LED ZEPPELIN: The song doesn't always remain the same

It’s funny how certain bands develop quite a complex mythology despite having been quite well documented during their time in operation. One such band is Led Zeppelin.

Now, as regular readers will know, the other week my lovely wife and I drove up to the north of England to a wedding. On our way, I popped into a newsagent and bought the Uncut special edition bookazine (I hate the term, it’s almost as bad as the word ‘signage’ that is rapidly coming into the parlance of the publishing industry, and as I am an ever-so-tiny, but bona fide part of said industry, I have no real option but to grit my teeth and use terms like this although they make me cringe). This bookazine was about the history and mystery of Led Zeppelin. Then, upon my return to the Gonzo Daily nerve centre (actually a converted potato shed with a leaky roof in North Devon, where I and five tanks of tropical fish manage not only Gonzo Daily, but the Centre for Fortean Zoology, CFZ Press, and various other things) I unpacked the post and found that those jolly nice people at Omnibus Press had sent me a book about Led Zeppelin.

Ironically both of these publications were laid out in very similar styles and went through the band’s career, album by album with the bookazine fleshing it out with classic interviews and press items and the book adding a section where it went through each of the albums song by song. As I said at the beginning, you would expect that the band like Led Zeppelin whose every movement, action, and change of underwear had been written about, analysed, and generally documented, would have been pretty easy for both projects to write about. One would also have the imagined that both of these projects would have been essentially the same. Not on yer Nelly! There are some fundamental differences about people, places and songs which make you wonder whether at least one of the authors hadn’t done their homework properly. But I think it’s more fundamental than that. In my career as a Fortean zoologist I have documented how perfectly normal events can become myths; and how perfectly normal flesh and blood animals can become monsters. A good example of this is the various wild cat species which have been introduced surreptitiously into the United Kingdom. There are pumas/panthers living wild on many of the more remote areas of the country particularly in the South-West. If the only media coverage of such things had been an academic paper entitled ‘On an Incidence of Introduced Pantherine spp. on West Country Moorland’, then quite probably most of the general public would have neither known or cared, but it didn’t work out like that. Newspapers dubbed these creatures the 'Beast of Bodmin', or the 'Beast of Exmoor', and gave them the type of accolade given to a rapist, serial killer, or terrorist, and a new
media monster was born. I dubbed this process ‘the mythologisation process’ and wrote quite widely on the subject.

It wasn’t until the other day that I realised that the same process happens within popular music; a band like Led Zeppelin acquires a mythical status far greater than one would have imagined for four blokes recycling riffs first invented by black bluesmen in the southern states of the USA 30+ years before. Led Zeppelin became a cultural behemoth, and in the end the mythology overwhelmed them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is why they have never properly reformed – whatever they did could never live up to the legend.

Weird huh?

So which of these products do I reccomend? The truth is that they are both good (although they are both slightly flawed), and neither are expensive. So buy them both. But put them on different shelves of your collection - they might argue.