Does Led Zeppelin suck?

[upinkzeppelin2]

This thread topic/question is what is commonly referred to in the Modern-Castaways era as 'PEW-bait'. Coming from Melaun of all people? Dude, are you a masochist?

Wha?? I actually wondered if the consensus would be they sucked or not. Really, that's all. PEW-bait?? C'mon, Kool. That's stretching things a bit far, donchathink?

[Ryosuke]

He was just joking, lighten up.

[upinkzeppelin2]

Consider me lightened.

[KooL]

Yeah, I was joking.

I should've added a smiley there, but I already had the 'wink' emoticon for Holzman. No one post should have more than 1 emoticon. It's just lame. Especially if it's a short post like that one was.

[upinkzeppelin2]

Yeah. I agree.

[wayved]

Melaun-Cmon man! Led Zeppelin?

I wish Strawman were here. He hates em. HATES EM. If Led Zeppelin came to his house for a reunion show he would probably shoot em or poison em.

I can understand why people don't like them.

A. Jimmy Page and his stupid ass wanna be mysticism/occult bullshit. On the live DVD he waves his hand over the audience like hes trying to put a spell on everyone. WHAT? Get real man. Shut up.

B. Robert Plant's pontificating and pants. I love the live DVD but that got on my nerves. I'm a heterosexual male, Mr. Plant. All your thrusting and moaning does NOTHING for me. I dont wanna see an outline of your package.

Those 2 things aside they rock like there is no tomorrow. They broke ground. John Bonham. I will go out on a limb and say punk would have never taken place without them. (punks got pissed at them and their ilk perhaps?)

I just cannot understand why some cannot see any merit at all......Strawman--cmon man!
Deep Purple--do they suck?

[Paul]

I voted no, but I do think they're kinda overrated - as noted before however, I love LZ1 and LZ3. As for the rest, make me a mix of the remaining albums, and that would do it for me.

[Paul]

wayved said:

Melaun-Cmon man! Led Zeppelin?

Those 2 things aside they rock like there is no tomorrow. They broke ground. John Bonham. I will go out on a limb and say punk would have never taken place without them. (punks got pissed at them and their ilk perhaps?)

*coughs* The Kinks!

[Thorngrub]

ritalinpants said:

Led Zep 1 - good album, very few poor tracks.
Led Zep II - terrible overcooked, and underbrewed mishmash.
Led Zep III - an improvement over II. though it's cloying in places. ugh.
Led Zep 4 - wafer thin, but some really good riffs abound.
Houses of The Holy - nice riffs. colourful. pretentious.
Physical Graffitti - great album. period.
Presence - who let this piece of crap get committed to vinyl?
In Through The Out Door - kaleideoscopic nonsense.

Led Zep 1 - "The cannon shot heard round the world", and as such, remains to this day a bona-fide R'n'R classic.
Led Zep II - Pushes the band forward in artistry while retaining their bombast and lean, mean blues chops.
Led Zep III - One of the most classic rock albums of all time, competes w/Zep I and Physical Graffiti for Best Zep Album
Led Zep 4 - Before DSOTM, there was this Ultimate Classic Album
Houses of The Holy - Zeppelin at the peak of their creativity.
Physical Graffitti - Arguably the greatest Zeppelin album.
Presence - Although down a notch or two from PG, does have its share of epic blues burners. Underpar.
In Through The Out Door - An intimation of what Zep in the 80s would have sounded like. Good, worthy, rock music a tad overproduced and lacking the classic, raw blues edge the band built their reputation on.

[Thorngrub]

In a word, real true blue rock'n'roll has as much to do with "attitude" (just like them snarly lil 'punks') as it does anything else, and Led Zeppelin had attitude in spades. It's like, folks can argue the technical merits of whether or not Page was a "great" or "talented" guitarist, but the point of his particular genius had less to do with technical ability and more to do with the fact he sold his soul to Satan in exchange for the magickal ability to mesmerize anyone who listened to his smoking leads, while smoking a cig no less (ever wonder how he managed to do that without burning his eyes?).

Sure I could name ten other guitarists who are technically more proficient than Jimmy Page, but I honestly can't think of a single one who more deserves legendary cult status as the greatest guitarist that ever graced the rock'n'roll stage. His leads were beyond the capacity of other's due partially to that pact he made with Satan, sure, but also because it wasn't so much the conscious part of his brain doing the playing, but rather, his primitive Id was in total control (Satan again), and as such, ran with the leads to heights and depths no other rock guitarist could ever manage. And of course his experimentation with violin bows and the grandiose 20-minute plus soloes from such crazed, raw classics as "Dazed & Confused" veritably defined & enshrined rock bombast itself for eternity.

Make all the fun you want, get out your arsenal of post-punk sensibility and lay as much waste to Zeppelin's legacy as you can, but it don't mean squat facing the juggernaut of what they were and have become:

THE sole heirs to the One True Throne ruling over the entire genre of rock and roll, period.

So, have some respect regardless of what your personal opinions of their overplayed music might happen to be. Today there are many truly significant bands who owe their own legacies as much to Led Zeppelin as they do to Pink Floyd or any other classic rock band from that era. Case in point: the new Porcupine Tree pays strict homage to Zep, just check out the beginning of track 2 from Fear Of A Blank Planet, "My Ashes": it starts off with this beautiful reference to the beginning of "No Quarter". Note how Alex Lifeson (of Rush) has a guest spot on the new Porcupine Tree. Now turn your attention to the new RUSH album itself. RUSH owe their entire existence to Led Zeppelin. Alex plays tribute to this on the devastating & beautiful 12-string acoustic instrumental song "Hope", a post-Zeppelin number that evokes shimmering echoes of "White Summer", and is enough to melt an ice age of Zeppelin neglect.

Without Led Zeppelin, we would all be dead.
;b

Seriously. . . w/out the mighty Zep, who knows what the fuck we'd be listening to on the radio today. Probably dried out Don McClean folk ditties with barbershop quartet refrains. Respect

[strat-0]

Well said, Thorny.

[KooL]

Yeah, thoRns obviously knows his Zep.

That said, I don't think I've listened to any of my Zep albums in a couple of years. But they're still the best, and most influential rock/hard rock band that ever was. And ThoRn's is right, if it weren't for Zep, rock today would suck.

[Kensterberg]

Ryo -- I grew up in the midwest in the seventies/early eighties. I was inundated with hard rock/metal as an adolescent. I had Cheap Trick's Live at Budokan in '78, my brothers had most of the Led Zep and Aerosmith catalogs (I was actually pretty into Toys in the Attic around that time as well), lots of Lynard Skynard, Molly Hatchet, etc., and so on and so forth. Plenty of Deep Purple, Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, and so on was played on local radio, at parties, etc.

One of these reasons I fell in love with punk (and the Clash in particular) was b/c I could have the kind of smart lyrics I loved in artists like Springsteen combined with a knock-out rock and roll punch which no metal/hard rock act could touch. The Clash could rock harder than any metal band, but they had lyrics that were worth memorizing (as opposed to being cringe-inducing).

And I've always absolutely loathed Plant's vocals in LZ. If you removed his wailing from "Rock and Roll" (for example), I actually kind of enjoy the instrumental work on that one (esp. Bonzo's drumming), but I cannot abide that fucking squealing voice. Ironically, I really enjoyed some of Plant's solo work in the early eighties, where he sang in a normal octave as opposed to that damn falsetto and the instrumentation often owed more to Peter Gabriel's work at the time than to ripping off old blues men and jacking the volume to 12.

Led Zep should have been forced to pay royalties to all those old blues guys, BTW, for every song on (at least) their first two records. Outright fucking copies, all of it.

Yeah, when I say that Fred Zeppelin suck, I've got some context for it. And a chip on my shoulder as big as a fucking battleship when it comes to the shite that they inflicted on the music-listening public. I'd rather listen to any early Alice Cooper album than listen to the best of Led Zep. Killers and Billion Dollar Babies are both better (and more genuinely menacing) hard rock albums than anything Zep ever cut. For that matter, the Stooges catalog is miles ahead, too. One of the other issues I had with Led Zep and their ilk was how it seemed so contrived. Punk (at least when it's good) feels natural and unforced, but Led Zep sound like they sat around (stoned) and tried to come up with ideas for "ooooh, what else can we do to scare the little suburban moms so their kids will buy our records." Fucking pretentious, contrived, egotistical wankers.

Led Zeppelin fucking suck.

(Did I work my way up to something resembling Strawman levels here? Once I got started it just all sort of came flowing out ... one word after another after another).

[Kensterberg]

The world would be a much better place without Led Zep. No hair bands, for one thing. Ever. Motley Crue, Warrant, Quiet Riot, all those assholes were Led Zeppelin wannabees ... and they all suck, too.

No White Stripes, probably, but I'm sure that Jack White's musical brilliance would have worked itself into the daylight via some other means. Hell, he probably could've listened to the same old blues records that Page did and come up with the same idea, without all the obvious rip-offs.

[skvorisdeadsorta]

I think Bruce Springsteen sometimes sucks so I guess we're even.

I will say that with the records that Zeppelin made, Page broke some serious technological ground on making those. I think Page is a genius.

However I do agree with you on the outright stealing blues riffs though. That one is a hard one to justify.