How Led Zeppelin Changed the World

Owen Gleiberman
·6-min read

Led Zeppelin, if you take in the full measure of their annihilating sunburst grandeur, are a very hard band to categorize. They’re usually thought of as the gods of metal, and few would deny that — though it’s my opinion that the DNA of classic metal owes as much to Black Sabbath’s second album, “Paranoid,” as it does to Zeppelin. That said, Led Zeppelin loomed like figures on Olympus over the entire cosmos of metal: the hard-charging thunder chords and blistering guitar solos, the long-haired priapic strutting, the vocals that scream out their omnipotence, the eroticized vandalism, the power.

Yet I also think of Zeppelin as the Beatles of heavy metal. There was a yin to their destructive yang — the songs they would do, like “Going to California” or “Thank You,” that conjured a vision of life as incandescent and romantic and glorious. The place where the hippie spirit still lived in them. And that, of course, all leads to “Stairway to Heaven,” which I wouldn’t hesitate to call one of the 10 greatest songs of the 20th century. It’s an idyllic song, and tragic, and godly, and sublimely gorgeous. It contains multitudes.

More from Variety

ADVERTISEMENT

The two sides of Zeppelin exist in a strange harmony. They were hippies who were also ravagers; they were lyrical songsmiths who found their way, through Jimmy Page’s riffs and Robert Plant’s wails and John Bonham’s thuds, to a kind of transcendent recklessness. I love the way the yin and yang would work together in a single song, so that “Over the Hills and Far Away,” for instance, starts out as a glittering folk-rock ballad, with Plant coming in like a medieval minstrel (“Hey lady, you got the love I need…”), and then Page’s acoustic strumming takes the song right up into the clouds, and then all of a sudden — BUM-bum! BUM-bum! — Bonham’s drums crash into it like a tank barreling through a Sunday picnic. At that moment you’re not in Kansas anymore. You’re in rock ‘n’ roll heaven-that-feels-as-good-as-hell. (With Zeppelin, the stairway went both ways.)

This weekend, “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” the first official documentary about the band, opened on 369 IMAX screens, where it made $2.6 million. Next weekend, it’s set to open on 1,000 screens. That’s almost unheard these days for a music documentary — and it’s also just about unheard of for Sony Pictures Classics, the boutique distributor that was smart enough to pick up the film, preside over its recutting (from the too-long version that played in 2021 at the Venice Film Festival), and release it. When you see the documentary, which presents the four members of Zeppelin from their earliest years on, and covers how they came together in the second half of 1968, then spent 1969 putting out their first two albums and playing live, often at the music festivals that took place in the wake of Woodstock, you feel the special charge of volcanic intensity they gave off. The cataclysmic force of Led Zeppelin still rules as sound, and as totemic rock mythology.

What struck me drinking all this in now, as opposed to, say, 50 years ago, when Zep was the soundtrack of my youth (definition of teenage bliss, at least for me, in the ’70s: playing air hockey in a pinball parlor with “Black Dog” blasting through the speakers), is that the spirit of Zeppelin, rather than being stuck in time, feels larger and more alive than ever. The greatest music, of course, tends to age well; there’s no mystery in that. But what hits me when I hear Zeppelin today is how much their music was channeling the impulses of the future.

Their songs took many forms, from metal before it was named to electric blues to “Lord of the Rings” pastoral to mystic Eastern drone rock to Beatles-meets-primal-Stone-Age-drums. Jimmy Page, as the documentary explains, would sometimes tune his guitar like a sitar to create the exotic modalities you heard in tracks like “The Rain Song.” But the quintessential Zeppelin, from “Whole Lotta Love” to “Black Dog” to “Immigrant Song” to “Rock and Roll” to “Misty Mountain Hop” to “Kashmir,” was about the spirit beneath the sound, and in many ways that spirit was the bridge to what we would call punk. The closing credits of “Becoming Led Zeppelin” feature a track I’d never heard before, the band’s incendiary live cover version of “C’mon Everybody,” and it’s the purest Ramones.

What, exactly, do I mean by punk? The punk revolution of the ’70s was many things. And if, like me, you believe that the greatest punk band — the one that defined the looking glass that the world was going through at the time — was the Sex Pistols, then I think what that means is that punk, at heart, was an electrifying music that celebrated a fundamental hardcore detachment from what we think of as…empathy. Human feeling. One of my favorite Sex Pistols songs was always “No Feelings” (“No feeeel-ings…for anybody else!”), because I think it’s so searingly, cathartically honest about the new condition that was starting to settle into youth culture: the unabashed self-directedness of it all, and the rage at a world that was starting to turn “connection” into a commodity.

ADVERTISEMENT

True punk was over pretty quickly (and the Clash created music that allowed kids to think of themselves as Punks Who Cared). But I don’t believe the underlying affectlessness that punk tapped into went away; I think it just grew. I think that the punk vision, in more ways than not, describes the world we have today: people full of rage, at each other’s throats, talking and not listening. No feelings…for anybody else. And though we all know about the pioneers of punk, the literal inventors of it (the MC5, Iggy Pop, the Who doing “My Generation” and the Beatles doing “Helter Skelter”), I’d argue that on a mass scale it was Led Zeppelin who got there first. Their songs don’t sound like “punk,” but Zeppelin’s music was out to destroy the world as much or more than punk ever did.

And because they were such a monumental band, epic in reach and influence, Led Zeppelin marked the moment when vast numbers of people, for the very first time, experienced rock ‘n’ roll as a reckless orgy of the self. That’s part of the beauty of Zeppelin, and the beauty of the metal revolution the band inspired: that it didn’t pretend to care. You’re banging your head down to your navel; it’s all about you. This nihilism was already out there, but never underestimate the power of rock ‘n’ roll to redirect the energy of society. Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis did it. The Beatles and Dylan and the Stones did it. And Led Zeppelin did it — by tripling down on the libidinous energy of all the counterculture that had come before, and also by shining a light, for the first time, on where such a musical wrecking ball of hedonistic trash-the-world stimulation could lead. Was it a good place or a dangerous place? It was both. But it’s where we’re at now. As Robert Plant sang in “Kashmir,” Oooo my baby! Let me take you there.

Best of Variety

Sign up for Variety's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Latest stories