Читать книгу Sonic Boom: The Impact of Led Zeppelin. Volume 1 - Break & Enter - Frank Reddon - Страница 10

I was 14 when I first heard Led Zeppelin, as were all my friends. The funny thing is, I don’t recall any of us ever actually going out and buying it, we all just had it. Back then, you could buy selected new albums for 99 cents on the first weekend of their release, so we’d go out and get as many records as we could, purely on a whim, without having to spend that much money. So I imagine we got it because either the cover looked cool, or it was dirt cheap to buy, or because someone at Northern Secondary already had a copy and the word just got around.

One thing that I know for sure—to coin a later lyric—is that Led Zeppelin wasn’t the must-have pop culture artefact that Led Zeppelin II would instantly become later that year. Which isn’t to say that Led Zeppelin wasn’t immediately popular, but in many ways it was a below-the-radar recording that had an underground patina about it, just like the first Led Zeppelin bootleg Blueberry Hill would soon have. Anyone who listened to that debut album when it first came out was in an elite corps of cool.

One of the great things about hearing it for the first time at the age of 14 was that you weren’t old enough to analyze it; just young enough to hear it with an open uncritical ear and intuitively get it for what it was: something very loud and extremely heavy. Not that we were a stranger to heavy: we were already listening to Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly and Grand Funk, so Led Zeppelin naturally fit into that loud and heavy mould. It had a beat, you could groove to it, we gave it a ten.

Looking back with the forced perspective of being a hoity-toity CREEM rock critic for over thirty years, it’s now easy for me to connect the dots and see what came from where. But even after a recent listening to Jimmy Page’s perfunctory playing on early sessions like the All Stars’ L.A. Breakdown and Nico’s cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s I’m Not Saying, it’s well-nigh impossible to hear any shred of future greatness there. Page may have been infinitely more adept than his peers on tracks like The Lancastrians’ She Was Tall but there wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination any sonic foreshadowing whatsoever that within five years he’d be well on his way to becoming arguably—and let’s face it, there’s always an argument—the world’s greatest rock’n’roll guitarist.

Any four year old watching Blow Up on a grainy black and white television could hear how Page’s work with The Yardbirds was a majestic quantum leap in quality that would eventually lead to something. Nevertheless, blues purists will always prefer Clapton’s tenure there, just as hard core rockers like myself will always be partial to the psycho Beck era. But even if you never cared for guitarist number three, you still have to begrudgingly admire how Page took an influential pop band on the wane and reshaped it into his own vision of what a real rock’n’roll band should be - one which he would operate on his own terms, without any external inferior influence.

Having sonically suffered at the hands of many a house producer over the years, Page’s determination right from the very beginning to properly produce his own music would ultimately prove to be the crucial key to the overall consistency and ultimate sustainability of Led Zeppelin’s sound. Not for Page would there be any Andrew Loog Spector waiting in the wings to swoop down and “salvage” his band’s sound at the last moment. Unlike The Beatles prior to their first recording session, Page had spent many years in a studio environment and as such didn’t need a George Martin in tow to make his music manifest. That’s why Led Zeppelin’s superior state-of-the-art sound and pristine production values immediately stood out in stark contrast against the vastly inferior subsonics that Leigh Stephens and Mark Farner had to endure.

Of course, having all those New Yardbirds-honed songs make it onto the first album didn’t hurt matters either—even if some of Page’s “original” compositions did prove to be of questionable provenance. Besides, it sure was fun to watch the song writing credits change with each new label pressing as a succession of ageing plaintiffs came forth to successfully seek retroactive song writing recognition. Or, as he was memorably memorialized on The Simpsons: “There’s Jimmy Page, one of the greatest thieves of American black music to ever walk the Earth.”

But why quibble over a small thing like that when it’s the world’s greatest rock’n’roll guitarist we’re arguably talking about? After all, what makes Page great isn’t his technical ability so much as it’s the robust riffs he preternaturally comes up with—and especially how he mentally conceptualizes them. Two examples which immediately come to mind are his solo on Walter’s Walk off Coda and the ending of Feeling Hot off the Coverdale Page album.

Despite being one of the most moronic rock songs ever written, Page manages to salvage Feeling Hot in the very last minute by coming up with not one, not two, but three different meaty high octane riffs that anyone else would take and milk three entire songs out of. Instead, Page just casually tosses them off into the ether as if they were nothing before moving on to the next song.

Then there’s the extraordinary Zen-like solo during the middle of Walter’s Walk in which Page selects a few notes and then proceeds to weave them into four distinct configurations, each of which is a cohesive part of an organically intertwined whole. Add that kind of advanced thinking to Plant’s creative caterwauling, Bonham’s brutal bludgeoning and Jones’ dexterous double duty and it’s no wonder that Led Zeppelin struck fast, struck deep, and still remains lodged in our collective musical psyche.

Technical proficiency coupled with quality song writing will always make a good first impression, but authentic heart and soul will always be much harder to come by—and always impossible to fake if you want that initial impression to last a long time. That’s why we still enjoy listening to Led Zeppelin some four decades after the fact: because every time we hear them, we’re all 14 year olds who intuitively get it for what it is and for what it will always be.

JEFFREY MORGAN has been the Canadian Editor of CREEM: America’s Only Rock’n’roll Magazine since 1975. He is also the author of the definitive authorized biography of Alice Cooper, The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper, which is published by Sam and Jack Warner. His award-winning newspaper column, Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout, appears weekly in Metro Times Detroit. He resides in Toronto where he oversees the international humanitarian tax-deductible charity organization he founded, Rock Critics Without Borders. Contact address: jmorgan@interlog.com