Led Zeppelin were supposed to represent everything punk rock despised: excess, extravagance and stadium-sized egos. Yet their 1969 classic Communication Breakdown sounds remarkably like a punk record, years before punk existed. From Johnny Ramone to Killing Joke and Nirvana, the connections run surprisingly deep. Perhaps punk didn’t destroy the old rock establishment quite as thoroughly as it liked to pretend.
by Chris Harris
Watching the recent Led Zeppelin documentary, what struck me more than anything else was just how extraordinarily modern some of that early music still sounds, because when you strip away everything that Led Zeppelin later came to represent — the stadiums, the private jets, the mythology, the excess and the enormous shadow they cast over 1970s rock — there are moments on that first album where the music sounds astonishingly raw, aggressive and, for want of a better word, punky, despite the fact that some of it was recorded in 1968, nearly a decade before punk supposedly arrived to tear everything down.
Punk Before Punk Had a Name
The most obvious example is “Communication Breakdown”, which is barely two and a half minutes long and is driven by Jimmy Page’s brutally repetitive downstroke guitar riff, John Bonham’s hammering drums and Robert Plant singing with a kind of breathless urgency that bears remarkably little resemblance to the bloated progressive rock that punk would later claim it had come to destroy, because there is almost no fat on the song at all, and although Page was already an exceptionally sophisticated guitarist, he deliberately reduces everything to attack, repetition and sheer physical impact. On the recent documentary I watched at an early performance of the song , Page is dressed in black and with his slim build and long hair, with his face turned away from the camera angle, he even looked a dead ringer for Joey Ramone
What makes the connection particularly interesting is that this is not simply something we can hear retrospectively and conveniently label “proto-punk”, because Johnny Ramone himself repeatedly acknowledged the importance of “Communication Breakdown” and how he was heavily influenced by the guitar style
The Punk Contradiction
That alone makes the standard story of punk rather less tidy, because punk has often been presented as a Year Zero movement in which a younger generation suddenly rejected everything that came before it, when in reality many of those musicians had grown up listening to exactly the bands they were later supposed to despise, and while punk certainly rejected much of the spectacle, virtuosity and self-importance surrounding 1970s rock, it did not somehow emerge without musical parents.
Led Zeppelin were not alone in producing music of this kind, of course, because by the end of the 1960s you already had The Who smashing their instruments and producing astonishing levels of noise, The Kinks distorting guitars, The Sonics playing primitive garage rock in America, and then bands such as MC5 and The Stooges pushing aggression and simplicity towards something much closer to what would later become punk, but what is fascinating about Zeppelin is that these characteristics existed inside a band that was simultaneously capable of playing blues, folk, psychedelia, acoustic music and extremely sophisticated hard rock. History has shown though that the actual content and conception of Led Zeppelin and their earlier work is unfairly eschewed by their later output and behaviour.
The Band Punk Was Supposed to Hate
Because by the middle of the 1970s Led Zeppelin had become almost the perfect symbol of what punk claimed to oppose, because here was one of the biggest bands in the world playing enormous venues, travelling in extraordinary luxury, producing long albums, playing extended solos and generally embodying the grandeur and excess which punk musicians delighted in ridiculing, yet beneath that cultural battle the musical relationship was considerably more complicated than either side sometimes liked to admit.
Rat Scabies of The Damned later recalled that by 1976 it had become almost unacceptable within punk circles to admit that you liked Led Zeppelin, even though he acknowledged that only a year earlier people might happily have recognised the punk energy in “Communication Breakdown.”
The same contradiction can be found throughout punk, because Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols did not magically invent that enormous distorted guitar sound in isolation from the hard rock of the previous decade, while Johnny Ramone could simultaneously represent the deliberate simplicity of punk guitar and regard Jimmy Page as one of the great guitarists, which rather undermines the idea that punk musicians spent 1976 ceremonially throwing their Led Zeppelin albums into skips. Marky Ramone features heavily on another Zep documentary, espousing the virtues and techniques of John Bonham.
Rock Punk Hybrid
What punk did was not so much abolish the musical language of bands such as Zeppelin as edit it ruthlessly, taking the distorted guitar, the aggression, the riffs, the huge drums and the physical impact of rock music while discarding much of the blues improvisation, the extended solos, the virtuosity and the idea that a song might reasonably occupy half a side of an album, so in that sense punk was partly a revolution but also partly an exercise in compression.
From Jimmy Page to Killing Joke and Beyond
The connection becomes even more intriguing when you look at Jimmy Page’s later enthusiasm for Killing Joke, because Page was not somebody who suddenly discovered the band decades later when they had become safely established as influential post-punk veterans, but somebody who had actually gone to see them and who later spoke with enormous admiration for Geordie Walker’s guitar playing and the sheer weight and intensity of his sound. Joke singer, Jaz Coleman later recorded a classical music album of Led Zep faves.
Despite Page’s reputation as one of rock’s great lead guitarists, much of Zeppelin’s power was actually constructed around riffs, unusual chord voicings, drones, repetition, dynamics and the physical character of the guitar sound itself, and Geordie Walker was operating from a remarkably similar philosophy while taking it into a completely different world, producing a huge, metallic, atmospheric wall of guitar that was simultaneously heavy, repetitive and strangely spacious.
Killing Joke themselves represented another stage in the breaking down of the supposed wall between punk and heavy rock, because they emerged from punk but were never constrained by three-chord orthodoxy, and their music became increasingly enormous, rhythmic and confrontational, influencing bands from industrial and alternative rock through to metal, while Page’s admiration suggests that he recognised something in Walker’s playing that belonged to the same broad tradition of making the guitar sound physically overwhelming without relying simply on conventional soloing.
From there the lines become even more blurred, because by the 1980s and early 1990s bands such as Killing Joke, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth and eventually Nirvana were reconnecting punk’s simplicity and hostility with genuinely heavy guitar music, while Dave Grohl, whose roots were firmly within punk, became an enormous admirer of John Bonham, meaning that by the time grunge arrived the supposedly incompatible worlds of Led Zeppelin and punk had effectively reunited.
That is perhaps what I found most striking watching the documentary, because we tend to organise popular music into neat historical movements after the event — blues became rock, rock became bloated, punk arrived to destroy it, post-punk became more experimental, alternative rock followed and grunge eventually combined everything again — when the reality is much messier and considerably more interesting.
Led Zeppelin were never a punk band, obviously, and punk was absolutely a reaction against much of the culture that bands such as Zeppelin eventually came to represent, but listen again to the violence of Bonham’s drums, Page’s guitar attack and the extraordinary economy of “Communication Breakdown”, recorded while the 1960s still had two years left to run, and there is an unmistakable piece of punk already sitting there, land as such one of the best pre-punk songs of all time.
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Something About England: Amazon.co.uk: Harris, Christopher, Turner, Louise: 9798174255661: Books
Welcome to Denham, a fictitious Sussex village where behind respectable doors, well-tended gardens and familiar faces, things have a habit of going badly wrong.
Obsession, ambition, deception, jealousy and petty rivalry run through this collection of tragi-comical and satirical short stories. From poltergeists and lottery winners to cricket club feuds and environmental disasters, ordinary people embark on discovering just how quickly an ordinary life can unravel into an extraordinary mess.
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