Led Zeppelin Song Quotes

These are the seasons of emotion, and like the winds, they rise and fall.

A semi came screaming around a bend in the road, interrupting my thoughts and reminding me suddenly of why walking by the side of the road on a country lane was best reserved for historical romance and Led Zeppelin songs.

I was petrified of making a mistake—head-banging to the wrong song or not hard enough, or thinking a guitar solo was over when it wasn't. A rule of thumb is that if the guitar solo is by Led Zep or Lynyrd Skynyrd then it's not over. Ever.

Led Zeppelin! I clapped my hand over my mouth. This big, strong man, wearing a muscle shirt and cargo pants, sang rock songs to a toddler in the middle of the night. I was so toast. Game over. And it was doubly terrifying, considering I had no idea how to make him stick around. He would leave and take his sweetness and his Pepto and our hearts.

selected a disc, and turned the volume up louder than he’d ever pushed it. A gentle guitar riff; a tap-tapping of some percussion instrument—he pictured a man hitting a wooden spoon against his legs; a solid male voice, and the song broke into something more, a beat that filled his head with cool images and colors. “What is it?” “Led Zeppelin,” she said. “‘Ramble On.’” He sat against the wall, his eyes trained on the space in the corner, while she selected more songs, rocking back on her legs and staring at him intently. “Free Bird.” “Roundabout.” “Sympathy for the Devil.” “Time.” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” “Brass in Pocket.” “Bad Company.” “Limelight.” “Crazy on You.” “Voodoo Child.” “Take the Long Way Home.” “Thank you,” he said. “Where have I been hiding all this time?

Robert Johnson, whose primitive licks hid behind the chords of almost every Led Zeppelin and Yardbirds song ever recorded. Who, according to the legend, had gone down to the crossroads and sold his soul to Satan for seven years of fast living, high-tension liquor, and streetlife babies. And for a jukejoint brand of immortality, of course. Which he had gotten. Robert Johnson, supposedly poisoned over a woman.

I’m not one of those guys who can hear a band and immediately cite their influences and probable heroes. There are guys like that out there. Play them the first drumbeat and they’ll start banging on about Led Zeppelin or Limp Bizkit or how everything can be traced back to the man who wrote the Birdie Song. Dev can do it with videogames. He can take one look at a game and tell you what it’s trying to be, where it got the idea, what it’s been crossed with and how well it’s done, but I just can’t. Because I’m the other sort of person. A Type 2. One that judges everything on its own merits. Not because it’s the right and just and fair thing to do, but because there’s something about me that doesn’t quite have that passion. That need for peripheral knowledge. I like a little of everything; I don’t need it all. It can make conversations with the Type 1s a little strained. A Type 1 will have all his opinions ready to go and probably alphabetised before he even gets near you. A Type 2 will then shrink behind his sandwich.

Not long after I learned about Frozen, I went to see a friend of mine who works in the music industry. We sat in his living room on the Upper East Side, facing each other in easy chairs, as he worked his way through a mountain of CDs. He played “Angel,” by the reggae singer Shaggy, and then “The Joker,” by the Steve Miller Band, and told me to listen very carefully to the similarity in bass lines. He played Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and then Muddy Waters’s “You Need Love,” to show the extent to which Led Zeppelin had mined the blues for inspiration. He played “Twice My Age,” by Shabba Ranks and Krystal, and then the saccharine ’70s pop standard “Seasons in the Sun,” until I could hear the echoes of the second song in the first. He played “Last Christmas,” by Wham! followed by Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” to explain why Manilow might have been startled when he first heard that song, and then “Joanna,” by Kool and the Gang, because, in a different way, “Last Christmas” was an homage to Kool and the Gang as well. “That sound you hear in Nirvana,” my friend said at one point, “that soft and then loud kind of exploding thing, a lot of that was inspired by the Pixies. Yet Kurt Cobain” — Nirvana’s lead singer and songwriter — “was such a genius that he managed to make it his own. And ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’?” — here he was referring to perhaps the best-known Nirvana song. “That’s Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling.’ ” He began to hum the riff of the Boston hit, and said, “The first time I heard ‘Teen Spirit,’ I said, ‘That guitar lick is from “More Than a Feeling.” ’ But it was different — it was urgent and brilliant and new.” He played another CD. It was Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” a huge hit from the 1970s. The chorus has a distinctive, catchy hook — the kind of tune that millions of Americans probably hummed in the shower the year it came out. Then he put on “Taj Mahal,” by the Brazilian artist Jorge Ben Jor, which was recorded several years before the Rod Stewart song. In his twenties, my friend was a DJ at various downtown clubs, and at some point he’d become interested in world music. “I caught it back then,” he said. A small, sly smile spread across his face. The opening bars of “Taj Mahal” were very South American, a world away from what we had just listened to. And then I heard it. It was so obvious and unambiguous that I laughed out loud; virtually note for note, it was the hook from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” It was possible that Rod Stewart had independently come up with that riff, because resemblance is not proof of influence. It was also possible that he’d been in Brazil, listened to some local music, and liked what he heard.

Please listen to the hi-hat on the recorded version of Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.” Listen through once. Allow yourself to be trans- ported back to the time or place when you first fell deeply into that trance of sound, so wide and powerful it gave a new depth to your life, a depth you had not known to search for. Or maybe this is the first time you are hearing the song. In that case, I imagine you prefer different music altogether. Maybe you discount rock and roll as ego-driven, disconnected from that channeled light of Bach or Satie or Django or Monk. No matter. Allow the resistance to rise here as well, then wait for the moment the song breaks through, rings that same truth, that same transportive bell of beauty, that hyp notic atmosphere music offers. How beautiful to find lessons in our resistance. This may be a foundation of spiritual practice, to dive into the center of no and investigate. All those pronouncements and walls dis- solve like so much dust under the microscope of mind. The trance of song—loud, immense, gorgeous—does the same.

Well, I can no longer hear the silence.” But that’s okay, because you are mildly amusing and I am enjoying hearing you ramble on like a Led Zeppelin song. “Oh my God!” “What is it this time?” “Your subtext changed!” Jared’s smiles were always

Yngve came in and said that John Bonham, the drummer in Led Zeppelin, was on one of the songs.

My favored stick of rock was glam, where Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music, Sparks, and Cockney Rebel provided the soundtrack to my youth. Each had an individually captivating sound, and together they told the story I wanted to hear through those times in Britain. Other kids at school were lost in a haze of Pink Floyd and Genesis, or were queuing endlessly to secure Led Zeppelin tickets. We were all members of different factions, but wherever you belonged, the music was inspirational. It was an important voice in our culture, a way for our generation to express its singularity.

By then I’d played with a couple of college bands, doing clumsy covers ofrock staples. There were other bands that would produce note-perfect imitationsof songs by Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd and drive audiences wild. If a bandcould play something exactly as it was on tape, the consensus was that they mustbe good. But after a period of proving themselves this way, most bands became alittle more ambitious, and a day would come when they’d go up on stage duringa college festival and introduce a song with the dreaded words, ‘This is anoriginal composition.’ Almost always, these originals were listless pastiches ofthe covers the band played, the lyrics apparently not about anything at all. Thesewere skilled musicians, but their chosen form seemed to preclude any realengagement with their own lives or the lives of their audience. This was mostevident in the Death Metal bands, where you might have a good Hindu boygrowling menacingly about his affinity for Satan. This was a cargo-cult, amimicking of someone else’s rebellion.

The Rain Song" It is the springtime of my loving The second season I am to know You are the sunlight in my growing So little warmth I've felt before It isn't hard to feel me glowing I watched the fire that grew so low, ooh, oh It is the summer of my smiles Flee from me, keepers of the gloom Speak to me only with your eyes It is to you I give this tune Ain't so hard to recognize, oh These things are clear to all from time to time, ooh Oh, oh Ah, talk, talk, talk, talk Hey! I've felt the coldness of my winter I never thought it would ever go I cursed the gloom that set upon us, upon us, upon us But I know that I love you so, oh, oh But I know that I love you so These are the seasons of emotion And like the winds they rise and fall This is the wonder of devotion I see the torch we all must hold This is the mystery of the quotient quotient Ah, upon us all, upon us all a little rain must fall Just a little rain, oh yeah Uh, ooh, yeah yeah yeah Led Zeppelin Houses Of The Holy (1973)