AN AGEING ROCKER RE-CAPTURES SOME OF THAT OLD LED ZEPPELIN MAGIC
By the end of the 70`s, Led Zeppelin had lost favour with all the up and coming punk
acts of the day, the patchy album `Presence` from 1976 was the beginning of the end really for Zep`s dinosaur blues rock, punk rock had arrived and all of a sudden Jimmy Page seemed about as cool as a safari suit and a polka dot tie.
acts of the day, the patchy album `Presence` from 1976 was the beginning of the end really for Zep`s dinosaur blues rock, punk rock had arrived and all of a sudden Jimmy Page seemed about as cool as a safari suit and a polka dot tie.
Punk rock might have been an unfocused garage noise that gave you a migraine, but it remained in vogue long enough to put a lot of bluesy rock out of business. Led Zeppelin`s final album before Bonham`s death was the more pop influenced `In Through The Out Door`, a weak album compared to Zep`s earlier ones but it still contained the heartwarming ballad `All My Love`, a song written and sung by singer Robert Plant following the death of his toddler son, and the disposable but hook laden `Hot Dog`.
Really speaking, the last great Zep album was PHYSICAL GRAFFITI in 1975, a double album of daring eclectic experimentation.
Anything from the acoustic delta blues influenced `Black Country Woman`, the growling thumping blues of `The Rover`, the funk of `Custard Pie` or the orchestral eastern mystic of `Kashmir`.
After 1980 when Zeppelin split, singer Robert Plant proved to have the most successful career carving out a string of slick pop rock albums which although pleasant and well produced never captured the primal blues power of his former band.
Guitarist Jimmy Page post Zep is best known for forming the short lived power rock group The Firm in 1985 with Free and Bad Company vocalist Paul Rodgers the singer, and being half of the Coverdale/Page supergroup that turned out a screamer of a blues heavy rock album in 1993.
Bass player John Paul Jones done everything from being a session musician for the girl led
canadian band Heart to in more recent times being part of the stoner rock trio THEM CROOKED VULTURES.
canadian band Heart to in more recent times being part of the stoner rock trio THEM CROOKED VULTURES.
Plant definitely done better than the other two in the commercial success stakes, releasing albums under his own name obviously did help.
Plant saved his post-Zep best until 2006
in my opinion, in that year he and his backing band THE STRANGE SENSATION released a critically well received but totally underated album MIGHTY REARRANGER.
in my opinion, in that year he and his backing band THE STRANGE SENSATION released a critically well received but totally underated album MIGHTY REARRANGER.
Viewed by some critics as being the best effort by Plant since Zep`s own Physical Graffiti, the album is flavoured with an assortment of musical styles, the most obvious being the African rhythms of the Bendir.
Plant`s band on the album is John Baggot on keyboards and moog bass, Clive Dreamer on drums and bendir, Justin Adams on electric
guitar, bendir, tehardant, lap steel and bass and Skin Tyson the same as Adams minus the tehardant.
guitar, bendir, tehardant, lap steel and bass and Skin Tyson the same as Adams minus the tehardant.
Unofficial guest band member Billy Fuller puts in a stunning effort on double bass, this album is noticeably loaded to the hilt with double bass.
Officially there are 12 songs on MIGHTY REARRANGER, although it comes with a few customary alternative versions and/or outtakes that didn`t quite make the cut.
My favorite songs on here is the most Africana beat driven one of them all, ANOTHER TRIBE, a song which is a very cynical observation of the uprise of religious extremism across the world, the second song SHINE IT ALL AROUND, which is very much in the Physical Graffiti mould, the more pastoral ALL THE KINGS HORSES and the echoey and big chorused THE ENCHANTER, not totally unlike `The Rover` or `Sick Again` off Physical Graffiti in dynamics and build-up.
A great comeback for Plant after being written off by many as a washed up flower power rocker and a one time hard rock legend turned pop crooner.
It's pretty hard to rate a better complete work of an album for musicianship, content, originality and variation, especially over a double LP as Physical Graffiti, this is an album that still holds it's own.
ReplyDeleteOne can only wonder had John survived a little longer what the band had left, watching some of their live performances in particular "the immigrant song" or "Kashmir" you could hardly believe this band could get the sound quality live that they did and the live performances appeared to take it out of them.
Their names would have been so big after LZ, that working on other projects with other people wuld have always been compared to LZ.
As you say Plant was first out of the blocks with his own style, and "the principle of moments " was indeed a good (not great) album which produced a couple of hits ( Big Log etc )
Since LZ the remaining three have seemed a little aimless, but of late Jimmy with the black crows and John Paul's foray into "them crooked vultures show they still hit as hard as they ever did even if they are kind of genre specific and stuck in the time warp.
anyway I won't go on,
ps I've had no net for a couple of months, did ya miss me? ha ha.