In Remembrance of Zucchini Past

{... and the hits just keep on comin' ... for Stomp and Stammer.}

Way back in high school, during that ‘70s show called my adolescence, Led Zeppelin held such mythic sway that I actually believed they might be satanic. This was well before I’d ever heard of Aleister Crowley, the British mystic and original “magick” man who so fascinated guitarist Jimmy Page, and whose influence would often prompt dark innuendo regarding the fret wizard’s own Faustian bargains. (After all, if there was ever a rock musician who could be suspected of drinking the blood of virgins, it was Page, though evidence suggests he only deflowered them). No, my fears were based solely on two factors. One was the tape-distortion effects used on “Whole Lotta Love,” which, combined with Robert Plant’s harrowing wails of unimaginable torment and/or forbidden ecstasy, really did sound like a field recording from the Lake of Fire. The other was Roddy Jones. Roddy was, as perceived by some not in his clique, a “bad kid.” Or, if not outright bad, surely up to trouble. He was skinny and had long hair and probably hung out in the parking lot well after the first bell rang smoking cigarettes and cranking, well, Zep, on an 8-track player in some Chevy dashboard. I mean, I guess. It’s hard to remember. I do recall that pimply-faced 14-year-old girls, their tube-tops buoyant with glandular effervescence, were drawn to him as bees to honey, and that he had a band, one filled with guys who looked a lot like him, with the tight jeans and the boots and the shaggy feathered mullets and, most important of all: The Squint. The Squint always gave their peachfuzz moustaches an nth more definition, making them look less like straining wanna-bes who would most likely end up in the military if not pumping gas for a living, and more like – well, definitely NOT Jimmy Page, but not like clean-scrubbed college prep types, either. Actually, all these young dudes looked exactly like Kid Rock, avant la lettre, as the French say, and I figured, since they swaggered and talked back and could mysteriously ferret out the encoded meanings of Physical Graffiti as if it were the Kabbalah, whispering its secret knowledge between their ceaselessly masticated wads of chewing gum and nodding in conspiratorial unison – “Not even yet!” – and then cackling as if this ensured them nights full of Boones Farm and trailer-park lovin’ – I figured hey! how could this not be of the Devil? No music known to mid-70s youth came closer to reflecting the coarse hormonal surges that drove us all bonkers, except maybe the Rolling Stones, but they were nearly INTELLECTUALS compared to Led Zeppelin and, besides, had already “gone disco,” which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because we all listened to Wings, too, and how lame were they? But when Roddy’s band blew helter-skelter into “Whole Lotta Love,” or maybe “Black Dog,” at one or another illicit keg party at the house of some kid whose parents were away for the weekend (think a milder, gentler Larry Clark, with beer and pot and no AIDS yet), and the lights were dim and such ribald activities as “feeling up” and “making out” and “the Bump,” were going on, damn, perdition seemed pretty goddamned cool.

That’s what electric guitars are supposed to do! If Led Zep was scary, it wasn’t solely because they reveled in the sexual mastery we had yet to put a finger on, it was because they tapped so profoundly – and more profoundly than your standard middle-to-lower class white kids would be aware of – into blues, Celtic folk sources and Middle Eastern traditional music, plus dirty-ass funk that sounded even dirtier because the drummer wasn’t the exquisite and nimble Clyde Stubblefield, but the plodding and thundering Bonzo, aka John Bonham, whose Neanderthal tumult might as easily have been your own heartbeat, lurching from your chest cavity as you spun, dizzied by whiskey or the heat-seeking thrust of that new girl’s tongue down your very own throat. The song remained the same, but we never would.

You can experience it all, all over again, for the very first time on the minor avalanche of Zep artifacts released earlier this year by Atlantic Records. The 3-CD How the West Was Won, which compiles live recordings exhumed from some forgotten archive by Pagey himself, accompanies the 2-disc DVD, which is the same deal, pretty much, only different: An assortment of concert documents that span the band’s career. The shocking thing, now, is to see how danged INNOCENT the band looked, and marvel at their gradual evolution from farmboy punks to slicked-up rock icons. Clocking in at more than four hours (extras included), DVD atones for the paucity of Zep celluloid, and the laughable The Song Remains the Same concert film that, sadly, was all fans had to remember the band by following Bonham’s 1980 death. Though reunions of a sort have recurred, the surviving band members clung to an integrity their peers eschew, never pretending there could ever be a Led Zep again without the original Heavy Metal Drummer. It wasn’t as if the music had not pervaded everything since, permeating hip-hop’s juicy ribs like so much mojo sauce, making the Beastie Boys and Schooly D (who gave Puff Daddy the notion) possible, spawning Soundgarden and Jeff Buckley, and supplying the style template for “Almost Famous.” All of which are just a few of the thoughts that occur while watching this blissfully endless footage. All this time, I had only thought that Led Zep had given Johnny Rotten something to hate besides Pink Floyd. Lo and behold, they invented punk rock! I know, it sounds crazy. But there it is, 10 tracks into Disc 1. The Royal Albert Hall, 1970. Plant shoots Page a loving glance, whirls an arm up, and the guitarist starts plucking a high, buzzing, fuzzing rhythm, swinging his axe down low against his hip, while seeming to execute some sort of sideways crabwalk. A few repetitive measures in, and you realize it’s not the Ramones, ferchrissakes, it’s Eddie Cochran. “C’mon Everybody,” a flat-topped rockabilly anthem that challenges Page, for one fleeting instance, to be anti-virtuosic. (This, after all, was the guy they brought into to play the scorchy solo on The Kink’s “I Really Want You,” since he had the kind of mad chops none of the other art-school yobbos could muster, even if they did have a bustle in their hedgerow). I keep replaying those tight few seconds over and over, because it’s always such a shock. Nearly as much a reality check is how freaking good they were, already, in 1970. Beyond Page’s mercurial flash was a stunning grasp of traditions, his Celtic Delta dervish blues not merely a hypnotic display of musical finesse and bravado but beautiful, even breathlessly so. The band already had an immaculate sense of the dynamics that would make a fortune for Nirvana 20 years later, and also knew how to balance Page’s folkie affinities with sheer, ball-busting power chords. The opening downstrokes of “Whole Lotta Love” do constitute the Greatest Rock Riff Ever. And this proves it.

Likewise, Plant’s prowess as a front man can never be second-guessed. True, he was a human swizzle stick, a pretty boy, a Pre-Raphaelite heroine whose resplendent waterfall of curly blond locks played gender-bent mindgames with all the zucchini he was smuggling in his snug, frayed jeans. Cockzilla! Chris Robinson owes him style royalties. So does Michael Stipe. Or, well, he DID, back when he had those same curly locks, and knew how to muse them. All hail the Shark Whisperer.

As much fun as this is, and as fulfilling as is the footage from Zep in prime time (Madison Square Garden 1973 – and, in an acoustic set that gives the band it’s fully dimensional due -- Earl’s Court 1975), a lot of the magic has begun to rub off by the final concert sequence, staged at Knebworth in 1979. It’s all a bit valedictory (which, of course, it was), though thrilling to hear tracks from Presence (the last studio album that mattered) and Page at his magisterial best (“Kashmir”). Yet, it’s all a little too clean. Page has passed through his Cozmik Sorcerer phase, traded in his star-studded balloon pants for a pair of nice white slacks and a billowy blue shirt. Plant’s twirling in polka dots. Even Bonzo has tidied up. Urgency seems to have yielded to professionalism. It makes perfect sense though, this arc. The dark overlord didn’t own their souls, it was only Ahmet Ertegun.