Overview
Objectives
- Identify the defining musical characteristics of hard rock
- Identify the important predecessors and early examples hard rock music and musicians
- Examine Led Zeppelin’s career
- Identify the defining musical characteristics of Led Zeppelin’s style
Led Zeppelin continued
Led Zeppelin II is generally considered by fans and critics to be the band’s heaviest-sounding album. It was also the first album on which Page played his Gibson Les Paul guitar, the instrument with which he became associated. They continued to include a variety of sounds, themes, and styles in their music. "Ramble On ♫" prominently features the acoustic guitar (a nod to the folk music tradition), but at the same time, it engages with fantasy themes inspired by the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Fantasies or abstractions were common in psychedelic rock, and the Tolkien inspiration was the result of Plant’s personal interest in the author’s works. Page and Kramer took advantage of a number of recording and post-production techniques in "What Is and What Should Never Be ♫." For example, they panned the sound of the guitar back and forth between channels, and the sound of Plant’s voice was phased through the stereo field.
Page preferred the album format and resisted the idea of releasing tracks as singles. Thus, the only single released from Led Zeppelin II was "Whole Lotta Love ♫." The song quickly became a fan favorite and a staple of the band’s live shows. "Whole Lotta Love ♫" is riff-based: the guitar plays a two-bar riff in the opening, and then the bass joins the guitar for the subsequent statements of the riff. The only time the riff stops completely is during an instrumental interlude in the middle of the song. The song is in verse-chorus form, with an extensive psychedelic interlude between the second chorus and the third verse. The song also ends with a lengthy vocal improvisation from Plant. During the psychedelic interlude, the sounds of the guitar and voice are panned from side to side in the stereo field, and a number of avant-garde studio effects are audible. The interlude also features the sounds of a Theremin, an electronic instrument that we encountered in the context of the Beach Boys’ "Good Vibrations ♫." "Whole Lotta Love ♫" also features a production technique called reverse echo a production technique claimed to have been invented by Jimmy Page in which a recorded echo is played backwards, and the reverse echo is placed before the sound it is supposed to be echoing, which Page claimed to have invented. In reverse echo, a recorded echo is played backwards, and the reverse echo is placed before the sound it is supposed to be echoing.
Plant’s lyrics for "Whole Lotta Love ♫" were based on "You Need Love ♫," a Chicago blues song by Willie Dixon that had also been recorded by Muddy Waters. Plant was a devoted fan of the American blues, and he frequently quoted or alluded to blues lyrics in his own songwriting and during the band’s live performances.
According to Plant, "Page’s riff was there before anything else. I just thought, ‘Well, what am I going to sing?’ That was it, a nick [theft]." Dixon sued Led Zeppelin, and with the money he earned in his settlement, he started an organization called the Blues Heaven Foundation. The goal of the Blues Heaven Foundation was to help blues musicians recoup royalties from other artists’ recordings of their songs.
The group’s third album was entitled Led Zeppelin III (1970), and it contained many more acoustic tracks than had appeared on either of the two earlier albums. Many of the songs were influenced by folk music and Celtic music, but they retained characteristics of the band’s heavier numbers. For example, "Immigrant Song ♫" is still electric and riff-based, but the riffs are shorter and more rhythmic when compared to the melodic riffs heard on the group’s first two albums.
"["In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida"] was used in The Simpsons episode "Bart Sells His Soul," where Bart switches a hymn out for this song and convinces the Reverend Lovejoy it is penned by I. Ron Butterfly. The whole 17-minute version is played by the First Church of Springfield's exhausted church organist."
