Today’s Vinyl: Led Zeppelin
Back when I was in middle school in southern California, the lost, lamented KMET would play “Led Zeppelin A-Z” once a year, which is exactly what it sounds like – all the band’s songs played in alphabetical order. One summer I sat down with a cassette deck and recorded the whole thing in preparation for an arduous family road trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where I was to be unceremoniously dumped at a Christian summer camp and left to fend off reprobates with lighters and bug spray and girls hitting early puberty. I left there substantially better educated about the female anatomy than the word of God.
Somewhere around Fresno, though, between the Mervyn’s and the motel, it hit me: Led Zeppelin is the greatest rock band, ever. Years later, when people would ask the “Beatles or the Stones?” question, I would inevitably reply, confused, “Led Zeppelin or The Who?” I always wanted my rock big, mean, loud and bombastic. If the Beatles were a delicately-crafted confection and the Stones were a rich, saucy bit of trash, Led Zeppelin was the bloody, three-pound steak staring you down and daring you to eat it. The Beatles kissed you; the Stones licked you; Zeppelin fucked you silly and stole your goddamn chickens. This is what heavy is.
It doesn’t get much heavier than Physical Graffiti in Led Zeppelin’s discography. The first two records may have been dirtier, but they’re too deeply rooted in the blues (and Zeppelin’s dick-swinging interpretation thereof) to be considered truly heavy. Physical Graffiti is unabashedly massive, with three tracks clocking in at over eight minutes, and the eleven-minute In My Time of Dying closing out side 1, which sports only three songs! The motherlode of heavy rock is here - you’ve got the blueprint for every cock-rock song thereafter (Custard Pie); Eastern influences and clashing time signatures (Kashmir); weird spirituality (In the Light); and, in the last three minutes of In My Time of Dying, a template for nearly every guitar lick Jack White has ever played.
The jacket for the original vinyl is a stunning piece of design (the album was delayed due to the difficulty of production) with a die-cut exterior sleeve, two internal sleeves and a third printed foldover sleeve, all of which show different images through the die-cut windows of a New York City tenement. It’s a thick, heavy package for what may be the heaviest double album of all time.
