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and you can hear how he swings—
he’s swiping his sloshy hi-hats back
and forth and bouncing the beat for-
ward, less like the archetypal heavy-
metal player than like the elegant mid-
century big-band drummers he ad-
mired. In “Good Times Bad Times,”
the opening song on the group’s first
album, Bonham makes funky use of
his cowbell, and introduces something
that, it would seem, hadn’t featured
before in rock—a series of fast trip-
lets on the bass drum, but with the
first strike of the triplet merely im-
plied, so that the beat falls more heav-
ily on the second and third strikes.
That’s the technical explanation. Most
listeners simply hear the staggered
staccato of the bass drum worrying
away at the beat in an interesting
manner. That swift right foot is every-
where in the early albums. It’s a joy
to hear bassist and drummer working
together in the fast instrumental cho-
ruses of “The Lemon Song,” for in-
stance. While Jones runs syncopat-
edly up and down the scales, Bonham
supports the fidgety bass line with
quick repeated double kicks. The song
has a wicked velocity.
Spitz’s biography situates Led Zep-
pelin’s formation in the context of the
nineteen-sixties English scene. Those
skinny white boys with big heads and
dead eyes were obsessed with Ameri-
can music, and with the blues above
all. It was difficult to get hold of blues
albums in England. You might wait a
month for something to arrive from
the States. Mick Jagger hung around
the basement annex at Dobell’s Record
Shop, on the Charing Cross Road, wait-
ing for shipments. Jagger, Page, Keith
Richards, and Brian Jones eagerly trav-
elled from London to Manchester, in
October, 1962, to see John Lee Hooker,
Memphis Slim, and Willie Dixon play
on the same stage: the adoration of the
Magi. Four years later, Jimi Hendrix’s
London gig, in a Soho club, had an
enormous impact; Eric Clapton, Pete
Townshend, Jeff Beck, Eric Burdon,
Donovan, Ray Davies, and Paul Mc-
Cartney all attended. London was a
busy little world. Everyone knew one
another, and all these performers were,
in various ways, chronically indebted
to a music that originated somewhere
else—the English journalist Nik Cohn
called London the “Dagenham Delta.”
In the summer of 1968, when Plant
first visited Page to discuss joining his
band, he brought his precious records
with him, each one a kind of borrowed
identity card—Howlin’ Wolf ’s rock-
ing-chair album, “Joan Baez in Con-
cert,” and, as Plant recalled, “my gate-
fold Robert Johnson album on Philips,
which I bought while I was working
at Woolworth’s.” In reply, Page played
him Muddy Waters’s “You Shook Me.”
Woolworth’s and the Chicago-blues
sound—that pretty much sums up En-
glish musical life at the time. Listen
to Eric Burdon and the Animals per-
forming their 1968 slow blues song “As
the Years Go Passing By,” and you’ll
hear Burdon, born not in Mississippi
but in Newcastle Upon Tyne, in 1941,
solemnly intoning, “Ah, the blues, the
ball and chain that is round every En-
glish musician’s leg.”
Page—who wrote most of the group’s
music, as Plant wrote most of the lyr-
ics—had no intention of being impris-
oned by the blues. He wanted to treat
them with a strange and never pre-
viously attempted alloy of hard rockand acoustic folk. Acoustic alternat-
ing with electric; quiet verses and hard
choruses—many of the best-known
Led Zeppelin songs, like “Babe I’m
Gonna Leave You,” “Ramble On,” and
“Stairway to Heaven,” adhere to a sort
of velvet-followed-by-fist form. Some
of the gentler ones, such as the sweet-
natured “Thank You,” a favorite of mine,
or the lovely Joni Mitchell tribute
“Going to California,” are all velvet.
Spitz puts it well when he says that
Led Zeppelin “claimed new musical
territory by narrowing the distance be-
tween genres.”
Already experienced in the studio,
Page seems to have known precisely
what sounds he wanted, and he worked
fast. The band recorded its first album,
untitled and known as “Led Zeppe-
lin I,” in September, 1968, in London.
Page paid for the sessions, and the
whole album was recorded in thirty-
six hours. Speed is the dominant motif
of Spitz’s early pages. Astonishingly,
the first four albums were released in
a little under three years. The band’s
second album, which came out on
both sides of the Atlantic in October,“I brought you your Tupperware back.”