"We are your overlords"

Though I can't call myself a Led Zeppelin fanatic, the band was important to the development of my musical tastes in my teenage years. "Whole Lotta Love" came out when I was 13, just after I hit puberty, and it was a revelation to this kid who had really just discovered rock and pop music that very summer. In the late 60's one could listen to the radio and hear The Archies, The Beatles, Sly & the Family Stone, and Led Zeppelin all in one half-hour--the kind of diversity that hasn't existed on commercial radio for years now. I liked all the bands I heard on top 40 radio, but my only real exposure to what would become "heavy metal" (or just "heavy" in the late 60's) would have been Steppenwolf and Cream. Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" changed everything: it was, to quote myself from an earlier blog post, "a strikingly strange piece of music for mass consumption: blues riffs, sexual references like 'backdoor man,' and that crazy explosive middle section." Not to mention that "every inch of my love" line, which was like hard-core porn to a freshly sexually-aware teenager who was pretty sure he was gay.

I tended to buy singles back then, but I knew the AM top 40 radio version of "Whole Lotta Love" was missing that orgasmic middle section (that you could only hear late at night or on the FM progressive rock station) so I bought the album. I never took to it as a whole, though I did like the beginning of side 2, with the triple-threat piledrivers "Heartbreaker," "Living Loving Maid," and "Ramble On," but I sure enough wore out "Whole Lotta Love." (Years later, I read that you could literally wash albums with warm soapy water, and Zeppelin II would be the first one I would subject to that treatment--I think it kinda helped...) I liked Zeppelins III and IV, though after that, they would mostly fall off my radar (with the exception of a handful of songs on Physical Graffiti).
Now I feel my own private Led Zeppelin renaissance happening in the wake of having read a new biography of the band, When Giants Walked the Earth by Mick Wall, a British rock journalist. This one is less sensationalistic than an earlier best-seller about the band, Hammer of the Gods, and manages to humanize the group a bit. Yes, they trashed hotel rooms, did loads of drugs, and had sex with oodles of groupies; yes, guitarist Jimmy Page was into "magick" and the writings of occultist Aleister Crowley (and even owned an occult bookstore in England for a time); yes, Robert Plant wore skintight jeans and thought a lot of himself; yes, John Bonham's death from too much alcohol seemed, like Keith Moon's end, predestined; and, yes, John Paul Jones was the quiet one, though he is on record as being unhappy that he wasn't asked to join up with Plant and Page for their 90's collaborations.

But like Papa John, the John Phillips autobiography, this book presents the cautionary aspects of their story (more money and more fame don't make you happier) and presents the sympathetic real people behind the legends. To me as a teenager, Plant and Page always seemed like dark gods who could do no wrong, but they've both had tragedy touch their lives (above and beyond the death of Bonham which brought an end to the band). Plant's 5-year-old son died suddenly of an infection while Plant was on tour in America, and a year later Plant was in a car accident which took him a year to recover from. Page, who everyone hailed as a musical genius, got wrapped up in heroin to the detriment of his health and creativity; though he's gone straight since then, he's never managed to even come close to getting out the Zeppelin shadow (unlike Plant who has had a major solo career which has hit a new peak in the last couple of years in his recordings with Allison Krauss). Instead Zeppelin is an albatross around his neck. Perhaps most interestingly, the role of their blustering and vicious manager Peter Grant is given full coverage here.

The book gets a bit weird in structure, bouncing back and forth in time, sometimes without sufficient clarity, and a few minor errors are problematic (Plant's Honeydrippers project came years after his first solo albums, not before; the album is called In Through the Out Door, not Outdoor). Wall completely fails at his strange fictitious interior monologue chapters, supposedly from the viewpoints of the individual members, but overall the book is a success, largely because he has interview all the living members of the band in recent years, so this is several notches above a slapdash bio pieced together from press releases and magazine interviews.

As for the title of my post, it comes from a line from one of my favorite Zeppelin songs, "The Immigrant Song." I never knew the lyrics except for the crystal-clear opening ("We come from the land of the ice and snow/From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow"); it turns out one of the most ominous-sounding lines, which I always took to be "We are yours, over and over," is actually the fabulous and truly ominous "We are your overlords." Below, that very song.