassroots, shit-kickin’ R&B artists – the very ones whose own whitefilth countrymen summarily ignored – was certainly one badge of honour. Their media reticence – they didn’t give many interviews, and when they did, they weren’t a very garrulous bunch – fit with the zeitgeist and left no traces of silly, prurient or even stale-dated behaviour. They mixed in some cheeky ditties as entr’actes to towering oeuvres, but never anything clownish or sensationalist. And though they’ve served their musical missions with fidelity and a seriousness of purpose, they’ve never, even to the present day, taken themselves too seriously. In an interview with David Letterman following their Kennedy Center Honors celebration, Dave asked them what their songs were ‘about’: “Sex”, replied Plant; “Vikings”, pitched in Page; “Vikings having sex”, capped Jonesy. Late Show at the Chucklehut.
And yet… for all the univocal praise the band will garner, if you asked a study group of even a hundred fidels what the band’s best songs were and why, far from consensus, you’ll fetch yourself a ruddy-faced, table-banging nuclear war.
I think that multiplicity of opinion says a lot more about the roots of our musical leanings than they do about the merits of this great band’s accomplishments. But since Led Zep’s songs are so widely and uniformly celebrated after a half a century, they give us a great control variable to look beyond the band’s allure and instead toward, broadly put, why we love the songs we do.
I’ll riff on that topic in the posts ahead.
