The Led Zeppelin Top 50 Countdown (#03-01) & This Week's Statistics

Hello, my friends! When I started compiling the list for this countdown, the first thing I did was to write down the top 3 songs. These three were written in stone - there was no doubt in my mind that they were the ones. The time has come to give them a listen...

At #3, from Physical Graffiti (1975), is Kashmir. By this point, Page had plainly mastered the fast-slow, soft-hard dynamics of sound with his guitar, in song construction and in the studio. For Kashmir, he decided to experiment with stasis. The song starts out with a high pitch and stays there, producing a hypnotic M.C. Escher staircase of a guitar riff; always moving upward, yet somehow always coming around to create itself again. And it's all built on a herky-jerky beat that Bonham uses to drive the band forward. No other hard-rock band of the time recorded a song like this, and no other group ever would - and it's probably the band's most popular song after Stairway To Heaven.

It's also their hugest-sounding track, partly because it was one of the few that used outside musicians – a string and brass corps that augmented Jones' Mellotron swirls, Bonham's druid storm-trooper processional and Page's Arabic-­Indian vibe ("I had a sitar before George Harrison," he said). Plant's lyrics were born from an endless car ride through southern Morocco, and his 15-second howl around the four-minute mark may be his most spectacular vocal moment. Plant called it "the definitive Zeppelin song."

Led Zep' most singular, hypnotic and awesome-in-the-truest-sense epic of the band’s career, this was the song Led Zeppelin themselves would most like you to remember them by. A postscript: Remember the Sex Pistols, the band dedicated to tearing down the rock Establishment in general, and dinosaur rock bands like Zeppelin in particular, on the rise just as Physical Graffiti was released? Close to a decade after the Pistols' demise, their escapee leader, John Lydon, debuted his new live ensemble called Public Image Limited. They opened their shows with a stunner: a grand, precise, sweeping, and wholly admiring version of Kashmir - a potent example of the respect from unexpected quarters that accrues to those who, you might say, decide to be a rock, and not to roll. 

This is a powerful live version:

Page and Plant recorded a longer, live version, with an Egyptian/Moroccan orchestra for No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded (1994) and performed the song with an orchestra on their 1995 tour.

Puff Daddy caught some heat when he sampled the song for Come With Me off of the 1998 Godzilla soundtrack, but his instincts were right: The Kashmir riff is the sound of a gigantic green lizard wrecking a downtown metropolis, and like the rest of the song, it never ceases to amaze.

At #2 we find Whole Lotta Love, from Led Zeppelin II (1969), Led Zeppelin's defining song - obscene, brutish and utterly awesome. Even the faint scoff, barely discernible at the start of the song, is dripping with testosterone. "Way down inside," squeals Robert Plant, "I'm gonna give you every inch of my love" - adding, "I wanna be your backdoor man!" just for extra romance. His post-verbal singing is even dirtier, especially around the 4:30 mark, where he starts saying "love," and then shoots his wad into a black hole of echo. (The ghost vocals were a happy accident, the result of a bleed-through from an unused vocal track that Jimmy Page decided to leave in.)

This titanic recording represented the farthest reaches of unquestionably pop-based studio sound and bravura guitar-slinging of the era. Page's riff - implacable, huge, and priapic defines rock at its hardest. Plant's singing is a definitive set of authoritative declamations and howls of desire and Page takes it to another dimension in the studio, everything from the backward echo you can hear if you turn the damn thing up to the fact that he keeps the drums off the tack for the first 30 seconds, making the hardest rock you'd ever heard suddenly even harder. Then there's the daringly long percussion break, culminating with paroxysms of noise, some heavy breathing from Plant, and then, almost matter-of-factly, the return of that guitar riff. 

It was the band's biggest US chart hit, hitting #4 in late ’69, and a regular on pretty much any greatest-rock-song-ever list, for a reason. It was also #1 in Germany and Australia, #2 in Canada, Belgium, and Denmark, #3 in Austria, #4 in Spain and New Zealand, #5 in the Netherlands and Switzerland, #6 in South Africa, and #7 in Finland. In the UK the band refrained from releasing singles while they were active. When it was released almost 30 years later - in 1997 - it peaked at #21.

Here they are, explosively live in NYC, 1973. You may notice the camera's numerous close-ups on Plant's crotch; these were tight pants that he was wearing...

Years later, Plant freely admitted his heavy lyrical debt to You Need Love, by uncredited blues-master Willie Dixon (who sued and won); "I just thought, 'Well, what am I going to sing?' That was it, a nick. Now happily paid for." This is Willie Dixon's You Need Love, recorded in 1962 by Muddy Waters:

In 1966, British band the Small Faces recorded the song as You Need Loving for their eponymous debut Decca album. According to Steve Marriott, the group's vocalist and guitarist, Page and Plant attended several Small Faces gigs, where they expressed their interest in the song. Plant's phrasing is particularly similar to that of Marriott's, who added, "he [Plant] sang it the same, phrased it the same, even the stops at the end were the same".

But Whole Lotta Love, recorded at London's Olympic Studios and mixed in New York, was far more than a remake. The midsection is a black-light head trip, a tornado of orgasmic moans, cymbal teases and shivering theremin foreplay, all magnified by wild stereo-panning. Page's pumping riff – made with a metal slide and augmented with some backward echo – is one of the most straightforwardly bruising to ever come out of a Les Paul, and John Paul Jones and John Bonham back it up thrust for thrust. Said Page, "Usually my riffs are pretty damn original. What can I say?"

You know which is my number one song, don't you? I've already said that Led Zeppelin IV (1971) is my favorite album of theirs and I also said that the top six would be a song from each of their six best albums. Also, we haven't heard Stairway To Heaven yet, have we?

You may remember the monolith in Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey. It existed both in primitive Earth, as well as in future Moon and it was the device that put the film's plot in motion. Well, Stairway To Heaven is like that monolith. It comes from the far past and also from the distant future and it is reaching for heaven with its feet planted firmly on earth.  It is often referred to as one of the greatest rock songs of all time - and it truly is.

Stairway to Heaven was voted #3 in 2000 by VH1 on its list of the 100 Greatest Rock Songs, and was placed at #31 on "Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". It was the most requested song on FM radio stations in the United States in the 1970s, despite never having been commercially released as a single there. In 2007, through download sales promoting Led Zeppelin's Mothership release, Stairway to Heaven hit number 37 on the UK Singles Chart.

According to Page, Stairway to Heaven "... crystallized the essence of the band. It had everything there and showed the band at its best... as a band, as a unit. Not talking about solos or anything, it had everything there. We were careful never to release it as a single. It was a milestone for us. Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality, something which will hold up for a long time and I guess we did it with Stairway. [Pete] Townshend probably thought that he got it with Tommy. I don't know whether I have the ability to come up with more. I have to do a lot of hard work before I can get anywhere near those stages of consistent, total brilliance."

From the Elizabethan ambiance of its acoustic introduction to Plant's lyrical mysticism to Page's spiraling solo, the eight-minute song is a masterpiece of slow-reveal intensity that withholds power, then ascends skyward like nothing in rock. "It speeds up like an adrenaline flow," said Page, whose on-the-spot improvisation was the perfect complement to Plant's evocation of excess and salvation. "It was a milestone for us."

Even when you think that you have lost your ability to hear this song, dragged down as it is by overfamiliarity, it will come to you when you least expect it, in a parking garage, on a freeway on a rainy afternoon, or while relaxing at home - and you'll be caught up in it again. High dynamics; a set of evocative lyrics; a restrained, then intense, then overwhelming band attack; and, finally, that solo to end all solos, Page at his most utterly articulate and dramatic, keening and at times so fast as to beggar belief. That speed, logic, lyricism, and intensity make all other guitar solos seem puny. I don't want to put too much into the lyrics, but I will point out that the song has a point - you can't buy a stairway to heaven - and further that in its arcing, thrilling penultimate line, we can hear a statement of intent, strength, and resolve in the face of that other much more malleable '60s survivor band, the one that insisted on Rolling.

This is from The Live-DVD The Song Remains The Same:

The song was covered by a variety of acts, from White Skull to Pat Boone - and from the Leningrad Cowboys to the London Philharmonic Orchestra. None of these versions was a match to the original, but here are two covers by two lovely ladies anyway...

This is Dolly Parton's version:

This is a version by Mary J. Blige:

Over the years, some people have considered that the song's opening guitar arpeggios bear a close resemblance to the 1968 instrumental Taurus by the Los Angeles-based rock band Spirit, written by Spirit guitarist Randy California. In the liner notes to the 1996 reissue of Spirit's self-titled debut album, California wrote: "People always ask me why Stairway to Heaven sounds exactly like Taurus, which was released two years earlier. I know Led Zeppelin also played Fresh Garbage in their live set. They opened up for us on their first American tour." We know that Led Zeppelin are (occasionally) song thieves, but they are among the most ingenious and talented song thieves ever. This is Taurus:

Next week we'll start a new countdown of the top 50 songs of another of the greatest rock groups ever. Can you guess which one?

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; it was a good week, with an increase of visits of 11% compared to last week. All new stories did well; Euro Disco / African Disco did slightly better than the rest. Of the older stories, George Maharis is still accumulating an impressive number of visits each week. Tony Washington & The Dynamic Superiors, as well as Sam Smith also did very well.

As far as countries are concerned, this week's top 10 countries are the same ones that appear on the all-time list, with the exception of Belgium, which didn't register enough visits and was replaced by the United Arab Emirates. The fact that the UAE is just outside the all-time top 10 should be considered as a warning sign for Belgium - if the trend continues, it will soon exit the all-time top 10 in favor of the UAE. Otherwise, the United States did well, easily ending first for the week, although its all-time rate is still dropping. The same goes for Germany and Russia; a relatively good week, but not good enough to keep the all-time rate from dropping. The United Kingdom and Greece kept a steady all-time rate, while France, Cyprus, Italy, and Canada increased theirs.

Here are this week's Top 10 countries.

1. the United States

2. France

3. the United Kingdom

4. Greece

5. Canada

6. Italy

7. Cyprus

8. Germany

9. Russia

10. the United Arab Emirates

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Lesotho, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 36.7%

2. the United Kingdom = 9.7%

3. France = 9.0%

4. Greece = 8.8%

5. Russia = 4.6%

6. Germany = 3.1%

7. Cyprus = 1.40%

8. Italy = 1.39%

9. Canada = 0.88%

10. Belgium = 0.59%

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