Tag: Led Zeppelin

With all due respect to James Patrick, who I don’t otherwise think is wrong here, he really is the last person who should be criticising others for stealing without credit or payment.

Just gave this a listen for the first time in… I don’t know, but it’s an awful lot of years. Was just browsing Youtube and, oh, look, Zep’s YT channel has their first five albums up there in full, why not give the first one another spin, been so long… It’s really not that good, is it? Never been my favourite LZ (I increasingly favour the third album), and it still isn’t… one thing I did kind of rediscover, though, is that their propensity to crap on at unnecessary length was right there at the start of their career (this, of course, was so early that they were still the New Yardbirds when they recorded the album). I mean, look at the lengths of some of those songs (and look at the dominance of slower songs on side one). “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” just about cuts the mustard, “Dazed and Confused” gets by mostly because the instrumental break is still kind of ball-tearing when it speeds up, “How Many More Times” works cos it’s kind of a multi-part jam, but good grief “You Shook Me” is fucking interminable. Obviously they were to even greater lengths in the live arena—I used to have a bootleg where the show was two and a half hours long and fully 90 minutes of that was spent on just three songs, all in a row too—but album number one was not their greatest recorded moment.

So a mystery I didn’t realise was a mystery has been solved:

A man depicted on the album cover of Led Zeppelin IV has been revealed as a 19th Century thatcher.
The figure is most likely Lot Long from Mere in Wiltshire, photographed by Ernest Farmer.
Brian Edwards, from the University of the West of England (UWE), found the original picture when looking through a photograph album for other research.
“I instantly recognised the man with the sticks – he’s often called the stick man,” he said.
A long-time fan of British rock band Led Zeppelin, he told BBC Radio Wiltshire “it was quite a revelation”.

I’ll bet it was. Apparently the picture as it appeared on the album was thought to be a photo of a painting when the band discovered it (and apparently it’s since vanished, too), but it was actually a coloured version of this photo:

Which then begs the question… where did the coloured version come from and who made it? The photographer is evidently one Ernest Farmer and the photo itself was found in an album he gave to his aunt… how, then, did it travel beyond the confines of that album, as it clearly did for Led Zeppelin to make use of another copy of it, and indeed why did it do so? Did Ernest do it himself? I feel like it’s only opened up more questions… Anyway, a tip of the hat to Lot Long, who I feel certain would never have even heard recorded music (or known that such a thing existed even in 1892), let alone thought he would achieve immortality on an album cover or even conceived of what those words might mean…