That's all the Zep I can take for a while.

I considered throwing on a Coda (get it?) about the later Zep albums that I don't have, but the name of the series is Rating My CD's, not Babbling Incoherently About CD's I Don't Have.

So what's coming in the future at Genre Confusion?

Rating My CD's: Physical Exhaustion

37. Led Zeppelin -- Physical Graffiti


When Joey Ramone died in 2001, Bill Wyman at Salon.com summed up the shift that his band had caused in the mid-70's thusly:

When the first Ramones records were released, high school friends and I would sit in one of our rooms, huddled around the stereo. (Parents would yell if we turned it up.) We tried to parse the lyrics, the sounds, the meanings. We didn't know much about pop history, but we could sense the sendups -- "You're Gonna Kill That Girl," the title a slap at the Beatles's "You're Gonna Lose That Girl"; the indolent drawl with which Johnny sang the thing a slap at the indolent Mick Jagger.
Once we figured out the Zen of it, the world looked different. Bands like the Eagles and the Who sounded weak, Pink Floyd sounded mannered, Zeppelin almost flatulent.

When I first read that, I knew exactly what he meant, even though I knew it to be a less-than-just description of Zeppelin's catalogue. But when it comes to Physical Graffiti, the word "flatulent" becomes almost apt.

Rating My CD's: The Universal White-Boy Unconscious

36. Led Zeppelin -- IV/Zoso/Runes/Old Fart With a Bunch of Sticks/The One With "Stairway"/Whatever


I chose to open this Rating My CD's death-march series with a one word review of Back in Black because coming up with something to say about Back in Black that hadn't been said a thousand times already proved insurmountable. Basically, I owned Back in Black because it was a well-loved hard-rock record by a well-loved hard-rock band, and suburban doughboys like myself like them some hard-rock. It may as well have come in the mail with the Pennysaver.

I'm rather tempted to kick the same punt right now. I mean, this is freakin' Zeppelin IV we're talking about here. What the hell am I gonna do, make stupid guesses about what "bustle in your hedgerow" actually means? Thunderously declaim that I will never tire of "Rock and Roll"no matter how many car commercials it appears in? Issue the "One of us! One of us!" chant at Robert Plant on behalf of anyone that's ever played Dungeons & Dragons, for "The Battle for Evermore"? How do you write about something ubiquitous?

Rating My CD's: Alchemy

35. Led Zeppelin -- III


Bands are a product of human alchemy, of a group of individuals offering their talents to make a unified sound. Sometimes, that alchemy mixes individuals who work well together and survive decades of the grind of rehearse-record-tour. The Rolling Stones are still around because Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have an unshakeable chemical bond. In other cases, such as the Sex Pistols, the mixture was inherently unstable, in fact deliberately designed to combust.

Combustion was more or less what Zeppelin was selling on it's first two albums, or more properly combust-a-bility (Bust-a-bility!), as John Adams would put it. Which is why III has always been their head-fake record; their pastoral yawp from the Welsh hill country. They were the biggest band in the world at this point, and they made what's basically an acoustic-electric-folk record. Because they felt like it.

Dude! The Song "Houses of the Holy" isn't on the Album "Houses of the Holy"

Houses of the Holy isn't the only Zeppelin album I don't have. I don't have any of the ones after Physical Graffiti, either. But HoTH may be the only one I still might want, since III arrived by Amazon yesterday.



My dad had Houses on eight-track; I remember seeing it as a kid. Maybe it was the naked kids on the picture that threw me off. But I'm seriously considering throwing down for it on iTunes.



For that matter, I don't think I've ever seen "The Song Remains the Same." No one can fault the guys in Zeppelin for making a movie about being the biggest band in the world. Otherwise, we'd have to throw out Hard Day's Night, wouldn't we? But I never felt the need to see it. that might mean something, but I suspect it doesn't.



Here's the thing about this band: the first time I ever listened to "She's Crafty" from License to Ill, I knew they were sampling a Zeppelin riff. I didn't know the album or even the name of the song ("The Ocean") until just now. But I knew who it was.



And now I'm debating whether this would be worth owning on vinyl. I shall have to consider the matter most carefully and thoughtfully. In the meantime, You should buy this, even if I haven't.

UPDATE: I went with Amazon MP3. It was totally worth it.

Rating My CD's: British Blues

34. Led Zeppelin -- II


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.

Behold, For it is Time to Get the Led Out.

I actually thought I could knock out at least one of my CD categories in a year. It's been a year and a half, and I've gotten through 31 albums. But it's okay, as I'm now getting to one of my favorite bands, which happens to be one of everyone's favorite bands.

So this week is Zeppelin Week at Genre Confusion. All posts will be Zeppelin-related. I've got 4 Zep CD's to praise with my spoon-edged wit. You're all going to gorge on Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham until you're ready to puke like you'd done this:

You thought I was going to make a Bonham joke, didn't you?

So strap on your Les Paul, ready your Tolkein references, and get ready to party like it's 1969. Which is to say, like this: