Album Review: Led Zeppelin IV

For technical reasons, Matthew is not able to review Led Zeppelin albums as part of his albums of the 1970s series. Because I think Led Zeppelin IV deserves its own review, I am writing this one myself. Please note that this review covers only my own views -- they should not be attributed to Matthew or Eric. Also, because I don't want to interfere with Matthew's system, I will not be giving a numerical rating.

OK, here goes.

Any male who went to high school in the United States after 1950 will recognize that in the modern world, one of the most profound dividing lines in life is the line between nerds and cool people. Some boys -- King David, for example, or Mick Jagger -- are inherently cool. Others -- such the Apostle Paul or Bill Gates -- are inherently nerdy. As these examples show, being cool or being nerdy says nothing about how good a person you are, or how successful you are likely to be in life. Willie Loman was probably a cool kid in high school. Charles Schulz was a nerd even after he became rich and famous. No, being cool or being nerdy has to do with your attitude toward life. Cool people tend to focus on things outside themselves -- relationships, political causes, and so forth. Nerds are more interested on the stories taking place inside their own heads -- the imaginary conversations they have with girls they would like to date, the comic books they would make if they knew how to draw, and the like.

Now the Bible tells us that King David -- who killed giants, wrote great songs, and danced before the altar of the Lord -- was a man after God's own heart. And Jesus chose Peter -- the big tough fisherman with the country accent -- to lead the apostles. So it seems clear that while God loves all of us, the cool people are His favorites. And who can blame Him? Even most nerds prefer to hang out with cool people. If given a choice tomorrow, I would much rather be a rock star than a lawyer. So cool people always seem to have an advantage in society. In some societies this advantage is quite profound -- in Medieval Europe, for example, the cool people got to live in castles and ride around on horses rescuing maidens and killing pretty much whoever they wanted, while the nerds had to be celibate and stay in monasteries, copying down the Bible.

For most of the 20th century in the English-speaking world, music was uniquely the province of cool people. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, George Gershwin, Elvis Presley, the Beatles -- all pretty cool guys. Music was for parties, for dancing, for picking up girls -- all the sort of things cool people like to do. Nerds had their moments -- they took over jazz in the 1950s and they after Gershwin's death they turned classical music into a sort of weird anti-popular cult that no one else wanted to listen to -- but, for the most part, they were kept out of the music biz. Even guys who looked like they had nerd potential -- like Sonny Bono, or Bob Dylan, or Brian Wilson -- ended up writing love songs or getting drawn into political causes.

As the 1960s came to an end, there was no reason to believe that any of this was about to change. But the pieces were in place. New and improved technology meant that teenage nerds could really focus on music in a way they had never been able to do before. Before the 1970s, if you wanted to listen to records, you had to play them on a little portable record player -- or on your parents' home stereo in the living room. Neither of these forms was really suited to the nerd style of music listening -- where you sit in the room by yourself and listen to the same song over and over until it's burned into your soul. But the advent of component stereo equipment was perfect for nerds. In the first place, you had to be nerdy to even understand it -- there were all sorts of technical terms like "megahertz" to learn and there was a big advantage for people who could build their own shelves and knew how to best hook up the equipment to maximize the purity of sound. In the second place, you could close your door, put on your headphones, and suddenly disappear into a world of your own imagination.

So you had all these guys sitting in the suburbs with their Pioneer turntables and lots of time on their hands. But what could they listen to? There were the Beatles, of course -- you could spend a lot of time trying to identify all the people on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's or to figure out what John Lennon was doing in "Revolution 9" -- but Lennon and McCartney are, in many ways, the ultimate cool people, so you could never really identify with them. You could identify with Pete Townsend, but that's not enough. You could argue with your friends about the relative merits of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton -- but Hendrix died and Clapton stopped doing the whole guitar hero thing after Derek and the Dominos broke up. And of course, the whole singer-songwriter thing was never going to work for your true nerds -- not enough anger, and too much emphasis on human contact. Nor were the nerds likely to sign up for the whole CSNY lefty movement -- nerds figured out as kids that the whole political process is never likely to lead to a result that they care for. So there was a big vacuum at the center of the music world.

Led Zeppelin not only entered this vacuum, it filled it in a way that changed the whole culture. Led Zeppelin was, and is, the ultimate nerd band. In the first place, they looked like cool guys -- remember, I told you that nerds would rather hang out with the cool crowd anyway. But in the second place, almost everything about them was nerdy. Unlike the Beatles, or Elvis, or almost any other big musical act of the 20th century, Led Zeppelin didn't get started to meet girls or provide dance music. Its purpose was to provide a framework for the remarkable guitar work of Jimmy Page. And the best way to enjoy Mr. Page's mastery was to close the door, put on your headphones, and listen very carefully to every note he played -- at a very high volume. Perfect. Plus Zeppelin had an appealing collection of interests. They liked girls, of course -- but from a distance. They were also interested in Tolkien, the occult, the history of blues music, and other obscure things. And they would work their interests into their music in such a manner that the more you knew about the stuff they liked, the more you would "get" what they were trying to do. This set up a dynamic where the more time you spent with Zeppelin, the more you would enjoy them -- exactly the sort of dynamic that nerds like.

Of course, most of the folks who had enjoyed 1960's music -- people like Tony Kornheiser and the original staff of Rolling Stone magazine -- hated Led Zeppelin. But of course they would. For them, music was about connecting with people -- meeting girls, crossing racial lines, building a political movement. Zeppelin didn't really care about any of that stuff. What they promised was a way to help lonely 15-year-old guys feel better about living in a cold and unfriendly world -- and a really neat collection of topics to discuss with your friends in the cafeteria. "Which of Page's solos is the best?" "Did you hear those references to Tolkien in 'Ramble On'?" "Who exactly is Alistair Crowley, anyway?" Zeppelin didn't sound all that great on a little transistor radio, and you couldn't play their songs at your Junior Prom, but when you put on those headphones and cranked up the volume, they sounded like the greatest band in the world.

And that's why, for almost every white male nerd born in the English-speaking world between 1955 and 1975, Led Zeppelin IV forms a major part of the soundtrack of their lives. This was the best album Zeppelin ever did -- the perfect mix of Page's fantabulous guitar work, their love of old blues music, and their Celtic mysticism. Everything about the album -- the cover, the weird artwork on the inside, the bizarre symbols on the record itself, the fact that the album has no official name, the strange names of some of the songs, the evocative but ultimately incomprehensible lyrics in "Stairway to Heaven" -- lends itself to speculation, contemplation, and argument. And the mood of the album is very much that of a teenage nerd -- now angry, now wistful, now forgiving, now head-banging -- exactly the sort of mood swings I went through every day in high school.

How do you rate such an album? It changed the world, of course. Matthew talks about influence -- well, every four-piece rock band since 1971 has learned something from Led Zeppelin. Their sound became "Heavy Metal" -- making them perhaps the only modern rock band to literally found its own genre. Their green pagan Celtic mysticism -- which seemed so bizarre in the plastic world of 1971 -- is now pretty much the mainstream belief system of the East Coast Establishment. And they proved to the showbiz crowd that you could make money -- a lot of money -- appealing to teenage nerds. Six years later, "Star Wars" would make a fortune -- and pop culture would never be the same.

But the changes in pop culture ultimately made Zeppelin unnecessary. I have three nerdy sons, but they don't need Zeppelin the way I did. They don't need music at all. They still go into their room, and close the door, and enter their imaginary worlds -- but they get there through video games, YouTube, and other modern forms. Music is for old people. It's just as well, really. Zeppelin never sounded right on a transistor radio, and it wouldn't sound much better playing through those tiny speakers on your laptop.

But I still have the old components. And sometimes, when my wife and kids are out of the house, and I have the chance to crank it up, I find myself pulling out Led Zeppelin IV and jumping on that old roller-coaster again. I don't care what the cool folks think. I think it's great.