58 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022
“When the Levee Breaks” (from Mem-
phis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy).
It didn’t really matter that the lyr-
ics didn’t matter. In the manner of an
opera with a nonsensical libretto, the
violence and the power were all mu-
sical. In “Led Zeppelin: The Biogra-
phy,” a gossipy, readable new account,
the music journalist Bob Spitz reminds
us that Jimmy Page hated the term
“heavy metal”; he derided it as “riff-
bashing.” Led Zeppelin’s talent and
daring went way beyond the capabil-
ities of the headbanging deadweights
who hung off the group’s example in
the nineteen-seventies and eighties.
Yes, Led Zeppelin was “heavy”—to
hear “Communication Breakdown” or
“Good Times Bad Times” or “Rock
and Roll” or “Black Dog” or “Dazed
and Confused” for the first time was
to hear danger, perilous boundaries,
the dirty roar on the other side of music.
Page got extraordinary kinds of dis-
tortion and fuzz from his guitar, and
Bonham hit his snare and his gigan-
tic bass drum killingly. But I liked the
fact that Led Zeppelin’s members were,
above all, heavy musicians; their talents
as virtuoso performers made sense in
the largely classical musical world that
had shaped me.
Like most middle-class adolescents,
I wanted to witness danger rather than
actually experience it. My bets were
comfortably hedged. As a teen-ager,
I used to fall asleep at night to Led
Zep—specifically, to the lovely blues
ballad “Since I’ve Been Loving You.”It soothed me; it still does. If half the
group’s energy was proto-punk destruc-
tion, the other half was musically re-
fined restoration: it was the world’s
most brilliantly belated blues band. Its
violence tore things apart which its
musicianship put back together. In this
respect, Led Zeppelin was the oppo-
site of punk, whose anarchic negationwas premised on not being able to play
one’s instrument well, or, in some cases,
at all. But Page was already one of Lon-
don’s most successful session guitar-
ists, and a member of the group the
Yardbirds, when, in the summer of 1968,
he began to pick the members of his
new group, aiming for a declaration of
musical supremacy. Led Zeppelin, that
is, functioned first and foremost as a
collection of great musicians.P
age, then twenty-four, chose a fel-
low session player, John Paul Jones,
as the group’s bassist (after toying with
the idea of poaching the Who’s John
Entwistle). Jones, who grew up in Kent,
was one of the few bassists in Lon-
don who, in his own words, could “play
a Motown feel convincingly in those
days.” Dexterous, imaginative, mobile,
Jones is always sharking around at
the bottom of the score, hunting for
rhythmic tension and tonal complex-
ity. His parts, in songs like “Ramble
On” and “What Is and What Should
Never Be,” are pungent melodies in
their own right.
John Bonham, like Robert Plant,
was from farther north, near Birming-
ham. When Page came calling, Bon-
ham and Plant were jobbing musicians,
barely out of their teens, doing the cir-
cuits at provincial pubs and halls. On
July 20, 1968, Page was in the audience
when Plant performed at a teachers’
training college in Walsall with a group
of little distinction called Obs-Twee-
dle. Ambitious and calculating, Page
surely understood what he had found
in his singer and his drummer, though
even he couldn’t know that in a few
short years Bonham would establish
himself as one of the world’s greatest
drummers, perhaps the greatest in rock
history. He had a comprehensive col-
lection of percussive talents: speed and
complexity rendered with a forbid-
dingly flawless technique; an instantly
identifiable and original sound (best I
can tell, the celebrated Bonham snare
makes a dry bark in part because he
seems to have hit the more resonant
edge of the skin rather than the buzz-
ier center); a wonderful feel for the
groove of a song.
Bonham was Led Zeppelin, in this
ability to land heavily and lightly at
once. Listen again to “Rock and Roll”lyrics told stories. The members of
the Who were excellent musicians but
not great ones: Moon was all over the
place, in good ways and bad, and
Townshend tended to collapse when
tasked with a solo. They were pleas-
ingly familiar.
Led Zeppelin was uncanny. My
brother dropped the needle onto the
rustling vinyl, and something very weird
began: “Hey, hey, mama, said the way
you move/Gonna make you sweat,
gonna make you groove.” Where was
Robert Plant’s voice from? This bluesy
banshee sounded like no other white
man in rock and roll. Decades later,
it’s still one of those voices—like Lou
Reed’s, James Brown’s, David Byrne’s,
Kate Bush’s—which encode a whole
strange world. If the voice was mean-
ingful, though, the lyrics were mostly
gibberish: the bandmates seemed quite
content to get on with their fantastic
musical particulars, as long as Plant,
somewhere above them, was intermit-
tently moaning “woman” or “babe.”
When you could decipher any sense,
you’d find scraps borrowed from the
more misogynistic blues formulas
(“Wanted a woman, never bargained
for you... /Soul of a woman was
created below”); basic sex demands
(“Squeeze me, babe, till the juice runs
down my leg... /The way you squeeze
my lemon/I’m gonna fall right outta
bed”); and swirls of Tolkien, one of
Plant’s favorite authors (“’Twas in the
darkest depths of Mordor/I met a girl
so fair”). The band seemed uninter-
ested in politics, in the state of the na-
tion, or in the traditional patricidal re-
volt of most rock and roll. In fact, its
members didn’t even seem to have
much of an investment in being young.
They were strangers to irony and lev-
ity; they would never have rhymed, say,
“Lola” with “cola.” Oddly classless and
placeless, they were less angry rockers
than nerdy but cool transatlantic ar-
chivists, cleverly raiding the blues and
folk traditions to patch together some
of their own best songs—“Rock and
Roll” (the famous drum intro was in-
spired by a Little Richard song), “Babe
I’m Gonna Leave You” (they got it
from Joan Baez), “I Can’t Quit You
Baby” (from Willie Dixon), “Whole
Lotta Love” (Dixon again), “The
Lemon Song” (from Howlin’ Wolf ),