Yeah, it's Saturday night and I'm sick of reading about Mel Gibson and Lebanon.
It put a smile on my face to learn that the greatest band ever is still selling albums to a new generation of fans.
Posted on 08/05/2006 3:55:31 PM PDT by Drew68
Thirty-seven years after Led Zeppelin's debut, their albums continue to sell in the millions, while their music inspires everyone from Aussie metalheads to Nashville punks
BRIAN HIATT
The studded leather bracelets and Napoleon Dynamite merchandise at Hot Topic target customers between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two—kids who weren't born when Led Zeppelin broke up in 1980.
Nonetheless, the all-time top-selling band T-shirt at the chain's 700-plus mall stores is Zep's Swan Song tee—the one bearing the image of a naked, winged Apollo.
"It's not like with the CBGB or Ramones T-shirts, where it was a fashion trend," says Cindy Levitt, vice president of music and marketing for Hot Topic. "Kids appreciate the music."
According to Nielsen Soundscan, Led Zeppelin have sold 20.2 million albums since 1990 alone. In the last four years, thirty-eight percent of all Zep sales were to fans under the age of twenty-five, according to the research firm NPD.
"There's almost a religious thing about Zeppelin—I got obsessed really badly when I was in high school," says Matthew Himes, a twenty-year-old college student from Los Angeles who has the four symbols from Led Zeppelin IV tattooed vertically along his right shoulder.
"By my age, everyone has gone through their Zeppelin phase," adds twenty-one-year-old fan Dan Teicher, who credits the band with helping to lead him to major in music at Brown University.
Thirty-seven years after the release of Led Zeppelin I, the band also continues to inspire generations of musicians.
"Led Zeppelin—I think that's the band we always looked toward," says Pearl Jam's Jeff Ament. The hot Australian trio Wolfmother draw on Seventies sources from Sabbath to the Stooges, but Andrew Stockdale's banshee vocals and the band's chordal riffs clearly pay tribute to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.
At age thirteen, before Stockdale had even heard of the band, he used to wear a tie-dyed Zep T-shirt to junior-high dances to impress girls. Then, when he was eighteen, Stockdale got into Led Zeppelin III.
"I said, 'If someone started a band now that was just like this, it would f---ing go off,' " says the frontman, now twenty-eight.
Stockdale, who sings about unicorns and carnivals on his band's debut, was especially intrigued by Plant's lyrical approach.
"People go onstage and pour their hearts out and no one wants to hear it—why not sing about 'Gollum and his evil ways' instead?"
Even Nashville punks Be Your Own Pet, whose squawky teenage riot couldn't sound less like Houses of the Holy, credit Zep as a touchstone and titled a song on their debut album "Stairway to Heaven."
"Everyone I know in music is into Zeppelin—they're just such a necessary band to know about," says eighteen-year-old BYOP guitarist Jonas Stein. And while the original punks saw Zeppelin as irrelevant dinosaurs (Clash bassist Paul Simonon once said, "I don't have to hear Led Zeppelin—just looking at their record covers makes me want to throw up"), Stein finds that hard to understand.
"If no one had told me otherwise, I would have thought that some of the punk stuff is sort of influenced by Zeppelin," he says. "They're solid, they're concrete. Zep's music will last forever."
Yeah, it's Saturday night and I'm sick of reading about Mel Gibson and Lebanon.
It put a smile on my face to learn that the greatest band ever is still selling albums to a new generation of fans.
Incidentally, Nancy Wilson (the hot one) is married to Cameron Crowe who directed the semi-autobiographical film Almost Famous about his years as a teen writing for Rolling Stone magazine and touring with Zeppelin trying to get them to sit down for a cover story.
Zeppelin hated Rolling Stone as the magazine always gave their albums poor reviews. By the time they were the biggest band in the world, Rolling Stone was begging them for a cover story! Page famously quipped that being on the cover of Rolling Stone would be far more helpful for the magazine than it would be for him.
In the end, Zeppelin relented and gave Crowe his cover story.
Zep, Sabbath, Deep Purple, etc. They still sell, because they were GOOD. Today's music has no shelf life. cRap and Pop (which is pretty much all there is nowadays). Grunge doesn't seem ti have much staying power either.
I grew up with them all. They were beyond good.
Great songs played by great musicians.
Saw 'em once -- summer of '77, L.A. Forum. Loudest show I've ever attended by a wide margin. ....and the songs (especially "No Quarter" and "Dazed and Confused") were even more long an drawn out than usual. But a good show overall. Found myself focused on Bonham's percussion work. ....mesmerizing.
The proper question is why they were ever popular in the first place.
They weren't even the first band to rip off Muddy Waters, Ledbelly, and Link Wray and they didn't do it half as well as the Stones did.
Unadulterated overly self indulgent claptrap. The only concert I ever suffered through that was worse than Zepellin was the Dead.
L
At work the other day I got in the elevator, and etched in the stainless steel was "Zoso", with the tail of the "Z" extend under the "oso". And this has been going on for what, over 30 years?
Some things just stand the test of time.
I liked grunge a lot. Grunge was basically early 70s rock.
I was never really sure why the genre passed so quickly. I've always thought that maybe the morose themes of grunge music just didn't fit well with the economic and technological boom that was happening during the 1990s. A bunch of sullen Gen X-ers singing about the pains of life while everyone around them was getting rich in the tech markets!
The times called for "happier" music and grunge was swept into the dustbin.
I've been a fan of Led Zeppelin for as long as I can remember. I was raised on classic rock.
As a guitar player, I think Bonham's drumming defined the Zeppelin sound more than Page's guitar playing.
Bonham revolutionized rock drumming in a way that has forever altered the sound of heavy music. He was to drumming what Hendrix was to the guitar. He pushed the envelope as to what the instrument could do.
I'm a guitar player as well (picked it about a year before I saw Zep), and agree that Bonham was just as much a key to Zep's sound as Page.
As a side note, I just listened to Presence for the first time in a long while and was reminded how much I enjoy the change of pace in Page's sound -- single coils / Strat. Nice complement to his usual Les Paul.
In concert he used the LP for all but a few songs -- I remember him playing a Telecaster on "Kashmir" and "Sick Again."
The best dam band, period. After decades of listening their albums there is nothing better out there, IMO.
It's a shame though how Page and Plant have frozen out John Paul Jones.
In my younger years when I pretty much listened to nothing but Zeppelin, "Presence" was probably the album I listened to the least. I don't know why, I just thought it wasn't very accessible to me when I was young.
In the latest Rolling Stone cover story on Zeppelin, writer Mikal Gilmore calls "Presence" Zeppelin's finest album ever. I may have to give it another listen. Currently, I have their DVD playing in the background.
In concert he used the LP for all but a few songs -- I remember him playing a Telecaster on "Kashmir" and "Sick Again."
He did a lot of recording on a Tele. Most people don't realize that the solo in "Stairway" is pure Telecaster --as was much of "Zeppelin II." Page had his rarely-photographed black Les Paul Custom stolen at the airport and Joe Walsh had not yet sold him his famous '59 Sunburst (an act I'm sure Walsh now regrets).
So true, even though Bonham was influenced by Carmine Appice's "big" sound with Vanilla Fudge. But he brought it to even more masses due to Zep's heavy style and popularity. Still today, Ludwig sells "Bonham" drum sets and they sell like hotcakes. Best rock drummer ever to me.
Heart has been doing Zeppelin covers since the 70s. IMO, they're probably the only band that can truly do Zep justice, particularly their original band members. Their original drummer, Mike Derosier, tears it up on "Rock & Roll" live. My 2 favorite bands.
Good thread. As much as I hate their politics, the full Rolling Stone article was a fun read.
Page has never divulged where he came up with this symbol. Now Bonham's three rings? He took that from a beer can.
Rolling Stone is still a great magazine for music journalism --the best, really. That's why I've subscribed for years.
Yeah, all us Zep fans went through a period of listening to practially nothing else. The album I listened to the least was In Through the Out Door, partly because it was released after I went through my "Zep only" phase, and partly because I think it's by far the weakest of their albums. (Page was sloppy, the effects on Plants voice were annoying, and the songs were relatively weak).
Page used a Tele for the entirety of Zep I, which is apparent from the unusually biting tone. ...and yep, not many are aware he used it sporadically throughout the album catalogue.
I'm a big Tele fan myself, but my favorite Fenders are hard to find -- "hardtail" Strats with swamp ash bodies and maple boards. The hardtail design gives it the bite of the Tele, and the combo of ash/maple allows the fullest range of tones. Place a good humbucker in the bridge position and you get probably the most versatile axe around.
(For alder-bodied Fenders I prefer rosewood boards. ...like Stevie Ray's rig).
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