Hey-hey Mama: 50 years of proper Rock and Roll

I don’t know what your memory of 1971 is, but mine’s pretty hazy, mostly because I was 4. But, as David Hepworth’s terrific tome 1971: Never A Dull Moment argued, it was a pivotal year in music - even more so than my own birth year, 1967 (for music, you understand) due to its profound confluence of significant album releases. 

1971 was the year that saw the long playing record, in old money, find its place as one of the major artistic mediums, alongside books and cinema. There had been albums before, of course, and ground-breaking ones, too, like Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper, that had made ‘album artist’ a thing in its own right. But 1971 generated an  unprecedented slew of milestone releases, including David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, The Who’s Who’s Next, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Carole King’s Tapestry, Elton John’s Madman Across The Water and at least 20 more that played their part in defining not just the year but the decade itself (for a more comprehensive list and examination of Hepworth’s book, here’s my post from when it was published).

50 years on, one of those albums stands out, arguably more than any of the others: Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. Colloquially known as ‘Led Zeppelin IV’, the officially untitled record could - should, even - be described as a touchpoint for classic rock as a genre. A bold claim, I know, but within its eight distinct tracks, over a run time of 42 minutes and 34 seconds, it remains a remarkable piece of work by a band that, with it, truly hit their stride. Yes, it contains Stairway To Heaven, a song worthy of discussion all on its own, but within its octet of tracks lies a breadth of hard rock (Black Dog, Rock And Roll), ballsy stompers (Misty Mountain Hop) and those rooted in traditional blues (When The Levee Breaks), mystic, 12-string folk (The Battle Of Evermore, Going To California) and pastoral country references. It’s legacy extends well into its 50-year history, too, with John Bonham’s distinct drums - captured by virtue of the cold, damp stairwell of the Hampshire country house they recorded it in (latterly sampled and used by seemingly everyone, including the Beastie Boys and Beyoncé. 

“It’s like there was a magical current running through that place [Headley Grange] and that record,” guitarist Jimmy Page recently told Mojo’s Mark Blake. Like it was meant to be. Perhaps this comes somewhat from Page’s singular vision. The former teenage guitar prodigy from Epsom, the third of that remarkable trio of Surrey sons to join The Yardbirds (after Eric Clapton had handed the six string reins to Jeff Beck, who in turn handed them to his friend Page) had largely been the architect of Led Zeppelin, the band renamed from The New Yardbirds in 1968. 

Their first three albums had built their profile and credibility on both sides of the Atlantic, riding the post-Beatles wave for British bands with a harder rock tendency in parallel to the early progressive bands that were coming through at the turn of the decade. Notably, Zeppelin built their reputation through, largely, word of mouth and electrifying live performances at events like the Bath Festival Of Blues And Progressive Music and relentless touing in America, playing legendary venues like Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York and its counterpart Fillmore West in San Francisco. 

Notably, too, they had deliberately shied away from releasing singles, the primary promotional vehicle of the pop era. This defiance of convention would remain with Led Zeppelin to the band’s abrupt end in 1980, brought about by Bonham’s untimely death. But in Zeppelin’s fourth album, this belligerence found a particular outlet, led by Page’s own wariness of the way the music industry dictated things, leading to the record being as intentionally enigmatic as the band’s reputational rise had been unconventional. 

For a start, the album would go untitled, a notion obliquely referred to in This Is Spinal Tap by the band’s insistence on releasing Smell The Glove with an all-black sleeve and no lettering. While that was a gimmick, Page had another intention: “I didn’t want anyone, including Rolling Stone, making a judgement before they heard the music,” he told Mojo. “I wanted to prove our music wasn’t just selling because of our name.” 37 million album sales may have proven his instincts to be correct, but that wasn’t how Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary boss of Atlantic Records saw it, telling the band it would be “professional suicide” to not even have the band’s name on the cover. “We weren’t backing down,” Page recalls.

So, for a band that had been feted on both sides of the Atlantic as the Second Coming, Led Zeppelin IV arrived with anonymity, not just lacking cover text, but also photographs of the band anywhere in the album artwork. Instead, the front cover featured a 19th-century agricultural oil painting singer Robert Plant came across in a Reading antiques shop, while the rear featured a drab Birmingham tower block, an attempt to highlight themes of urban and rural living. In place of band pictures, Plant, Page, Bonham or bassist/multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones. Instead, Page came up with the idea of the quartet being represented by four rune-like symbols. “That whole cover was a Jimmy and Robert production,” Jones has said, somewhat sniffily. “I didn’t quite get it myself.”

Page’s own self-designed symbol, ‘ZoSo’, has itself been a source of much debate, with some pointing to the guitarist’s apparent interest in the work of occultist Aleister Crowley as being its inspiration. Collectively, however, the entire approach of IV’s graphic design is probably just one of those rock band gimmicks which, in 1971, meant that anything went and record company marketeers couldn’t say no. Conventions of album design weren’t broken as few had yet been established. “It’s not something to be questioned or dissected,” Page said of the artwork in his interview with Mojo. “Like the album, it was something that was just meant to be. You listened and made up the pictures in your own mind.”

Which brings me back to Stairway To Heaven, a song commanding a cultural mythology all of its own. As Bohemian Rhapsody is for Queen, Led Zeppelin were so much more than this one song, but Stairway will always be their opus, regarded for it’s sheer expanse and complete defiance of pop tradition. Stairway will also never be regarded as a pop song, but that’s what makes it’s lasting endurance even more extraordinary. It was also, famously, never released anywhere as a single, and yet it has received close to three million plays on American rock radio, according to official figures (it was the most requested song on FM radio stations in the US in the 1970s. By a more contemporary measure, it has been streamed more than 600 million times on Spotify. 

To some extent, too, Stairway is the quintessential early ’70s rock album track, and one that - whisper it - comes closer to prog rock than blues-rooted heavy rock. Broken into three sections over its eight minutes, Stairway commences  with the pastoral, arpeggiated A-minor chord so beloved of guitar shop wannabes everywhere (remember the “No Stairway To Heaven” sign from Wayne’s World?), rolling into a folkier groove before rocking out in the final third, Page committing an excoriating solo to it with his vintage Telecaster (a Yardbirds gift from Beck). While this structure clearly creates the attention, its lyrics - penned by Plant while, apparently in a bad mood - have been the subject of intense debate. “Depending on what day it is,” Plant once said, “I still interpret the song a different way - and I wrote the lyrics.” The general consensus is that the “lady who's sure all that glitters is gold” is about a woman who accumulates money, only to find out - badly - that life is meaningless and she wouldn’t get into heaven. Beyond that, Stairway is no more profound than the product of a band at the peak of their chutzpah indulging in the early ’70s penchant for album tracks that got a tad widdly-widdly. 

Jimmy Page has suggested that when Zeppelin started working on the song in October 1970 it was envisaged as being as long as 15 minutes (still quite brief compared with some examples of the prog genre, such as the 23-minute Supper’s Ready by Genesis), with a construct built on a mystical story that leads to a romping climax. Rumours about hidden satanic messages, contained in reverse-recorded passages, have led to some with too much time on their hands to suggest that Stairway was the Devil’s work. Page’s flirtations with the work of Crowley haven’t helped, either (he did, to be fair, buy Crowley’s house near Loch Ness, which only added to the association). Plant has wisely dismissed the suggestions in pragmatic terms. “There are a lot of people who are making money [out of these suggestions],” he has said. “If that's the way they need to do it, then do it without my lyrics. I cherish them far too much.”

While, though, there is some sense of Stairway being something of a millstone for the surviving members of the band, its place is rock music history hasn’t been lost on them, least of all Page: “I thought Stairway crystallised the essence of the band,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975. “It had everything there and showed the band at its best - as a band, as a unit.” Page called it a milestone for the band, and remains proud that it was never released as a single, a point that only adds to its enigma and its lasting significance. That, though, hasn’t indemnified Stairway from critics (even Plant once said in an interview with Q magazine: “If you absolutely hated Stairway To Heaven, no one can blame you for that because it was so pompous” (he has also branded it a “wedding song”). 

Its appearance on Led Zeppelin IV drew no shortage of accusations of being pretentious and bloated. For a song so eulogised now, it wasn’t always so loved by the music press, but then again, they were never the most receptive audience to anything deemed progressive in the early ’70s (although, in my experience, even the most pro-punk/anti-prog journalists all had plenty of art rock in their record collections…).

With John Bonham’s death in 1980 Led Zeppelin came to an abrupt halt. Plant, Page and Jones were persuaded to play at Live Aid five years later, using both Chic drummer Tony Thompson and Plant’s friend Phil Collins on drums (Collins and Page have since traded barbs, with the latter saying the drummer was unrehearsed, and Collins suggesting the guitarist was somewhat out of it on the day. Stairway To Heaven closed the 30-minute set, which also included Rock And Roll and Whole Lotta Love. The song was performed again in 1988 at the Atlantic Records 40th anniversary concert, with Jason Bonham playing drums. The performance wasn’t great, with Plant even managing to forget some of his own lyrics. A better rendition appeared - for the last time - in 2007 when Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham Jr agreed to play at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute at London’s O2 Arena, the final time Led Zeppelin as a band performed on stage. Stairway was a part of Heart’s tribute set in 2012 at the Kennedy Center Honor show, attended by Barack Obama and intended to take a hat off to artists who’d made an important contribution to American culture (the only other British recipients have ever been Cary Grant, Sean Connery and Paul McCartney).

When it was released on Monday, 8 November, 1971 Led Zeppelin IV went to Number 1 in the UK, only narrowly missing out on the top spot in the US. It is still regarded as one of the greatest albums of the classic rock era, and you can take from it what you want in terms of its legacy. It wasn’t Zeppelin’s first and it wasn’t their last, and certainly wasn’t the only memorable entry in 1971’s lengthy parade of classics. But with so much of the music produced that year, it was the work of a group of young men for whom anything went, creatively (though as numerous biographies have revealed, the same could be said of Zeppelin’s touring antics). Unlike today’s somewhat over-curated, packaged pop, it comes from a time when bands had licence to do what they liked, and weren’t dictated to by popular taste or the need to appeal to radio airplay algorithms. Led Zeppelin IV can also be broken down into the individual DNA of the four proponents - the very people depicted by the inner sleeve’s runes - in so far as it draws, in different degrees, from all the different musical interests Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham had at the time - blues, rock, folk, heavy rock and more. “I think that was the beauty of the players, of all of us, that maybe the style went over here, and then over there, and we could cut it wherever,” Plant told Mojo. “But we were in a really fluid creative place.” 

That manifests itself in the album’s eight tracks: in Black Dog’s riff; Rock And Roll’s nod to the musical revolution of the 1950s that set everything in train; The Battle Of Evermore hippy-dippyness (enhanced by Sandy Denny’s co-vocals); Stairway To Heaven’s sheer audacity; the bonkers groove of Misty Mountain Hop, Four Sticks’ rhythmic veracity; the wistful beauty of Going To California; and those signature, pounding drums of When The Levee Breaks, which consciously made the genetic link between original Delta Blues and hard rock. 50 years on, what it lacks in the innovations of more revered albums like Sgt. Pepper before it, or The Dark Side Of The Moon which followed two years later, over 42 minutes it remains an utterly compelling album. 

These days albums seem designed to be dipped in and out of, with tracks extracted for streaming playlists rather than complete, start-to-finish playback. Led Zeppelin IV, over its eight tracks, defies that. It’s also, by the way, much, much more than that one song that closes Side 1.

Still dazed, but not confused: Led Zeppelin - The Complete BBC Sessions

There are many things to love about the BBC. I do, willingly, admit a bias on this, since dear old Auntie put a roof over my head from birth (my dad was a BBC studio cameraman at the time and remained with the Beeb until his retirement). I therefore have a close affinity with the organisation, as distinguished and grand a public institution as the National Health Service, and probably equally as flawed.

But despite all the things about the BBC you could probably fill an entire edition of the Daily Mail with (which they do), one of its finest traditions has been the curation of music, from pop to the Proms and all stops in between, recorded in its own studios and theatres, and during in-show sessions for programmes like John Peel's suspiciously titled Top Gear (nothing to do with motoring, folks...), Radio 1’s landmark In Concert broadcasts, and other specials over the last half century or more.

This incredible wealth of music history lying in the BBC's vaults writes the history of pop and rock, and many of the recordings have found themselves released by the bands themselves, often providing fascinating snapshots of bands in development. The two Beatles' Live At The BBC compilations, recorded in the early 60s for the BBC Light Programme (Radio 1's forerunner) are wonderfully reverent captures of a band in the initial throes of superstardom, while Bowie At The Beeb covers The Dame's emergence in the late 1960s, as he trod a line between progressive rock and the vaudeville of his Anthony Newley/Jacques Brel phase (it also includes brief but fascinating exchanges between Bowie and Peel, for example, introducing his "new" guitarist "Michael Ronson"). The recently released Yardbirds Live At The BBC double CD captures the raw energy of the band as it launched the British R&B boom, along with the careers of three Surrey guitarists - Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Amusingly, it includes interviews between the BBC's plummy-voiced Brian Matthew - whose corny questions and use of phrases like "hit parade" became ironically parodied years later by Smash Hits magazine - and Page, sporting a slightly Epsom-posh, high-pitched voice.

By the time he played at the BBC with The Yardbirds in 1967, Page was already a seasoned 23-year-old session guitarist, having recorded with The Who (augmenting Pete Townshend on their first single, I Can't Explain) and The Kinks, played on Van Morrison/Them's Baby Please Don't Go and Here Comes the Night, and on Petula Clark's Downtown. In 1968, The Yardbirds' Keith Relf and Jim McCarty left, leaving Page to recruit replacements for a tour of Scandinavia. The musicians he brought in were vocalist Robert Plant, drummer John Bonham and another prolific session musician. John Paul Jones. And thus was born "the New Yardbirds", until a Keith Moon quip about a "lead Zeppelin" brought about another change of name: Led Zeppelin.

Ten years after Zeppelin formally broke up in the wake of Bonham's death, Page took on the role of band curator, overseeing a series of CD remasters of the original studio recordings. However, despite being one of the greatest stage acts in rock history, there had been a paucity of official Led Zeppelin live recordings to work on, despite the 1970s vogue for live albums. The one exception had been the soundtrack for The Song Remains The Same, the critically flawed concert film recorded over three nights at Madison Square Garden, and added to with bizarre fantasy sequences, such as Plant in soft focus rescuing a castle-bound maiden while in search of the Holy Grail. No, me neither.

For the rest, however, Zeppelin fans had to make do with myriad bootlegs, many of which had been poorly recorded on dictaphones smuggled into venues. This has long irked Jimmy Page, believing that fans have been denied access to the full power of the band live. So, on November 11, 1997 (coincidentally, my 30th birthday folks...), Led Zeppelin released BBC Sessions, a CD package containing BBC recordings from 1969 for the likes of Peel and Alexis Korner's Rhythm And Blues show, as well as exclusive BBC gigs between 1969 and 1971 during which early versions of Dazed And Confused (which Page had first performed with The Yardbirds), Communication Breakdown and the Whole Lotta Love medley, a staple of their later tours, were premiered.

The BBC Sessions package - which included a limited edition version containing band interviews - was a masterpiece. Coming more than 20 years after The Song Remains The Same, it gave fans a chance to hear Zeppelin in their raw state, capturing in sessions often recorded in small radio studios the energy that would later expand into the arenas that became their domain in the 1970s. Of note, however, was the quality of the recordings: in 1997 the CD was still in its infancy, along with digital media in general, but fans were amazed by the detail in the recordings, such as the squeak of Bonham's hi-hat levers going up and down on one of the Dazed And Confused performances.

"The BBC really had very well trained engineers who would have done orchestral sessions, jazz sessions, folk, rock - even skiffle at one point," Page told Johnny Walker last week during a Facebook Live interview to promote the reissue of the BBC recordings - The Complete BBC Sessions, which was released on Friday. "These engineers did a terrific job, considering [most sessions] were recorded for just one broadcast. But to go in with something this avant garde for them to listen to...we were absolutely fearless!".

BBC engineers were products of highly respected training centres, such as the BBC technical college at Wood Norton, near Evesham in Worcestershire. For Page - who, on top of his experience as a session musician, was already a skilled hand in the studio - the BBC's staff responded to the challenge of Led Zeppelin's loud, raucous blues. "[The BBC] didn't know what they were going to be confronted with. For instance, with the Dazed And Confused recording we went in with that and the shorter Communication Breakdown to give two sides of the coin of what we were doing. But there were also usually three, maybe four, songs on the session, but we also used to make up songs on the go, like Sunshine Woman, The Girl I Love and Travelling Riverside Blues. We were creating music so freely and these songs were just in the moment."

Some of those 'made-up' songs didn't appear on the original BBC Sessions CD package, something Zeppelin fans have been known to growl about, feeling that they'd missed out on unheard songs from the canon. "20 years ago a lot got left off because of the amount of space you get on a CD," Page explained to Walker. To this end, the 'new' BBC set contains all 20 tracks from the 1997 release along with nine previously unheard performances from a 'lost' session. These include two more versions of Communication Breakdown and What It Is And What Should Never Be, another version of Dazed And Confused, the semi-improvised Sunshine Woman, and the instrumental White Summer (which appeared as a track extra on the 1990 CD reissue of Coda).

For those who missed the 1997 release, The Complete BBC Sessions is a terrific and thoroughly worthy indulgence - available in three options: an eight-disc (five vinyl and three CD) package containing a 48-page book, an individually-numbered, limited edition luxury print and access to high-definition digital downloads. A five-disc 180g vinyl package is also available, along with a CD-only version containing all 33 tracks on three discs. And, as if that wasn't enough, all versions come with comprehensive sleeve notes by Dave Lewis, editor of the long-running Led Zeppelin magazine and the fan site Tight But Loose, as well as author of several highly informative books about the band.

That The Complete BBC Sesssions just covers the period between 1969 and 1971 shouldn't mean that fans should clamour for more. The 1971 recordings were their last for the BBC, perhaps marking the moment that, with their fourth album, they were propelled into the superstar period of their career, spending the next nine years as their original line-up marauding across the world - and especially North America. Some will say, with some justification, that Led Zeppelin became the perfect example of bloated stadium rock (I will always disagree), but the thing that makes The Complete BBC Sessions so engaging is where the band were, musically, at the outset of their journey.

This was the dawning of the rock era and Led Zeppelin were, arguably, the vanguard, bridging that period between pop's maturing and British rock's transatlantic dominance. By 1969, Page had, in just a few years, gone from suburban Epsom to playing on Petula Clark and Tom Jones as a teenager, and then on to founding one of the most notable - and notorious - bands. At the BBC, though, you can hear Led Zeppelin, as a collective, playing with, toying with the blues and finding the voice that would eventually be branded "heavy rock". Most amusingly, however, is the idea that BBC engineers - whom, it seemed from my visits to Television Centre with my dad, were mostly called Brian and wore cardigans - were studiously, scientifically even, recording Robert Plant's overtly sexual singing, Bonzo's simply enormous drumming, Jonesy's measured, cultured bass and keyboards, and Page's incredible guitar work for posterity.

On this new collection there are also lighter moments - the Isleys' It's Your Thing as a bolt-on to Communication Breakdown, for example, plus a far greater array of experimentation than Zeppelin usually gets credit for. There is little wastage, either. "John Paul Jones and I had both been session musicians ourselves so we were used to working under very controlled conditions, where every second is literally costing money," explained Page in the Facebook Live session. "We were always very efficient - ruthlessly efficient."

Without getting into the marketing economics of the Led Zeppelin reissues - with middle aged, credit card-burning fans like me clearly the target demographic - they are clearly a labour of love for Page, and his earnestness at curating the Zeppelin legacy shines through. "With the renaissance of vinyl it was crying out to do this, and to put it in context of the reissues of the studio albums," Page explained to Walker. "This is a historical document. There wasn't anywhere else in the world that was like the BBC. It's a great time capsule. You can hear the band progressing from 1969 to 1971 - only two years!"

The process has also been rewarding, but highly time-consuming for Page: "The BBC Sessions are 'complete' as the name of the package says! I've been doing this a long time - you have to listen to everything in real-time. There are no short cuts," to which he added "Now it's time to dust down the guitar!", pointing to his eagerness to get on with a new project - with, or probably, without Plant.