Did Jimmy Page Play Session Guitar on This Too?

December 5, 2024 3:12 PM

Led Zeppelin II, if it was recorded in the 50s If you ever wondered what Led Zeppelin would sound like if they were contemporaries of Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly and the Crickets, then wonder no more.

Track listing so you can skip ahead if you want:

Whole Lotta Love
What Is and What Should Never Be
The Lemon Song
Thank You
Heartbreaker
Living Loving Maid (She's Just A Woman)
Ramble On
Moby Dick
Bring It On Home

posted by jonp72 (36 comments total)

Ugh! This was ye olde pre-enlightenment "rock and roll" that I was totally glad to jettison when the Beatles opened the door that Led Zeppelin later smashed down!
posted by a humble nudibranch at 3:30 PM on December 5, 2024 [1 favorite]

From the same guy:

Rainbow - Rising, if it was recorded in the 50s


Kiss Dynasty, if it was recorded in country style


Deep Purple In Rock, if it was recorded in the 50s

posted by milnak at 3:45 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]

Pretty awesome - wound up listening to more than I planned! And in this case, it's OK to read the comments (on the video) - full of praise and amazement.

Q: how on earth were recordings done? Legit performing - AI - hybrid?
posted by davidmsc at 3:48 PM on December 5, 2024 [3 favorites]

Anyone want to hear what Tryouts for the Human Race would sound like if Peggy Lee performed it? Here you go!
posted by pxe2000 at 3:56 PM on December 5, 2024

Gold!
sort of reminds when Pat Boone sang Crazy Train
posted by clavdivs at 4:02 PM on December 5, 2024 [3 favorites]

I forget how old I was when I realized that “I’m going to give you every inch of my love” wasn’t a metaphor.
posted by Lemkin at 4:07 PM on December 5, 2024 [3 favorites]

sort of reminds when Pat Boone sang Crazy Train


Boone is exactly who came to my mind, singing about the darkest depths of Mordor and Gollum in such a sprightly manner.
posted by 2N2222 at 4:14 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]

This was ye olde pre-enlightenment "rock and roll" that I was totally glad to jettison when the Beatles opened the door that Led Zeppelin later smashed down!

yeah, I still maintain the "modern" music that I genuinely care about it, that continues to infuse and enthuse me more or less starts with that snare shot at the beginning of Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone. That's the door getting kicked open. Everything before that was just preamble. Necessary preamble but I'm far more interested in where we've gone with it ...

This oldies stuff (as we kids called in the 70s) just lacks something I need. I'd rather hear a reverse of this process. Led Zep AI trained on a pile of ole rockabilly and sockhop options, amps cranked to eleven, Lucifer enabled, the gods hammering forth.
posted by philip-random at 4:28 PM on December 5, 2024 [10 favorites]

I'd rather hear a reverse of this process. Led Zep AI trained on a pile of ole rockabilly and sockhop options, amps cranked to eleven, Lucifer enabled, the gods hammering forth.

I believe what you're looking for is just actual Led Zeppelin.
posted by gurple at 4:36 PM on December 5, 2024 [17 favorites]

Well that's something!

I liked it, but it's funny: what they're playing seems to lean more to 50s pop with a bit of doo wop & rockabilly flavour, without the gritty edge in some old rockabilly tracks. They change some of the vocal melodies and often leave out the iconic Page riffs which defined the songs. The last couple of tracks sound the closest, even though Moby Dick doesn't have a drum solo (heh). Still a fun listen, of course.

It's even more funny, because many years ago I shared a scholarly opinion to an AskMe question about the difference between "Rock" & "Rock'n'Roll" (I'd said a shuffle beat was the big part, but there are other aspects). Led Zeppelin are an interesting example, because they played their "Rock" at their concerts, but always ended their encores with old Rockabilly medleys, which I'm sure confused some of their audiences, and kinda bridged the gap between Rock and Rock'n'Roll in an odd way.

What made LZ distinct from music before them was short crunchy melodic guitar riffs, and bombastic live-sounding drums.
posted by ovvl at 4:54 PM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]

Annd in related: here's Big Daddy's Rockabilly interpretation of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band from 1992. (Which actually has a lot of doo wop).
posted by ovvl at 5:01 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]

I love the idea of it but I can’t. Folky, jazzy, croony I could probably get down with but nuh uh, this stuff isn’t for me. Still, neat idea!
posted by ashbury at 5:29 PM on December 5, 2024

I'm unreasonably annoyed that the turntable in the corner never advances towards the center.
posted by grimmelm at 6:10 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]

Same. Which is exactly why nobody touches my vinyl but me.
posted by flabdablet at 6:26 PM on December 5, 2024

Zep as if it were 1920’s Mississippi has been available for a hundred years. Oh wait no. Do Clapton, fuck yeah.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 7:34 PM on December 5, 2024

Okay, but there's another side to the music of the 50s - and here's the actual Jimmy Page grooving on it (and playing air guitar to it). And as a bonus, here he is playing it himself.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:53 PM on December 5, 2024 [5 favorites]

You hate to be That Guy, but sometimes...

Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone. That's the door getting kicked open

I dunno, maybe that was Dylan and other white kids wandering through an already splintered door and mumbling "Thanks, we'll take it - and the money - from here"
posted by deadgar at 8:40 PM on December 5, 2024 [5 favorites]

It's not difficult to hear Rumble peeping out from inside Black Dog.
posted by flabdablet at 8:50 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]

I'm seeing suggested videos of a similar form from other channels with low view counts, which makes me suspect that this is just a new trend in AI-based content farms. As in, have an LLM generate a bunch of "song/band if it was different style" suggestions, scrape the song lyrics from some website, feed the lyrics and intended style to AI music generation, generate a thumbnail image (AI of course), and upload the result to youtube. That whole pipeline could be automated.
posted by swr at 9:44 PM on December 5, 2024 [1 favorite]

Bred Schleppin
posted by fairmettle at 1:29 AM on December 6, 2024

This is amazing! 🤘
posted by TheophileEscargot at 3:40 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]

Never understood why Jimmy Page gets a free pass for banging a 14 year old when he was in his late 20s.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 4:03 AM on December 6, 2024

I forget how old I was when I realized that “I’m going to give you every inch of my love” wasn’t a metaphor.
Whole Lot of Love (1969, of course) was pre-metrication but "every centimetre" would be a higher number...
posted by rongorongo at 4:26 AM on December 6, 2024

A bit tangential to the post but on the Led Zeppelin tip: If you're a podcast listener I recommend the latest season of KCRW's Lost Notes called Groupies. It talks to the women (then teenage girls) who built the culture around Zeppelin and other 60s and 70s music stars, including a nuanced perspective on the power imbalance in the relationships they had.
posted by latkes at 6:51 AM on December 6, 2024 [2 favorites]

This is all Suno, right?

IMO, it does pseudo-Motown the best. Like the Hard Archive YT channel (cw: probably not actually ironic Blacksploitation & DV themes).
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:54 AM on December 6, 2024 [4 favorites]

Extremely low effort AI content
posted by anazgnos at 7:32 AM on December 6, 2024 [2 favorites]

This is a good reminder that delta blues really had no bearing on rock and roll until the mid-sixties , and the arrangements excise any heavy blue note-bending, both vocally and string-wise, as appropriate.

Also, it emphasizes how weird and awkward the lyrics are on II, like they've been run twice through aughts-era machine translation:

And thanks to you it will be done
For you to me are the only one
All right, yeah
Happiness, no more be sad
Happiness - I'm glad
posted by bendybendy at 7:49 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]

I personally like this better than Led Zepplin since I'm not a fan, but then it emphasizes the lyrics, which are IMO one of their weak points.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:09 AM on December 6, 2024

Q: how on earth were recordings done? Legit performing - AI - hybrid?

Think it’s just AI. The vocals sound pretty AI, and the popular AI song generators are good at this sort of vintage pastiche. I haven’t listened to the whole thing but I’m not sure they really draw much on the Zeppelin versions beyond the lyrics. Are they all even in the same key?

I'm seeing suggested videos of a similar form from other channels with low view counts, which makes me suspect that this is just a new trend in AI-based content farms

Well on one hand this kind of thing is something people genuinely enjoy doing with AI (the first AI song channel that took off was doing vulgar novelty songs with original lyrics in 50s style). So “content farm” isn’t always fair. But this is pretty formulaic.
posted by atoxyl at 8:47 AM on December 6, 2024 [2 favorites]

What's interesting is that the generated cuts that really take off are instantly reposted by a bunch of actual farm channels as they are not protectable. (eg: still whoopin'.)

The YT algo wants to play Baby Huey next. (Though that may be based on my watch history.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:02 AM on December 6, 2024

Now do Kraftwerk. 🤭🫢🫣
posted by varion at 11:11 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]

Yarrrrrgh this is tormenting me. Zeppelin is my favorite band and just … lord no. R.e. The lyrics, they belong in context with the song so reading them “straight” with no trace of sexuality or earnestness is … yeah. I mean if I made “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” into some arch indie track it’d sound godawful. Make it stoppppppppp

This also reminds me that I fucking hate Buddy Holly
posted by caviar2d2 at 5:00 PM on December 6, 2024

While we're at it, I can't stand Weezer or Green Day.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:10 PM on December 6, 2024

Caviar2d2, I love Zep and Holly. To each his own lol.

But this “pastiche” is trash. Just warmed over nonsense with no dynamics or drama.
posted by billsaysthis at 6:33 PM on December 6, 2024 [2 favorites]

Abomination

I say this as a human, not in reverence to LZ
posted by ginger.beef at 7:29 PM on December 7, 2024

Mod note: [This is breaking our heads (so of course we had to add it to the sidebar and Best Of blog roundup of recent great posts)! Thanks, jonp72!]
posted by taz (staff) at 1:58 AM on December 8, 2024