With Led Zeppelin, there was no break-in period, no "early phase" where they figured out what kind of band they wanted to be. They were fully formed from the first repetition of the "Good Times Bad Times" riff, and they powered along through their first half-dozen albums crushing everything in their path. Zep never had their Sgt. Pepper's, their Exile, their Who's Next, because every album was more or less that good—for a while, anyway. This was a band that knew the music it wanted to make and executed it with ruthless precision. The second trio of Led Zeppelin reissues (the fourth album and Houses of the Holy came out last fall, Physical Graffiti this week) found the band inhabiting what Neil Tennant once described (and Tom Ewing fleshed out) as their "imperial phase." Riding on their massive initial success, and pushed even further by the game-changing success of "Stairway to Heaven", everything they tried during these years somehow worked.
If you grew up on classic rock radio, you sometimes felt like you were listening to Led Zeppelin's fourth album on shuffle. It has eight songs, all of them are huge, and one, "Stairway to Heaven", frequently lingers near the top of lists of the Greatest Rock Songs of All Time. Given its place in culture, IV can seem like an album of moments more than songs. Individual parts have been selected, cropped, amplified, and dropped into both songs by other artists and into our collective unconscious. Every song has two or three sections that are instantly identifiable and always seem to be playing somewhere nearby. The circular guitar figure in "Black Dog"; the chiming mandolin in "Going to California"; Bonham's cymbal bashing on "Rock and Roll". It's hard to hear "When the Levee Breaks", by now, and not think of hip-hop. If Led Zeppelin's music formed the DNA of anything that could remotely be called "hard rock," IV is a petri dish overflowing with stem cells. The debut was darker and moodier, II was heavier, and III was prettier, but the fourth album is a triumph of form meeting function.
"Stairway to Heaven" is so ubiquitous that it cycles through phases of deep reverence and self-parody, and the movement between these two poles is so rapid it all becomes a blur. This happens both for individual listeners (I'm going to guess the very young still discover this song and have their idea of what a rock song can be expanded considerably) and on the level of mass culture. It's both a marker of religion and an instant punchline, a singularity that sucks in a world of experience and observation and jeering laughter and sincere tears and compacts it all into an infinitely dense point. Like many who both love it and hate it, I pretty much never need to hear it again. But "Stairway" aside, IV is their least weird album. It's basically their stab at perfection, and they get there, but this band was always at its most interesting at the margins, when they had the possibility of failure.
By 1973, Zeppelin's only competition for Biggest Band in the World was the Stones, who were losing their hunger. Later that year, the Stones would put out Goat's Head Soup, beginning a period of drift they wouldn't return from until 1978's Some Girls. The field was clear, with the '60s starting to recede in the rearview, but punk was still a couple of years away, Zeppelin didn't waste the opportunity. Houses of the Holy, their fifth album in four years, takes the most powerful moments of the fourth album and amplifies them, and also adds some oddball experiments that flesh out the Led Zeppelin story.
They are most in the zone on "Over the Hills and Far Away", which is on a very short list of best songs Zep ever wrote, which is to say that it's among the best rock songs ever written. Everything they ever did well—pastoral beauty, crunchy riffs, stop/start changes, monster drum grooves—could be found on this single track. "The Ocean" features what could be Jimmy Page's single greatest riff. "The Rain Song" is a masterful study in the power of guitar tone, both for its full acoustic strumming and the electric guitar work that has always evoked the weather of its title. John Paul Jones' gorgeous Mellotron passage is one of the definitive uses of that strange instrument. And "No Quarter" is a disorienting bad-vibes epic, archetypal of the '70s, capturing the bleak interiority of a certain kind of drug experience.
Houses of the Holy is a perfectly reasonable choice for best Zeppelin LP, even if it had signs that the band couldn't last forever. "The Song Remains the Same" is the first sign of Robert Plant using a more pinched sound for his upper register, adapting to that gradually disappearing top octave by contorting his vocals into a strange squeal. By the last two Zeppelin records this would be his default approach when singing in this range. "The Crunge" is a sour version of funk, a weirdly fascinating half-song complete with a groaner of a James Brown joke. John Bonham supposedly disliked "D'yer Mak'er" so much he refused to write an interesting drum part, sticking instead with the first shuffle beat that came to mind. It was Zeppelin's stab at reggae, and though they never try to breathe any space or light into the mix, it's impossible to dismiss the song's easy catchiness, its affection for doo-wop melody, the motion of Page's spindly guitar.
Houses of the Holy might be Zeppelin's most impressive album on a purely sonic level, and this particular remaster reinforces that notion. The best remastering jobs always offer a subtle improvement—a touch of EQing here, a bit more volume there without overdoing it. Taken together, they hopefully offer more detail, and these versions make the grade. The bonus discs, however, continue to be disappointing. From one angle, there's actually something admirable about how little Led Zeppelin left in the vaults. It was a testament to their brutal efficiency as a rock machine. But aside from the live set released with the debut, the bonus discs so far have been the definition of "fans only."
They are mostly filled with "alternate mixes," which is a strange concept. Mixes freeze in time a single moment that is the end result of many individual decisions; they document fader settings. Alternate mixes showing what could have happened are literally infinite; all these mixes are said to have been created while the album was being mixed, and there is no reason to doubt that, but the truth is Page could just as easily make an "alternate mix" of any one of these songs this morning and no one would know the difference. The fact that a mandolin was briefly considered to be slightly louder for a given sound is basically a stray fact and nothing more. All it provides is a chance to hear familiar performances in familiar songs in a way that sounds slightly unfamiliar.
Among the first six records, aside from III, Physical Graffiti suffers least from overfamiliarity. It's Led Zeppelin's White Album, the one they made when they were at their creative peak and had a million ideas, but were also under a tremendous amount of strain and saw the end starting to come into focus. It's also, to my ears, their best album, even if it's not as unified or complete as some of what had come before. Why their best? First of all, there's more of it. The previous two albums were awesome, but each had just eight songs; Physical Graffiti has 15. It's math—when you are talking about songs from this period of the band, that makes it roughly twice as good.
But Physical Graffiti is Zeppelin's best album ultimately because it felt like a culmination. In some senses it was literally so, since its tracks had been recorded over the course of the previous few years and, in some cases, were leftovers from the previous few records. (The best of the new material was still too much for a single record, so they went back to unreleased songs and decided to flesh out a full 2xLP. The songs are all over the place, but the band makes it all work together.)
Iconic riffs abound—"Custard Pie", "The Wanton Song", and "Houses of the Holy" alone have more hooks than most rock bands manage in a career—but here they are just the beginning of the story. "In My Time of Dying" is Zeppelin's ultimate blues deconstruction, mixing the open-chord slide of acoustic Delta blues with electric heaviness and extending the whole thing past 11 minutes. Pastoral instrumentals had been in the mix for Zeppelin since the first album's "Black Mountainside", but Page never managed another one as beautiful as "Bron-Yr-Aur", a crushingly brief two minutes of guitar bliss that every rock kid who picked up an acoustic guitar in the next 10 years dreamed of playing. And their non-Western dabbling crested with "Kashmir". But Physical Graffiti's greatest strength is its looseness and general sense of playfulness. Here and there, Zeppelin showed comfort with pop. The bounce of "Trampled Under Foot" owes everything to Stevie Wonder; "Down By the Seaside" has an easeful lilt; and "Night Flight" twinkles with a bright optimism.
The song I returned to most here is also the simplest—"Boogie With Stu", an interpolation of Ritchie Valens' "Ooh My Head" (his mother gets a songwriting credit). It makes me think of what blues and early rock'n'roll meant to a certain generation of young men growing up in England during the 1950s and '60s. You hear one story after another about lives being changed by a rock'n'roll record. In a famous quote, John Lennon summed up his musical taste to Jann Wenner in a 1971 Rolling Stone interview: "Sounds like 'Wop Bop a Loo Bop'. I like rock and roll, man, I don't like much else."
When the members of Led Zeppelin get together with famed session pianist/long-time pal Ian Stewart on "Boogie With Stu", you can hear five people who speak the same language. It's drunk on the joy of the discovery. Whatever else they have going on in their lives, they can sit down and play a chugging 12-bar song and have a fucking ball, because they remember when they first heard a song like this as kids and realized that song was a portal to another world. On Physical Graffiti, the end point of Led Zeppelin's incomparable initial run, they are living deep inside that new world, still finding new things to discover, taking it all in.
