Are There Any Rock Bands Today That Rival The Level Of Fame And Influence Led Zeppelin Had At Their Peak?

Modern bands with the same level of influence as Led Zeppelin during their peak? You could mean several different things by modern rock band, but I’m going to interpret it as a band that still makes albums and tours. Also, remember that metal is a sub-genre of rock.

Metallica is the one that comes closest, but their fame is not as great as Led Zeppelin’s though and maybe more importantly, Metallica never cultivated the mystique Led Zeppelin did.

You have no idea how much it hurts to be writing this now when I should be singing. I am counting the days, I am salivating over the prospect of coming back and when I do, look out!

Nobody knows how to cultivate mystique anymore. They don’t understand it. It’s a lost art. I’m gonna bring it back. I get it.

Mystique brings about excitement. What you imagine in your mind is so much more powerful than what you see, but nobody dares to leave anything to the imagination anymore. They want to put it all out there on social media and that is the single biggest culprit in the disappearance of mystique.

Led Zep set a standard that nobody else ever reached. People like Metallica only get half the message. Jimmy Page understood there had to be light and shade.

That’s exactly how he put it: "light and shade."

Metallica gets the heavy part, they get the shade part, but they wouldn’t have a clue as to how to go about producing the light part. Therefore, the dynamics are just not there.

Ya understand me?

When you have two critical ingredients to a sound and people rip one of them off all to hell, but they’re mystified by the other, then they will never be anything more than pretenders to your throne.

Oh, Metallica got a little bit of it in a song like Fade To Black and in a song like One, but they have no idea how to just do a song that’s light all the way through. Led Zeppelin could…and did!

Think of Tangerine from Led Zeppelin III or Going To California from their fourth album. Metallica has nothing remotely like those songs, yet Led Zeppelin made some of the heaviest music of their day!

They did that and they made light beautiful songs as well. They never pigeonholed themselves into something as confining as the label thrash metal band, like Metallica did in the 80s, or even metal band like they are now.

Maybe bands are starting to learn to not pigeonhole themselves. It only took about half a century to learn that lesson from Led Zep, but now you do see bands who will do two or three seemingly disparate styles within one song.

It's brave to try to take that challenge on. It's admirable. To then go ahead and make it work? That is something else.

That is something truly remarkable: To take the lightest and the heaviest rock music of the day and fuse them together in the band that dominated an entire decade. You've gotta fuse those elements awfully cohesively to have a shot at attaining that level of fame and the level of influence Zeppelin would go on to have.

Now...if we could just do something about taking on the challenge of how to reclaim mystique. To find someone who can devise a way to bring back to rock music what social media took away.

Now that's a challenge...and I'm up for it. I hope there are others too. I don't want this just for me or even primarily for me.

I want good things for rock 'n' roll. As human beings, we are hardwired to like it. It is a spectacular art form...but it is so much more spectacular when it has mystique. There's nothing else like it.

When you leave something to the imagination, when you take the path of the aspirational rather than the relatable, then you do something truly special.

Then you light the spark in people's imaginations to form dreams...and give them the inspiration to pursue those dreams. That's what rock music can do when it's at its best.

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