Four or Five Lads Who Shook the World

Guest Blogger: George Case is the author of Led Zeppelin FAQ , Jimmy Page , and Out of Our Heads. Below is an excerpt from his blog.

Four or Five Lads Who Shook the World

I have close relatives who listen attentively to One Direction, the popular boy band from the UK, and after observing the phenomenon I can confirm: One Direction are the new Beatles.

Before the protests pour in, I hasten to say I don’t believe 1D (I know the lingo) will have anything like the long-term success and influence of the Fab Four. Yet it’s precisely such a dismissal that links the two groups. Where One Direction and the Beatles resemble each other is in the contemporary mainstream responses to their music, which was, and is, pretty skeptical. One Direction will probably not end up like the Beatles, but they’ve started from the same position.

Today John, Paul, George and Ringo are routinely cited as only a little less significant to Western civilization than Mahatma Gandhi, Julius Caesar, and Moses, but throughout the 1960s, and certainly during the Beatlemania years, many outsiders found their songs forgettable and their mass appeal dismaying. “All I want to know is, why?” asked veteran British saxophonist Tubby Hayes of the Beatles’ popularity, after three of them had blithely dropped in at jazzer Ronnie Scott’s nightclub. The New York Herald-Tribune wrote them off as “75 percent publicity, 20 percent haircut, and 5 percent lilting lament.” “These bums are what all the fuss is about?” wondered boxer Sonny Liston after the foursome posed with his upcoming opponent, a young prospect named Cassisus Clay. Though film critic Andrew Sarris liked A Hard Day’s Night, he qualified, “[t]hey may not be worth a paragraph in six months.” In 1964’s Goldfinger, no less suave a figure than Sean Connery’s James Bond told his latest conquest, “My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done, such as drinking Dom Pérignon ’53 above a temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!” That same year, Paul Johnson described the Beatles as a “mass-produced mental opiate” in his infamous article “The Menace of Beatlism,” published in the New Statesman:

Nowadays, if you confess that you don’t know the difference between Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Waller (and what is more don’t care) you are liable to be accused of being a fascist…Both TV channels [!] now run weekly programmes in which popular records are played to teenagers and judged.  While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience…How pathetic and listless they seemed:  young girls, hardly more than sixteen, dressed as adults and already lined up as fodder for exploitation…At sixteen, I and my friends heard our first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  I can remember the excitement even today.  We would not have wasted thirty seconds of our precious time on The Beatles and their ilk…

Keep reading this article on George’s blog!

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Led Zeppelin FAQ

In this exhaustive and insightful reference text, rock writer and cultural critic George Case details the key names, dates, figures, and features of one of the biggest and most mythologized rock-and-roll groups of all time: Led Zeppelin. Here, finally, are the answers to the puzzles that have haunted fans for over four decades – puzzles such as the meaning of Led Zep’s enigmatic album covers; the truth about leader Jimmy Page’s involvement with the occult; a breakdown of the sometimes murky roots of their greatest songs; firm data on their musical instruments, live performances, and studio productions; and sordid specifics of the band’s infamously debauched private lives.

But here, too, is a deeply reflective analysis of why Led Zeppelin’s music has endured as long as it has, and of how Led Zeppelin’s mystique has only grown in the years since their official disbanding. Placing the group in the context of their time and place, Case scrupulously compares and contrasts their achievements with those of their influences, rivals, and followers. Led Zeppelin FAQ is not only an indispensable listener’s companion to a classic rock act, but a considered history of rock and roll as a business, an art form, and a worldwide social phenomenon.

Roger Ebert’s Legacy

Guest Blogger: George Case is the author of Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin FAQ, and Out of Our Heads. Below is an excerpt from his blog.

Always At the Movies

Roger Ebert, the famous film critic who died on April 4, is rightly being remembered as an impassioned defender of cinematic art and a fierce opponent of Hollywood’s lowest-common-denominator ethic. He was a champion of the sleeper and the un-blockbuster. If his aesthetic standards were not as rigorous as those of highbrow reviewers like John Simon or Stanley Kauffmann, they nonetheless informed a generation of moviegoers who learned from him that big budgets and big stars do not inevitably produce great films. But Roger Ebert left another, more troubling, legacy – one he surely didn’t intend but which has nevertheless changed, for the worse, the medium he loved.

When it debuted on PBS in 1978, “Sneak Previews,” the program Ebert co-hosted with Gene Siskel, was a unique show that afforded TV viewers the unusual opportunity to learn about new, old, and little-known films. Today the review paradigm it pioneered – thumbs up, thumbs down; five star, one star; I say, you say; he says, she says – is ubiquitous on television and the Internet. Today movies, TV series, music, books, dance, and just about every other art form are subject to instant judgements passed by countless professional and amateur critics, ranging from highly paid celebrities, as Roger Ebert certainly was, to talking heads on the local news and down to anonymous bloggers and online trolls. Today there are cable networks devoted to old movies, websites devoted to new graphic novels, YouTube channels about television and Facebook pages about radio. Today the opinions of Ebert’s descendants and imitators are themselves praised, panned, and deconstructed by ever-expanding circles of commentary. Today the relationship between even the most populist creators and the least discriminating audiences is mediated by leagues of insiders, second-guessers, and full-time spectators. Today the entertainment and cultural industries are, in a significant sense, their own chief subjects.

Finish the article on George’s blog! 

 

Led Zeppelin FAQ

In this exhaustive and insightful reference text, rock writer and cultural critic George Case details the key names, dates, figures, and features of one of the biggest and most mythologized rock-and-roll groups of all time: Led Zeppelin. Here, finally, are the answers to the puzzles that have haunted fans for over four decades – puzzles such as the meaning of Led Zep’s enigmatic album covers; the truth about leader Jimmy Page’s involvement with the occult; a breakdown of the sometimes murky roots of their greatest songs; firm data on their musical instruments, live performances, and studio productions; and sordid specifics of the band’s infamously debauched private lives.

But here, too, is a deeply reflective analysis of why Led Zeppelin’s music has endured as long as it has, and of how Led Zeppelin’s mystique has only grown in the years since their official disbanding. Placing the group in the context of their time and place, Case scrupulously compares and contrasts their achievements with those of their influences, rivals, and followers. Led Zeppelin FAQ is not only an indispensable listener’s companion to a classic rock act, but a considered history of rock and roll as a business, an art form, and a worldwide social phenomenon.

40 Years of Led Zeppelin IV

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Guest Blogger: George Case, author of Led Zeppelin FAQ, Jimmy Page, and Out of Our Heads.

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Forty years ago today, Led Zeppelin released their landmark fourth album – commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV, it’s the one that contains some of the band’s best-known songs, including “Black Dog,” “Rock and Roll,” “Going to California,” “When the Levee Breaks,” and, of course, “Stairway to Heaven.”

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Led Zeppelin IV was Led Zeppelin’s masterpiece, and the culmination of their first breakneck three years of almost non-stop travel, performing, and recording.  By many estimates, the quartet was never as inspired or as cohesive afterward.  Although later albums such as Houses of the Holy, Physical Graffiti, and Presence were all strong additions to their catalog, IV was a peak of commercial and critical success they could not quite surpass.  “Stairway to Heaven” became their anthem, and “Rock and Roll” their volcanic show opener or mandatory encore.

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What makes the album so special?  The material, certainly – ranging from heavy electric blues to lilting folk, from the dense rhythm of “Four Sticks” to the exuberant drive of “Misty Mountain Hop,” and from the ethereal mandolins on “The Battle of Evermore” to Jimmy Page’s soaring guitar solo on “Stairway.”  The production – producer Page’s careful, crystalline use of his “light and shade” effects to highlight every instrument and vocal line.  The album cover itself - a wordless sleeve that offered listeners only cryptic imagery and a puzzling set of sigils that stood in for the band members’ names.  It all adds up to a near-perfect package of songs that cohere into a single, irreducible work as few rock albums ever do.

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Four decades later, Led Zeppelin IV has sold some 40 million copies around the world, regularly makes reviewers’ All-Time Best Album lists, and “Stairway to Heaven” is a Classic Rock staple that is as familiar to average fans as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”  However many times you may have heard them already, today’s a good day to fire up your turntable, CD player, or iPod, and crank up this collection of eight brilliant pieces of popular music that have together stood the test of time, and which will still be with us until the Levee Breaks.

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Led Zeppelin FAQ by George Case (Backbeat Books)
In this exhaustive and insightful reference text, rock writer and cultural critic George Case details the key names, dates, figures, and features of one of the biggest and most mythologized rock-and-roll groups of all time: Led Zeppelin. Here, finally, are the answers to the puzzles that have haunted fans for over four decades – puzzles such as the meaning of Led Zep’s enigmatic album covers; the truth about leader Jimmy Page’s involvement with the occult; a breakdown of the sometimes murky roots of their greatest songs; firm data on their musical instruments, live performances, and studio productions; and sordid specifics of the band’s infamously debauched private lives. Available here.

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