The Zeppelin track that best showcases Robert Plant?

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Which Led Zeppelin Track Best Reveals Robert Plant’s Voice?

Ask which Led Zeppelin track best showcases Robert Plant with his unique talent and convention dictates: Stairway to Heaven, Whole Lotta Love, Black Dog. They are not bad tracks - far from it! - but they don't answer the question.

What makes Robert Plant’s Zeppelin-era singing so distinctive in the first place? Not merely the high notes, the scream, the intimate purr. Plant’s early voice is a peculiar compound: a bright, metallic upper register; blues phrasing and bending; a capacity to move from folkish vulnerability to banshee assault; and, crucially, a relationship with Jimmy Page’s guitar in which the voice becomes a second lead instrument rather than a singer riding above the band.

Whole Lotta Love is definitive theatre, but more about persona and studio drama than the complete vocal package. Stairway to Heaven is too ceremonially iconic: magnificent, overfamiliar even. But the song’s architecture tends to both dominate and restrict the whole range which Plant can bring to a song. Black Dog is too constricted to showcase Plant's full vocal resources.

There is a choice of answers.

If the question is: which track most completely displays the early Plant phenomenon, choose Babe I’m Gonna Leave You. It has the quiet, breathy intimacy; the blues anguish; the sudden vault into full-throated attack; the strange mixture of beauty, melodrama and sexual danger. It's not just Plant singing well; it's Plant's unique charisma as he totally inhabits the song.

If the question is where Plant is most completely a singer, then the answer is one of my favourite tracks: Since I’ve Been Loving You. There the issue is less range than intelligence: phrasing, restraint, ache, timing, the exact pressure placed on a note before it breaks. Voice and guitar seem to argue the same emotional case, phrase by phrase. Plant with Page, at their extraordinary best.

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Real Gone - talking the Blues

Real Gone - talking the Blues

She’s cute, she can play guitar, she’s got a voice like Sheryl Crow, and she channels Stevie Ray Vaughan. What’s not to like? So this is the Ally Venable Band with the title track of her 2023 album, Real Gone.

I’ve always been in the Blues/Rock camp, ever since I was a young teen (c. 1965). It drove me to save up for my first guitar: £15 with a generous subsidy from my father.

In the sixties, Blues for me was not scratchy acoustic songs from the impoverished black balladeers of the Delta; it was the reinvention of the genre in the hands of Clapton, Page and Hendrix; the power of the sixties counterculture.

Today, fifty years later, Joe Bonamassa may be every bit as technically fluent as the old masters, but Blues in the 2020s is adrift. Rooted neither in hardship nor in rebellion, the modern blues has turned inward: angst about 'preserving the tradition' and 'purity'.

I sometimes listen to new bands like the Zac Schulze Gang.

I’m super-impressed by the energy, the technical and performing skill. But apart from the classic covers (video) most of the new songs are not up to much - they feel disconnected from the zeitgeist.

What would it look like, a Blues which authentically expressed the angst and aspirations of today? Beth Hart, a woman of the demi-monde, comes to mind, and the blue-collar desperation of Walter Trout; the authentic, personal expression of long, hard lives lived at the sharp end.

But as a channel for the disaffected youth?

Not yet.

The Wickedest Man in the World

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The Wickedest Man in the World

Aleister Crowley, born in 1875, was dubbed "the wickedest man in the world" by his detractors, Crowley was a poet, occultist, mountaineer, and self-styled prophet of the new age of Thelema. Raised in a strict Plymouth Brethren household, he rebelled against the narrow confines of Victorian morality. 

His magnum opus, The Book of the Law, introduced the world to Thelema, (Greek for 'Will'), encapsulated in its famous maxim: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law". While often denounced as a call to unbridled hedonism or anarchy, Crowley envisioned Thelema as a path to discovering and aligning with one’s "True Will" - your unique spiritual destiny. He also dabbled in ceremonial magic, mysticism, and esotericism.

His life was fraught with financial troubles, accusations of immorality; personal conflicts dogged him until his death in 1947. Was he a genius, a charlatan, or something in between?

Let’s ask him.

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The Interview

Me: Jimmy Page, the founder, animating spirit and lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin idolised you. Perhaps this led to his descent into the madness of drug addiction, paranoia, isolation and personal disintegration while on that final American tour? I believe he might have bought one of your houses - he certainly had a collection of your works. Do you take responsibility at all for this? Personally?

Crowley: Ah, Jimmy Page - a sorcerer of strings and seeker of shadows! It flatters the ego, even in this modern incarnation, to know that my life and works have left their indelible mark upon such an artist. Indeed, he purchased Boleskine House, my former residence on the banks of Loch Ness, a place steeped in magic.

As to whether I bear responsibility for his descent into the abyss, I must remind you: "Every man and every woman is a star." Each star must navigate its own heavens or hells, guided - or misguided - by the gravitational pull of their True Will. I offered my followers no encouragement toward indulgence-in-excess or self-destruction; I merely proclaimed liberation from the shackles of moral mediocrity and blind conformity. How can you doubt I was right?

Me: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" is pretty stupid as a guiding principle. It's a crude Darwinian parody which entirely neglects the benefits of a society to each of its members;  a policy which, if carried out comprehensively, would destroy society utterly.

Crowley: Ah, how invigorating to be confronted with criticism! Allow me to clarify. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" is often misunderstood - wilfully or otherwise. The "True Will" of which I spoke is no mere license for selfish indulgence or anarchic destruction. It’s a divine purpose unique to each individual, harmonizing with the cosmic order, not disrupting it.

You invoke society - a construct of cooperation, interdependence, and mutual benefit. Precisely! The health of society depends upon individuals knowing and manifesting their True Wills, for when they do, they cease to act in conflict with themselves and others.

It isn’t my teaching that would destroy society, but the failure to understand and live in accordance with one's authentic purpose. That’s what leads to all the greed, envy, and exploitation you so fashionably excoriate.

I envision a cosmos of stars, each burning brightly in its rightful place, their combined radiance illuminating the whole. It is not the principle that is stupid, but its misapplication by those too stupid to grok it.

Me: So: Nietzsche, the Death of God and the Triumph of the Will! You issue a call to become the Übermensch, then?

Crowley: Ah, Nietzsche - the tempestuous German with whom my name is so often intertwined! Indeed, there are echoes of his thought in my own, though we are kindred spirits only up to a point. His Übermensch and my True Will share a common disdain for mediocrity and a celebration of human potential, but then our paths diverge.

Nietzsche declared the "Death of God", leaving a vacuum he filled with the self-overcoming of the Übermensch. I, on the other hand, have never declared the death of divinity but rather its diffusion.

God has not perished; God is within each of us, waiting to be awakened through the discovery and enactment of the True Will.

The Übermensch rises by sheer willpower, forging meaning in a godless universe. The adept of my Thelema rises by attuning to the cosmos, finding meaning in alignment with a pre-existing, transcendent order.

Nietzsche's Triumph of the Will is solitary, even agonistic; my True Will, while intensely individual, is harmonious and integrative. Become a star! A radiant, unique presence in the universe! Not by crushing others underfoot but by shining in one’s rightful orbit. Nietzsche’s vision may intoxicate; mine illuminates!

Me: Metaphors; always metaphors with you. What should a true devotee of your vision do with their life? Please tell me it's not going around brazenly shocking people like some narcissistic stand-up comedian! Tell me instead about ethics, morality...

Crowley: Ah, so you now see me as some sort of… what was it? A jester? A provocateur? How quaint! You confuse the glint of shock-jock showmanship for the fire of the soul, the shattering of idols for… well, something else.

My ethics? Simple. Know thyself. Discover thy Will. And let it be done with the fierce joy of the creator, the artist forging beauty from chaos. We love, yes, but not with the sickly sentimentality of the weak. Our love is a raging inferno, consuming all that binds. What’s not to like?

So, tell me, you who cling to your petty moralities, your fear-based dogmas… is this not a life worth living? A life of passion, of purpose, of ecstatic freedom? 

Will you, in your quivering petty-bourgeois interviewer’s soul, ever have the courage to get with the programme?

C’mon, tell me! - Do you feel plucky, punk? 

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