The Led Zeppelin Blues
 

I watched Vh1's "Greatest Hard Rock Songs". It was insulting to find Led Zeppelin on that list. Aren't they really a blues band? Well, an experimental blues band. Isn't Robert Plant purely a blues singer? Jimmy Page in his respects also.

Some of the blues community dislikes Zep because they ripped off old lyrics from Willie Dixon or Robert Johnson. Some of the blues community though feels Zep was a whole new era in blues music. It would only benefit the blues clame Led Zeppelin.

How do you feel about the matter?

while there's no denying zeppelin was influenced by the blues to call them purely a 'blues' band is selling them short.

i'd be far more offended to not see a LZ song on a vh1 list of 'greatest hard rock songs' than to have them in the top10. does 'the immigrant song' really sound like the blues? how about 'kashmir' or 'achilles last stand' or 'the ocean'.

simply put led zeppelin is the hard rock band by which all others are compared whether anyone involved likes it or not.

I'm a blues fan who loves Led Zeppelin but they're not a blues band by any stretch of the imagination.

Blues has a unique twelve bar, 3 chord progression. The sound is based on the Blue Note, or a slight drop of pitch on the third, seventh, and sometimes the fifth tone of the scale. It is also known as a bent pitch. There is room for minor chord progressions and jazzy innovations like the Baise 12 Bar progression. Cadence plays a role in what makes the blues unique as well.

A lot of Led Zep's music falls well within the blues category and a lot their music doesn't.

The band has influences as diverse as Celtic music, rockabilly, psychedelica, traditional country music, jazz and especially early black R&B rockers like Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

A lot of Jimmy Page's guitar playing is influenced by Jeff Beck's sonic experiments with feedback, fuzz, distortion and rave-up style music when both Beck and Page were in the Yardbirds. Led Zeppelin's first album sounded like an extension of blues/psychedelic music of the Yardbirds.

Led Zeppelin first two albums have many tracks that are blatant rip-offs of other people songs. What I mean they took whole lyrics and structures of other’s people songs like “Dazed and Confused” and “Whole Lotta Love” from other songs. They did a great job the problem is that they did not give songwriting credits to those songs. That being said they did not invent Hard Rock or anything really but they are the standard Hard Rock bands are compared to.

It could be said Led Zeppelin first album sounded like an extension of blues/psychedelic music of say Cream maybe more than the Yardbirds.

I personally think that Jeff Beck's Beck-Ola blows Zeppelin out of the water. Certainly in terms of guitar work.

Beck is a technically more accomplished guitar player than Jimmy Page but Page has always had a keen ear for hypnotic guitar riffs. I used to underestimate Page's guitar playing but if you listen to Led Zep's complete body of work, you'll see he was quite prolific at creating perfect guitar hooks. His guitar riffs are among the most sampled by the underground dance culture.

Many of the early British rock groups were notorious for pilfering public domain blues songs--- the Stones and Led Zep were among the worst offenders.

Jeff Beck spent too many years in a self imposed exile and by the mid-Seventies he drifted away from the kind of forward thinking music he played best.

I saw Jeff Beck two years ago live and he's still a great guitarist but his musical vision is this amorphous pastiche of jazz fusion/metal/blues/rockabilly and whatever. Beck's biggest problem is his guitar playing in the Yardbirds and the original Jeff Beck Group set an impossibly high standard of perfection that he just couldn't maintain for the next thirty years. He still does the world's greatest version of Sleepwalk, a song that I love and have heard dozens of versions of.

But when JP is on the ball, hes ****ing on top of it.

Zeppelin is the original nifty little crevice between experimental rock and blues.

Captain Beefheart?

The early Beefheart albums are a hybrid of delta blues and psychedelica. With the passage of time Captain Beefheart (Don Vliet) moved into the unchartered regions of free jazz and modern classical music.

Vliet was not only a musical genius who had a multi-octave singing voice and played a dozen instruments; he also was an child artist prodigy whose abstract figurative paintings brought him international recognition at age 4. At age 13 he was offered a scholarship to study painting in Europe but his parents vetoed the idea and moved to the desert, the place that has always the object of Don Vliet's lifelong artistic muse.

Vliet left the music business in 1982 to move to the Mojave Desert. He lives in an Airstream trailer and paints full time. His paintings sell for high 5 figure and low 6 figure dollar amounts which ain't exactly chicken feed. He lives a hardcore hermit lifestyle and rarely is seen in public.

Below is a link to Don Vliet's portfolio of paintings on Artnet:
Don Van Vliet on artnet