• Album: How The West Was Won
• Atlantic Records
There are still old geezers wandering around, still sucking air, still talking about how Led Zeppelin was the most kick-ass band on the earth, especially during their first few American tours culminating in 1972.
Well, with How The West Was Won, a live three-CD document culled from that very same tour by the pioneer heavy metal band, you can judge for yourselves whether those geezers were speaking the truth… or just hitting the bong too hard.
Taken from two concerts at the LA Forum and Long Beach Arena, June ’72, How The West Was Won finds the Zep boys – guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant, bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham – wielding a power and command onstage that was to evaporate by the time they recorded their "authorized" concert album, The Song Remains The Same, in ‘75. As all Led Zep fans know, that live album sucked; this one rocks.
By 1975, Led Zeppelin onstage had ossified into a heavy metal cliché which they themselves had helped create. They were bombastic and pretentious, lazy and slack as hell. Drugs and fatigue were the chief culprits.
Not so with the band heard on How The West Was Won. Obviously, this English group still had something to prove to the flower children on the West Coast. The set opens with a ripping version of Immigrant Song, proof positive that every metal band from Metallica on down owes massive props to Led Zep.
It’s all held together by Bonham’s drumming and Jimmy Page’s guitar: thick, meaty slabs of floor upon which Page lurches around drunkenly, carving out angular riffs, pirouetting into the ether.
Page, as most rock fans know, was a guitar prodigy who guested on something like 75 percent of the studio sessions recorded in England before forming Led Zeppelin (after the implosion of the Yardbirds). With so much live canvas space to work with (there’s 2:30 hours of music here), he explores his fondness for country playing, blues, middle-eastern scales, old rock ‘n’ roll – even bits and pieces of Bach and Holst turn up (the "Mars" section of Holst’s The Planets has to be the first heavy metal riff in music history.) Onstage, Page was the equivalent of any top DJ today on a good night, pressing buttons until dawn: he never runs out of blitz, energy or riffs. He’s a bleedin’ machine, ‘e is.
Okay, you could argue about the wisdom, in this day and age, of including 24-minute versions of Whole Lotta Love or Dazed and Confused (complete with Page’s witchy electrified bow solos). But what’s the alternative out there now? Bands like Linkin Park, Staind and others that shy away from real guitar solos? Bands that build on Zeppelin’s legacy, but fail to push it any further? Bands whose guitarists get little box columns in magazines though they’re not fit to polish the sweat off of Jimmy Page’s axe?
Okay. Starting to sound like a geezer again. Back to the music.
It must be emphasized that, as a quartet, Zeppelin developed a pretty massive live sound. Eddie Kramer, their studio engineer on early albums, recorded these live sets; the sound is impeccable. Bonham’s drum skins and sticks were reportedly double-sized and huge. There are cavernous spaces between each bass-pedal hit, increasing the tension between the players. Singer Plant by then had found his true calling as a Tolkien hippie with shades of Janis Joplin – his wails and bellows add just enough texture to Page’s guitar lines, without indulging in the histrionics that would later mar The Song Remains the Same. Jones, another studio musician, was equally skilled on bass, keyboards, mandolin, or sharing acoustic guitar duties with Page during the band’s "folkie" set. And Page clearly had something to prove. His solos tend to wander off in numerous unplanned directions, most of them (surprisingly) interesting. On these two dates at least, his 32nd notes were up-to-speed (check out the blistering runs on Heartbreaker).
But do guitar solos matter, you ask? History tells us that punk pretty much killed off the pentatonic blues solo. It wasn’t cool to noodle into the stratosphere after the Sex Pistols and the Ramones came around. These days, "nü-metal" bands cling to the punk line that technique is passé, overrated. Hey, who needs to know the rudiments when your singer is going to rap over the riffs, anyway?
But the new bands are just pissing in the wind. Let’s face it: Page and Plant wrote great material, and the best of it is represented here. The essence of a Led Zeppelin song fuses an acoustic guitar intro with a rat-a-tat guitar riff somewhere by the second chorus, the kind that drills its way repetitively into your skull. Take Over The Hills And Far Away, which goes from folk to strident metal with – dare I say it? – style and grace. Same with What Is And What Should Never Be and Stairway To Heaven. This band understood dynamics, shading, and the need to balance the heavy and the light.
If you can get past the slightly dizzying stench of incense and the paisley vibe that permeate this artifact from the ‘70s, you can enjoy How The West Was Won for its musicianship, and understand that, whatever else, Led Zeppelin, on a good night, came to rock.