Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same

And so Zeppelin has made its mark on postpunk British rock (the Cult and the 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 & 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. "Obviously 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. (White-snake singer David Coverdale declined to be interviewed for this story; a spokesman for Coverdale says 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 fora 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 surprising finesse of Jimmy Page's arrangements and production and the mystical yisions 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 its 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 Graffiti. "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 major 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."

[From Issue 552 — March 24, 1988]