The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Led Zeppelin · produced by Jimmy Page · mixed with Eddie Kramer · Atlantic · about 41 minutes
Mode
Electric blues turned to riff rock; the twelve-bar song giving way to the riff as the unit, with hush and assault built into the songs
Mythos
Desire as a storm that dissolves form and returns; the wanderer’s road, set once in a borrowed fantasy world
Phase
Nine tracks on two sides; each side opens on its strongest riff, the first passing from appetite to devotion, the second closing in the blues it came from
Presentation
Album; the band’s faces set on a photograph of a squadron of the First World War
Register
Riff, drums in a room, theremin and treated voices, organ, acoustic guitar, an unaccompanied guitar break, a drum solo
Scale
One male voice: a lover, a dreamer, a wanderer, a man undone and grateful
Governing Proposition
A band made its second record in sessions snatched between concerts and fixed the grammar of hard rock: the riff as the unit of the song, the drummer as an equal force in a live room, hush and assault in one track, the guitar break as a set piece. Its deepest knowledge is in sound, desire as a storm that breaks the song into noise and lets the riff return; its words are borrowed blues, and part of its music was owed to others before it was paid.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on a riff, and the riff is the law. Whole Lotta Love states in its first bars what the whole record will do: a figure of a few notes, heavy and spare, repeated until it becomes a pressure, and a voice riding it as a demand. Then, in the middle, the band drops out. Theremin and treated voices swirl across the stereo field with a backward echo, rhythm is lost, and for a time the song is noise. Then the riff comes back as if nothing could stop it, and the band falls in on Jimmy Page’s solo with overwhelming force.
That shape, riff, collapse and return, is the record’s deepest knowledge. Desire is rendered as a storm that breaks the song’s form and lets it reassemble, the body’s climax heard as disorder and the riff’s return as compulsion. No lyric on the record says as much. It is the place where the record discloses most and where its one deep image lives, and it is a piece of studio composition set inside a hit single, mixed by Page with Eddie Kramer, the stereo field used as a space for the storm to move in.
Atlantic released the album in October 1969, nine tracks on two sides, produced by Page. The band is Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham. It was made in sessions snatched across 1969 while the band toured Britain and North America, and it bears the marks of its making on the road. Side one runs Whole Lotta Love, What Is and What Should Never Be, The Lemon Song and Thank You; side two runs Heartbreaker, Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman), Ramble On, Moby Dick and Bring It On Home. The sleeve sets the band’s faces on a photograph of a squadron of the First World War. Later remasters, and the companion disc of 2014, are context, not the record.
Movement II
The second track teaches the record’s other method. Its verses are quiet, a dream sung low over a light accompaniment; its choruses break into a wall of guitar. The alternation is the meaning: the dream and the waking world set as two volumes, and the gap between them heard each time the chorus falls. The song glances at a dream castle and an escape to the stars, and its close spins across the stereo field. Light against heavy, hush against assault, is built into the song itself, not laid over it.
The inheritance the record works from is the electric blues of Chicago, the British blues of the 1960s, Cream, Hendrix, the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth (1968), and the band’s own first album of the same year. What this record does with it is move the blues away from the twelve-bar song toward the riff as the unit of composition, heavier and more spare, and build its dynamics into the songs. That turn was the record’s, and it carried.
The stake was modest. The first album had already proved the path and sold, and the riff-based heavy blues was in the air in 1969. The swerve is in the weight and the riff, not in the language, and part of it was borrowed: some of the record’s departures are rearrangements of earlier songs. The record codified more than it reorganised. But codification, done this decisively, is itself a kind of force, and the grammar it fixed is the one that later records took.
Movement III
Side one passes through The Lemon Song, a long electric blues that holds its jam past the song’s need. Its words are commonplaces carried over from the blues, Robert Johnson’s lemon image among them (“squeeze my lemon”), and its frame is Howlin’ Wolf’s Killing Floor. The swagger is of its era and has aged against the record. It is the side’s plainest statement of the voice the record mostly speaks in: desire as a force that will not be refused, sung as pressure, boast and threat.
Then the side turns. Thank You is a song of devotion without strut, lit by Jones’s organ, with a warm height and a false ending that returns. It is the one place the record turns appetite into gratitude, and it is required: without it side one would be all appetite. It also proves the record’s law wider than it first appears. Thank You and the abstract middle of Whole Lotta Love lie furthest apart on the record, yet both are about a man undone by love, one in body and one in gratitude, and both use dynamics, collapse and return, the false ending, as their means.
The side thus runs from the storm of appetite to its opposite, and that arc is the sequence’s best argument. It is not a strict one. The order was assembled from sessions on the road, and most tracks would stand in another order with little loss. What gives the side its shape is less a planned course than the law of the riff and the volume, which governs a range wider than a heavy record’s and holds the devotion of the last song within the physics of the first.
Movement IV
Side two opens on its strongest riff, and then the song stops. In Heartbreaker the band falls silent and Page plays alone, an unaccompanied break that stands outside the song, a single player suspended; then the band comes back. The stopping is the point, and it became a set piece that guitarists have learned note by note for decades. The track is built tight around its riff, and the break is an invention, not a display. Living Loving Maid follows, a two-and-a-half-minute sneer that the record would not miss.
Ramble On is the one place the record widens its world. Acoustic restlessness in the verses, a chorus that lifts each time, and a wanderer’s quest set in Tolkien’s world, naming “Mordor” and “Gollum” and a girl lost to the dark lord: the oldest road of the songs, and the archetype is load-bearing in the song, its restless form the road itself. The borrowed world is allusion and does not reach across the record, but the young man who cannot stay is caught truly.
Moby Dick is a riff framing a drum solo, four minutes that document a concert practice more than they argue. It is display, and it is charged as such. Around it the making is strong: Page places the drums in a room and lets the room sound, giving Bonham a weight few records of 1969 have, Jones’s bass is exact, and Plant’s voice is a powerful instrument at full stretch. The faults fall on a share of the record, and the unevenness of sound between tracks shows that it was made between concerts.
Movement V
The record closes in the blues it came from. Bring It On Home frames the band’s own riff with a pastiche of Sonny Boy Williamson’s song of that name, quoted at length, a joke against the record’s own seriousness of weight. The frame is also a confession. Three tracks rest heavily on earlier blues records whose authors were not credited on the first release: Willie Dixon’s You Need Love, recorded by Muddy Waters in 1962, under Whole Lotta Love; Killing Floor and Robert Johnson’s image under The Lemon Song; Williamson’s song around the closer. The credit came only later, and the record as issued owed more than it said.
The reach has been very large all the same. Hard rock and heavy metal took this record as a template: Deep Purple’s In Rock (1970), the riff rock of the 1970s, Aerosmith, Van Halen’s guitar showpieces in the line of Heartbreaker, and later the sampled Bonham drum sound in hip hop. Whole Lotta Love became the riff of riff rock and has been in broadcast for over five decades. The record has been kept in print and heard whole, and its middle passage is still taken apart by engineers; its words yield little more on the fiftieth hearing than the first.
What the record holds lies close together, gathered in one male voice: appetite, restlessness and gratitude; the couple as desire, contempt and devotion; the road; a dream and a glimpse of fantasy; and the body, rendered in sound, as the ground of all of it. Labour, the family, the state, history beyond the borrowed past of the blues, the sacred and the natural order stay outside. The record is great in the way a riff is great: the sound repays without end, and the sense is soon known.
Act III · The Twelve
Nine tracks in about forty-one minutes, and the record stands on four required places. Whole Lotta Love must open: the riff states the record’s law in its first bars. Heartbreaker must open side two. Ramble On is the one place the record widens its world, and Thank You is required for another reason: it is the one song of devotion without strut, and without it side one would be all appetite. The test bites elsewhere: Living Loving Maid is slight, Moby Dick is a frame for a drum solo, a document of a concert practice, The Lemon Song holds its jam past the song’s need, and Bring It On Home quotes its source at length. The required places carry the record; the rest is permitted.
Score: 8.0 / 10
What the words state is narrow: male desire as a force that will not be refused, sung as pressure, boast and threat, and once, in Thank You, turned to gratitude. Sound carries more than words, and is credited in full. The middle of Whole Lotta Love discloses what no lyric states: desire breaking up into noise, rhythm lost, the body’s climax rendered as disorder, and then the riff returning as if compelled. What Is and What Should Never Be sets a dream against waking life, quiet verses against heavy choruses, and the alternation tells the gap between them. Ramble On catches a young man who cannot stay. What holds the axis: the words are blues commonplaces carried over, and much is enacted rather than opened.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Elevation is frequent, and of one kind above all: grandeur by weight. Whole Lotta Love rises twice, at the riff’s first entry and at the return after the abstract middle, where the band falls back in on Jimmy Page’s solo with overwhelming force. What Is and What Should Never Be lifts at each chorus, the quiet dream breaking into a wall of guitar, and its close spins across the stereo field. Thank You reaches a warm height in John Paul Jones’s organ and its false ending. Heartbreaker’s unaccompanied break is a summit of another kind, one player suspended outside the song, and Ramble On rises at each chorus. What holds it: no terror, and little beauty held for long.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth is built in one place and evoked around it. Ramble On sets the wanderer’s quest, the oldest road of the songs, in Tolkien’s world, naming “Mordor” and “Gollum” and a girl lost to the dark lord: the journey is load-bearing in the song, its restless verses and lifting choruses the road itself. The record’s one deep image, desire as a storm that dissolves form and returns, lives in the sound of Whole Lotta Love and is real, a pattern the music enacts rather than names. The blues supplies an inherited figure, the potent man of the juke joint, and the record enlarges him to a giant’s scale. What holds it: the fantasy world is allusion, and it does not reach across the record.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is the electric blues of Chicago, the British blues of the 1960s, Cream, Hendrix, the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth (1968) and the band’s own first album of the same year. The turn is real: the record moves the blues away from the twelve-bar song toward the riff as the unit of composition, heavier and more spare, builds dynamics of hush and assault into the songs themselves (What Is and What Should Never Be, Ramble On), and sets a passage of studio abstraction in the middle of a hit single. What holds it: the band’s first album had proved the path, and the record leans on its blues sources so closely that some departures are rearrangements of earlier songs, a debt the first release did not acknowledge.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The sequence is counted here, once. Each side opens on its strongest riff; side one passes from appetite to devotion, and side two closes in the blues it came from. Change the form of Whole Lotta Love and it stops knowing what it knows: riff, collapse and return is its knowledge, desire as a pressure that breaks form and reassembles it. The light and heavy alternation of What Is and What Should Never Be and Ramble On is meaning, the dream and the waking world set as two volumes, and Heartbreaker stops its song for a solo that stands outside it, the stopping the point. What holds it: elsewhere the frames are inherited, and the order was assembled from sessions on the road.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over fifty-seven years, and it is mostly formal. Musicians have returned to the record for decades: the riff of Whole Lotta Love, the Heartbreaker break that guitarists learn note by note, John Bonham’s sound and feel, and the stereo treatment of the middle of Whole Lotta Love, with its backward echo, still taken apart by engineers. The companion disc of rough mixes issued in 2014 was received as a document worth study, and the long argument over the record’s sources, about borrowing, credit and the blues, keeps it open in another way. What holds the figure: semantic return is thin, the words yield little more on the fiftieth hearing than the first, and only Ramble On and Thank You renew.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is the rock album of 1969 and the years after. The intrinsic force is a codification: the record took the heavy blues that Cream, Hendrix and Truth had opened and fixed its grammar, the riff as song, the drummer as an equal force recorded in a live room, hush and assault in one track, the guitar break as set piece. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: hard rock and heavy metal took this record as a template, from Deep Purple’s In Rock (1970) through the riff rock of the 1970s and Aerosmith to Van Halen’s solo showpieces in the line of Heartbreaker, and later the sampled Bonham drum sound in hip hop; Whole Lotta Love became the riff of riff rock.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty-seven years. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, kept in print, remastered and reissued, heard as an album and in its tracks. Presence is wide and continuous: Whole Lotta Love has been in broadcast for over five decades, and the album has sold steadily and is heard whole; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric bears its moment less than many records of 1969. Two charges hold it below the widest figure: the sexual swagger of The Lemon Song and Living Loving Maid is of its era and has aged against the record, and the credit owed to its blues sources, settled only later, is a fact about the work as it was issued.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, strong and in places load-bearing. Page as producer places the drums in a room and lets the room sound, giving Bonham a weight few records of 1969 have. The stereo field is used as space, most of all in the middle of Whole Lotta Love, with the theremin, the backward echo on the voice and the panning that Page mixed with Eddie Kramer. Jones’s bass and organ are exact and give Thank You its colour; Robert Plant’s voice is a powerful instrument at full stretch; Heartbreaker is built tight around a riff, with a solo of real invention. What holds it: The Lemon Song’s loose middle, Moby Dick’s display, and an unevenness of sound between tracks made on the road.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs most of the record: the riff and its weight, desire as force, light against heavy. Take the two most distant elements, the abstract middle of Whole Lotta Love, rhythm dissolved into noise, and Thank You, an organ-lit song of devotion: they obey the same law more than first appears. Both are about a man undone by love, one in body and one in gratitude, and both use dynamics as their means, collapse and return, the false ending. Ramble On brings Tolkien and acoustic guitar under the same physics of light and heavy. The range is wider than a heavy record’s. What holds it: Moby Dick obeys only the concert, Living Loving Maid only its genre, and Bring It On Home frames the band’s riff with a pastiche of its source.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held as appetite, restlessness and gratitude. The couple is held in several kinds: desire, contempt, devotion. The road is held, the wandering of Ramble On and the touring life the record was made in; a world of fantasy is glimpsed through Tolkien, and the dream through What Is and What Should Never Be. The body, rendered in sound, is the record’s ground. What holds the figure lowest: the other orders are absent, no labour, no family, no state or history beyond the borrowed past of the blues, no sacred, no natural order except as image, and what there is lies close together, gathered in one male voice.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, then The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Made at 8.8. A record that fixed the grammar of hard rock, the riff as song and the drums in a live room, and became a template for hard rock and heavy metal; a recording kept whole, in print and in broadcast for over five decades; and a production in which the room sounds and the stereo field becomes the space of a storm.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: appetite, restlessness, gratitude, the couple, the road and the body, gathered in one male voice, with labour, the family, the state, the sacred and history absent. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 7.8, a disclosure carried by sound around words that are blues commonplaces; then The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, a quest built in one song and a deep image in another, the fantasy borrowed.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9 and The Unconcealment at 7.8 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.3, stands below it as well.
Basis · the LP as first released by Atlantic in October 1969, nine tracks in their original sequence on two sides, about forty-one minutes; produced by Jimmy Page and mixed with Eddie Kramer; judged from knowledge of the recording, its arrangements, its words in outline, its history of making and of credit, and its reception. No recording, lyric sheet or sleeve was in hand, and running times are approximate. The remasters of 1990 and 2014, and the companion disc of rough mixes and backing tracks issued in 2014, are context, not the object. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact release dates in each country, the studios and session dates, where and how quickly the record was mixed, its chart positions and those of its single, the later uses of Whole Lotta Love on television, and the form and dates of the composer credits added later, are not given.