Led Zeppelin deluxe reissues spark critical reevaluation of the band's legacy
An early Led Zeppelin publicity photo, with guitarist/mastermind Jimmy Page front and center. He personally remastered the first three Led Zeppelin albums for a new set of reissues.
Keith Spera, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on June 24, 2014
If you're a music critic younger than age 50, you are too young to have written about the great British rock bands of the 1960s and '70s – the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Beatles, Pink Floyd – in their heyday. You never had the chance to expound at length on the merits and meaning of a new album from these acts, when their new albums actually mattered.
Deluxe reissues, happily, afford writers an opportunity to re-assess the greats and riff on not just the original material, but the legacy of the band in question.
Case in point: Atlantic Records' brand new reissues of the first three Led Zeppelin albums. Zeppelin guitarist and mastermind Jimmy Page personally remastered the original albums; he also combed through the tape vaults to discover much of the previously unreleased material on the bonus discs included with deluxe reissues of "Led Zeppelin," "Led Zeppelin II" and "Led Zeppelin III." (Singer Robert Plant, perhaps not surprisingly given his commitment to making new music with new bands -- his new album, "lullaby and...The Ceaseless Roar" is coming out Sept. 9 -- was apparently less interested in trolling through the band's past. Not that he's above trotting out the old songs, as his set at the 2014 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival demonstrated.)
That bonus material includes alternate takes and rough mixes of anthems that, in their finished form, are now part of rock's DNA. The expanded "Led Zeppelin" also contains a live recording of the band in Paris in 1969 that, up to this point, had been available only as a bootleg. All three reissues recently debuted in the Top 10 of Billboard's album chart -- 34 years after drummer John Bonham's death signaled the end of Zeppelin's remarkable 12-year run.
Zeppelin was the sort of band that critics of the day reflexively loved to hate. The reissues have sparked some critical backtracking. In his review of the reissues, Rolling Stone senior writer David Fricke notes that "this magazine is still living down 1969 pans of 'Led Zeppelin' and 'Led Zeppelin II' as brutal blues ham." Fricke's 4.5 out of 5 star review concludes that "the music is now beyond reproach."
The Houston Press rated all of the bonus tracks on the three albums, scoring some as long-lost gems (the previously unreleased instrumental "La La," a rough mix of "Gallows Pole") and some as nothing special (the familiar album version of "Friends" sans vocals).
An epic analysis by Jack Hamilton, Slate's pop music critic and a University of Virginia assistant professor of media studies and American studies, uses the three new reissues – the rest of the Zeppelin catalog will eventually receive the same treatment – to reconsider not only the original albums, but Led Zeppelin's proper place in the whole of popular music.
His premise is apparent in the headline: "Modern rock didn't start with Dylan or the Beatles. It started with Zeppelin."
That said, Hamilton's essay is by no means the work of a slavish fan-boy. He delivers some barbs. "The only way 'Immigrant Song' could have sounded more like a parody of Led Zeppelin," Hamilton writes, "is if it were seven minutes long as opposed to a mere (blessed) two and a half."
But he goes on to praise the remainder of "Led Zeppelin III" as "an album of real songs, enormous eclecticism, and startling beauty. The album's second side contained the finest collection of unplugged rock music this side of (the Rolling Stones') 'Beggars Banquet.'"
He succinctly runs down landmark moments in the post-mortem extension of the Zeppelin mystique, including the 1985 publication of the decidedly unauthorized biography "Hammer of the Gods." Hamilton correctly describes it as "as seminal a ninth-grade text as 'Of Mine and Men,' despite the band insisting its tales of occult hijinks and hotel debauchery were grossly exaggerated."
The reissues, especially the previously unheard, unfamiliar practice takes of now codified songs like "Ramble On," "Whole Lotta Love" and "Gallows Pole," are the real revelations. These peeks-behind-the-curtain, Hamilton asserts, "give us the opportunity to rediscover this band as they were, four absurdly gifted young people making music together, as opposed to the rock deities they'd forever after be imagined as."
The Slate essay reconsiders Page, Plant, Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones in the present tense. In a lengthy assessment for Pitchfork, Mark Richardson reiterates that that is exactly how Zeppelin should be considered. "I'm very glad these new remasters and the attendant publicity push exist," Richardson says, "to get us all listening to and talking about Led Zeppelin again, where they stand and what they might mean. However you feel about them and their brand of ultra-huge arena rock, there has never been another band like them, before or since."
And, thanks to the reissues, a new generation of writers are able to say so.
http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2014/06/reissues_of_first_three_albums.html#...
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Led Zeppelin Readying Unreleased Material For New Box Sets (Read 83,059 times)
