The iconic band Joe Perry said had no limits: “They could change gears six times”
There are limited directions for music to evolve if one is solely focused on playing pure rock and roll. Although there are various subgenres within this style, they often circle back to the foundational blues elements established by pioneers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Joe Perry began with this foundation in Aerosmith, but he recognised that Led Zeppelin, at their peak, transcended traditional boundaries, exploring uncharted musical territories.
Because before Led Zeppelin even formed, Jimmy Page was already starting to twist the idea of what rock and roll should be. Sure, there could be the same bluesy licks that he got up to in The Yardbirds, but Zeppelin never defined themselves as being a strict blues band, usually breaking out the acoustics every now and then.
For all the great exercises from their early years, such as ‘The Lemon Song’, some of their most iconic songs took the blues and turned them into the basis for hard rock. The Rolling Stones already had chops as a great rock and roll outfit, but hearing the primal sting of a song like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was something fresh that no one had ever seen before.
Even when half of their albums didn’t even have a proper title, everyone in the group was still experimenting with where each of their songs could go. Some days there would be tracks that took a rock and roll approach like ‘Black Dog’, and then there would be tunes that no one knew they needed in their lives like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘The Battle of Evermore’.
Perry was well into making riffs for Aerosmith at that point in his career, but he knew that what Zeppelin was doing was something different. The rest of the group had grown up listening to The Yardbirds, but if they wanted to be looked at as more than just a flash in the pan, they would need to study what Page and Robert Plant were doing.
When inducting them into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Perry said one of the best parts about Zeppelin was their fearlessness in the studio and onstage, saying, “I love this band because they had no limits. They weren’t snobs, and they never held onto any one style. They could change gears six times on one album. They played blues, funk, rock, reggae, and ballads with equal ease.”
Nowhere is that mentality better explored than on Houses of the Holy. Since this was the first official Zeppelin album not to feature any covers, nothing was off the table in terms of what they could touch, including the primal sludge of ‘No Quarter’, the folksy breeze behind ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ and the ethereal beauty behind ‘The Rain Song’.
Although Aerosmith eventually adopted the same mentality of switching things up on every album, they went for a more commercial approach than their predecessors. Whereas Zeppelin had songs like ‘D’yer Ma’ker’ to their name, Steven Tyler and Perry took the more soulful route by making tracks like ‘Rag Doll’ or ‘Love in an Elevator’.
That didn’t mean they couldn’t experiment, like using different digitised sounds and world instruments on later tracks like ‘A Taste of India’. Zeppelin were broken up for a while at that point, but it’s impossible to forget that first band that dared you to dream.
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