The only Led Zeppelin song I enjoy

And why!

In November 2018, standing inside a Beatles-themed store, a good writer friend of mine told me Led Zeppelin was her favorite band. This surprised me because 1) I had never heard anyone bestow that title on this band, and 2) if I had, she would not strike me as one of ‘those people,’ whatever that means.

I have admittedly never cared for…the Zep? What does the fandom call them? Since my teens, and particularly since this personal endorsement, I’ve made a periodic attempt to ‘get into’ them, and I just can’t. I’m not moved by 10-minute songs about Vikings and Lord of the Rings, and it turns out there actually is only so much white-boy blues I can handle.

I don’t like that it took them five albums to start titling them. I don’t like that ‘Page and Plant’ sounds like a coffeeshop opened in 2014 by a couple of Brooklyn gentrifiers who charge 6€ a latte. I don’t like that members of the band would have been interested in me at half my current age (a problem certainly not unique to them). Or that their definition of artistic license seemed to amount to an especially shameless set of IP overreaches and/or straight-up theft.

Also Keith Moon literally gave you your name lol.

A storefront in Berlin.

An establishment in Stuttgart. There’s a Zeppelinstraße here somewhere.

I do appreciate John Paul Jones’ gift for arranging and producing, wielded to great effect on one of my favorite albums, R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People. I do see a “(ft. Robert Plant)” in the wild nowadays as a promise of a solid song. And I do respect the decision, when their drummer died, to walk away. Perhaps more of their peers could have used that wherewithal.

AND there is one track I well and truly love: “Houses of the Holy.” Which, for reasons I haven’t researched, appears not on the album of the same name but on a different album from two years later.

It’s a stomp. The riff is great, the sort of stumble in the drums on every third repetition of said riff is great, the “you kno-owwwww” is great. “Said there ain’t no use in crying” is my fave verse, with the “ooh-ooh-ooh” in back. Irresistible. And the job is done in four minutes.

Hang on, girlies (used gender-neutrally), here’s the research:

Ok but then why name the album after a song that didn’t make it??

Anyway. Let me follow this up with the caveat that other songs do hit in the right context. LZII imagined as a ‘50s rockabilly record? I dig. Even if the lyrics are every conceivable blues trope smashed together. I earn the money, you spend the money, you go around with other men, I love you, you love me, we are not a happy family. That is, if you can make any of that out; several comments said something like I’ve been listening to the album for fifty years and this is the first time I’ve understood the lyrics.

It was on this train of thought that I realized—revelatory in its simplicity—that most of my favorite bands have multiple singers. There may be a lead, but they’re not alone. It’s so much more band-ish that way, more communal. You’re gonna make this guy sing everything by himself? What do the rest of you do? Eat bonbons? Endlessly paint your 12-string with which you then lift whatever melodies strike your fancy, JAMES?

No thanks. My largely-single-vocalist bands are Talking Heads and Radiohead, their names being conveniently/tellingly linked. Thom Yorke, by the way, is hands-down my unintelligible singer of choice. (Helpfully, he and David Byrne both dance.) Actually, Talking Heads are a bad example—Stop Making Sense portrays what a multi-vocalist band they became in the end. See? Together is better!

And so, back to “Houses,” while the riff and the melody and the whole formula suffice on their own, those backing oohs—first in unison, then in two parts—seal the deal. They sound so chic. Fashionable rock & roll. Even if it’s just layers of Robert’s voice, it at least sounds like a group effort. And the choral touch is hinted at in an earlier verse, with the ever-so-slight harmonization on “Let the music be your master / Will you heed the master’s call?” Why yes, I think I will, if the master keeps this up.

In conclusion, I’ll be watching the upcoming doc, momentous for having been authorized by the living, and nearly coinciding with the 50^th anniversary of none other than Physical Graffiti. Maybe I’ll write about it, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll learn I’ve been wrong about them and eat my hat! But that doesn’t mean I want to listen to “The Lemon Song.” Which, for those who don’t know, is NOT about lemons. 2 stars. (It’s still kind of catchy.)

First song rec of 2025: “Stairway to Heaven,” Neil Sedaka