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.

Tribal extinction - the demise of the rock star

There is a widely-held belief that rock stardom ended a long time ago, even if the prefix "rock star" continues to be applied liberally, from questionable media descriptions of anyone who can hold a guitar (er..."rock star Ed Sheeran") to politicians ("rock star French president, Emmanuel Macron") and even business people (Branson, Jobs, et al).

For those of us of a generation, the term "rock star" still conjures a certain image. Indeed, simply Google the term and a generic picture appears that conforms perfectly to the stereotype. But, says David Hepworth in his tremendous new book, Uncommon People: The Rise And Fall Of The Rock Stars, the rock star as a concept has grown diluted.

"There are still people who dress like rock stars," he writes, "and do their best to act as they think rock stars would have acted in an earlier time, much as there are people who strap on replica holsters and re-enact the gunfight at the O.K. Corral." But, he says, in essence, the time of the rock star has now gone.

Plenty of acts still trade legitimately under the luminous rock star moniker - the Stones, The Who, Neil Young, take your pick. U2 and Coldplay retain the bombast, even if Bono and Chris Martin have become more irritants than icons. But there is definitely a case that proper rock stardom has gone the way of the dinosaur, leaded petrol and daytime telly closing down after the lunchtime news. Indeed, the original form of the species has been reduced to rare glimpses such as last weekend, amid the joyous rebuttal of extremism that was Manchester's One Love concert, Liam Gallagher - resplendent in a £400 orange coat, hands customarily behind his back, declaring "Tonight, I'm a rock'n'roll star" with requisite aura and swagger.

In Uncommon People, a follow-up of sorts to last year's equally good 1971 - Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year (featured on this blog here), Hepworth traces an anthropological arc from rock stardom's primordial root - when Little Richard's Tutti Frutti brought sexual innuendo to the previously anodyne 'hit parade' in the 1950s - to its nominal extinction at the hands of the Internet, around the time of Kurt Cobain's death.

"I wanted to write something about rock stars as a tribe," explains Hepworth, whose long career in music journalism encompasses the NME and Smash Hits, launching the magazines Q, Empire, Mojo, The Word and others, as well as co-fronting the BBC's Whistle Test with frequent partner-in-crime Mark Ellen. "This tribe came along in the mid-'50s and by the mid-'90s had passed away. That meant I could write the story of their rise and fall." Moreover, he says, there was a new angle to explore: "I've always been just as interested in the personal side of it as the musical side, and it struck me that nobody had taken that approach."

That approach is an incredibly well researched piece of work, presenting - almost like forensic evidence for a murder trial - 40 examples from as many years of what contributed to the arc. Hepworth refreshingly avoids some of the well-trodden tales and subjects in favour of more insightful examinations of what contributed to stars' rise to rock stardom (the influence of Hank Marvin, for example, often forgotten as the inspiration for many of our Stratocaster-wielding stage gods) and in some cases unpicking what they finally became, such as Elvis Presley.

When I were a lad, the aspiration to be a rock star was fulfilled quite easily by a tennis racquet and a full-length mirror. You appropriated the attitude, struck a pose and you were done: you'd become whoever it was you'd just seen on Top Of The Pops, doing, apparently, much the same thing. Those who took it to the next stage - applying actual musical talent, amongst other ingredients - wound up as cultural icons, "uncommon people", as Hepworth writes in the book, "...from the masses who got to the top without the help of education, training, family ties, money or other conventional ladders."

Now, Hepworth says, "The game has changed". Rock stars emerged when there was a cultism about rock music, either owning it or seeing it being performed. Today, the competition for attention is myriad, and for all the self-importance we musos still apply to the form, it - and its practitioners - are no longer kings of the hill. That Kurt Cobain came to be viewed as the last rock star might have more to do with his suicide coming in the same timeframe as the Internet's arrival. "The technology revolution was pretty significant," says Hepworth. "I don't think there will be anything quite like rock and roll again because now we've got so many choices. People formed all those groups because they were bored. Nobody's bored any more. Just distracted."

© Simon Poulter 2017

On top of that, the Internet has also impacted what we see of those stars: during a recent recording of a Word In Your Ear podcast, the terrific online discussion shows fronted by Hepworth and Ellen, an audience member pointed out that there is just less mystique surrounding pop stars, thanks to social media enabling them to share everything in minute, unfettered detail. The old days, when access was controlled by a fearsome record company press officer and photography would be just an official 10x8 black and white handout, have long gone.

Hepworth agrees: "The music papers were part of the star maker machinery. It was a business driven by hunches and personal preferences. Now it's a business driven by data. I know which I preferred...".   On top of that, Hepworth adds, rock stardom has lost its impact. "It used to be enormous fun to go and meet Keith Richards and find out what he had to say. Nowadays I can't believe anybody's really interested. It's years since anybody said to me, 'Have you seem what so-and-so said in Q?'. Nowadays they just say it themselves on social media."

"The point of [this] book," Hepworth adds, "is that rock stars didn't have to be anything. The only thing they had to be was stars." So what, then, does Hepworth himself consider to be the model rock star? "I'd have to say Bruce Springsteen. He tells the entire story of rock and roll on stage every night and gives you a glimpse of what he got from The Beatles, the Stones, The Who, Bob Dylan and everything else. I like that about him."

1971: the year it all began

Ask anyone who knows their Elvis C from their Elvis P and you will never reach any consensus on when pop music was at its most vibrant.

For every proponent of 1954 (the year Presley invented rock and roll by recording That's Alright Mama at Sun Studios), there will be another to champion 1964 (the year Beatlemania exploded in America). The Beatles also have a claim on 1966, the year they released Revolver, which included Tomorrow Never Knows, the track that for so many reasons probably changed the course of music more than any other.

Move on to 1977 and the arrival of punk, 1982 and Thriller, The Smiths' This Charming Man and New Order's Blue Monday a year later, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit in '92, Britpop in '95 - I could go on, but we'll never, ever, reach any conclusion. But if there is one year which, simply because of the volume of milestone releases, is inescapably more significant than most others it's 1971.

Music journalist, Smash Hits co-founder and former Whistle Test presenter David Hepworth came to this conclusion four years ago when, having previously noted how much of an annus mirabilis (in his words) it had been, he compiled a 121-track Spotify playlist from the albums released that year (also published in this blog post).

It is likely that you and I will beg to differ on just how much these were landmark songs, or even whether those making were any bigger than anyone since, but when you look at the compilation - below - of albums released in 1971, it's inescapable that this year in particular witnessed momentum unlike any other in pop history.

• Led Zeppelin - IV
• David Bowie - Hunky Dory
• The Who - Who's Next
• Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
• T-Rex - Electric Warrior
• The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
• Carole King - Tapestry
• Paul McCartney - Ram
• John Lennon - Imagine
• Elton John - Madman Across The Water
• Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
• Faces - A Nod Is As Good As A Wink...To A Blind Horse
• The Doors - LA Woman
• Joni Mitchell - Blue
• Stevie Wonder - Where I'm Coming From
• Genesis - Nursery Cryme
• Pink Floyd - Meddle
• Jethro Tull - Aqualung
• Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Tarkus
• King Crimson - Islands
• Nick Drake - Bryter Later
• John Martyn - Bless The Weather
• James Taylor - Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon
• Rory Gallagher - Rory Gallagher
• Humble Pie - Rockin' The Filmore
• ZZ Top - ZZ Top's First Album
• Yes - The Yes Album
• Earth, Wind & Fire - Earth, Wind & Fire
• Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - 4 Way Street
• Don McLean - American Pie

I may have been four years old at the time (though I believe I was already in possession of my first album, Songs From Chigley And Trumpton), but almost half a century on, it would be hard not to regard Led Zeppelin IV as one of the most important rock albums of all time, or Hunky Dory as the album that created David Bowie, the songwriting from S to F of Who's Next, What's Going On's social commentary, McCartney and Lennon's solo albums breaking out of The Beatles' shadow, Carole King's landmark Tapestry (which she'll be performing in full this summer in London), and even Stevie Marriott and Pete Frampton defining the live album for years to come with Humble Pie's ear wax bothering Rockin' The Filmore.

In his excellent new book, 1971: Never A Dull Moment, Hepworth has returned to chronologically explore 12-months that bore “more influential albums than any year before or since”. From the outset, he states the case that 1971 wasn't just an extraordinary year for releases, but effectively the start of the rock era. Of course, it wasn't exactly Year Zero: rock had emerged when Chuck Berry cranked up his Gibson for the first time, and was then followed by The Beatles, the Stones, The Kinks, The Who, the Beach Boys and myriad others blurring and stretching the boundaries of pop and rock in the 60s. But Hepworth's argument - which is bang on the money - was that '71 established the longevity with which these artists would endure, in many cases long after their peak, and in some cases as we push on into the new millennium, long after they've left us.

Starting from New Year's Eve 1970, when Paul McCartney effectively wound up the Fabs, Hepworth writes that the next day would herald "the busiest, most creative, most innovative, most interesting and longest-resounding year of that era". To support his argument, he doesn't just trawl the albums and the stories behind them, but provides context, too - the political and economic environments of the early 1970s, the cultural emancipation that teenagers enjoyed in the 60s that endured into the 70s as owning records became as affordable a hobby as creating bubblegum cards had been in childhood.

There was, also, the attraction of the form itself - the gatefold sleeves, the Hipgnosis and Roger Dean artwork - but more importantly, the lack of other distractions which inhibits attention to the long-form recording today. In 1971, youths didn't have iPhones and iTunes, PlayStations or even their own TV sets. Immersing oneself in two sides of a 43-minute album (or four if it was a prog act's latest overblown double) was an escape from the grey skies and prevailing austerity outside if you were in Britain, or the horrors of being at war in Vietnam if you were American.

Even if, now, you might consider the 23 minutes of Echoes that consumed the entire second half of Floyd's Echoes, or the eight-minute duration of Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven, grossly over-indulgent or patronisingly "of their time" on the part of the bands, it would be churlish in the extreme to dismiss their virtuosity, and that, Hepworth suggests, underpins the richness of what appeared in 1971. This was was the year, he asserts, that the rock era truly began. But it was also the year when pure creativity and raw talent, before many of these artists ascended into superstardom, and then descended into drug-addled mediocrity later in the decade.

Hepworth notes how this was a time when bands were able to do more or less what they wanted to, artistically, but they did so on the back of paying their dues. More or less every one of these landmark albums was a product of artists who performed relentlessly, using gigs in provincial ballrooms and university refectories to hone material before committing it to the studio, before going out on tour again with the new album and developing even more material for the next recording - which might even appear in the same year.

Old heads like me will have an inbuilt interest in Hepworth's tome, even though, at 48, I've clearly come to the releases of 1971 retrospectively. But as the owner of a good 90% of the albums listed above, I've come to them as modern classics, as vital to my cultural development as reading 1984, The Catcher In The Rye, On The Road or Hamlet.

I may have come to Bowie via Ashes To Ashes, but it proved to be essential to go back to the very beginning to see how he progressed from Hunky Dory through Ziggy and all the other guises to reach the 1980s. As a Beatle fan, I was compelled to find out what happened next, and with Lennon being tragically taken from us in 1980, listening to Imagine, released nine years before, became part of the mourning process. I was introduced to Genesis via Follow You, Follow Me, a love song, but was intrigued by Nursery Cryme and the frankly dark goings on in The Musical Box. You could even argue that with so many hip-hop artists sampling Bonzo's drums on When The Levee Breaks (recorded in a toilet at Headley Grange for its unique acoustics), 1971's tail has stretched long into the subsequent decades.

In 2011, on the 40th anniversary release of 1971's Aqualung by Jethro Tull, my friend and contemporary Steven Wilson - who had just remixed the album - told Classic Rock magazine that he thought that by '71 the record industry had finally recognised that rock music was an art form. "There seems to be something leading up to 1971," Wilson said, "which is when record labels started to get interested. That's usually when scenes start to die, but I think you can see 1971 as the zenith of creative expression for experimental music. The records were still very ambitious after that, but there's something about the spirit of '71 that was special."

In chronicling, month-by-month, the major albums released in 1971, Hepworth doesn't just present a giant coincidence, but perhaps by coincidence, the year's progress tells a story (as Hepworth relays) that began with The Beatles breaking up and ended with Don McClean's American Pie telling a tale of loss of innocence.

1971 was, then, a year of profound confluence, a year in which the album, itself, found its place as one of the most important artistic mediums, alongside books and cinema; in which the groundwork done by Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper created the album artist as a thing in its own right. It was the year in which the music business began tapping into rock music for the next decade or two, at least, as its great money spinner.

So, if you have any interest in what happened along the way, then you'll want to know what fired the starting gun. Hepworth expertly dusts the trigger for prints with 1971: Never A Dull Moment, compiling a fascinating, entertaining and revealing examination of rock music's genetic structure from the events of the year which, arguably, brought it all together.