I just discovered your channel. I am a HUGE Zep fan being a teenager in the 70's I listened to them all the time lying on my bed wearing headphones. At 62 yrs old I still listen to at least one of their songs everyday!
Here's a few more Zeppelin masterpieces: Dazed and Confused Whole Lotta Love Since I've Been Loving You The Song Remains The Same Rain Song In My Time Of Dying Trampled Underfoot Kashmir Ten Years Gone Achilles Last Stand Nobody's Fault But Mine Fool In The Rain Carouselambra
My first thought as well. Achilles reaction would be the most interesting to see, by far. It also is widely recognized as one of the greatest of LZ songs I feel.
@@xcforce9067 yeah but really the only people who I've heard talk about it are other diehard Zeppelin fans, nobody else I talk to seems to know this song compared to some of their more popular ones
My Dad gave me this vinyl when I was a teenager even though he didn't like it. He was a huge Elvis fan. 🤣 I also had Houses of the Holy and alternated those 2 albums with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon to fall asleep to every night. I get mesmerized watching LZ play live (on TV of course). It's been a long time since I've listened to them. I love so many of their songs. They really have a lot of variety now that I think about it.
Title of the song "Black Dog" just happened because there was literally a random black dog wandering around at time of recording.... so it's not related to the lyrics at all😂
Bonzo is drumming in 4/4 time and bass and guitar are in 5/4 for most of the song. This might seem confusing especially trying to find a steady rhythm to bop to but it does resolve after going through multiple successive back beats to sporadically return to a unified tempo. This fits perfectly with the lyric theme of disorder and then the desire for peace and harmony. Led Zep for me changed the way I listen to music and I think that was their intent.
I was lucky enough to get to see Led Zeppelin on the Zep 4 tour. In a 3,000 set theatre in Glasgow. What a night and this was in the set. I still had ringing in my ears the next day...
As someone else mentioned, the song title has nothing to do with the lyrics. Instead, it's named after the black Labrador that used to wander about the location where they were recording. The lyrics refer to the common blues theme of the "evil woman taking advantage of a good man". The riff was created by bassist John Paul Jones, whose first love is jazz music. The acapella vocal styling was partially inspired by Fleetwood Mac's song Oh Well. Zep was definitely into Celtic/folk musical roots and American bluegrass comes from the Irish, Scots, and Welsh who settled in the American South. The rhythm guitar was triple tracked to help give it that fat sound. Also, Jimmy recorded the guitar directly into a 1176 limiter preamp distorted the stages of it, and then sent that to a normally operating limiter. In other words, no guitar amplifier was used in the recording process. According to engineer Andy Johns, for the stereo, they had one guitar on either side and one in the middle, each recorded live.
Just love your reactions man. So many Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd But, how about Supertramp - School (Crime of the Century) With possibly the best use of a "scream" ever? (not counting Immigrant Song as that's a War Cry)
Zepplin took alot of influences from early early blues artist and folk/blue grass if you dive into their catalog. When I say early blues & folk/blue grass im talking like 1920s-1950s
Like "When the levee breaks", "Nobody's fault but mine" from the Presence album is a Delta Blues cover that sounds nothing like the original but shows what a huge influence trad blues was on the band. Worth checking out.
This is the opener to Led Zeppelin IV from which When the Levee Breaks is the closing track. Hard blues rock 'n' roll was def the core of this band! They also included quite a lot of folk and some more experimental (call it prog) stuff. Happy to hear you doing this excited and well executed analysis!
When I was 14-15 I probably spent a good, solid month just listening to this this album (Led Zeppelin IV). It was my first experience with them and I was hooked instantly. This is one of the first songs I learned to play on guitar, and it's one of the first songs my dad and I jammed together (he played drums and loved Bonham). It's just a straight banger and still rocks as hard today as it did in the early 70s. Not one of their most complex songs, but really shows their complete mastery of the hard rock genre. FWIW, this track opens the album and When the Levee Breaks closes it, with Stairway to Heaven and Rock and Roll stuck in the middle! It's definitely worth noting how differently all of these songs sound despite being on the same album and all being produced by Jimmy Page. Like I said on Levee, Page really tailored his approach to production to each individual song. As for the song not having "weight," it's definitely a contextual thing. If you went back and listened to 60s rock you'd immediately hear the difference. We take for granted now that we can plug a guitar into an amp, crank the gain knob, and have instant access to heavy distortion at bedroom levels. Back in the 60s and 70s most guitar amps were not made for heavy distortion. The only way you got them to distort was to crank amps to ear-bleeding levels so the power tubes would distort, basically pushing them past the point they were designed to be used at. That's why most of the rock music from the 60s makes use of very light distortion, because there were limits to how far they could push the amps. Zeppelin themselves were hugely influenced by the blues and bands like the Rolling Stones (listen to something like Gimme Shelter or Satisfaction to hear the difference), and one of Zep's innovations was pairing the heaviest amp distortion they could muster at the time with the blues and rock. In a very real sense, hard rock = blues rock with heavy (for the time) distortion. A song like Black Dog sounded absolutely massive for that time, and certainly would've come as a shock to people not used to hearing such heavy guitar distortion in which the guitar was right in their face production wise... not to mention there's also Bonham just pounding away on the kid like it owes him money. Beyond the distortion, the actual guitar tone on this one is very interesting. Here's an interview with the guy that worked with Page on the production explaining it: "It was a direct sound and I thought that I knew what to do. There were three guitars on “Black Dog” so I triple tracked it. When I mixed it, these three guitars were down here and the rest of the tracks were up here. Since the sound was so loud, it gave me much more room for the other stuff. Anyways, he meant two 1176s in series, one of which has the compression buttons punched out, so it is like an amp. You hit the front of the next compressor really hard and make the mic amp distort a bit with the EQ -a bit of bottom to make it sing. So “Black Dog” has a direct Gibson Les Paul Sunburst 52 or something, going right into the mic amps on the mixer, which is going through two 1176s, and it sounds like some guy in the Albert Hall with a bunch of Marshalls. I couldn’t have done it without the 1176s. There is not another compressor that will do that, because you can take out the compression stuff."
Interesting production notes for the time. Yeah, I have no context for that kinda stuff so it's interesting to hear about technical limitations that they had to ingeniously overcome with hardware experimentation. It's certainly a drastically different skill/process than dialing in a tone with modern equipment.
@@CriticalReactions You can still buy replicas of old late-60s amps. I've played through some of them, and they sound pretty amazing cranked up, but you can't get them to distort like modern amps. Without an attenuator they are incredibly loud. Stand in front of one and hit a power chord and you really do feel like a god... I can only imagine what playing a huge stack of them in an arena must feel like.
Fun fact: bassist/keyboardist wrote this riff on a plane when the idea came to him in a shorthand version of sheet music his dad taught him sans instrument.
Yeeesss. Back when they were experimenting with atmosphere in basic engineering. How to make even a guitar track, or any instrument, have its own atmosphere. Not just close-micing a huge amp and making it right in your face. Certain amps in certain rooms with certain mics that provide more specific kinds of presence that add to the initial sound. It goes back to the idea of them being innovators of production. A track can be big because of its density, or because of its atmosphere, or both. A track that comes to mind that does BOTH is their track "four sticks". It is an audio eargasm. It was recorded for the dame album, in the same place - a huge wood filled mansion called Headley Grange, where a black dog hung out outside, but with a lot more layering. It's an experience. A landscape.
This song is about groupies, of which Zep had many. The title of the song comes from a black dog that was wandering around while the band was working on this album. It was recorded at a house call Headley Grange in England somewhere. The band stayed at this house and recorded inside it using the Rolling Stone's mobile studio to capture the music. Much of the atmosphere of this album comes from the acoustics of the house and Jimmy Page's production genius. The remasters are, as you suspected, just a clean-up of the original recordings.
I believe a lot of the guitar parts were run direct into the mixing desk and the channel input gain was turned up to get what essentially is a fuzz tone. I guess the studio monitors were dimed too for feedback. The solo sounds like a mic'ed amp...
One of the songs I grew up to I guess I showed my age…. what I like about the song Bonham Harmonizing w/ Someone towards the end - Whhoooooooooo!!!!.. When they were recording this @ a old English house a black lab wandered in the yard and they noticed it dog then hung around so they name this song black dog
Led Zeppelin is all about contrasts in their song. Jimmy Page produced all of Led Zeps albums. Light and Shade as Jimmy Page said. Call and Response..... try out You Shook Me and In My Time Of Dying. However, I really enjoyed your very detailed breakdown of Black Dog. Very good video.....
I wish you would react to their first album titled "Led Zeppelin." It would give you a feel for what threw these four gifted musicians together--their love of American black southern blues and early rock and roll. They were unique and their music works today. Just please react to their first album and let us know what you think.
Yeah, it's shocking to me that this 'composer' has reacted to a couple Zeppelin songs and never seemed to notice the odd time signatures. They used competing time signatures in this track and many others. They wander away from each other in some parts and come back together pleasingly at the right times. Often it's Bonham and JPJ hammering an underlying beat while Paige and Plant wander off into something completely different, which only hits with the main beat on oddly spaced offbeats. It's an amazingly difficult thing to perform, as all human musical instinct wants to bring everything back into synchronicity.
I'm not sure if I missed you saying it or not but in the main hook/groove the guitar and base are in a different time signature than the drums. It's a really strange sound especially considering how tight it is. The guitar and bass is in 9/8 while the drums are in 4/4.
Not only does Jimmy Page play amazing lead guitar, he had total control over producing mixing etc. all their songs. They didn’t just record, & let someone else make it sound the way they wanted. Another aspect of the genius of Jimmy Page.
My 2 cents on the blue grass. Typically, the southern white person in the US has held on to a Northern England culture which does not exist today. These where people that came from Northern England and settled in the US. I would dare to say that this is the connection. LZ's members loved American blues.
The parents' generation, back then were into Jazz. Jazz is smooth. You know, the musicians play around the melody, taking the edge off of everything, turning it into a bland mess, where everything sounds the same. Bluegrass is just another branch of American Folk, just centered around KY, rather than MS. Led Zeppelin is Skiffle, just played on a stack of Marshals.
not skiffle, the use of a plethora of instruments and classical orchestration is not the same as using rudimentary or improvised instruments, not even close. They also don’t improvise their songs, they have very well defined melodies, harmonies, syncopation, lyrics, time signatures, etc. They innovated, that’s not improvisation. They would improvise riffs and solos live, because they could, but always based on the foundation. Skiffle is very simplistic crap using makeshift instruments because were poor and improvised because they were untrained, couldn’t read music, and had no idea how orchestrate. It’s like comparing tic tac toe to three dimensional chess.
@@cbrend22 Jimmy Page appeared on the Ed Sullivan as teenager performing Skiffle. Rock 'n Roll is electrified folk music, combined with whatever you want. There is no barrier between RNR and anything else. Led Zeppelin was the lowest, bottom feeding crap there was, according to anybody that knew anything about music, in 1970. As far as reading music goes, Steve Howe of Yes can't read music! I imagine if you rounded up a handful of the best young hicks in Appalachia, in 1930, and let them do whatever they wanted, they would have put together music that would stand up today, even as the big bands were forgotten.
Not all jazz is smooth. Check out stuff like late/free-jazz era Coltrane. Stuff like Ascension and Live in Japan are all edge and anything but bland. Not the easiest listen, but there's tons of avant-garde jazz out there. Zeppelin most certainly isn't skiffle, and like all innovative bands Zeppelin were hated by the musical conservatives in their day only to be considered one of the greatest bands ever once that generation died out. They will now appear in the top ~10 of any list of the greatest musical artists of the 20th century.
@@jonathanhenderson9422 I'm overstating it, but Led Zeppelin were bad boys. They broke all the rules, playing the lowest, meanest, crudest music they could find and mixing it up. Mixing different forms of Folk with Jazz comes from the Skiffle background. The old Jazz crowd disowned Coltrane and most everything taking a cue from Rock 'n Roll, back in those days. As late as the 1990's I had Jazz aficionados telling me that Yes was "shit," like playing variations of 1940's tunes was the height of talent and creativity.
@@ThatsMrPencilneck2U Coltrane never took a cue from rock and roll (unlike Miles Davis), Coltrane embraced the avant-garde in the form of free-jazz that broke with tonality altogether, largely in favor of complete freedom of expression that was less about "making music" and more about "communicating with God" and expressing the soul of man. It sounded (still sounds) like complete noise to many. I just used him as an example of how jazz isn't all smooth an inoffensive. Even a lot of late Miles Davis isn't smooth and inoffensive, though that is, indeed, because he embraced rock and funk and other genres.
![Led Zeppelin - Heartbreaker [ISOLATED TRACKS - REACTION & ANALYSIS] musicians react S01E17](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3hfcuiFLxBE/mqdefault.jpg)
![Led Zeppelin - Heartbreaker [ISOLATED TRACKS - REACTION & ANALYSIS] musicians react S01E17](/img/tr.png)
I just discovered your channel. I am a HUGE Zep fan being a teenager in the 70's I listened to them all the time lying on my bed wearing headphones. At 62 yrs old I still listen to at least one of their songs everyday!
I love this song!
I’m glad you liked it - I’d gladly watch you do any more Led Zeppelin songs!
Here's a few more Zeppelin masterpieces:
Dazed and Confused
Whole Lotta Love
Since I've Been Loving You
The Song Remains The Same
Rain Song
In My Time Of Dying
Trampled Underfoot
Kashmir
Ten Years Gone
Achilles Last Stand
Nobody's Fault But Mine
Fool In The Rain
Carouselambra
Achilles Last Stand is a criminally underrated Zeppelin tune, albeit a long one. I'd really like to see your reaction to it
My first thought as well. Achilles reaction would be the most interesting to see, by far.
It also is widely recognized as one of the greatest of LZ songs I feel.
@@xcforce9067 yeah but really the only people who I've heard talk about it are other diehard Zeppelin fans, nobody else I talk to seems to know this song compared to some of their more popular ones
Best Zep song imo.
My favorite from them. As close as they ever got to basically inventing 80s metal.
I don’t know if this guy did it, but Kashmir would be another great one, with different timings.
My Dad gave me this vinyl when I was a teenager even though he didn't like it. He was a huge Elvis fan. 🤣 I also had Houses of the Holy and alternated those 2 albums with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon to fall asleep to every night. I get mesmerized watching LZ play live (on TV of course). It's been a long time since I've listened to them. I love so many of their songs. They really have a lot of variety now that I think about it.
Title of the song "Black Dog" just happened because there was literally a random black dog wandering around at time of recording.... so it's not related to the lyrics at all😂
Bonzo is drumming in 4/4 time and bass and guitar are in 5/4 for most of the song. This might seem confusing especially trying to find a steady rhythm to bop to but it does resolve after going through multiple successive back beats to sporadically return to a unified tempo. This fits perfectly with the lyric theme of disorder and then the desire for peace and harmony. Led Zep for me changed the way I listen to music and I think that was their intent.
I was lucky enough to get to see Led Zeppelin on the Zep 4 tour. In a 3,000 set theatre in Glasgow. What a night and this was in the set. I still had ringing in my ears the next day...
As someone else mentioned, the song title has nothing to do with the lyrics. Instead, it's named after the black Labrador that used to wander about the location where they were recording. The lyrics refer to the common blues theme of the "evil woman taking advantage of a good man". The riff was created by bassist John Paul Jones, whose first love is jazz music. The acapella vocal styling was partially inspired by Fleetwood Mac's song Oh Well. Zep was definitely into Celtic/folk musical roots and American bluegrass comes from the Irish, Scots, and Welsh who settled in the American South. The rhythm guitar was triple tracked to help give it that fat sound. Also, Jimmy recorded the guitar directly into a 1176 limiter preamp distorted the stages of it, and then sent that to a normally operating limiter. In other words, no guitar amplifier was used in the recording process. According to engineer Andy Johns, for the stereo, they had one guitar on either side and one in the middle, each recorded live.
Little known fact: John Paul Jones (bassist) came up with this lick. Made JP add him to the songwriting credits years later.
Just love your reactions man. So many Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd
But, how about
Supertramp - School
(Crime of the Century)
With possibly the best use of a "scream" ever?
(not counting Immigrant Song as that's a War Cry)
one day they will be famous i can feel it
I really enjoy your analyses. Would love to see you do Zeppelin's 'Kashmir' and 'The Rain Song.'
Zepplin took alot of influences from early early blues artist and folk/blue grass if you dive into their catalog. When I say early blues & folk/blue grass im talking like 1920s-1950s
Like "When the levee breaks", "Nobody's fault but mine" from the Presence album is a Delta Blues cover that sounds nothing like the original but shows what a huge influence trad blues was on the band. Worth checking out.
This is the opener to Led Zeppelin IV from which When the Levee Breaks is the closing track. Hard blues rock 'n' roll was def the core of this band! They also included quite a lot of folk and some more experimental (call it prog) stuff.
Happy to hear you doing this excited and well executed analysis!
Led Zeppelin songs make you feel like you’re right there with them, surrounded by the members, where nothing can ever go wrong!
When I was 14-15 I probably spent a good, solid month just listening to this this album (Led Zeppelin IV). It was my first experience with them and I was hooked instantly. This is one of the first songs I learned to play on guitar, and it's one of the first songs my dad and I jammed together (he played drums and loved Bonham). It's just a straight banger and still rocks as hard today as it did in the early 70s. Not one of their most complex songs, but really shows their complete mastery of the hard rock genre. FWIW, this track opens the album and When the Levee Breaks closes it, with Stairway to Heaven and Rock and Roll stuck in the middle! It's definitely worth noting how differently all of these songs sound despite being on the same album and all being produced by Jimmy Page. Like I said on Levee, Page really tailored his approach to production to each individual song.
As for the song not having "weight," it's definitely a contextual thing. If you went back and listened to 60s rock you'd immediately hear the difference. We take for granted now that we can plug a guitar into an amp, crank the gain knob, and have instant access to heavy distortion at bedroom levels. Back in the 60s and 70s most guitar amps were not made for heavy distortion. The only way you got them to distort was to crank amps to ear-bleeding levels so the power tubes would distort, basically pushing them past the point they were designed to be used at. That's why most of the rock music from the 60s makes use of very light distortion, because there were limits to how far they could push the amps. Zeppelin themselves were hugely influenced by the blues and bands like the Rolling Stones (listen to something like Gimme Shelter or Satisfaction to hear the difference), and one of Zep's innovations was pairing the heaviest amp distortion they could muster at the time with the blues and rock. In a very real sense, hard rock = blues rock with heavy (for the time) distortion. A song like Black Dog sounded absolutely massive for that time, and certainly would've come as a shock to people not used to hearing such heavy guitar distortion in which the guitar was right in their face production wise... not to mention there's also Bonham just pounding away on the kid like it owes him money.
Beyond the distortion, the actual guitar tone on this one is very interesting. Here's an interview with the guy that worked with Page on the production explaining it: "It was a direct sound and I thought that I knew what to do. There were three guitars on “Black Dog” so I triple tracked it. When I mixed it, these three guitars were down here and the rest of the tracks were up here. Since the sound was so loud, it gave me much more room for the other stuff. Anyways, he meant two 1176s in series, one of which has the compression buttons punched out, so it is like an amp. You hit the front of the next compressor really hard and make the mic amp distort a bit with the EQ -a bit of bottom to make it sing. So “Black Dog” has a direct Gibson Les Paul Sunburst 52 or something, going right into the mic amps on the mixer, which is going through two 1176s, and it sounds like some guy in the Albert Hall with a bunch of Marshalls. I couldn’t have done it without the 1176s. There is not another compressor that will do that, because you can take out the compression stuff."
Interesting production notes for the time. Yeah, I have no context for that kinda stuff so it's interesting to hear about technical limitations that they had to ingeniously overcome with hardware experimentation. It's certainly a drastically different skill/process than dialing in a tone with modern equipment.
@@CriticalReactions You can still buy replicas of old late-60s amps. I've played through some of them, and they sound pretty amazing cranked up, but you can't get them to distort like modern amps. Without an attenuator they are incredibly loud. Stand in front of one and hit a power chord and you really do feel like a god... I can only imagine what playing a huge stack of them in an arena must feel like.
Fun fact: bassist/keyboardist wrote this riff on a plane when the idea came to him in a shorthand version of sheet music his dad taught him sans instrument.
Yeeesss. Back when they were experimenting with atmosphere in basic engineering. How to make even a guitar track, or any instrument, have its own atmosphere. Not just close-micing a huge amp and making it right in your face. Certain amps in certain rooms with certain mics that provide more specific kinds of presence that add to the initial sound. It goes back to the idea of them being innovators of production. A track can be big because of its density, or because of its atmosphere, or both. A track that comes to mind that does BOTH is their track "four sticks". It is an audio eargasm. It was recorded for the dame album, in the same place - a huge wood filled mansion called Headley Grange, where a black dog hung out outside, but with a lot more layering. It's an experience. A landscape.
This song is about groupies, of which Zep had many. The title of the song comes from a black dog that was wandering around while the band was working on this album. It was recorded at a house call Headley Grange in England somewhere. The band stayed at this house and recorded inside it using the Rolling Stone's mobile studio to capture the music. Much of the atmosphere of this album comes from the acoustics of the house and Jimmy Page's production genius. The remasters are, as you suspected, just a clean-up of the original recordings.
I believe a lot of the guitar parts were run direct into the mixing desk and the channel input gain was turned up to get what essentially is a fuzz tone. I guess the studio monitors were dimed too for feedback. The solo sounds like a mic'ed amp...
One of the songs I grew up to I guess I showed my age…. what I like about the song Bonham Harmonizing w/ Someone towards the end - Whhoooooooooo!!!!..
When they were recording this @ a old English house a black lab wandered in the yard and they noticed it dog then hung around so they name this song black dog
Both songs you’ve done are from their 4th album in 1971. The remasters just clean it up, nothing more!
Led Zeppelin is all about contrasts in their song. Jimmy Page produced all of Led Zeps albums. Light and Shade as Jimmy Page said. Call and Response..... try out You Shook Me and In My Time Of Dying. However, I really enjoyed your very detailed breakdown of Black Dog. Very good video.....
I wish you would react to their first album titled "Led Zeppelin." It would give you a feel for what threw these four gifted musicians together--their love of American black southern blues and early rock and roll. They were unique and their music works today. Just please react to their first album and let us know what you think.
You'll notice the interesting and complicated time signatures.
John Bonham considered the greatest rock drummer ever.
Yeah, it's shocking to me that this 'composer' has reacted to a couple Zeppelin songs and never seemed to notice the odd time signatures. They used competing time signatures in this track and many others. They wander away from each other in some parts and come back together pleasingly at the right times.
Often it's Bonham and JPJ hammering an underlying beat while Paige and Plant wander off into something completely different, which only hits with the main beat on oddly spaced offbeats. It's an amazingly difficult thing to perform, as all human musical instinct wants to bring everything back into synchronicity.
@@Mr.Ekshin Very astute reaction.
I'm not sure if I missed you saying it or not but in the main hook/groove the guitar and base are in a different time signature than the drums. It's a really strange sound especially considering how tight it is. The guitar and bass is in 9/8 while the drums are in 4/4.
Not only does Jimmy Page play amazing lead guitar, he had total control over producing mixing etc. all their songs. They didn’t just record, & let someone else make it sound the way they wanted. Another aspect of the genius of Jimmy Page.
I agree with your breakdown about the vocals and the instrumentation, however I think it works.
Jimmy calls it light and shade.
It’s not a light saber, it’s just Jimmy Page! :)
My 2 cents on the blue grass. Typically, the southern white person in the US has held on to a Northern England culture which does not exist today. These where people that came from Northern England and settled in the US. I would dare to say that this is the connection. LZ's members loved American blues.
It's blues bby.
Black Dog is the name Winston Churchill, nobel prize poet, called his depression, his pst, he was a soldier and an alcoholic. It's the blues bby.
Irs Zep. Case-closed
It's not like Queen, awsome band but that is progressive rock. This is blues.
The parents' generation, back then were into Jazz. Jazz is smooth. You know, the musicians play around the melody, taking the edge off of everything, turning it into a bland mess, where everything sounds the same. Bluegrass is just another branch of American Folk, just centered around KY, rather than MS. Led Zeppelin is Skiffle, just played on a stack of Marshals.
not skiffle, the use of a plethora of instruments and classical orchestration is not the same as using rudimentary or improvised instruments, not even close. They also don’t improvise their songs, they have very well defined melodies, harmonies, syncopation, lyrics, time signatures, etc. They innovated, that’s not improvisation. They would improvise riffs and solos live, because they could, but always based on the foundation. Skiffle is very simplistic crap using makeshift instruments because were poor and improvised because they were untrained, couldn’t read music, and had no idea how orchestrate. It’s like comparing tic tac toe to three dimensional chess.
@@cbrend22 Jimmy Page appeared on the Ed Sullivan as teenager performing Skiffle. Rock 'n Roll is electrified folk music, combined with whatever you want. There is no barrier between RNR and anything else. Led Zeppelin was the lowest, bottom feeding crap there was, according to anybody that knew anything about music, in 1970. As far as reading music goes, Steve Howe of Yes can't read music! I imagine if you rounded up a handful of the best young hicks in Appalachia, in 1930, and let them do whatever they wanted, they would have put together music that would stand up today, even as the big bands were forgotten.
Not all jazz is smooth. Check out stuff like late/free-jazz era Coltrane. Stuff like Ascension and Live in Japan are all edge and anything but bland. Not the easiest listen, but there's tons of avant-garde jazz out there. Zeppelin most certainly isn't skiffle, and like all innovative bands Zeppelin were hated by the musical conservatives in their day only to be considered one of the greatest bands ever once that generation died out. They will now appear in the top ~10 of any list of the greatest musical artists of the 20th century.
@@jonathanhenderson9422 I'm overstating it, but Led Zeppelin were bad boys. They broke all the rules, playing the lowest, meanest, crudest music they could find and mixing it up. Mixing different forms of Folk with Jazz comes from the Skiffle background.
The old Jazz crowd disowned Coltrane and most everything taking a cue from Rock 'n Roll, back in those days. As late as the 1990's I had Jazz aficionados telling me that Yes was "shit," like playing variations of 1940's tunes was the height of talent and creativity.
@@ThatsMrPencilneck2U Coltrane never took a cue from rock and roll (unlike Miles Davis), Coltrane embraced the avant-garde in the form of free-jazz that broke with tonality altogether, largely in favor of complete freedom of expression that was less about "making music" and more about "communicating with God" and expressing the soul of man. It sounded (still sounds) like complete noise to many. I just used him as an example of how jazz isn't all smooth an inoffensive. Even a lot of late Miles Davis isn't smooth and inoffensive, though that is, indeed, because he embraced rock and funk and other genres.