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!

Carole Pope / Rough Trade

Today's act created the first ever lesbian hit single. Carole Pope has a good solo career in the 21st century, but her most successful years were those with the band Rough Trade, an act whose nucleus consisted of Pope and multi-instrumentalist Kevan Staples, with various other musicians revolving around them.

Carole Pope was born on August 6, 1946, in Manchester, England, UK. She was raised in Scarborough, Toronto, Canada, where her family emigrated when she was a child. She attended Cedarbrae High School with female impersonator Craig Russell and Klaus Kassbaum, future bass player for Steppenwolf. Her sister is television writer/producer Elaine Pope.

Pope met her longtime musical partner, Kevan Staples at a band audition in Scarborough. In 1968, they began performing together as a duo in Yorkville, which was Toronto's live music and arts district at the time. In 1970, they adopted the name O, changing it to The Bullwhip Brothers the following year, performing as a largely acoustic duo at Toronto art festivals and at private events. 

In 1973 they called themselves Rough Trade and added percussionist Chris Faulkner, then bassist Bob Jennings, followed by drummer Donny McDougal. As would happen frequently going forward, the players supporting Pope and Staples were subject to sometimes wholesale change, and by 1974 the Pope/Staples duo was joined by Hap Roderman, Jane Cessine, Sharon Smith and Marv Kanarek. The band, through their theatrical combination of rock, R&B and raw sexuality (Pope often performed in bondage attire), became a popular draw on Toronto's live music scene through their regular shows at Grossman's.

They were the first rock band to record a direct to disc album with 1976's Rough Trade Live, which despite the title was actually a studio recording. Each side was performed live (without an audience) all the way through and cut directly to the mastering disc for greater audio fidelity. By this time, the band's line-up was Pope, Staples, Jo-Ann Brooks (vocals, percussion), Rick Gratton (drums), Michael Fonfara (keyboards, arranger), and Peter Hodgson (bass). As would be the case throughout the band's entire career, the vast majority of the album's songs were written by Pope and Staples.

Birds of a Feather was the album's opener:

The song was covered in 1978 by Dr. Frank-N-Furter himself, Tim Curry.

This was followed by Take Me:

This is a live version of both Take Me and Birds of a Feather

This is Butch:

... And this is Surrender (Give Up), the album's closing track:

On December 19, 1977, the band presented a newly created live musical called Restless Underwear which co-starred Divine alongside the band (who by this time had added an additional backup singer, Luci Martin-Keyes). The show, which played at Toronto's prestigious Massey Hall, was noted for its outrageous (for the time) sexual satire. However, aside from Pope and Staples the rest of the band quit after Restless Underwear had completed its one-show run, in a dispute over payment.

In 1979 Rough Trade contributed the song Shakedown to the soundtrack of the controversial film Cruising. It was their first single, albeit not commercially successful.

Numerous personnel changes later and in 1980 the band settled into a stable five-person line-up of Carole Pope (vocals), Kevan Staples (guitars, keyboards, etc.), David McMorrow (keyboards), Terry Wilkins (bass) and Bucky Berger (drums).

This new iteration of Rough Trade landed a record contract with True North Records in mid-1980, and recorded the group's second album, Avoid Freud, which was released in October 1980. The official first single was the deliberately controversial What's the Furor About the Fuhrer?, but radio stations flipped the single over and the B-side Fashion Victim became a top 40 hit in Canada, peaking at #25.

This is What's the Furor About the Fuhrer?:

... And this is Fashion Victim:

The album's most famous single, however, is High School Confidential. The song's narrator is a student observing a sexy female classmate, a "cool blonde scheming bitch" whose activities suggest that she may be having sexual relations with adult men, including the high school principal. The narrator compares the classmate to 1950s sex symbols Mamie Van Doren, Anita Ekberg, and Dagmar, and reveals her own unrequited lust for her: in one of the most famous lyrics from the song, Pope sings "She makes me cream my jeans when she comes my way".

The lyrics never explicitly state the narrator's own sex, so they may be read either as Pope speaking from a male perspective or as a reference to lesbianism. In a 2000 interview with Eye Weekly, Pope confirmed that while she intended the lyric from her own perspective as a lesbian, the ambiguity was intentional: "The general public didn't get that I was gay – if you were gay you did – and when I wrote love songs, I wanted them to be interpreted however."

At the time of its release, it was one of the most sexually explicit songs ever to reach the Canadian pop charts, and despite the sexual ambiguity, the first with such strong lesbian overtones. Although controversial, the song was a Top 20 hit, peaking at #12 nationwide. Here it is:

k.d. lang was apparently inspired by seeing the band perform the number on the televised Juno Awards presentation that year, "seeing [Carole] set a tone for me that I could be out, no question".

In 2000, Pope recorded a new version of High School Confidential for the television series Queer as Folk, with the lyrics altered to reflect a gay male perspective: "He's a cool blond scheming trick... He's a combination Tom Cruise-Zack O'Toole". (Zack O'Toole was a fictional porn star in QAF, played by Matthew G. Taylor.) The song appears during Justin's pole act. It's a chance to remember that ground-breaking show:

This video is even better:

Lie Back, Let Me Do Everything wasn't a timid song either. This is a recent live version:

For Those Who Think Young, appearing on the album cover as (for those who think young) and originally to be entitled for those who think jung, (Jung being a natural progression from Freud) was released in 1981 and contained Rough Trade's biggest international hit: All Touch opens this album with a wallop right to the libido, a powerful statement that this Canadian band strove for. Helping with the singing in a number of songs from this album is Dusty Springfield, who was in a relationship with Pope at the time.

All Touch peaked at #12 in Canada, at #40 in Australia, and at #58 in the US. Here it is:

Prisoner Of My Skin was another worthy song from this album:

... So was The Sacred & The Profane (the B-side to the US release of All Touch):

Blood Lust was also a single, but it didn't chart:

Shaking the Foundations was released in 1982 and became a hit in Canada in 1983, spending 21 weeks on the charts and peaking at #9. The album's only single, Crimes of Passion, peaked at #18. Part of the song deals with male homosexuality:

"Johnny and Eddie lay in bed, their limbs entwined,
The air full of the sickly sweet smell of amyl.
Their tanned bodies bathed in sweat,
They looked like two young gods,
Writhing in the throes of ecstasy."

This is a live version from 1985 of the album's title track:

This is a recent (2016) live version of I Want to Live:

The album closes with another good song, Beg for It, consistent with Carole's BDSM image:

Weapons (1983) was their first album since their debut that did not chart in Canada. Nona Hendryx sings on a couple of songs. The title track was the album's first single but it too did not chart. The weapons referred in the title are "my lips, my breasts, my body":

If You Want It is another good song from this album:

Softcore was one of the album's standouts, with raw lyrics concerning Carole's breakup with Dusty Springfield:

The great Dusty Springfield did an amazing cover version of the song, redirecting the lyrics at Pope:

The album ends with a sarcastic look backward with a combination Revolution 9/A Day in the Life crescendo that mocks the Paisley Generation. The song is geo-blocked for me, but perhaps you can listen to it:

Pope and Staples co-wrote the 1983 single Transformation, recorded by Nona Hendryx.

Pope also appeared as a guest vocalist on the Payola$ single Never Said I Loved You, which was a top ten hit in Canada in 1983.

Rough Trade's follow-up album was called O Tempora! O Mores! (1984). The opening track and lead single was called Sexual Outlaw:

Sexual Outlaw peaked at #92 in Canada. The follow-up single, On The Line, peaked at #91. These would be the last records to chart for Rough Trade. Here's On The Line:

Symbolic is a ballsy, fast rocker that kick-starts like a motorcycle and has fantastic drumming:

The highlight of the album is probably Rescue Me. Featuring a cold start where Carole cries "I want you now", this song has similarities to One Thing Leads to Another by The Fixx. Great lyrics such as "You remember, we scorched the bedsheets" and funky horns make this one a winner that should have been a hit single.

Lisa Dalbello does backup vocals on Tied Up, in which the verses are slower but Carole really lets loose on the chorus and sounds wicked.

In Low Blow, we descend into heavy-metal territory as Carole drags us down into her dungeon. This is probably as dark and dangerous as Rough Trade ever sounded.

Rough Trade returned to a stable five-person line-up in 1985 for performance purposes. This line-up would record a handful of new tracks for the 1985 greatest hits compilation Birds of a Feather. Their final full-scale tour, "Deep Six in '86", took place in 1986, although they performed a few local concert dates in Toronto in 1987 and 1988.

After the final breakup in 1988, Rough Trade subsequently performed several reunion shows, with varying personnel supporting Pope and Staples. The first reunion show was in Toronto in December 1994; a handful of one-off shows later took place at various times through the late 1990s and into the next decade, mostly in Toronto. In 2001, Rough Trade undertook a mini-tour of several venues in eastern Canada.

Since the break-up, Staples has busied himself as a composer for film, television, and theatre, and still lives in Toronto. Pope's solo career has been lower-profile than her time with the band. She issued a debut solo single in 1988 (Nothing But A Heartache/I'm Not Blind) but did not issue a follow-up release for several years afterward. In 1991, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue opportunities in soundtrack work and acting. Here are both sides of her single in one video:

Pope issued an EP called Radiate in 1995. Love Strikes Hard was the EP's first track:

In 1997, Carole provided the voice for the schoolteacher in the animated version of Pippi Longstocking. In 1999, playwright Bryden MacDonald staged Shaking the Foundations, a musical revue based on Pope's music with Rough Trade, at Toronto's Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Pope also released an EP called The Silencer. Here's the title track, where Pope got to unleash her inner Shirley Bassey Bond Girl:

In 2000, Random House published Pope's autobiography, Anti-Diva. The book included Pope's first public acknowledgment that she had been in a relationship with Dusty Springfield in the early 1980s. That year she and Staples contributed a track (Softcore) to the Dusty Springfield tribute album, Homage to an Icon.

In 2004, two decades after the release of her previous album, Pope returned to Los Angeles and released her debut full-length solo album, Transcend. This is the title track:

With All Touch/No Contact, Pope was revisiting her biggest hit with Rough Trade:

Shadows was the penultimate track of the album:

... While the album closed with Americana:

In 2007 she released the single Johnny Marr. It was included in the 2007 reissue of Transcend.

In 2011 Pope released her second solo album, called Landfall. Rufus Wainwright was among her collaborators. Shining Path was a worthy first single:

Tell Me was the second track on the album, as well as the single's B-side:

This is a live version of God=Love:

This is a live version of Did I Mention:

This is the album's impressive title track:

She then released a few singles. In 2013, there was Francis Bacon; Alain Johannes created a Smiths-like glam-rock track for Carole's ode to Dusty Springfield.

Lesbians in the Forest, which was inspired by performing at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, was also a single in 2013. For this song, she collaborated with Peaches and Tim Welch.

Vagina Wolf, another Shirley Bassey moment for Carole, was a single in 2014:

The above three singles were compiled in an EP called Music for Lesbians. Also included in the EP was a duet between Pope and Sara T Russell of the Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra classic Some Velvet Morning:

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, she released a new single called This Is Not A Test. You can listen to it here.

Carole Pope invites us to view her music with our tongues firmly in cheek. When told by a reporter that "A lot of people took Rough Trade very seriously," she answers, "Well, that’s their problem. (laughs) I mean, we had a serious side, but there’s a wealth of humorous material in human sexuality. And that’s never going to go away. Never!"

Carole has earned three Juno Awards, a Genie Award, and four Gold and two Platinum records. She is an icon of transgressive music, who never hesitates to risk it all. And most of all, she doesn't take herself too seriously, which is always a plus in my book. I hope that you've enjoyed the presentation!