Gorging on a feast of Zeppelin Excess by Bernard Zuel

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Gorging on a feast of Zeppelin excess
Reviewed by Bernard Zuel
May 28 2003

How the West Was Won (CD) and Led Zeppelin (DVD)

There's the swagger in Robert Plant's voice - that wail-meets-guttural sound
he took from the blues and refashioned for a skinny blonde kid who was never
going to stay long in going-nowhere-fast Birmingham bands.

It may sound half-comic now (and always did, to be honest) but it became the
template for a genre of singers wordlessly asking for loving, for pleasure,
for something nameless but surely libidinous.

When you see him on stage that swagger has transmogrified into a strut, a
preen and a shamelessly cocky, highly sexual animal who knows what he's got
and knows that it's wanted. It's there in the hair - long and curly, like
some central casting idea of modern Apollo. It's there in the clothes - open
shirts and pants so tight you knew not only that he dressed to the left but
often was happy to be there.

And, finally, the band, probably the most powerful trio of musicians
assembled. There were louder bands and faster bands but none that could be
that heavy and still have finesse, none that was prepared to be as soft as
this one often was. Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John
Bonham as Led Zeppelin pretty much define '70s rock, for better and worse.

If Led Zeppelin has ever meant anything to you, three hours of previously
unheard live performances from 1972 on a triple CD (How the West Was Won)
and another five hours of different and mostly unseen live performances on
DVD (called simply Led Zeppelin) that cover their whole career offer the
kind of excessive consumption by which Zeppelin made their name.

And, after diving into this feast, you have to admit that as well as
thrilling music, some outstanding playing (often improvised) and not a few
over-the-top moments (an 18-minute drum solo for Godsakes!) there was a bit
of sex about. Ask Robert Plant's companion.

"My girlfriend said to me the other day as she was watching Immigrant Song
from that Australian show [on the DVD], she turned to me and due to my
senior years she looked at me with almost an old-fashioned look and said
'Christ, I wouldn't want to be left alone in a room with that group's
music."'

Plant laughs. Fifty-five in August, he's feeling cheerful, ebullient even.
The preparations for Friday's worldwide release of the triple album and
double DVD have had at the very least an educational effect on him.

"You can imagine that, for me, I'm almost in the same position as you,"
Plant says. "When you're right in the middle of the adventure you don't
really, can't really, see it from the outside.

"Whenever anyone's spoken to me over the years about what it is or what it
was, I don't really have an overview. I just was right in the middle of it
all doing my best to keep my head above the water. And also riding very
happily on a few clouds."

The DVD's final segment is the band's "comeback" concert at Knebworth before
more than 200,000 fans in 1979, less than a year before drummer Bonham died,
effectively ending the band. There's a remarkable look on their faces, a mix
of pleasure, relief and something else that you can't quite identify.

"It was four years since our previous gig in England," explains Plant. "I
had lost my boy in the middle of '77 and I had a car wreck shortly after the
previous gig in the UK in '75. The volume of tickets was such that I didn't
think anyone was worth that. I really didn't think that we could uphold and
qualify the faith that had been put in us by 220,000 people who had shown
up.

"The look on my face is just like absolute relief that it worked and threads
and tendrils and shudders of fear that were chasing through me like electric
currents. Because the thing about Led Zeppelin was that it wasn't a
four-minute tune, with a couple of choruses and a solo. There were a lot of
times when we were flying by the seats of our pants and I guess in '79 we
didn't know where that was going to take us."

How the West Was Won and Led Zeppelin are out on Friday through Warner
Music.