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| Version 1 | Version 2 |
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| Led Zeppelin: hear an unreleased version of Good Times Bad Times/Communication Breakdown | Led Zeppelin: hear an unreleased version of Good Times Bad Times/Communication Breakdown |
| (4 months later) | |
| I've got a confession to make. I was never much of a Zeppelin fan until I was summoned to interview Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones in September 2012. I'd always thought them a bit stodgy, and my longstanding conviction that the "heavy blues" style of the early 70s was pretty much rock's nadir led me to stay away from much of their work. I had albums, I liked individual songs, but the monolithic whole of Led Zeppelin didn't appeal. | I've got a confession to make. I was never much of a Zeppelin fan until I was summoned to interview Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones in September 2012. I'd always thought them a bit stodgy, and my longstanding conviction that the "heavy blues" style of the early 70s was pretty much rock's nadir led me to stay away from much of their work. I had albums, I liked individual songs, but the monolithic whole of Led Zeppelin didn't appeal. |
| In preparation for the three interviews, though, I immersed myself in Zeppelin's back catalogue. And – I think you've seen this coming – I realised I was wrong. They're now one of my favourite bands – barely a week goes by without me listening to some Zep. But if you're reading this, and listening to the two tracks below, you probably don't need me to tell you how good they were (though, to be frank, I still can't make my way through live versions of Dazed and Confused or Moby Dick, and my mind sometimes wanders during the percussion breakdown in live versions of Whole Lotta Love, a song Jimmy Page refers to as Whole Lot of Love). | |
| These two tracks were recorded live at the Olympia in Paris in 1969, for a show broadcast on French radio – a remastered recording of which is the companion disc to June's reissue of the first Led Zeppelin album (accompanied by II and III). And what a way to start a show. My colleague Alexis Petridis said to me the other day that when you put the needle on the first side of that first album and hear Good Times Bad Times, you have a pretty good idea of what Led Zeppelin was going to be: it's a mission statement. I think that's right. But it also opens Zeppelin's career with something I've realised was a Page trademark, something that crops up again and again throughout the band's career: the one-two punch of a pair of powerchords, used as punctuation. Here they're exclamation marks, shouting to you to be prepared for what's about to hit you. You get the same one-two punch coming out of the percussion break in Whole Lotta Love, and there they are semi-colons, steering you back to the song. And you get them, repeated four times, at the end of the instrumental breaks – immediately before the verses – in When the Levee Breaks, where they serve as full stops, signifiers of apocalypse. Listen to your Zeppelin albums and you'll find that two-chord punch all over the place, as simple but effective a trick as any guitarist ever devised. | These two tracks were recorded live at the Olympia in Paris in 1969, for a show broadcast on French radio – a remastered recording of which is the companion disc to June's reissue of the first Led Zeppelin album (accompanied by II and III). And what a way to start a show. My colleague Alexis Petridis said to me the other day that when you put the needle on the first side of that first album and hear Good Times Bad Times, you have a pretty good idea of what Led Zeppelin was going to be: it's a mission statement. I think that's right. But it also opens Zeppelin's career with something I've realised was a Page trademark, something that crops up again and again throughout the band's career: the one-two punch of a pair of powerchords, used as punctuation. Here they're exclamation marks, shouting to you to be prepared for what's about to hit you. You get the same one-two punch coming out of the percussion break in Whole Lotta Love, and there they are semi-colons, steering you back to the song. And you get them, repeated four times, at the end of the instrumental breaks – immediately before the verses – in When the Levee Breaks, where they serve as full stops, signifiers of apocalypse. Listen to your Zeppelin albums and you'll find that two-chord punch all over the place, as simple but effective a trick as any guitarist ever devised. |
| And from Good Times Bad Times into Communication Breakdown. I think it was Julian Cope who suggested that hardcore punk was simply the result of American teenagers trying and failing to master playing Communication Breakdown, and that sounds wholly plausible. It's as ferocious as Zeppelin ever got, yet you can also hear it reaching back to Page's previous life as a 60s session star: take the chorus alone and it sounds like freakbeat, rather than the dawning of heavy metal. | And from Good Times Bad Times into Communication Breakdown. I think it was Julian Cope who suggested that hardcore punk was simply the result of American teenagers trying and failing to master playing Communication Breakdown, and that sounds wholly plausible. It's as ferocious as Zeppelin ever got, yet you can also hear it reaching back to Page's previous life as a 60s session star: take the chorus alone and it sounds like freakbeat, rather than the dawning of heavy metal. |
| Anyway, I'm thrilled to hear these tracks. I hope you are, too. | Anyway, I'm thrilled to hear these tracks. I hope you are, too. |
| • Good Times Bad Times/Communication Breakdown are available from iTunes as of Tuesday when you pre order the Led Zeppelin album reissue. |