Will Durant once wrote that Christianity did not destroy the ancient pagan world; rather, it was the last great creation of it. To me, Led Zeppelin fulfills a similar dynamic with regard to the mid-to-late 60's British Blues scene that spawned it. So I don't care what Lester Bangs snarked from a fictional future about Zep in the midst of giving praise to the Yardbirds:
The Yardbirds, as I said, were incredible. They came stampeding in and just blew everybody clean off the tracks. They were so fucking good, in fact, that people were still imitating 'em as much as a decade later, and getting rich doing it I might add, because the original band of geniuses didn't last that long. Of course, none of their stepchildren were half as good, and got increasingly pretentious and overblown as time went on until about 1973 a bunch of emaciated fops called Led Zeppelin played their final concert when the lead guitarist was assassinated by an irate strychnine freak in the audience with a zip gun just fifty-eight minutes two-and-a-half-hour virtuoso solo on one bass note.
Yeah, it's funny, and there's a needle of truth hiding underneath that haystack of verbiage, but it's a thin needle at that.The critics were sour on Zep at the start: John Mendehlsson's take on II is good but condescending, playing the "good for stoners" card with about as much subtlety as the mag was wont to say Zeppelin lacked. And true to the pattern this blog has noticed about the hipster doofii, they all came around two years later, when Lenny Kaye reviewed IV, and was forced to write of Zeppelin's imitators in detracting terms.
So for all the sniffing of "so 1966" that greeting this record when it dropped, we have the space and time to hear the blues, growling like a tail-dragging coyote underneath the sensation. We savor the marriage of Page's blister-riff and Plant's cribbed Willie Dixon lyrics that is "Whole Lotta Love." We can smirk at the juxtaposition of Robert Johnson's "Travelin' Riverside Blues" and Howlin' Wolf's "Killin' Floor" in "The Lemon Song". We can stand up ant point at the intro and outro of "Bring it on Home" being a deliberate homage to Sonny Boy Williamson's version. And we can pat ourselves on the back for knowing these things. And that's all fine.
But at some point, we have to admit that Page & Co. moved beyond the blues, as they had to. We have to admit that they did the same thing Cream did, which was to take the raw structure of blues and fill it with hydrogen until it was a titanic monster, a multicolor mass spectacle that the blues never really was.
That's why these guys took over the world; that's why rock music in the 1970's, from Queen to the Ramones, stood in their shadow. Because they took the rawest folk music there ever was, the bitterly raucous cries of an oppressed people, and made it the world's number one entertainment attraction, without distilling one ounce of the original swagger.
And if racial purity is something you really care about, you can lay them on the ever-growing heap of White Boys Who Took the Blues Out Of My Car When I Just Left it There for a Second, Honest. But the only reason I've got Wolf's The Real Folk Blues on my stereo as I type is because a good friend forced me to hear "Bring it On Home" when I thought I knew what I was talking about.
Believe me, gang, when 90% of the music of this decade has faded to retro-novelty status, kids will still be blasting this album out of their iPod decks, seeking its secrets.
Grade: LL
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