Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin III

THE REVIEW

It is well known that heavy metal is a true genre and not just one of the many subplots that exploded with the disintegration of rock&roll.
Clear and irrefutable is the technical and scenic supremacy of something that not only survived the gray dust of time but managed to evolve, giving birth to creatures as monstrous as they are innovative.
It is equally clear that, in an era of ruthless commercialization like the one we are living in, nothing can be beneficial without first carrying out an expensive accounting operation or, even better, formalizing a respectable agreement with the henchmen of the all-knowing and criminal Copyright, the hyper-media filter and superintendent of the modern society of horrors.
If it's true that nothing is created and nothing is destroyed but everything transforms, we could dare say that the scraping and mechanical delirium of Sunshine Of Your Love, the psychedelic cackle of I Ain't Superstitious, and the plutonium blues of Jimi Hendrix (the extraterrestrial) were nothing other than the eviscerated consequence of the biological corruption of the electric sound and a guitar connected to a buzzing amplifier, many years earlier.

Yet, times had definitively changed, in the late '60s a new, dense, claustrophobic, almost sulfurous air was in the air, and that chasm that the aforementioned guitarists had helped to dig with their companies was transforming into a volcano in full eruption. If everything was born with the blues, now of the songs of the slaves, the sweaty suffering, and the bloody pain that moistened the plantations and strengthened the iron of the chains, only a foggy memory remained.
The bright and blurred images of BB King and Muddy Waters, of Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin' Wolf headed from the tour posters pasted on the walls and bulletin boards. Those dusty and expensive records that marked the childhood and early adolescence of Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, Brian Jones, Eric Clapton, and all other future rock stars were now experiencing dizzying drops in sales and were often left on the offer shelves. The Beatles hadn't just revolutionized the music scene: the "Fab Four" had overturned the world of pop, shaking it to its foundations. And, while the Liverpool quartet frescoed the walls of the "Short Century," a young guitarist named Jimmy Page was cutting his teeth in the recording studios of London, dreaming in the shadow of the immortal melodies of Across The Universe and A Day In The Life.

1970. Times have changed. The Revolution has reached its peak: a better world is not possible. A new world is not possible. Political instability and social unrest bury the positive vibrations and good times of the last decade. A period of transition begins, extending until the complete dissolution of the pacifist dream. Consequently, music changes too. In reality, a slow descent begins. In the impossibility of transforming gold into something even more precious and shining, one is limited to beating the prodigious beaten earth years earlier by the great seekers and extracting it as long as it lasts. But the new seekers are not satisfied with the abundance and riches lying in the underground of Rock n' Roll, they also demand their piece of history, they want to ride El Dorado to the end: there is no room in the carriage for scribblers and jesters, no logbook, legend will speak for them.
The dark tale of Led Zeppelin begins with the implosion of the Yardbirds and a failed coup in the Who. If events had continued along the path of Keith Moon's brilliant joke, today we would know a completely different story. It was '66 when Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce decided to join forces in creating the first "supergroup," the flaming Cream, who at the time did not yet have a name. Around the same time, the doors of IBC Studios in London swung open to five musicians who improvised the assembly of a shocking lineup. The result of that session was the revolutionary Beck's Bolero. Those same musicians, in fact, were supposed to be Led Zeppelin: Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Nicky Hopkins, and Keith Moon. Plus a choice that would soon prove impractical, the singer and guitarist of the Small Faces, Steve Marriott.
Today we know that the "Lead Balloon" set out with a completely different crew. Robert Plant and John Bonham were recruited when they had lost all hope, and it is precisely the case to say: the rest is history.

1970 is a year of astounding releases for hard rock. Pink Floyd releases Atom Heart Mother, the Rolling Stones launch Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, Black Sabbath releases Paranoid, perhaps their greatest success, the Who strikes a deadly blow with Live at Leeds, Peter Green hits hard with his new The End of the Game, the Doors publish Absolutely Live, the The Guess Who churns out American Woman, Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsys records its first and last effort, Miles Davis enchants with Bitches Brew and Deep Purple sets the roads on fire with In Rock. Amidst the reshuffle, critics destroy Led Zeppelin III.

The journalists, those from Rolling Stone especially, while the year before they accused them of raping the blues by plundering the repertoire of American authors, now complained about the drastic drop in power that Page and company operated in favor of a delicate acoustic refinement. Up to a few months before, they were nothing more than a loud and flashy band, at times violent, expressing themselves through an exhausting chiaroscuro for the listener's ears. The devilish guru of evil literature, William Burroughs, after attending the group's famous performance at Madison Square Garden in New York, did not fail to highlight how Led Zeppelin's music hit the head, not the legs: "They are not like the Rolling Stones, their music does not make you want to dance, it is not directed at the legs, it hits the temples..."

When it comes to descending into the babble and syrup of rankings and genres, even to the discourses of certain deconstructionist philosophy propellants, in the constant search for intellectual approval, it must be taken into account that the ensemble composed of the four British musicians managed to overcome a musical manner before it was paraphrased and interpreted, and to make it an enormously successful business.
The music that Led Zeppelin produced over their career surpasses the limits imposed by classifications, overthrows stylistic canons and reference models, burns any sort of comparison. For better and for worse. In just under a year and a half, Led Zeppelin fueled a creative engine capable of generating diverse songs contained in equally eclectic albums, such as the intense I and the irritable II, the LP of Whole Lotta Love, the first cry of that creature that one day would become famous with the expression heavy metal.

And it's precisely the "heavy" that is the stylistic hallmark of Led Zeppelin, that extraordinary ability to combine the electric solidity of bass and guitar with the distinctive elements of the ensemble: Robert Plant's wild voice and John Bonham's unprecedented power.
Page and company did not invent heavy metal. But that's not important. Nor is it important to try to analyze a perfect work like III. Globally, the third work of Led Zeppelin is the band's best, as well as one of the greatest albums of all time, but it's not even about that.
We all know the songs that compose the work: from the reiterated and driving metal riff of Immigrant Song to the sentimental melancholy of Tangerine; from the lively, exhilarating, and exciting hard of Celebration Day to the granite Out On the Tiles; from the very modern electric blues of the painful Since I've Been Loving You to the mythological Friends, Bron Y Aur Stomp, and Gallow's Pole, passing through the blurred tenderness of That's the Way and the slashed and delirious blues of Hat's Off to Roy (Harper).
We know its songs because they are famous and beautiful, and because -as with every Zeppelin masterpiece- they have been able to establish themselves as true musical standards of the contemporary pop scene.

The Myth.
Led Zeppelin went down in history immediately, perhaps from the very first strokes of their debut, those dry and precise thumps of Good Times Bad Times, the opening track of I and the crash of the Lead Zeppelin.

But what remains of the Myth today?
Listening to III on an old turntable is still a magical, almost surreal experience: one feels catapulted into a sort of no man's land, a place where the boundaries between ancient and modern widen and narrow, where one is unable to grasp the zeitgeist nor to monitor emotions. If postmodernism exists, then it's a Led Zeppelin record on a '60s system in 2020.

The twilight of the gods. Within a few years, bands incredibly diverse from one another would demolish the wall of sound that Led Zeppelin themselves had broken before everyone else. Deep Purple was about to record Made in Japan. The Sweet were starting to experiment with hard, cheeky, and fast rhythms and sounds. Groups like AC/DC, Aerosmith, Kiss, Blue Öyster Cult, Thin Lizzy, Budgie, and Armageddon were about to explode on the threshold of the already inflamed hard'n'heavy scene. Led Zeppelin's mastery risked falling under a loud rain of decibels. Soon it wouldn't be enough to increase the volume knob -again. Live at Leeds by the Who had paved the way for the metallic madness of great live performances, which in the '80s would become the norm for the hard rock/heavy metal scenario. So III remains the last testimony of the raw and dirty sound that made Led Zeppelin immortal, the barbaric residue of an idea as innovative as it is obvious, a synthesized blues elevated to the nth degree.
One year later, everything would change with the Olympic lyricism of IV. Under Jimmy Page's orchestral direction, Led Zeppelin abandoned the ferocity of their origins to embark on a more complex, sophisticated and pop, erudite and catchy artistic path, at times symphonic, but far from the chaos of creation.

Here, probably, of the Myth nothing remains but a ruthless and triumphant commercialization: 300 million records sold forty years after the band's breakup; a historic reunion, with Jason Bonham on drums and 20 million desperate phone calls to attend the show, a Guinness World Record.

Love and hate are two sides of the same coin. Just flip it and wait for it to fall.