The punk rock movement was always going to be an extremely mixed blessing for every single rock and roll band. It was great to see the genre get brought back to basics and show everyone what true aggression could sound like, but it’s hard to take every other stadium-rock seriously when the biggest names suddenly shift to people playing rudimentary songs in the middle of sweaty clubs. But it’s not like Led Zeppelin ever forgot about what it was like to sweat it out in a dingy blues club the same way they did when they started.
In fact, it almost felt like the fanbase they cultivated had simply become too big. It’s one thing to play ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or ‘Dazed and Confused’ in the confines of a club, but it would have been a missed opportunity if they didn’t play tunes like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or ‘Kashmir’ in the biggest venues possible. Those tunes are made for stadiums, but one should never mistake stadium-rock for milquetoast music, either.
Yes, their songs sounded massive in an arena, but Jimmy Page always had the same fire that he did when he first left The Yardbirds. If you listen back to the version of ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ that turned up on Led Zeppelin III, it’s still absolutely fantastic, but there’s no question that the live version of the tune is miles above anything else they ever did, complete with Page playing his guitar leads faster than most people could even imagine playing.
They had the same speed and aggression as punk, and yet they would always look like voyeurs into the new sound rather than anything else. Most people like Sex Pistols figured that people like Robert Plant drove around in limousines and didn’t have parties unless they were 40,000 feet in the air, so when the band were blowing off steam, they figured they would have some fun outdoing the punks at their own game.
While they had already gone through a more keyboard-based record on In Through the Out Door, Plant said that writing the song ‘Wearing and Tearing’ was the result of having a visceral reaction to punk, saying, “I love ‘Wearing and Tearing’, which Page and I wrote together. We were so pissed off witht he whole punk thing saying, ‘What do those rich bastards know?’ First of all, we knew that we didn’t have that much dough. Secondly, we knew more about psychobilly than they did.”
Although the song’s nowhere as heavy as what the band had done in the past, it does have one thing that most punk bands couldn’t embrace: groove. Since any technique was frowned upon, hearing John Bonham laying down a massive beat behind them is something that wasn’t going to come out of Paul Cook or Topper Headon, especially with Bonzo’s intense strength whenever he hit the drums.
And if you really wanted to be more specific about it, Zeppelin could have been considered the original punks back in the day. Their music was meant to be far more aggressive than anything else out at the time, and whether they wanted to be considered the forebearers or not, they and The Who are the reason why people figured out what could be done with volume and fury behind them.
So while John Lydon could talk smack all he wanted to about how they weren’t truly authentic, Zeppelin always had a place in every piece of heavy music. Even if people were rebelling against them in some way, there was no way anyone after them was going to completely ignore them, either.
