Barney Hoskyns - Trampled under foot : the power and excess of Led Zeppelin : an oral biography of the world’s mightiest rock ’n’ roll band

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Led Zeppelin was unobtainable and unattainable and we very seldom talked about it. Basically, the myth propagated itself.

ROBERT PLANT TO THE AUTHOR, MAY 2003

ON A WHITE-HOT MORNING in Twentynine Palms the Mojave desert town namechecked on Robert Plants 1993 album Fate of Nations I can see a number of the strangely shaped Joshua trees that lend their name to the nearby national park; the same place where, on Cap Rock in 1969, Gram Parsons dropped acid with Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg.

Ever since Parsons ODd and died in Joshua Tree itself twenty-five miles east along Route 62 the whole area has become one of Californias holy rock sites. So its fitting that, as I fill up my rental compact in a Twentynine Palms gas station, I hear the booming strains of a rock song approaching. Within seconds I know it as a staple of classic-rock radio an evergreen of easy-riding highway rock and the pop snob in me groans. Pulling up next to me is a mirror-shaded dude astride a black beast of a motorcycle, its wheels flanked by vast speaker bins that punch out the song I know so well: Babe babe babe babe babe babe m bayeebee Im gonna LEEEEAVE you

The owner of the songs strangulated male voice aint joking, woman, hes really got to ramble rather like this man in his sunglasses. The voice soundtracks the guys chrome-horse freedom on a song recorded almost four decades ago, and he is making sure we all know it. I look at him and want to dismiss him as an idiot. Hes at least as old as the song, and if he took the shades off he might be old enough to have seen Led Zeppelin in their pomp, maybe at the LA Forum, possibly at the Long Beach Arena or the San Diego Sports Arena the huge venues where the west was won. Perhaps he saw Zeps last US show, which remains shrouded in mystery, at the Oakland Coliseum in the summer of 77. Or he may only have seen the band in his mind, back when he was a beer-chuggin adolescent spellbound by their satanic limey majesty, one of the vast legion of disciples who worshipped them as your overlords.

It doesnt really matter which it is, because I understand the mythic potency of the music thats blasting from his speakers. And slowly I start to see him, in all his delusions, as oddly heroic. Like Robert Plant on Babe, Im Gonna Leave You, hes gotta keep moving, hitting the highway again, on to the next town and the next chick. Maybe hes heading east, further into the empty Mojave where he can feel the heat of your desert heart (29 Palms), and then on to Arizona or New Mexico or just some place he can hole up and be free. Alternatively he could be heading west to gaze out on the infinite Pacific and leave terra firma behind him. He could be a gung-ho libertarian, a man for whom Babe, Im Gonna Leave You says, simply, I have no responsibility to anyone except me. Or he could just be a weekend warrior, escaping the deep dreariness of his nine-to-five life.

As the songs frenziedly descending chords fade over Plants frayed larynx, I silently bond with Mr Get the Led Out as I recall my own first exposure to the second track on Zeppelins astounding debut album. (When I asked John Paul Jones which album he would play to someone who had never heard the band, he said, The first one its all there, right from the word go. Im not sure he wasnt right.) I understand why this and other songs became battle cries for a lost generation of disowned teenagers searching for dark magic in their suburban shopping-mall lives. I understand how Zeppelin became a new Fab Four for the younger siblings who missed out on Beatlemania and for whom the Rolling Stones were just too Cte dAzur for their own good.

For what you hear on Babe, Im Gonna Leave You and every great Zeppelin track is not just power amplified aggression matched by priapic swagger but yearning, journeying, questing for an ideal.

There is a point in your life, Chuck Klosterman wrote in Killing Yourself to Live, when you hear songs like The Ocean and Out on the Tiles and Kashmir, and you suddenly find yourself feeling like these songs are actively making you into the person you want to be. It does not matter if youve heard those songs a hundred times and felt nothing in the past, and it does not matter if you dont normally like rock n roll and just happened to overhear it in somebody elses dorm room. We all still meet at the same vortex: for whatever the reason, there is a point in the male maturation process when the music of Led Zeppelin sounds like the perfect actualisation of the perfectly cool you.

For the scurrilous svengali Kim Fowley, who consorted with them in their Hyatt House heyday, Led Zeppelin were both dangerous and spiritual and you could not have one without the other. Another way of saying that is to resort to hoary metaphors of light and dark, good and evil. Certainly its difficult to talk of Zeppelin and not speak of evil; many of those interviewed for this oral history do just that. And while its too easy to identify Robert Plant and John Paul Jones with the light and Jimmy Page and John Bonham (and Peter Grant and Richard Cole et al.) with the dark, the occult image of Page as a guitar magus steeped in the nefarious teachings of Aleister Crowley remains central to Zeppelins appeal to adolescents as they strive to create identities for themselves in a world that never recovered from the failure of Americas hippie dream.

By 1975, ZoSo was painted or carved on every static thing rocker kids could find, wrote the sociologist Dr Donna Gaines. It had become a unifying symbol for Americas suburban adolescents. The children of ZoSo are Zeps legacy. Mostly white males, nonaffluent American kids mixing up the old-school prole(tariat) values of their parents, mass culture, pagan yearnings and Sixties hedonism.

Yet the resonance of Zeppelins music goes way beyond acned initiation rites, otherwise wed be talking about them today as we talk about (or dont talk about) Kiss or Peter Frampton or Grand Funk Railroad. The reason my biker in Twentynine Palms is blasting Babe, Im Gonna Leave You from his roadhog bins after all those years is because Led Zeppelin still speak to him of danger and spirituality, darkness and light, power and beauty; because their albums at least, up to and including 1975s Physical Graffiti still sound so mighty and so sensual. Because they locked together tighter than any other rock unit in history. Because Jimmy Page wrote the most crunchingly powerful riffs ever fashioned by an electric guitarist. Because encoded within their metal blitzkrieg lies a deep funk that gives even James Brown a run for his money. Because their beauteous acoustic music is as sublime as their amplified anthems. Because live as the countless Zep bootlegs attest they took How Many More Times, Dazed and Confused, No Quarter and In My Time of Dying into new dimensions of giddy improvisation. Because John Bonham did things on his drum kit that confound the ear to this day. Because even when his lyrics smacked of ethereal piffle Robert Plant possessed the most frighteningly exciting hard-rock voice ever captured on tape, a blood-curdling fusion of Janis Joplin and Familys Roger Chapman.

Also because of the dizzying diversity of styles and moods the band mastered: Dense Chicago Blues (You Shook Me, I Cant Quit You, Baby, The Lemon Song, The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair); Metallic Funk (Whole Lotta Love, Bring It On Home, Immigrant Song, The Ocean, Custard Pie, The Wanton Song, Nobodys Fault But Mine, For Your Life); Kinetic Folk-Rock (Babe, Im Gonna Leave You, Ramble On, Gallows Pole, The Battle of Evermore, Over the Hills and Far Away, Poor Tom); Hyper-Prog Bombast (The Song Remains the Same, No Quarter, In the Light, Ten Years Gone, Achilles Last Stand, Carouselambra); Unplugged Pastoral (Thats the Way, Bron-yr-Aur, Going to California, Black Country Woman, the first half of Stairway to Heaven); Headbanger Raunch (Heartbreaker, Sick Again); Trebly Big Star Swagger (Dancing Days, Houses of the Holy); Swampy Delta Dread (Hats off to Harper, Black Dog, When the Levee Breaks, In My Time of Dying); Motor City Protopunk (Communication Breakdown); Eerie Orientalism (Friends, Four Sticks, Kashmir); Searing Blues Balladry (Since Ive Been Loving You, Tea for One) and Retro Rock n Roll (Rock n Roll, Boogie with Stu, the numerous live covers of Elvis, Eddie Cochran et al.) almost all of which Id put up there with the best of Elvis/Dylan/Beatles/Stones/Hendrix/Young/Nirvana/Radiohead and any other rock act from the last half-century .