Wait, what? Led Zeppelin on a Monday review? You’re gonna slag a Zep album? What is with you, Webb? Are you mental? This is LED ZEPPELIN, how can you pan them?

This is The Song Remains the Same, the proof of concept for Dread Zeppelin, which performs Zeppelin numbers performed in a reggae style with an Elvis Presley impersonator on vocals. Listen to “Whole Lotta Love” on this set and you’ll be amazed at how much Led Zeppelin themselves sound like an Elvis impersonator fronting a reggae group. While it works for the novelty group, I can’t cut the big bad Zep any slack for not sounding like themselves.

The whole performance was plagued with sloppiness and a lack of Page’s ability to play more than one guitar, which meant the live versions of songs lacked a lot of the punch they had in the studio. It’s not like this was a particularly poor concert, either. This was typical of the band. I’ve heard the bootlegs, and this is representative of the lot. It’s not to say the whole album is terrible and unlistenable: it’s to say that it’s not up to snuff, relative to other Zeppelin material.

When I was a kid, I remember watching the movie and almost falling asleep during “Dazed and Confused.” I can do that again now. After a heavy meal, I *will* fall to sleep during that song and “No Quarter.” It can’t be helped: the excitement really isn’t there. “Celebration Day” is a welcome relief of energy and the gem in this big ol’ lump of coal.

You want a good concert? Deep Purple, my friends. Deep Purple. Those guys knocked it out of the ballpark nearly every time they came up to bat. I think I know why, too. They weren’t as strung out on drugs as lots of other bands of the day.

I discovered this when I listened to a Black Sabbath 1972 bootleg right after a Grateful Dead live album. Aside from a few riffs from their hits, the Sabs sounded just like the hippy-trippy Grateful Dead. I concluded they must have all been doing the same drugs. Zeppelin seems to have hit the same goofball jar because they get really, really indulgent here. There’s no jazz-blues improvisation on this album, so Zep didn’t hit the goofballs as hard as Sabbath or the Dead, but they’re definitely on some sort of performance-diminishing substances.

Deep Purple aren’t the only guys from the 70s that did their best to give the people what they paid for. Rory Gallagher, Foghat, Pat Travers, Robin Trower, and The Who could all blow away the competition with their live sets. If I get wind of one of their live sets somewhere, color me interested. I can take the Grateful Dead live on their Europe ’72 album in small doses and Sabbath delivers solid, heavy rock starting in 1980, when Dio stepped up to the mike stand. I love Zeppelin in the studio, but I’ve learned that if I want that same hard rock sound to continue, I need to avoid their live stuff.

I still have the album on vinyl, but I have felt no compulsion whatsoever to back it up on CD or in a digital release. I’m a huge Led Zeppelin fan: my first album was Atlantic SD 19129, commonly known as “Zoso” or “Led Zeppelin IV”, but is actually without any real title. I bought all the Zeppelin albums before I branched off into other groups. Of all the Zep I bought, this one is the album that made me wish they hadn’t done it, so I wouldn’t have bought it.

I like only one song off of it, but the others aren’t unbearable. They just don’t excite me. They could have done much, much better. It’s a 5 out of 10, and I’m sticking with that rating.