 If songs like “Down By The Seaside,” “Gallows Pole” and “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” didn’t convince you that Led Zeppelin had occasional detours off the road to Clarksdale to the Appalachians, or at least Nashville, then maybe the words of the alt.country/roots music impresario T-Bone Burnett, who produced the great new CD Raising Sand with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss (review soon) will convince you:
“People confuse Led Zeppelin with what came after them, as if they were a heavy metal band. But the incantations that Robert was singing were drawn from the Delta and the Appalachian mountains. It was music of the mud and earth. They had many gears they could go up, but at its essence was something raw and true and authentic.”
T Bone Burnett hit the nail on the head in his description of Led Zeppelin. The reason so many millions of people remain convinced that Zep were the greatest of all rock bands, was the incredible range and breadth of their music. Most people outside of Zeppelin’s enormous fanbase mistakenly label them as strictly hard rock or heavy metal. Though these are genres that Zeppelin almost single handedly created, they never limited themselves to any particular category or style of music. Each gifted member’s taste in music was slightly different from the others, ie folk, rock, blues, country, celtic, rockabilly, arabic, soul, ect. Zeppelin spawned so many woefully inferior immitations that some people not familiar with the scope and depth of their brilliant catalogue, have confused them with some monolithic heavy metal bands. Led Zeppelin were effortlessly intense and powerful, while so many that followed in their wake, relied on sheer volume and posing, without having the musical chops to pull it off. Suggestion for country music fans, check out LZ-III.
Bobby – Nicely put. I couldn’t agree more.