Читать книгу Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict - Seb Hunter - Страница 19

Led Zeppelin were the daddies of us all. They were the biggest, the loudest, had the longest songs, went on the longest tours, had the longest instrumental solo spots, had the highest-pitched singer, had the best and thinnest guitar player, took the most drugs, shagged the most groupies, were the first to have their own private jet, had the most songs about knights and goblins and stuff, and, most importantly of all, sold far and away more records than anyone else of the period.

They came out of the ashes of the late 60s and ripped off old blues standards shamelessly but with virtuosic brio. The only weak link was singer Robert Plant, who looked the part with his puffed open chest and leonine mane, but who sang too high and too squawkily, and wrote silly lyrics, worse than Noddy Holder. But they conquered the world with their first ever tour – as simple as that – the crowds had never heard anything like it before. The Zep were the first to achieve rock’s definitive critical mass; to master its liberational equation: Blues + Power = Destination.

Led Zeppelin were so big and famous that when they got to their fourth album they didn’t even bother to give it a name, or even put their name on the outside record sleeve. It says a lot about the doggedness of the Metal community that people still row about what to call this fourth album. Seeing as the Zep called their first record 1, their second 2, and third 3, the argument for calling it 4 would appear overwhelming. But calling it 4 in front of a Zeppelin diehard provokes howls of protest. They know it as The Four Symbols. Others call it Zoso. Some say it has no name. All you need to know is that it’s the one with ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on it, the one you’ve probably got. It’s almost beyond seminal. It starts off with ‘Black Dog’, which is really hard to play on the guitar and is about sex. It’s followed by ‘Rock and Roll’, which is hard to follow at the beginning if you’re a guitarist and you’re trying to count yourself in, and is about sex too, and is really hard to sing if you’re playing it in the right key. Then it’s the medieval epic ‘Battle of Evermore’, which is full of wailing and mandolins and is profound and hard to play on the guitar (and the mandolin). Then it’s time to settle back for the main attraction.

‘Stairway to Heaven’ is perhaps the most famous rock song of all time. It goes on for about 15 minutes and has many different parts; it’s like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ but slightly less embarrassing. ‘Stairway’ is a song about nothing really. Plant (known affectionately in Metal circles as Percy) wrote some of the words with a hangover a few minutes before he was due to record them. For a song so famous, few other artists have had the nerve to record their own interpretation. Those who have (Dread Zeppelin, Rolf Harris, Dolly Parton) have produced a mixed set of results. Even Percy hasn’t got much to say about the song any more. ‘I was a kid when I wrote that,’ he says these days, dismissively.

After this, the Zep got even bigger, and they started to give their albums names again – a sign of insecurity if ever there was one. Punk arrived, and everybody assumed the Zep would be one of the first to fall, but instead they ran away to America and played three-hour sets with models of Stonehenge onstage. In the end neither punk nor their own bloated weight killed them: they were killed by Death. The best drummer ever, John Bonham (known affectionately in Metal circles as Bonzo), died the archetypal Metal death, going the same way as Bon Scott from the DC and several others: he choked on his own vomit while sleeping. He died in 1980, and the rest of the Zep did the right thing and broke up the band. To their credit, they still haven’t sullied their legacy by reforming, although they’ve come mighty close over the years, and probably will some day, but that’s OK because that’s what people do. People should be less precious about shit like that.

Black Sabbath were punk before punk was invented, but without sounding much like it. OK, they had long greasy hair and moustaches, and dressed in black, were obsessed with crucifixes, wrote songs about witches and stuff and were probably Satanists, but the principle behind the noise they made, and their attitude while making it, was punk all the way. All four of the Sabs were from Birmingham, and all were really dodgy, especially their delinquent young vocalist (in Metal, always use ‘vocalist’ rather than ‘singer’), the deadly Ozzy Osbourne. The noise they made was instantly terrifying. If you can imagine getting on the Titanic (before it sank), stripping out all its decks and cabins and everything until you’ve just got the gigantic iron shell, and then in the middle of the night scraping something rusty and fetid along the bottom, for hours, then you’ve got the raw effect of the sound of Black Sabbath. They did a few ballads too, though these weren’t ballads so much as funereal dirges, which provoked suicidal urges among those unconditioned to their sound. They scared people, and people love to be scared, so the Sabs became enormous.

The Sabs were bolder than the Zep when it came to naming their fourth record – they bit the bullet and decided to give it a name: Volume 4. Like the Zep, it was their best and most famous album. It came out in 1972 and included a song called ‘Supernaut’, which has, to my ears, the greatest riff of all time. And it’s these riffs that turned the Sabs from a modest blues band into bona fide Princes of Darkness. Tony Iommi, guitarist and songwriter (once described by the editor of Melody Maker as looking like ‘a gypsy violinist in an Earls Court pizza parlour, or more accurately, like the Italian contestant in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest’; Iommi later punched him), is the all-time Master of the Riff. Those thick slabs of chords, jagged grinding motifs, clanging statements of evil intent, were Iommi’s alone. So Tony laid down one of those, Bill and Geezer (drums and bass) doomed it out behind him, and at the front, bellowing the runic catechisms, was Ozzy himself. He wasn’t a great singer, still isn’t, but listening to their early albums there’s only one man for the job – though if foghorns were able to enunciate they could’ve used one of those instead.

The Sabs were always dogged by allegations of Satanism. It was an image they did little to dispel – why would they want to mess with their mystique? Iommi rebuffed the accusations by stating boldly: ‘We don’t do any sacrifices onstage.’ This kept people off their back for a while, but not for long. When Ozzy left the group in 1977, worn out from drunkenness and a recent death in his family, the Sabs ploughed on with another singer. Then another, and another. Altogether, if we come right up to date, they’ve had nine different singers, not to mention several bass players and drummers. Only Tony has remained at the helm throughout, keeping the Sabbath fires burning. And for that, surely, we have to salute him.

The third band in this Holy Trinity, Deep Purple, have had so many members that I can’t be bothered to name them, and that’s before we get to all the offshoot bands like Rainbow, Whitesnake and Dio. The Purps were a middle-class group, there were five of them, and one of those played the organ. I never liked them – they had an organ. The Purps didn’t set out to be Heavy Metal (they originally consisted of just the old drummer from the Searchers, and then he found a keyboard player to give him a hand), but after a while they couldn’t help themselves. The man in charge of Deep Purple was the legendary ‘Man in Black’, Ritchie Blackmore (not Johnny Cash). He was a great guitar player, but a guy with issues, and a legendarily short fuse.

The Purps named their fourth album Concerto for Group and Orchestra. It was singer Ian Gillan’s first with the band, and hardly an auspicious start. It was recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and it came with Movements. Odd as it sounds, it was only after this ambitious call-to-arms that they really got into gear and produced the body of work that gets connoisseurs into such a froth.

In Rock, Machine Head, Fireball, Made in Japan: don’t those names raise the hairs on the back of your neck? These are true foundation blocks of the catacombs of rock. Every second-hand record shop and record fair is virtually obliged to have a set of these albums somewhere within its midst, each for sale at a stone-cold 50 pence. Their sleeve designs should be etched on to your retinas. Which is the one that replaces the American presidents’ faces of Mount Rushmore with the Purps themselves? I raise an eyebrow at you if you don’t know this one. (In Rock.)

The Purps’ sound was actually very traditional. Ian Gillan was a true blue, straight down the line, classic Metal singer, and he had a decent set of pipes on him, but there was none of the spark, none of the pace-setting characterised by the blazing Zep or the grinding Sabs. The Purps were good guys; they could be depended on to churn out the tunes, crank up the juice, dust down their chops, crank up their chops, and dust down the juice, but they never had a dimension all of their own. On a good night, Blackmore and organist Jon Lord would ‘duel’, sometimes for up to 20 minutes, and the loser would get their amps blown up by the road crew afterwards. Not really.

The Purps’ most notorious moment came as they recorded their seminal Machine Head album in Switzerland. The band observed Montreux casino burn down during a Frank Zappa concert and the smoke from the fire drifting over the lake inspired one of the most famous Metal songs ever, ‘Smoke on the Water’. The riff is basic and dead easy to play and the whole thing goes on way too long, but to this day ‘Smoke’ remains the most played air guitar track in the history of rock. Not the whole song, just the opening bit, the good bit.

Blackmore and Gillan never really hit it off, though, and after this run of classic albums Gillan left the group to form his own band, which he called Gillan. The Purps replaced him with David Coverdale, who was soon to leave to form Whitesnake, but Blackmore remained unsatisfied and so left himself to form Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio, who then fell out with Blackmore and left to join Black Sabbath for a while and then form his own band, which he called Dio. Blackmore called in Graham Bonnet, but he didn’t last long and was replaced by Joe Lynn Turner, who, although getting on better with Blackmore than his predecessors, was less of a hit with the record-buying public. Their sales tumbled. In the meantime, Gillan had disbanded his own band, thinking Blackmore was about to recall the Purps, but he wasn’t, so Gillan joined Black Sabbath for a while instead. Only then did Blackmore phone him up, and, at last, in 1984, the Purps were back.

Then they did this merry-go-round all over again, and then probably one more time after that.

Ritchie Blackmore is currently performing a mixture of folk and medieval music, playing the mandolin dressed up as a druid with a pointy black hat and a moustache with his wife in an outfit called Blackmore’s Night.

They’re doing quite well.

The Purps are touring the world without him.

Here are some notes on a few more big 70s bands that crossed my path.

Uriah Heep – The Heep. Led by the interminable Mick Box. Got through scores of drummers. Début album was called Very ’eavy, Very ’umble. All nearly died of an electric shock onstage in Dallas in ’76. First Metal band to play in Moscow. Still going. Which album should you buy? Still ’eavy, Still Proud: Two Decades of Uriah Heep.

Thin Lizzy – Invented the classic ‘twin lead guitar’ sound that I mistakenly considered Iron Maiden better at.

Budgie – This posse of Welsh stalwarts emerged from humble boogie-woogie roots. Their album covers featured images of budgerigars dressed up in different outfits. Most notably a budgie dressed up in full Nazi Gestapo gear, and another with a squadron of fighter budgies dive-bombing enemy emplacements. Which album? Squawk.

Nazareth – Scottish. Rumbling. Big in Canada. Which album? Rampant.

The Groundhogs – A trio. Invented Grunge. Greasy and moustachioed. Intermittently brilliant. Album? Split.

Mountain – Leslie West their leader was incredibly fat. Their song ‘Nantucket Sleighride’ became the theme music for television’s World in Action. That’s all I know.

Dumpys Rusty Nuts – didn’t start until the 80s.

Jethro Tull – No.