RETROSPECTIVES / Pop Music : Led Zeppelin: Things Have Come Full Circle

More than 15 years after Led Zeppelin released its last listenable album (“Physical Graffiti”) and 11 after the band released anything new at all, Robert Plant’s keening wail still threatens to follow any Warrant or Guns N’ Roses song on any rock radio station anywhere. The arty Zep-isms of neo-metal also rule college radio.

The half-dozen or so Zeppelin songs that still get saturation airplay sound terrific: intense and bluesy, powerful and dark, riffy and individual. Posterity has been kind to the Zep.

Atlantic Records just released “Led Zeppelin,” a comprehensive Box Set of the Gods, nearly five CD hours of remastered Zeppelin, Inc., complete with arcane runic cover art and a trio of hagiographic liner-note essays from Rolling Stone magazine all-stars.

Do we need five hours of the stuff? Ten years ago, five minutes would’ve seemed too much.

In the spring of 1980, playing a version of “Communication Breakdown” could get you thrown off the stage at the Anticlub or your nose broken at the beach-punk Fleetwood. Two minutes of “Black Dog” could empty any hip dorm party in the land.

At a time when a night of rock ‘n’ roll could mean anything from neo-retro-country to a bunch of art students attacking oil drums with belt sanders, Led Zeppelin was about the only taboo . . . well, Led Zeppelin and disco--and the Pet Shop Boys would soon bring disco back bigger than ever. (Punk bands could, and did, play even Black Sabbath songs with impunity.)

Turgid stadium rock had so poisoned rock ‘n’ roll by that point that almost anything that wasn’t Zeppelin sounded fresh. Well-crafted pop felt new again--listening to the Kinks or early Beatles seemed like a revolutionary act--and so did the unaffected heavy metal of bands like Iron Maiden and Def Leppard.

Stripped-down, singles-oriented, bombast-free new wave was a specific reaction to the overblown album rock of Zeppelin and its school. Reggae, ABBA, George Jones were suddenly cool as well, and “alternative” rock radio meant pretty much this: no “Stairway to Heaven.”

Things have come full circle. Led Zeppelin is now acknowledged to be the greatest hard-rock band in the history of the world, mostly by people too old to really appreciate Metallica.

Zep revisionism is understandable. In retrospect, the band represents an era of rock as surely as Elvis or the Beatles.

Zeppelin was in its time a reaction to the vapid tyranny of the three-minute single; a decade later, the rock ‘n’ roll intelligentsia were celebrating the prospect of a Zep-free planet, and only long-haired, working-class dolts seemed to prefer “Houses of the Holy” to Prince’s “Dirty Mind.”

With the ‘80s, the three-minute radio song became more dominant than it ever had been in the ‘60s. Bands like the Go-Go’s were not only as popular, but more credible than their ‘60s equivalents. Pop singers like Madonna and Michael Jackson were seen as artists.

Where Led Zeppelin defined the terms for hard-rock bands of the ‘70s from Boston to Rush, the tight, commercial sound of Aerosmith became the model for ‘80s hard rockers from Van Halen through Guns N’ Roses and beyond.

Lyrics in the ‘80s were about sex, school, the everyday--not about ancient Celtic battles. If the new generation of rockers weren’t exactly one with its audience, at least it felt it had to try to be. Zep-style posing--arched-back singer, long solos, lyrics that could conceivably be illustrated by Frank Frazetta--was just silly, Spinal Tap stuff.

At the end of the decade, the artists most often compared to Zeppelin were those riffy art bands, Soundgarden and Jane’s Addiction, who offered abstract lyrics, songs based more on moods than hooks, and something of the Zep’s sheer power.

New-metalists Metallica--who rivaled Zeppelin not only in influence but in the utter incomprehensibility of their appeal to the uninitiated--had rehabilitated not only album-oriented rock but the potent communal high of the arena concert. A lot of Led Zeppelin suddenly started to sound pretty good.

In light of David Byrne and Peter Gabriel’s musical wanderings, the Zep’s penchant for tablas and Celtic folk tunes seems more prescient than self-indulgent, the sort of thing that would earn them a guest spot on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic.”

Zep’s erratic song structures sound merely eccentric alongside the artful meanderings of Jane’s Addiction. If in interviews Jimmy Page mewled about Stravinsky and Gustav Holst, he’d at least heard of those composers, which is more than you can say for most rock stars.

“Led Zeppelin” and “Led Zeppelin II” are in retrospect awesome British blues, as pure as anything this side of the first Stones album but with a swamp-blues intensity new to white rock ‘n’ roll.

“Led Zeppelin III” might have been a failed trope on the misty-heather acousticisms of Traffic and Pentangle, but led off with the extremely influential “Immigrant Song.” The untitled fourth album, though it included the stultifyingly pretentious ballad “Battle of Evermore,” is the masterpiece of the genre, as unassailable within the context of ‘70s hard rock as Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” is within the context of ‘70s R&B.;

“Houses of the Holy” and “Physical Graffiti” were less consistent--only half the songs hit--though only compared to earlier Zep, not to, say, Bad Company. (Of everything on the last four albums, only one song, “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” was up to the standards of the first four.)

Time has softened memories of satin bell-bottoms, half-hour drum solos, and drippy 45-minute versions of “Dazed and Confused” that always climaxed with a quarter hour of Page’s guitar-noise party tricks. Not to mention the inevitable bass solo on “No Quarter.” The universe of bong hits, converted vans and Jimmy Page posters universally used as white-male-teen wallpaper doesn’t seem quite so awful anymore.

But in a way, the new Led Zeppelin set can remind you of how bloated and directionless the band’s live show used to be--you can almost imagine producer Page cuing the re-mastering guy with an outstretched violin bow. There’s about four hours more than anybody really needs, two-thirds of everything they ever did arranged more or less chronologically, and with only two of the 54 songs previously unavailable on album.

A better-culled selection might have presented a more coherent portrait of the band. As it is, you emerge from a couple of hours with these CDs feeling as if you’ve been gorging on Chee-tos.

There seems to be less from the first two albums and way more of the late stuff than the quality of the material dictates. You’d think that a decade of hindsight would’ve persuaded Page of the merits of “The Lemon Song” and the horrors of “Achilles Last Stand.”

The sound is richer than the thin, tinny timbre of the currently available CDs. The track order is mildly interesting--it’s almost shocking to hear “Heartbreaker” instead of “What Is and What Shall Never Be” roar into your speakers after “Whole Lotta Love,” but the effect is nothing any Zep fan couldn’t do himself with a tape deck and a spare afternoon. Even the two “new” tracks have been widely available on bootlegs since the early ‘70s.

Still, there’s not a hard-rocker alive who can resist cranking up his Alpine when the first low moans of “Whole Lotta Love” come blasting across the room. And maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.