Records that Spun Me #4 - Led Zeppelin’s 151 Proof Bron-Y-Aur Grog
Since the new film Becoming Led Zeppelin ended before covering my fave album of theirs - the folk/rootsy III, I thought I would give this much-maligned platter a "whole lotta love."
Blend together equal parts Lead Belly and Incredible String Band. Infuse generously with Nicolai Tesla. Add a jigger of J.R.R. Tolkien. Spike with (Aleister) Crowley’s extra-strength black cat bone powder. Stir ingredients together slowly in an iron cauldron and wait until the mixture bubbles. (Chanting “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Cool it with a baboon's blood; Then the charm is firm and good,” is optional.) Serve as the steam begins to rise. Gulp greedily from a human skull. (By the way, the popular toast “skoal!” originated from the Old Norse “skāl,” or more specifically the “skull” of a beheaded enemy which Vikings raised in joyful celebration.)
No band before or since Led Zeppelin ever combined such far-flung ingredients to such powerful and lasting effect. A little over a decade before Jimmy Page assembled the New Yardbirds (as the band was originally known) to fulfill a previous contract for a tour of Sweden, a young truck-driving Adonis from Tupelo, Mississippi, named Elvis Presley unwittingly combined country music (the roots of which lay in Celtic folk song and dance) with the feel and attitude of the blues, brought to our shores courtesy of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Around the time this abominable practice finally ended, Lead Belly (AKA Huddie Ledbetter) was born on a Louisiana plantation in 1888. A living-breathing repository of black culture, Lead Belly is credited with writing everything from children’s songs like “Skip To My Lou” to “The Rock Island Line,” later popularized by skiffle king Lonnie Donegan (a fave of young John Lennon), to country standards like “Goodnight Irene,” warbled by everybody from Willie Nelson to Pete Seeger and Brian Wilson. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sheryl Crow and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds may have all bam-a-lammed Lead Belly’s “Black Betty” with the biggest, hardest beat they could muster, but Tom Jones’ “awesome” video of the song from 2002 takes the cake with a chorus line of high-steppin’ bus boys and slinky lingerie-clad babes giving it their all while “TJ” looking like a fit Ralph Kramden actually gives a shout out to the song’s author.
It’s not just all the great songs like “House of the Rising Sun” (The Animals) and “The Midnight Special” (Creedence Clearwater Revival and ABBA) that Lead Belly gave us, but his grand persona, from his natty threads and gold-capped tooth grin, to the fact that he sang his way out of prison not once, but twice, bucking murder raps because his vast talent was simply too great to rot behind bars, that made him the prototype of the baddest gangsta to ever stomp this sphere.
Don’t think for a moment that if Huddie Ledbetter, “The King of the 12-String Guitar” (who also played piano, mandolin, fiddle, harmonica and accordion) had lived long enough, wouldn’t have traded in his jumbo-body acoustic Stella for a Gibson 1275 (Jimmy Page’s trademark double-neck guitar) and plugged it into a Marshall stack and blown our heads clean off.
His “Gallis Pole,” renamed “Gallows Pole” by Page and Plant, was given a turbo-charged makeover that featured a driving banjo and 12 string-guitar, making it one of the stand-out tracks on the greatly underrated Led Zeppelin III.
Robert Plant at the time claimed to be under the spell of the Incredible String Band, a pair of Scottish eccentric multi-instrumentalists who employed an array of exotic sounds coaxed from sitars, penny whistles and a bowed gimbri. Their third album, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter became something of an operator’s manual to Plant, to which he “listened and followed instructions.”
The ISB’s Robin Williamson had an enormous impact on both Page and Plant in the way he sang bold, swooping cadences and played guitar in an open modal tuning (also favored by Davy Graham, Nick Drake and Bert Jansch of Pentangle fame).
Zep’s foray into their Celtic roots not only brought about big changes musically but lyrically as well. On their first two albums Plant mostly wailed and moaned about sex, from doomed affairs to the whole lotta love variety. Inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’sHobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Page and Plant suddenly began to pen pagan paeans to misty mountains. Spirit dwelled within every aspect of Led Zeppelin’s timeless landscape. At the same time it would not be too surprising to find Robert Johnson wandering along a deserted highway or Willie Dixon shooting crap amongst the dancing druids, bearded wizards and saucy groupies.
J.R.R.T.
Poet, linguist, and professor J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien created some of the most compelling fantasy, fabricated histories, imagined new worlds (Middle Earth) and invented entire languages (the glyphs which created Zep’s 4th album ZOSO seem to have been inspired by Tolkien’s archaic alphabet). His rich imagination has informed nearly every work of fantasy since his books were first published in the 1930’s, from “The Battle of Evermore” to multi-million-dollar Hollywood animated blockbusters. In 2009 Forbes Magazine ranked Tolkien Number Five amongst dead celebs with the most pocket-power.
Although considered one of the heaviest bands of all time (John Bonhams’ beat was massive, bordering on glacial) Led Zeppelin innately understood and employed dynamics like no other band in the history of rock. One minute Jimmy Page’s fingers danced lightly upon mandolin strings as medieval recorders wove ancient melodies, sheer as gossamer, until suddenly the band shifted gears, shaking arena foundations with a power that few knew how to wield… which brings us to Nicola Tesla, (no, not the band, or automobile named in his honor) but the Serbian born inventor and electrical genius, besmirched by Philistines as “a mad scientist” even after he proved in 1891 that energy could be transmitted without need or benefit of wires. He imagined innovation by the score, including what turned out to be the first loudspeaker. I suppose you can understand how he got a bum rap in Texas, after his famed coils shot blue snakes of man-made lightning over a hundred feet into the air, causing a power outage in the city of El Paso.
While Page, a multi-million-dollar rock star with a taste for the dark side and a seriously cool image to uphold bought Boleskine House, where occultist/author Aleister Crowley once lived on the shore of Loch Ness from 1899 to 1913, Tesla simply embodied the occult. He frightened people, not just with a glare from his dark, gleaming eyes, but as the first man to detect radio waves from outer space, it meant, to the same rubes, that he was probably tight with the aliens.
Aleister Crowley
And if you ever tried to scream as high and loud as the golden-haired shirtless one or match Jimmy lick for lick on a Les Paul, you were probably instantly convinced that they too, kept the same company.
I always loved LZ III and thought it was underrated - especially the Child Ballad "Gallows Pole" with its simple acoustic opening that builds to a maniacal, devilish ending. I used to teach it in my literature classes - juxtaposed with John Jacob Niles's "Maid Freed from the Gallows."