“Led Zeppelin Reunites: Iconic Rock Legends Set for Historic Comeback Tour!”
It’s never easy trying to compare the new school of rock and roll to the old guard. First of all, it’s not fair to claim that anyone can do what acts as The Beatles did, and no one should just be expected to emerge in the mainstream prepackaged with some of the greatest songs the world has ever known. Kurt Cobain understood that his era of rock and roll wasn’t looking to be classic rock snobs, but he knew that in terms of impact, Sex Pistols had just as much importance to him as Led Zeppelin.
When Zeppelin first emerged on the scene, though, they were already being seen as punks years before this became a popular trend. The first wave of British blues music had started to end, and when Jimmy Page struck out apart from The Yardbirds, he knew that things would be a bit chaotic on the first few Zeppelin albums.
Although the critics were never fans of theirs, Physical Graffiti solidified them as the greatest group in the world circa 1975, with everyone getting increasingly more excessive by the day on tour. Once they finally settled in to make a follow-up, though, the English underground scene already had a fine substitute for Zeppelin in a bunch of kids with spiky hair and nothing better to do but lash out in anger.
From the minute that John Lydon opened his mouth on ‘Holiday in the Sun’, he was looking to dismantle everything that rock and roll stood for. It had become far too pompous to take seriously, and now that someone was gaining traction in the mainstream by screeching obscenities.
Not everything they said was in good taste, but Cobain knew he had found the answer to what he had been looking for. Most of the bands from Zeppelin’s era had a lot of force behind them, but the casual misogyny and macho posturing made a lot less sense compared to Cobain’s desire to explode with anger every time he got onstage.
Despite getting introduced to punk rock years after it began, Cobain claimed that Sex Pistols deserved to be on equal footing with the biggest names in music, saying, “How important were they? About as important as Led Zeppelin [or] any other big rock band. Besides the hype, the music was great.”
Then again, half the reason why so many of those songs work so well is because of just how chaotic they are. Nevermind the Bollocks does sound pristine by some people’s standards, but when you unpack what Steve Jones is doing on guitar and bass, there’s a certain greasiness to his playing that made his leads sound like a jet engine blowing over your head as you listened to it.
While Nirvana did have those same kind of punk ideals when they broke into the mainstream, Nevermind seemed to have the best of both worlds regarding classic rock. It still had that ratty punk energy Lydon had talked about, but when combined with Dave Grohl’s John Bonham-esque drumming, it became the all too perfect antidote for the commercialised hair metal bands clogging up MTV.
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