The Led Zeppelin Top 50 Countdown (#30-26) & This Week's Statistics

Hello, my friends! Another week has gone in the blink of an eye. Before we enter the new one, time to get on with our Led Zeppelin Top 50 Countdown. Here we go!

Before we begin our regular countdown, I'll take a minute for a special request by our good friend, Mr. Record Man. It also happens to be my favorite song of Led Zeppelin members' solo careers. Big Log was Robert Plant's first US top 40 hit, peaking at #20. It was also very successful in other major markets: #5 in Belgium and the Netherlands, #7 in New Zealand, #11 in the UK,  and #23 in Australia. It was found in Plant's second solo album, The Principle of Moments (1983). A wistful road song with a killer guitar line, its video was appropriately filmed on location in various areas around California and Nevada, including the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel in Death Valley Junction, California, the Calico Ghost Town in California, the Glass Pool Inn in Las Vegas, and in Crystal, Nye County, Nevada.

Back to our list; In The Light (at #30) is one of the subtler and most pleasurable of the band's various epics. It was written by Jones, with contributions from Plant and Page. It was recorded between January-February 1974 and opened the third side of their only studio double album, Physical Graffiti (1975). In Dazed and Confused, Chris Welch says the band never played it live because the synthesizer Jones used couldn't be kept in tune on tour.

There are several great guitar sounds here, and a funkily odd instrumentation - that clavinet break, and the dead stop to let Page deliver a single silky rising guitar line. The intro is one of the band’s most captivating, and the way the song toggles between minor-chord tension and major-chord warmth across its various sections without totally breaking its sense of flow is pretty sensational. In the end, the band achieves something close to grandeur.

In The Light

This is a cover version by English psychedelic jazz band Syd Arthur:

At #29 is a track on one of their best and most successful albums, Led Zeppelin II (1969). What Is and What Should Never Be, one of Plant's earliest songwriting attempts is allegedly about an affair with his wife's younger sister. Zeppelin was doing loudQUIETloud way before the Pixies, with the verse-to-chorus on What Is and What Should Never Be being a particularly strong example of the band’s mastery of dynamic shifting. The loose, almost jazzy tip-toeing of the verse gives way to one of the band’s most rip-roaring choruses (and best outros), a juxtaposition well exploited by the most intense scene from 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook.

This was one of the first songs on which Page used his soon-to-become trademark Gibson Les Paul for recording. The production makes liberal use of stereo as the guitars pan back and forth between channels. Robert Plant's vocals were phased during the verses. Producer Rick Rubin has remarked, "The descending riff [of What Is and What Should Never Be] is amazing: It's like a bow is being drawn back, and then it releases. The rhythm of the vocals is almost like a rap. It's insane - one of their most psychedelic songs."

Here is Led Zeppelin live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1970:

This is Jimmy Page covering the song live with the Black Crowes:

The next three songs all happen to be from the same album: 1973's Houses Of The Holy. First, at #28, is The Song Remains The Same, which happens to be the album's opening track. The song was originally an instrumental with the working title The Overture. After Robert Plant added lyrics, it was temporarily known as The Campaign before becoming The Song Remains the Same. In an interview he gave to Guitar World magazine in 1993, Jimmy Page discussed the song's construction:

"It was originally going to be an instrumental - an overture that led into The Rain Song. But I guess Robert had different ideas. You know, "This is pretty good, Better get some lyrics - quick!" [laughs] ... I had all the beginning material together, and Robert suggested that we break down into half-time in the middle. After we figured out that we were going to break it down, the song came together in a day ... I always had a cassette recorder around. That's how both The Song Remains the Same and Stairway To Heaven came together - from bits of taped ideas.

If not the all-time best Zep opener, then the one that sounds the most like it couldn’t have fallen anywhere else on the album. The Song Remains The Same bursts out of the gate and barely lets up for its 5:30 runtime, each band member trying to elbow their way into the spotlight while still remaining perfectly in-step as a collective unit. The song was originally planned without vocals and sounds like it - Plant’s contributions are sporadic - but for a musical example of Zep at the peak of their instrumental powers, you can’t do much better than this.

There is something riveting about Page's guitar work. The high-speed solos are articulate and true, and throughout he keeps layering on new guitar sounds. There are also echoes of the Who in there, circa Tommy and Live At Leeds. Written shortly after Page and Plant's 1972 expedition to Bombay, this raga-tinged track is Zep at their sunniest, celebrating music's universality just as they had become arguably the biggest band in the world.

Here they are, doing it live in 1975:

This is a live cover version by Heart with John's son Jason Bonham on drums:

At #27 is No Quarter. The song became a centerpiece at all Led Zeppelin concerts thereafter, until their final tour. A mood piece unlike any other in the Zep discography, with supremely fuzzed-out guitar, aqueous electric piano, and a muffled-sounding Plant - not to mention Page pitch-shifting the whole thing down after the fact - creating a uniquely disquieting vibe that may as well have invented the Deftones’ entire post-90s output.

The band's trippiest moment since Dazed and Confused was a showcase for co-writer Jones, who gets cool-jazzy on piano in the middle section as Page spins fluid lines. If couplets like "Walking side by side with death/The devil mocks their every step" didn't invent heavy-metal mythology, they surely planted some seeds.

The title is derived from the military practice of showing no mercy to a vanquished opponent and from the brave act of not asking for mercy when vanquished. This theme is captured in several of the song's lyrics. The entire vocal track was run through a chorus filter and a leveler. Rick Rubin has remarked on the song's structure, "It takes such confidence to be able to get really quiet and loose for such a long time. Led Zeppelin completely changed how we look at what popular music can be."

This is a live version from 1973:

There have been numerous covers of the song. Let's listen to a few of them. First is Polish singer Kasia Kowalska:

This is progressive metal band Tool:

And here is Gov't Mule, live @ O'Shaughnessy Auditorium, St. Paul, MN - 31/10/2007:

Finally for today, at #26, is Dancing Days. After recording this at Mick Jagger's country home Stargroves in England, the bandmates were so excited they went out on the lawn and danced to it. The music - most strikingly, the searing slide-guitar line - was inspired by Page and Plant's trip to Bombay. The lyrics are an almost Beach Boys-like vision of Edenic summer ease.

The unrelenting guitar attack drives the song along and made for some of the most radio-friendly work of the band's career. Page's guitar is inventive, creating an illusion almost of propulsion on the breaks and offering along the way a dizzying amalgam of sounds.

Dancing Days

This is a good cover version by the alternative rock band Stone Temple Pilots, which was also a moderate hit single for them:

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; coming from a week with an unusually high number of visits - and with no special event to generate increased interest, it was only natural that we would have a corrective 12% drop in the weekly number. There's a positive way to spin this, however; if you compare to the visits that we had two weeks ago, there's actually an 11% rise this week. So, if we consider the week-before-last a happy interval, we're still on the right track.

As far as stories are concerned, last week's multi-centered presentation of Kristian Hoffman / Lance Loud / Kevin Kiely / Rick Berlin (with a sprinkling of Klaus Nomi) was read the most. That was actually a relief; at 7653 words it was the longest story I've written yet - and it also took a lot of research time to get there. To think that at one point in my life I was actually getting paid to produce 700-word opinion pieces for a newspaper... this was ten times as lengthy... and it's free.

As far as countries are concerned, this week's winners are the United Kingdom, which has retaken the #1 position in the weekly list as well as increasing the distance from Greece in the all-time list, but also Canada, which not only returned to the top 5 of the weekly list, but also re-entered, after a few months' absence, the all-time list at #9, forcing Belgium to move down to #10 (just a 3-visit difference between them!) and chasing the United Arab Emirates out of the top 10 altogether. Australia and Indonesia also did well, while France, Germany, Cyprus, and Belgium kept their overall percentage stable. Italy had a minor drop, while things were slightly worse for the United States, Greece, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates. South Korea, at #6 last week, is nowhere to be found this week.

Here are this week's Top 10 countries (once again, there are countries from four different continents present):

1. the United Kingdom

2. the United States

3. France

4. Greece

5. Canada

6. Germany

7. Cyprus

8. Australia

9. Indonesia

10. Italy

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and Vietnam. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10 (welcome back Canada!):

1. the United States = 38.6%

2. the United Kingdom = 9.1%

3. Greece = 8.7%

4. France = 7.5%

5. Russia = 4.6%

6. Germany = 3.5%

7. Cyprus = 1.37%

8. Italy = 1.24%

9. Canada = 0.67%

10. Belgium = 0.67%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!