Let's face it - Plant was no Lennon, Page was no Hendrix and JPJ sure as hell wasn't McCartney. Hendrix's medievalism was at least more colourful. McCartney's love songs were playful, not creepy. Simon and Garfunkel managed real folk by leaving out the machismo, something which Plant shamefully neglected to do on tracks like 'Going to California' which really reads like a mid life crisis for guys who like both Bob Dylan and shooting things.
No, Led was not a lyrics band at all. They failed in the lyrics department - and the closest they got to greatness in that department was a sophomoric dance track 'Rock and Roll' which unfortunately predates our modern club music in its subject matter. 'Stairway to Heaven' is another great failure of lyrics - it's pseudo medievalistic pagan claptrap that doesn't have the sense to be clever. In many ways they predated the regrettable trends in what was later called 'prog' and then 'neo-classical whatever' - medievalism, paganism, classism (all the isms, they're causing schisms).
And despite all the bashing I've been doing, I truly feel that they were one of the seminal acts in rock and roll after the 60s. No band today is without a deeply fundamental debt to everything they did - and though they didn't do many things well, what they did they did bloody well. And what they did well was this: a ham-fisted talent for making noise in the lower frequencies, and an clumsy (but entirely accurate) understanding of the blues. In fact, 'clumsy' is probably the best word to describe their style of ponderously repeating riffs and thundering drum beats. It was clumsy, but shockingly effective, and for this I credit that second thing, the blues, which gave Jimmy Page all the songwriting chops he needed. The blues gave them the simplicity needed to deliver the heaviness, and the result is satisfying in the gut the way the blues should be.
As the case study I pick 'When the Levee Breaks', a track in which Plant abandons his medievalism, Page abandons his progressive tendencies, and John Bonham abandons any remaining vestiges of subtlety. He opens the track here with what would become (I think) an iconic beat with the anticipated first beat of the second bar on the bass drum. As with all Led Zeppelin music, the key to heaviness (which I define as the 'insistence' that we so prize in rock music) is repetition. He does not vary the hi hat pattern, and plays sparsely so the reverb is audible. He sets a slow moving but unshakeable tempo for the song to begin, and it begins on a note of steadiness, steadiness that soon develops into inevitability. Inevitability is the real theme here - 'If it keeps on raining, the levee's gonna break/ If it keeps on raining, the levee's gonna break/ If the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay'. Notice how even after the the first line is repeated a la traditional blues, the words 'levee breaks' happen one more time in the third line, as if the first two times didn't make it clear enough. This slow build of paranoia is one of the rare successes of their songwriting. The guitar intro is played with a slide, like the real bluesmen did - only he plays the same thing over and again, only three notes - the root (and harmonised fifth, making it the 'heaviest' chord playable on a guitar at any pitch), the flattened major third or 'blue note', again harmonised, and the fifth. Aside from the blue note, these notes are colourless, being the fundamentals of the harmony. The nature of the notes is not lost on the listener - he only hears the blue note, the 'colour', the root which is the resolution, and the fifth which is tension. The slow ululation of tension-resolution over the steady drum beat, always with exactly the same notes, is another element that adds to the growing paranoia prevalent in the intro.
The next part of interest is the sudden instrumental refrain, which modulates to the major key. The tone here is almost triumphant - I say almost because the blues is never triumphant, and Page proves his facility with the idiom here - but the resolution from the 7th chord makes it uneasy, almost terrifying in a Gothic sort of way rather than satisfying. The chorus of multi-tracked guitar parts adds to this cathedral-like atmosphere, hinting infinitesimally at the sound of a wind orchestra, and the associated grandeur. It is a terrifying grandeur.
The second half of the refrain is a motif played distorted with slide guitar. Again, the three phrases are variations of the same melodic motif, and the repetition serves to create a feeling of insistence and intensity. It should be noted that this part of the refrain is not played in the intro, only after the first verse. Again, Page plays only simple chords. The accompaniment plays a root and a fifth, which reminds us of the band's perennial medieval obsession - certainly, it sounds like a drone note music, tonally resembling bagpipes or violin, both of which are often used to play drone notes in traditional scottish, irish, and indian musics. The medievalism here is subtle at least, and they get away with it - it only adds a not unwelcome colour to their straight-ahead blues.
TBC soon!
adam
