Maybe you’re the person who hasn’t quite made up their mind up about Led Zeppelin. That’s fine but fair warning, the band is the apotheosis of overstuffed arena rock, from private jets to strong-arming managers to personal excess in every musical, sexual, and philosophical front. Lester Bangs wanted to chuck pies at them in defense of Truth and/or Iggy Pop. Hammer of the Gods depicted them as decadent goons and tried to make that seem admirable. Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube” video, without even needing to name them, reduced their lyrical and aesthetic sensibilities to an interest in “where the hobbits dwell.” If you’re a young music head who shuns rockism, appropriation, and womanizing as loathsome retrograde traits to be avoided, being into Zep means your faves don’t come more problematic.
Still, rock dorks were tangling with this issue long before any of us, and in the context of reckoning with Led Zeppelin—especially as an oft-bootlegged yet still elusive live-band document—the official two-disc release of *BBC Sessions *in 1997 felt like a moment of clarity. Rhino’s 2016 reissue of the *BBC Sessions *is also a big important musical-legacy package deal, and justifiably so: Jimmy Page supervised a new remaster in the spirit of the studio album reissues that commenced two years ago, there’s an additional third disc that includes an unearthed performance that hadn’t been heard since its original 1969 broadcast, Dave Lewis’ contextual liner notes are informative and revelatory, and if you just love black-and-white photos of arcane recording gear and empty performance halls, you’re in luck. But above all that, it’s an exhaustive look at the lengths Led Zeppelin would go to for a chance to make it big through sheer force of music, and it’s borne out by witnessing the band in the process their own self-creation.
Aside from Jimi Hendrix, a few jazzy UK prog bands, and the artists in the orbit of Miles Davis’ electric period, nobody working at deconstructing rock‘n’roll took such advantage of the possibilities of improvisation. To know Zeppelin as musicians puts that into focus: Jimmy Page flourished as an ex-session guitarist who still wanted to try any style as his own. John Bonham was so in the pocket even the fractions between the one and the two sounded deep. John Paul Jones strode with purpose along the border between groove’s backbone and a nomadic soloist whether on bass or keys. And Robert Plant’s voice could wring a Valhallan catharsis out of reading the cooking instructions on a box of macaroni. In isolation they were great; as an ensemble they were supernatural. It’s not that they were merely shredding or otherwise showing off: Led Zeppelin wanted to find out where those sounds they built, borrowed, and stole could really go.
The first disc of *BBC Sessions *covers a stretch from early March to early August of 1969, a couple months after the release of their self-titled debut and a few before they dropped Led Zeppelin II. It seems wrong to call such a short stretch of time between first and second albums a “transitional period,” but that's what these sessions capture. The churning, riff-splintering heavy blues-rock of their debut is already shoving against the confines of what they’d already put to tape. They do their damnedest to wring new vistas from old Willie Dixon numbers on “You Shook Me” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” and there are moments where everything converges in waves of virtuosity that hint at picking up where the soon-to-disband Cream left off in the blues-rock supergroup sweepstakes. It’s when they stretch their legs on “Dazed and Confused”—still roughly album-length thanks to time constraints, and not yet the leviathan 20-minute concert centerpiece it was growing into—that their signature interplay starts to set them apart as their own entity, impossible to reproduce because they couldn’t stop moving.
The in-progress nature of their 1969 material brings out some unpredictable sides. Hearing them hammer through live-set favorite “Somethin’ Else” in rockabilly mode is borderline surreal, especially with Plant rampaging through a vocal diametrically opposed to Eddie Cochran’s. And the third disc’s unearthing of a three-song session once feared lost is a fine addition—as well as the first time anyone born after 1969 can hear the piano-driven, harmonica-blasting “Sunshine Woman,” a B.B./Albert/Freddie King-simpatico cut which is perhaps their shortest line to electric blues as contemporary style rather than a mythical predecessor. (The sound is not great here. After the masters were erased, these cuts had to be sourced from a recording off of AM radio, but they’re an exception on a collection with otherwise pristine fidelity.)
The most crucial detail of their ’69 sets is how nearly every BBC performance at the time included some variation of “Communication Breakdown.” You’d think it was their signature hit, or at least a cut that’d give them more critical affinity to the MC5 than Uriah Heep. It’s always the springboard for something new, from a revelation of how many ways Page could either slice or bulldoze his way through his solo to a hint at their engagement with funk that wouldn’t be heard so clearly again until The Song Remains the Same four years later.
If the 1969 sessions were Zeppelin figuring out who they were, the 1971 sessions were Led Zeppelin figuring out who they weren’t. Broadcast on BBC Radio One’s “In Concert” on April 4, 1971, and famously featuring the first-ever version of “Stairway to Heaven” eight months before the release of Led Zeppelin IV, the second disc features the band stepping into the vast musical expanse they had laid before themselves. III was released the previous October and was their first shot at pushing beyond their “blooze” rep to more vivid folk influences. There’s still a medley that builds off “Whole Lotta Love” to skulk through foundational classics by John Lee Hooker (“Boogie Chillun”), Bukka White (“Fixin’ to Die Blues”), Arthur Crudup (“That’s Alright Mama”), and Elvis Presley (“A Mess of Blues”), but this chops-fest belies how hard the press mocked them for coming from a place the band would rather live in than visit as tourists__.__ And the peak-blues “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is where they finally figured out how to use their explosive power sparingly. Page’s solo and Plant’s wails pierce so deeply because they emerge from one of their most contemplative arrangements.
But their confidence and their chafing at being pigeonholed made for a creatively lucrative combination and the period between the releases of *III *and *IV *was the best time to capture that. So we get the heavy metal equivalent of a chromed-god Jack Kirby *Thor *drawing in “Immigrant Song,” the careening time signature of a power-trio version of “Black Dog,” and the acoustic Joni Mitchell-fueled heartbreak of “Going to California.” Of course there’s “Dazed and Confused” snatched from its blues-rock cradle and transformed into the Kubrick *2001 *psychedelic stargate sequence of their live set, bowed guitar and everything. And if overexposure hasn’t dulled your senses to “Stairway to Heaven,” you can hear it as it first sounded before it was played approximately two billion times on the radio—even if the last Page solo hadn’t yet found its footing.
From a present-day perspective, where big-time arena-filling rock has settled on Muse, Foo Fighters, and 5 Seconds of Summer, diving headlong into the ’69/’71 timeframe of the band that most necessitated the obnoxious yet fitting phrase “Rock Gods” might otherwise feel like history homework. But *BBC Sessions *captures an actual excitement, a document of a moment in an oft-told story of a band that isn’t excessively beholden to it. No *Song Remains the Same *audio-visual stoner-movie overkill, no excess studio futzing, no sense that their peak was either already there or just in the rearview. It’s just a meticulous document of a band whose hedonism kept them from restraining their absurd level of mastery. So here: have Zep as they both wanted to be and eventually were.
