What’s great about it, though, the Zep’s special genius, is that the whole effect is so utterly two-dimensional and unreal. “Immigrant Song” comes closest, with its bulldozer rhythms and Bobby Plant’s double-tracked wordless vocal croonings echoing behind the main vocal like some cannibal chorus wailing in the infernal light of a savage fertility rite. In fact, when I first heard the album my main impression was the consistent anonymity of most of the songs - no one could mistake the band, but no gimmicks stand out with any special outrageousness, as did the great, gleefully absurd Orangutang Plant- cum-wheezing guitar freak-out that made “Whole Lotta Love” such a pulp classic. Most of the acoustic stuff sounds like standard Zep graded down decibelwise, and the heavy blitzes could’ve been outtakes from Zeppelin II. Their third album deviates little from the track laid by the first two, even though they go acoustic on several numbers.

I’ve never made a Zep show, but friends (most of them the type, admittedly, who will listen- to anything so long’s it’s loud and they’re destroyed) describe a thunderous, near-undifferentiated tidal wave of sound that doesn’t engross but envelops to snuff any possible distraction. If I rely so much on visual and filmic metaphors, it’s because they apply so exactly. Their albums refine the crude public tools of all dull white blues bands into something awesome in its very insensitive grossness, like a Cecil B. It doesn’t challenge anybody’s intelligence or sensibilities, relying instead on a pat visceral impact that will insure absolute stardom for many moons to come.

The Zep, of all bands surviving, are today - their music is as ephemeral as Marvel comix, and as vivid as an old Technicolor cartoon. Maybe it’s just that they seem like the ultimate Seventies Calf of Gold. Partly from genuine interest and mostly indefensible hopes, in part from the conviction that nobody that crass could be all that bad, I turn to each fresh album expecting - what? Certainly not subtle echoes of the monolithic Yardbirds, or authentic blues experiments, or even much variety. I keep nursing this love-hate attitude toward Led Zeppelin.

Led zeppelin logo snow cap