FEATURE:
Rock and Roll
The Titanic Led Zeppelin IV at Fifty
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ONE of the best albums…
of all time turns fifty on 8th November. I have written about Led Zeppelin IV before but, as it is coming up for that milestone, I wanted to step in one more time and talk about an album that is not only celebrated by fans and critics. In 1971, it was an album where Led Zeppelin shot back at doubting critics. It is one that I really love. I am a big Led Zeppelin fan and, whilst Led Zeppelin II might be my favourite of theirs, I hold a whole lotta love for the 1971 masterpiece. It was a golden period for the band. If you have the likes of Robert Plant, John Bonham, John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page in your ranks, when things click and come together, the results are magical! Their fourth studio album is sensational and filled with utterly amazing songs. It was produced by guitarist Jimmy Page and recorded between December 1970 and February 1971; mostly in the country house Headley Grange, Hampshire. Led Zeppelin IV is one of the biggest-selling albums ever. It is also one of the best-regarded and most-famous. To mark its fiftieth, there are a few articles/reviews that I wanted to drop in. In terms of the band performances, everyone is at their peak here. More consistent than later albums like Physical Graffiti (1975),l Led Zeppelin IV is both tough and nuanced. There are songs like Rock and Roll that are direct and insatiable, whereas we get tracks such as Misty Mountain Hop that are more pastoral and acoustic. The band switched from the mostly Rock and Blues sound of Led Zeppelin II in 1969 to incorporating more acoustic elements into Led Zeppelin III the following year - something that was met with disapproval from those who prefer Zep raw and ragged!
There are those who say, technically, the band’s fourth album is untitled. That is true. Whether you call it Led Zeppelin IV or prefer Untitled as a title, it was another stunning album in a year with more than its fair share (take Joni Mitchell’s Blue for example!). The album is sequenced so you get a balance of sounds and genres. No one side is too heavy or lacking in punch. Both sides end with epic songs. The first finishes with Led Zeppelin’s signature song, Stairway to Heaven. The album ends with When the Levee Breaks. There is so much intent and power running through these songs. Musicianship that beggars belief! You can buy Led Zeppelin IV from HMV or Rough Trade. It is an album that had a fascinating history, story and recording process. Before I come to the reviews, there is an article from Louder Sound that takes us into the creation of one of the most acclaimed albums ever:
“On a bitterly cold morning in January 1971, guitarist Jimmy Page, 26, singer Robert Plant, 22, bassist/ keyboardist John Paul Jones, 24, and drummer John Bonham, 22, arrived at Headley Grange, Hampshire, to find the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio already waiting for them in the driveway.
With them was a young engineer by the name of Andy Johns, brother of Glyn, who had worked on the first Zeppelin album, piano player Ian Stewart, formerly piano player and jack-of-all-trades for the Rolling Stones, and known to all and sundry as Stu, along with a small road crew.
Plant and Page, in the grip of an intense and productive creative union, fell into that group of artists whose muse was susceptible to their surroundings. The damp, cool manor, with its bleak history, surrounded by the bare winter trees, affected them quickly.
“Most of the mood for the fourth album was brought about in settings we had not been used to,” Plant later reflected. “We were living in this falling-down mansion in the country. It was incredible.”
In late October 1970 Page and Plant had returned to Bron-Yr-Aur, the idyllic cottage halfway up a mountain in south Snowdonia. It was here that earlier in the year they had conceived many of the songs for Led Zeppelin III. As before, they sat around the cottage hearth with a decent log fire burning and played and sang. They already had a backlog of half-finished songs and fragments of ideas. Among them was a lilting Neil Young-influenced piece titled Down By The Seaside and two semi-acoustic tunes, Hey, Hey What Can I Do and Poor Tom.
In December they booked initial studio sessions at Island Studios. The Basing Street location was becoming the most in-demand studio in London and they had recorded much of III there. Page, though, was also looking to record on location with The Rolling Stones’ new mobile recording unit.
“We started off doing some tracks at Island, then we went to Headley Grange,” he recalled. “We took the Stones’ mobile . It was ideal. As soon as we had an idea we put it down on tape.”
The group began to settle in at Headley Grange, Page and Plant revelling in the atmosphere which was so different from the sterile surrounds of a normal studio. It was the idyll of the early 70s; gentleman rockers at large in the country, gear set up for extended jams, and some sedate – by Zeppelin’s Herculean standards, at any rate – recreation on hand.
The sessions for the fourth Zeppelin album continued to develop organically. They were still drawing liberally from Page and Plant’s blues influences and were increasingly drawn towards the folk sounds that had either enthralled, enraged or confused those listening to Led Zeppelin III.
John Paul Jones had used a mandolin on That’s The Way on III, and he brought it to the Grange. Page was sitting around downstairs late one night and, “These chords just came out. It was my first experiment with the mandolin. I suppose mandolin players would laugh, because it must be the standard thing to play those chords, but possibly not with that approach. It did sound a little like a ‘let’s dance around the Maypole number’ but it wasn’t purposely like that.”
Plant had written the lyric for The Battle Of Evermore after reading a book on the Scottish wars. But he felt the tune needed another vocalist to act as a foil and so the band called on ex-Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny to provide a rare cameo.
“It’s really more of a playlet than a song,” says Plant. “After I wrote the lyrics I realised I needed another completely different voice as well to give the song full impact. So while I sang the events in the song, Sandy answered back as if she was the pulse of the people on the battlements. Denny was playing the town crier urging people to throw down their weapons.”
At Headley Grange, Plant sang a guide vocal, leaving the response lines for Denny to insert later. Denny noted Plant’s prowess as a vocalist on the session: “We started out soft but I was hoarse by the end, trying to keep up with him.”
The richness of the Bron-Yr-Aur sessions was also apparent. Although Page and Plant had written The Battle Of Evermore on the run at the Grange, other songs that took the same remit of acoustic guitar, mandolin and traditional influence had begun in Snowdonia. Going To California was written there and recorded later at the Grange. Other, more random factors were at work, too. Like the old black dog that used to hang around the Grange’s kitchen.
Bonham’s work on every track was superbly applied, and no more so than his dropping off the beat at 4 minutes 17 seconds into Misty Mountain Hop, the album’s nod to the medicinal properties of good, strong weed. Elsewhere on the album, Jones had an electric synth riff that the band were unable to nail until Bonham laid down a can of Double Diamond (much maligned and now forgotten workingman’s brew), picked up two drumsticks in each hand and, as Jimmy Page remembers, “just went for it. It was magic. We had tried different ways of approaching it. The idea was to get an abstract feeling. We tried it a few times and it didn’t come off until the day Bonzo did that.”
In a nod to John’s genius, the band decided to call the song Four Sticks. “It was a bastard to mix,” says Andy Johns.
More than any other Led Zeppelin album though, before or since, the fourth album, would become both glorified and then later vilified, before coming full-circle latterly to be glorified again for one track: Stairway To Heaven. Destined to become one of their two most famous songs (just ahead of Whole Lotta Love), we all know this one.
Still consistently voted one of, if not the, most popular and most widely known rock songs in history – kind of like Bridge Over Troubled Water and Bohemian Rhapsody all rolled into one – it has become the National Anthem of rock music”.
There are albums that receive near-perfect scores across the board. It is reserved for a special few. The Beatles’ Abbey Road might be one. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is another. Led Zeppelin IV can be added to the club! This is what the BBC wrote in their 2007 review:
“Recorded at Headley Grange in Hampshire, Island Studios in London and Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, Led Zeppelin IV is the album that put Led Zeppelin into homes around the world, acting as a successful marriage of the hard rock from their second album with the folkier meanderings of their third. It is an album that demonstrates their subtlety and restraint as much as their stadium-filling grandstanding and it confirmed their superstar rock status.
The actually untitled album (it was also known as Four Symbols or The Runes Album), a chart-topper on both sides of the Atlantic, captures the group’s schizophrenia perfectly. On the one hand, they wallop away through genre-defining rock standards such as “Rock And Roll”, “Black Dog” and “Misty Mountain Hop”; yet on the other, they are gentle and restrained on the folk mysticism of “Going To California” and the Sandy Denny co-sung “The Battle Of Evermore.”
It is on their anthem, “Stairway To Heaven”, however, that both strands come together in perfect accord. Starting as a recorder-driven acoustic folk ballad, it culminates in its closing minutes as a full-on, much emulated rock classic, with Robert Plant’s vocals and Jimmy Page’s guitar both approaching career-bests. Led Zeppelin IV also demonstrates the singular talent that was drummer John Bonham – the blues driven “When The Levee Breaks” is one of the most heavily sampled drum tracks of all time.
With immaculate playing (multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones’ contributions are not to be underestimated, either), a mystically obscure sleeve, and a remarkable range of tunes, Led Zeppelin IV, is still, for many, the best example of the group’s craft. Robert Plant thinks so himself. He has been quoted saying, simply: "the Fourth Album, that's it”.
To end things, I am going to source a review from AllMusic . They recognised the diversity and sheer quality of the 1971 classic from Led Zeppelin:
“Encompassing heavy metal, folk, pure rock & roll, and blues, Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album is a monolithic record, defining not only Led Zeppelin but the sound and style of '70s hard rock. Expanding on the breakthroughs of III, Zeppelin fuse their majestic hard rock with a mystical, rural English folk that gives the record an epic scope. Even at its most basic -- the muscular, traditionalist "Rock and Roll" -- the album has a grand sense of drama, which is only deepened by Robert Plant's burgeoning obsession with mythology, religion, and the occult. Plant's mysticism comes to a head on the eerie folk ballad "The Battle of Evermore," a mandolin-driven song with haunting vocals from Sandy Denny, and on the epic "Stairway to Heaven." Of all of Zeppelin's songs, "Stairway to Heaven" is the most famous, and not unjustly. Building from a simple fingerpicked acoustic guitar to a storming torrent of guitar riffs and solos, it encapsulates the entire album in one song. Which, of course, isn't discounting the rest of the album. "Going to California" is the group's best folk song, and the rockers are endlessly inventive, whether it's the complex, multi-layered "Black Dog," the pounding hippie satire "Misty Mountain Hop," or the funky riffs of "Four Sticks." But the closer, "When the Levee Breaks," is the one song truly equal to "Stairway," helping give IV the feeling of an epic. An apocalyptic slice of urban blues, "When the Levee Breaks" is as forceful and frightening as Zeppelin ever got, and its seismic rhythms and layered dynamics illustrate why none of their imitators could ever equal them.
[Led Zeppelin launched a massive, Jimmy Page-supervised reissue campaign in 2014, where each of their studio albums was remastered and then expanded with a bonus disc of alternate versions (in the case of the super deluxe editions, they were also supplemented by vinyl pressings and a massive hardcover book). The supplemental disc for Led Zeppelin IV is constructed as a mirror image of the finished album, comprised almost entirely of alternate mixes and instrumentals. "The Battle of Evermore" and "Going to California" belong to the latter category, consisting of nothing but the acoustic guitar and mandolin parts from the finished track, while the rest of the record is devoted to alternate mixes from various sources. Occasionally, a distinction leaps out -- there's a notable lack of swampy, cavernous echo on "When the Levee Breaks," perhaps a few more keyboards on the midsection of "Stairway to Heaven" -- but generally these mixes are leaner, tighter, and not all that different from the finished version. A song or two feels slightly different -- "Misty Mountain Hop" jumps a bit as it seems to groove a little bit stronger -- but by and large this disc shows that as a producer, Page not only knew where he wanted to go but he knew how to get it right the first time.]”.
A happy fiftieth anniversary to the magnificent Led Zeppelin IV. They would follow the album with 1973’s Houses of the Holy. Whilst not quite as strong, it is another wonderful album when the band were very much without competition (one could argue The Who and The Rolling Stones rivalled them, but I would disagree!). Fifty years in the world and Led Zeppelin IV remains this mind-blowing album that is played widely and adored. What better excuse do you need today…
TO spin a classic?!