Led Zeppelin

Zeppelin, who I saw at Western springs 1972, under orange barrel, perhaps the last of the Owsley acid. (by 72 it probably wasnt AOS3?) 707 full of speakers, before sound restrictions had been imagined, the peak of something - the 70s - eco-feminism-gay-indigenous-human liberation ?? such a beautiful vision that I remain damaged to this day by its brightness. Since then I have learned to work for fortune500 corporations, but not wholly burned conviction, tambourine man, vanishing now, how bright we burned.

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aljazeera

Rarely does the rhythm section have the space to take the music to a higher dimension.
But Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham did just that. The interplay between all four musicians linked Zeppelin to the great chain of Sufi inspired improvisers, from the Gnawa slaves of the Maghreb in North Africa to the qawwali of North India.
It was this pedigree that separated Led Zeppelin from the rest of the rock 'n' roll universe, reminding those with the right ears of a time when the distinctions between East and West, Islam and Europe, were still fuzzy.
It's no wonder the band was signed by Turkish music impresario and Atlantic Records founder, Ahmet Ertegun.
Ertegun passed away in 2006 and it is to honour him that Led Zeppelin reunites as a band next week.
Muslim rock and metal artists today have been powerfully influenced by Led Zeppelin. The band's music echoes their own history and culture, helping them create new hybrids of rock, metal and Islam, and through it, some of the world's lus

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Page had developed a new approach to rock, based on a multilayered "guitar army" (his words), ragalike uses of sevens and fives in meter, insistent drones drawn from folk music, and hypnotic, shifting cycles that swirled around you (during the elongated endings to "Celebration Day" and "Out On the Tiles" on Led Zeppelin III), and which sometimes sucked you right under (the sublime closing minutes of "When the Levee Breaks"). The notion of a new magic art—trance rock based on non-Western scales and nonstandardized song architecture coupled with odd bar structures—had already occurred to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, to George Harrison of the Beatles, and to the Grateful Dead. But Jimmy Page was the first to harness these ideas to the tantric possibilities of the modern recording studio.
...Does "Stairway to Heaven" possess these qualities? Absolutely not. The guitar army, yes, that is there. But this song is not just atypical of Zeppelin's music, it is unique among their epic tracks in that it privileges melodic/lyrical development at the expense of rhythmic exploration and timbral/psychoacoustic experimentation.

Led Zeppelin