rolling stone zep article 1988

["Michael_Lorette" <Michael_Lorette@xxxxxxx>]

A Rolling Stone article from Issue #522 March 24th, 1988 :



THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME (by Steve Pond)

The word was out about Kingdome Come. Even before the band's debut release,
the record-industry buzz was that it had the potential to be a smash hit.
And there's a good reason, say the buzzers: Kingdome Come sounds exactly
like Led Zeppelin.

So if Kingdome Come hits big, nobody'll be too surprised - because although
the band may be the latest and most shameless outfit to learn that sounding
like Led Zeppelin is a ticket to the top, it certainly isn't alone. In just
the past year or so, we've seen a slew of "New Zeppelins" of one sort or
another, including the L.A. underground thrash band Jane's Addiction, the
English reformed-punk band the Cult and the revived heavy-metal band
Whitesnake.

Yeah, it's been a long time since Zeppelin rock and rolled, but when it
comes to modern mainstream rock music, Zep still has the touch of the gods.
Classic-rock radio stations play the band's music incessantly; bands from
Def Leppard to Crowded House do versions of its songs; the Beastie Boys and
the Cult appropriate it's guitar riffs; just about every hard-rock and
heavy-metal band that ever tromped onstage has borrowed something from its
style and sound.

"In my opinion, next to the Beatles they're the most influential band in
history", says Geffen Records A&R executive John David Kalodner, whose label
will soon release a Jimmy Page solo album that advance reports say has a
distinct Zeppelin feel. "They influence the way music is on records, AOR
radio, concerts. They set the standards for the AOR-radio format with
'Stairway To Heaven', having AOR hits without necessarily having top forty
hits. They're the ones who did the first real big arena concert shows,
consisently selling out and playing stadiums without support. People can do
as well as them, but nobody surpasses them."

But if nobody surpasses Led Zeppelin, lots of people pay homage. Led
Zeppelin's ten albums - especially the string of six classics that began in
1969 with the band's debut, Led Zeppelin, and ended in 1975 with Physical
Graffiti - are reportedly one of the most lucrative back catalogs in rock,
selling consistently year after year. Certainly, those sales are helped by
Zeppelin's status as the backbone of AOR and classic-rock radio, where
"Stairway To Heaven" regularly ranks at or near the top of listeners' polls
and such Zeppelin songs as "Rock And Roll" and "Kashmir" get regular
airings.

"Other than the Beatles, for album radio they're the most important band,"
says radio consultant Lee Abrams, who developed the superstars format, which
emphasizes star attractions like Zeppelin. "Nobody seems to get tired of
them, and a lot of the new bands in that genre obviously owe a debt to
them."

If you want to start sending out bills to collect on that debt, you could
start with the bands that are still using Zeppelin songs on their albums or,
especially, in their live shows, where a few chords of "Whole Lotta Love" or
"Rock And Roll" are a sure-fire way to ignite audiences. The latter song has
become a hard-rock standard: it's been performed lately by Patty Smyth, Def
leppard and Heart (who has been doing it for more than a decade). Frank
Zappa has played "Stairway To Heaven" in some recent sets, as has the
California underground band Camper Van Beethoven. Another California band,
Lawndale, threw a few bars of "Whole Lotta Love" into a version of Dave
Brubeck's "Take Five" on its last album. On its tours last year, Crowded
House would occasionally perform "Dancing Days" and "Whole Lotta Love." And
jazz saxophonist Branford Marsailis, who patterned one of his album covers
after the cover of Physical Graffiti and says that even his purist brother
Wynton has a fondness for Zeppelin, performed a pair of Zeppelin songs on
Late Night with David Letterman.

"We've tried to drop 'Rock And Roll' from our sets", says Heart singer Ann
Wilson, a longtime Zeppelin fan, but there's always a place for it, and
people always yell for it. They won't let us stop, because it's the kind of
straight-ahead, no-tricks, no-nonsense rocker that people just crave".

Crowded House isn't quite as reverent with its own Zeppelin covers. The
popsters from down under do "Whole Lotta Love" in what they call a
"swing-shuffle arrangement".

Still they're admirers. "Believe it or not, we are actually very, very big
fans of Led Zeppelin," says bassist Nick Seymour. "They're probably one of
the strongest influences that we have in common as members of the group. We
do "Whole Lotta Love" jokingly, tongue in cheek, but that's not to say that
we're not big fans of the band."

"And I think the main reason one could find it amusing in 1988 is that there
are so many bands that have supposedly been influenced by Led Zeppelin that
don't really seem to understand the soul of what Led Zeppelin were about.
They just seem to have taken on the cosmetic appeal of the legacy that Led
Zeppelin left around. And that's unfortunate, because they're taking
advantage of a generation of kids that weren't around for the original
thing."

This is the territory where Led Zeppelin's real influence can be measured:
in a way, nearly every heavy metal or hard rock band has borrowed from one
or another of Zeppelin's innovations, whether it's the massive, slow paced
blues sound, Johm bonham's thunderously plodding drums or Robert Plant's
posthippie visions of a land of myth and fantasy.

"So many bands have taken from Led Zeppelin , it's been quite incredible to
watch", says Ian Astbury, lead singer of the Cult, the British band whose
second album, Electric, showed off a heavy quota of Zeppelin style guitar
riffs. "The whole 'Hall of the Mountain King ' vibe was one thing for glam
rockers to get into, you know? So all of a sudden you get fifteen American
bands singing songs about climbin' up mountains and slayin' dragons and
stuff, which is one of the things that Plant was into, that Old english and
Celtic imagery. And then a lot of bands are into the black magic and the
sorcery, which was Page's kind of thing. And then you get other people
trying to base a band around what Bonham did. It's incredible that even as
individuals they influenced different kinds of music."

And so Zeppelin has made it's mark on postpunk British rock (the Cult and
Mission U.K.), on rap music (the Beastie Boys, who rap to a couple of
Zeppelin riffs on their album and in their concerts), on mainstream rock
(Ann Wilson says she learned how to sing rock and roll by performing
Zeppelin songs, and Boston has based its career on Tom Scholz's version of
Jimmy Page's guitar grandeur) and on hard rock (everyone, including, of
course, Kingdom Come).

And the band has also influenced two of last year's biggest success stories.
On "Bullet the Blue Sky," from U2's album The joshua Tree, the Edge's guitar
sound is strikingly similar to the kind of churning, raw sound you'll find
in Zeppelin tunes like "The Rover."

"I was never really interested in heavy metal or that kind of thing," says
the Edge, who has been known to toss off a zeppelin song during the band's
sound checks, "but Zeppelin, of all those groups, really had something."

Whitesnake, meanwhile, became last year's most surprising hard-rock hit at
least partially because it sounds a lot like Zeppelin. Last summer, John
David Kalodner, who is Whitesnake's A&R rep, said, "Whitesnake is selling
because of the quality of the record and the lack of a Led Zeppelin record
in the marketplace. The kids really like records that sound like Led
Zeppelin, so they'll buy anything that's close." Kalodner now says that he's
unsure if the young record buyers are aware of Zeppelin's influence on bands
like Whitesnake and Kingdom Come. "Obvioulsy it's the same sort of music,"he
says, "but I don't know if seventeen year old kids make that comparison."
Nonetheless, the sound remains the same: lucrative. (Whitesnake singer David
Coverdale declined to be interviewed for this story; a spokesman for
Coverdale said the singer was irritated by a recent story in Rolling Stone
in which Robert Plant called Whitesnake a "Led Zeppelin Clone.")

So why did Led Zeppelin, which seldom had its records played on AM radio and
probably sounds like sludge to many casual listeners, become so influential?
You could say it's partly because of nostalgia, but in this case it's
nostalgia that cuts in different ways at once: if it's reasonable to call
Zeppelin the first band of the Seventies, the band that ushered in the
heavier, gloomier, more ponderous music of that era, it's just as easy to
dub it the last band of the sixties, the final glorious moment for a
community of starry eyed dreamers bound together by music. Led Zeppelin in
many ways marked a dividing line in rock history - but with the unbearable
heaviness of its sound, the often surprixing finesse of Jimmy Page's
arrangements and production and the mystical visions in Robert Plant's
lyrics, the band appealed to listeners on both sides of that dividing line.

"They balance that hard-rock edge with being ethereal," says Lee Abrams.
"And when I probe people and ask them about why they're so into Zeppelin, it
always gets to that. They have that hard edge, but they don't drive you
nuts. They're sort of cosmic at the same time, and it's a balance that
people really like."

Or you could ask a few fans about Zeppelin - fans like Wayne Hussey, lead
vocalist for the Mission U.K. His band recently enlisted Zeppelin
bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones to produce it's upcoming album. "I
think, essentially, they were a band," says Hussey, "and everything they did
came across as a band. They got self-indulgent at times, but they wrote
great songs, and when they performed them as a band, the power of it really
came across."

Mitch Easter, the leader of Let's Active, who is also a noted producer,
became a Zeppelin fan for life around the time of Physical Graffii. "We
started this sorta crusade when Let's Active first toured," he says,
"playing 'Black Dog' and stuff when we'd go to do interviews at college
radio stations. It was really outrageous to do that back then, but it was
good fun, and there was no denying that those records were powerful and
cool. And we also did 'The Rover' and 'Dancing Days' in concert for a while.
Every few shows we'd get a New Wave-diehard type who just didn't get it,
who'd say "what are you doing, man?" like it's a sacrilege. But most people
really dig it, you know"

Ian Astbury became a fan of Zeppelin when Liverpool clubs started playing
Seventies hard rock around 1980, when punk began to fade. I think they're
probably the greatest British live rock band,"he says. "The one that had a
real mystique, a real aura and presence about the band. It wasn't like a
band; it was like some kind of moving spiritual roadshow. Led Zeppelin were
a mafor influence on the Cult - I mean, we feel like the new generation,
ourselves and the Mission and other new bands. I guess we feel like the new,
shall we say, golden gods." He laughs. "If anybody reads that, they're gonna
go, 'Oh, what an asshole.' But it kinda feels that way, and it's great."

Still, Astbury admits that one event could give all the new golden gods a
real run for their money. "I'll tell you one thing," he says. "If Zeppelin
ever did a reunion tour, that'd be the biggest challenge for any of our lot.
Led Zeppelin, you can't compete with them."