This music holds nothing back. The angriest punk rock was never as balls-out as "Rock and Roll" or "When the Levee Breaks," the most idyllic doo-wop never as sweet as "Going to California" or "Stairway to Heaven." Zoso expresses the full range of human emotion; you cannot feel ambivalent about it; you cannot like it "just a little." It's got finesse and weirdness and newness and noise and funk, it makes you sweat and makes you groove, it's the same as sex, it stops time and history and seems to last hours, it's what the blues could never be. So it makes people uneasy: Ten-years-plus after the Sex Pistols, almost everyone who ever liked punk rock "likes" Led Zeppelin, but almost nobody likes "Stairway to Heaven." The band's other music they can stay detached from; they can like it as camp, as something stupid and cute and quaint and naive. "Stairway" doesn't give them that luxury.

Zoso demonstrates Zep's willingness, unparallelled in the rock annals, to fool around with form-as-form: "Black Dog" is a rope-burning shipwreck of run-in-search-of-estrus, "Misty Mountain Hop" an angular description of a country boy's acid-altered awe on his first trip to San Francisco, "Four Sticks" the treadmill at the end of the rainbow, and though any of the three would leave your head spinning anywhere else, here they're overshadowed by monstrous myths and lissome legends that deserve credit for inspiring Prince and Sonic Youth far more than they deserve blame for encouraging Kingdom Come and Whitesnake. This band got away with murder -- only Parliament-Funkadelic, who fell on their faces far more often, owns an oeuvre of comparable scope and variety. But where for years P-Funk's audience wasn't much more than a cult, Led Zeppelin was the most popular rock band in the world.

Some people despised the way Zep bleached the blues white and pocketed starving black men's royalties all the way to the bank. Others hated Robert Plant's voice, said he sang like a Martian or a guitar or an anorexic fop. Their shows were supposedly "impersonal" fascist indoctrination sessions, or something like that, and it's well documented that they did disgusting things with sharks and black magic. But I'd argue that Zep's modus operandi was basically honest; eschewing the easy-way-out purist regurgitation of Britain's late-sixties blues revival, they sounded white because they were white, and I doubt anybody without a conflict of interest would deny that their "When the Levee Breaks" makes mincemeat of Memphis Minnie's version (from '29, available on "Roots of Rock" on Yazoo Records if you wanna compare). Zep's zillions of fraudulent imitators, just like P-Funki's or the Velvet Underground's, only confirm their greatness. Yet the splendiferous immediacy of the sound has never been matched, and never will be.

The fundamentalists are right: This music, by any biblical standard, should be illegal. It is a golden calf. If you have a heart, a brain, a soul, an ass, a set of gonads, it will change your life. In "Rock and Roll," Robert Plant sings about rock 'n' roll, alluding to "Book of Love" and the stroll, but that's subsidiary; the sound is rock 'n roll, it rewrites the dictionary, curses anyone who won't accept the new way. When John Bonham's thunderbolts and Jimmy Page's cloudbursts of guitar-storm cascade from above, you cannot care about any other music, any other people, any better life you might be living, any better world you might help make. Zoso is a jealous god, it will accept no competition, it demands that you devote your life to it. "Open your arms, open your arms, open your arms," Plant screams; next, in "The Battle of Evermore," he's crooning about the "prince of peace," and the sound's gorgeous; it's a mass, a place of worship. With Sandy Denny from Fairport Convention at his side, Robert takes up the offering ("ohnow ohnow ohnow ohnow bringit bringit bringit"), which adds up to billions.

Then comes Holy Communion. "Stairway to Heaven" might be a song about a rich woman buying clothes at Bloomingdale's, who knows, who cares. Everybody I know has been sick of this epic warhorse for years; Robert Plant himself, when I talked to him -- like Irving Berlin disowning "Alexander's Ragtime Band" as a funeral march in 1925 -- called it "that bloody wedding song." Me, I can't stomach the live "does anyone remember laughter" version, but the studio "Stairway" was the most famous song in Western Civilization in the seventies because it was the best song in Western Civilization in the seventies, or real close. It's constructed as a stairway, with four steps; on every subsequent one, the music gets louder, and you can either turn the volume higher or turn the radio off. If you vote "yeah," to reach the top step, the altar, you will do anything.

If "Stairway to Heaven" is how you get there, "When the Levee Breaks" is how you get back. It, too, is a procession, a stairway with hundreds of steps (someday I'll count 'em), and they're the most massive drumbeats the world will ever know. "Cryin' won't help ya, prayin' won't do ya no good," you're told; it's too fucking late, you've cast your ballot, you shouldn't thought about that before we left home. "Goin' down, goin' down now, goin' down, goin' down now," the cantor intones over and over: "When the Levee Breaks" is the Stairway to hell.

-- Chuck Eddy, "Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe." New York: Harmony Books, 1991. Pp. 12-13.