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

Try listening to more than just their first two albums.

They have a lot of blues influence, so do many rock bands that I wouldn't actually call blues bands, Zep have very diverse influences and blues is just part of it, they're certainly hard rock.

Blow by Blow was amazing, too, even though alot of those songs are covers...

Cause We Ended As Lovers is one of the most amazing songs I have ever heard, personally. Nice to see some people can do a justice to a cover...

A point worth mentioning here could also be that hard rock relates more closely to blues than what some (the OP at least) may be aware of.

I think the main styling of Led Zep's initial work is more rhythm and blues (the original R'n'B) which is where the variations of guitar playing and vocals allowed the band to develop. I think they definitely are a band with blues roots, In My Time of Dying is a classic blues song and they recorded that pretty late in their career. I saw Robert Plant a few years back and he covered a Muddy Waters song perfectly and demonstrated how the standard blues riff from that evolved into Whole Lotta Love. One of the joys of Led Zeppelin is that the DO shift from hardrock to blues, to Celtic oddness. To tie yourself down in any one genre lacks artistic strength

If I was still a moderator I'd delete this thread.

Zeppelin invented hard rock as a mainstream form of music any other opinion ignores the facts


Yeah 2000 posts!

the truth is the truth. and the truth is right there in above quote. jimmy page is the most prolific guitarist in his time, appearing on more vynil than any other, especially as a session guy. that said, he is also the biggest plagarist that ever lived, and largely seems to have gotten away with it. i do love their music, it is great. but much of it was borrowed, uncredited, from others. a little research would bear this out, i won't bother posting the many examples.


the most important fact suggested by your post seems to be how fortunate the rest of us are that you are no longer a mod.

theres no denying that Led Zepplin is probably one of the best guitarists of his time... he had soul in his music...
but he was mixed... he has a classical rock genre inbetween blues

Him and Jethro Tull(the best flautist of all time) should start a super-group togeher.

I would call them a bluesy hard rock band or even a blues rock band, but I wouldn't call them a blues band.

Led Zeppelin
 

Led Zepplin, was a great band. Awsome at playing the blues, but they were a versitale unit, they played folk, rock n roll, hard rock and so on.... So you could not really class them as a blues act or band.

my 2 cents.

Zeppelin are in no way a pure blues band. Some of their songs like Communication Breakdown, Hot Dog, Heartbreaker, Kashmir, etc. are not that influenced by blues, while most of Coda and Houses of the Holy are.

I really cant place Led Zep anywhere, maybe experimental rock with a touch of blues.

ive never heard and of thier bluesy songs... could anyone tell me which of their songs are supposed to be blues? because they jsut sound like solid rock to me

Like many bands (Black Sabbath, Fleetwwood Mac etc..) Led Zeppelin started off as a "blues band". Of course they progressed into so much more than that. This whole thing about them (or any other band) "ripping off" the blues comes from people who don't really understand that the origin of many of the "blues songs" out there can't be claimed by any one person. Not to say specific songs were not written by specific people, but even in those cases much of the music and lyrics were learned and passed on from the black "working class" community. Where authorship can be claimed, it is fair to give credit. I will say this, Led Zeppelin served up the blues to me, before I had heard any "real" blues (Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, etc..) and as a result I did go down and buy my first blues records. So in a way, Zeppelin did not really "rip off" the blues, they brought them to me. How else would a kid be compelled to buy old blues records?

Bring It On Home (from L.Z. II)
The Lemon Song (from L.Z. II)
How Many More Times (from L.Z. I)
Dazed And Confused (from L.Z. I)
These are just off the top my head. Zeppelin's blues are electric and highly charged (which is why they might just seem like "solid rock" to your ears) Much of the "blues" influence is in the vocals and phrasing. Also you won't hear as much "12 bar" and slide guitar work in "straight rock", or "metal" rock music. If you were to start to listen to "real blues" music (Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, etc..), you would probably start really hearing it the next time you listened to Zeppelin. It's in there, it's their roots.

A lot of early rock bands had blues roots. Hendrix, Cream, The Who, The Kinks, The Doors, CCR, Black Sabbath.

I don't understand how these bands are any less bluesy than Zep so if they don't qualify as blues, Zeppelin sure as hell don't.

That is a primary difference between "new" bands and the "classic" rock groups. Not much blues influence in the new stuff, the influences are the "classic" groups. The Doors could do blues like Zeppelin. The Kinks,
Who and C.C.R., I'm not sure. Too Pop (imo).

The Who and CCR had a lot of bluesy stuff.

CCR had a lot more bluesy songs than Zep did.

Yeah, I guess Cotton Fields and Feelin' Blue make it. Sometimes CCR almost sounds like Country. What did the Who do that was blues?

The best blues tracks by led zep are you shook me baby from led zep 1 and tea for one from prescence and theres a mini album you can buy called blues roots the bands that inspired led zeppelin

Well, blues was one of the foundations of rock & roll to begin it, so to tell "bluesy" rock from non-bluesy can be quite difficult. Sure, Jeff Beck and Cream may have more obvious blues elements in its music, but even bands as different as Pink Floyd and Metallica have their sound originated to a large part in the blues tradition.

I think "blues" is easy to hear. Just listen for "in between" notes, or a plaintive
mood or lyric in the song. Thats it.

Led Zeppelin totally rock my socks!

Welcome to the forum! They rock me too, seeing Zeppelin in '73 was my first concert. Nothing matches their music. I will listen to anything, but they are still the best! Rock on.

I watched the Vh1 video too. It saddened me.