Why Led Zeppelin never impressed Bruce Springsteen: “They don’t do the old stuff so good”
The goal of any major artist is to try to outdo the people who came before. There are bound to be a million imitators of them, and people are never going to run short on nostalgia, so why not give the people what they didn’t know they needed whenever releasing a major record? Bruce Springsteen certainly was up to that kind of challenge, but when looking at Led Zeppelin, he didn’t really anything all that surprising on first glance.
Then again, anyone who has ever tried putting a few notes together has been accused of wearing influences on their sleeve too much. ‘The Boss’ wasn’t even immune to that kind of criticism, either, eventually being called the next phase of Bob Dylan when he was running through his first albums like Greetings From Asbury Park.
But Led Zeppelin was a little bit different in that regard. Looking through their body of work, some of their greatest hits aren’t necessarily owned by them, usually reworking old blues songs that are either retitled or structured in a slightly different way. No matter how often people headbang to it, it’s a bit hard to think of ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘The Lemon Song’ as being owned by them when they had been played for years before they started.
At the same time, Springsteen was able to overcome his own problems with his heroes by getting a lot more anthemic. Dylan wasn’t going to bother trying to make catchy pop songs for the masses, but by squeezing ‘Born to Run’ into a mini-epic, Springsteen finally had a style all his own and began to use his E Street Band as an instrument on their own whenever he got onto that stage.
The same could be said of Zeppelin once they reached their untitled fourth record. They still had those bluesy foundations, but who else would think of making a track like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or making the kind of grandiose take on the blues like their version of ‘When the Levee Breaks’?
For someone who had been used to hearing some of the greatest of all time, though, Springsteen initially was far from impressed with what he heard with Led Zeppelin, saying, “They’re like a lot of those groups. Not only aren’t they doing anything new, they don’t do the old stuff so good, either.”
But Zeppelin never had their eye on just doing the old stuff. Looking past their self-titled tetralogy, Houses of the Holy is one of the most experimental records they ever made, and by the time Physical Graffiti started, it was a practical smorgasbord of everything that a hard rock band should be capable of.
So, while Zeppelin might not have been Springsteen’s cup of tea in the beginning, he may have just been seeing them as a little bit of competition for him. He was singing about the wonders of the heartland, and even if Zeppelin only needed four guys to get their sound just right, ‘The Boss’ had an entire legion of followers behind him based on what he could extract out of the sounds of E Street.
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