Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same

"Other than the Beatles, for album radio they're the most important band," says radio consultant Lee Abrams, who developed the superstars formar, 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 (which 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 tour last year, Crowded House would occasionally perform "Dancing Days" and "Whole Lotta Love." And jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who patterned one of his album covers after the cover of Plrysical 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 Letteman.

"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 heavymetal or hard-rock band has borrowed from one or another of Zeppelin's innovations, whether it's the massive, slow-paced blues sound, John 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 differenr kinds of music."