'You've Got to Be Pissed Off': Rage and Reverence in Beth Hart's Take on Led Zeppelin
Friday, 25 February 2022
Written by Simon Ramsay
Some albums require all kinds of spin to generate interest. Others do not. So when you hear that one of the greatest vocalists of her generation has paid tribute to possibly the most influential rock band of all time, any additional hype is completely unnecessary. Luckily, Beth Hart’s powerhouse Led Zeppelin covers album more than does justice to the groundbreaking source material.
In life there will always be naysayers, especially when it comes to this kind of project. What’s the point of trying to recreate perfection? Some may label it second rate karaoke without a second thought, or even wonder why such a gifted songwriter didn’t use lockdown to produce her own material. Thankfully, all those questions are made irrelevant as soon as this record bursts from the speakers.
Although Hart wrote more than 70 songs during the pandemic, which we’re reliably informed will result in some epic forthcoming releases that cover every genre from aggressive bluesy rock to traditional jazz, recording them wasn’t logistically possible thanks to the regulations that came with managing Covid. This tribute album, however, was a completely different matter.
Producer Rob Cavallo already had an orchestral version of the record in the bag before Hart had been convinced to tackle it. Despite regularly nailing Whole Lotta Love in her live shows, the Californian songwriter was reluctant to approach this project because she didn’t have the kind of anger needed to do it justice. Thanks to a confluence of seemingly fated circumstances, that changed after the pandemic hit.
Enraged by what she was witnessing and needing to expel it from her system, Hart hooked up with Cavello via Zoom to belt out epic versions of everything from Kashmir and The Rain Song to No Quarter, Black Dog and, of course, Stairway To Heaven. Pouring every ounce of her aggression into honouring the music of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham, the result is an extraordinarily high quality record that doesn’t so much reinvent the formula as much as showcase why it was so magical and influential in the first place.
You’ve said that you’ve got to be ‘pissed off to hit Zeppelin right and make this kind of album.’ Can you describe what your experience of the pandemic was like and how it brought you to that point?
So, the pandemic hits and everything gets shut down. And me, being the hypochondriac that I am, think everyone’s gonna die. It’s probably because I come from so much trauma as a kid. I always think the worst, the worst, the worst. And I’d been on certain medications for my mind for many years. One of the things that did was dumb down all my emotions. When I was young the music I was making was much more aggressive and when I got on this medicine my songwriting shifted. I got a bit softer, which was fine. It was the lesser of two evils, to be healthier in the mind. Then, all of a sudden, all my old stuff came back up that had been suppressed.
I’d turned down doing Zeppelin before because I didn’t have that anger and now it’s back. And Covid made everything even more scary. How I usually deal with my fear is that I get angry. That’s my mask to make me feel safe. And the horror, even worse than Covid, was the politics and the beauty of people marching all around the world for equality. Seeing the resistance against that, even from some people very close to me, like blood relatives and friends, I just got so pissed off. So I called up and said ‘I would love to do this record. Send me everything. I want all their recordings. I want all their live stuff and everything Rob has already done with the orchestra.’
What was the recording process like?
It was really hard. There was a lot of poetry, a lot of non-repetitive parts. There were also some things I just didn’t pull off. It wasn’t good enough. We did 16 different pieces and ended up choosing nine. Then Rob ended up changing his mind at the very end. After all the vocals had been done he decided to push the orchestration to the back and bring the drums, bass, acoustic guitars and electric guitars to the forefront. When I was recording I didn’t hear any of that. I just heard the orchestra. Which made it harder because you don’t have that backbone. I’m gonna be aggressive no matter what, especially when it’s called for. I learned that from Plant and listening to their recordings. I couldn’t not do that because it would be so disrespectful and, literally, I’m working on hallowed ground, right?
Exactly. So, what were your initial feelings once you decided to go ahead and, essentially, tackle the holy grail of rock music?
I started learning it and was scared. I was blown away by how difficult it was going to be. Thank God I’d grown up being interested in studying so many different genres. Thank God I had that vocabulary because that’s what I realised about Page. He had a really wide vocabulary in terms of songwriting and, specifically, sonically. His harmonics, chords, arrangements, dynamics. Then you’ve got Plant, who had the biggest vocal range and could do anything. But what worked for me was that I could hear in his style that Plant listened to a lot of early Black blues and soul artists.
Just how difficult was it to sing Plant’s songs?
The massive vocal range was very challenging, but also his rhythms. Even though you could tell he listened to a lot of blues, he had interesting rhythms that are based in jazz. So he knew how to lay back and even how to double back phrase, which I’ve only really heard from Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. Those were the queens of double back phrase. Did he have some jazz going on in his household? Because it’s really hard to do. To know how to double back phrase, or how to push forward and get in and out of rhythms in a place that’s not on the ‘one.’ A lot of the time rock ‘n’ rollers are always on the ‘one’. You hear him do a lot off of that. I don’t know if Page was guiding him on that or just let him do his thing.
His lyrical talents were often underrated and disparaged because he occasionally wrote songs about getting laid.
I could see Plant was so much deeper than just being a young kid writing about wanting to have sex with lots of women. Of course he was going to write about that. He’s a young kid. He’s a guy. He’s filled with testosterone. But then he had this whole other spiritual side as a poet, like Jim Morrison. There was a lot of depth to Plant, in his thinking. Was he studying history? Was he studying poetry? Did he go to college? Did he have a literary professor in his family tree? Was he just interested in reading a lot of books as a young kid and a lot of great writing by great writers?
There was something there. Stairway To Heaven, to me, was not at all about a girlfriend. It had to be about some woman he really admired and looked up to. I don’t know if it was a religious thing like a Mother Theresa or who Paul McCartney writes to on Let It Be. But there was someone feminine that he looked at very spiritually with great respect. That’s how I see it.
As a classically trained composer yourself with an appreciation for lots of different genres, what more can you say about Jimmy Page?
So this is the thing, more than anything else, that blew my mind when I got into their material. What I was completely unaware of was that Page, clearly, was not just being schooled as a child on a lot of the Black artists coming out of the United States, like The Stones were, like The Beatles were, like Plant was. You could hear it in the writing and the approach. I don’t know if it was his grandparents, parents or somebody he was growing up with, but he was listening to a lot of classical music.
[It’s in] a lot of those arrangements, the dynamics, the diversity of chords, how he’d get in and out of chords and bend things. And then his production ideas, it was like he was listening to a lot of Rachmaninoff and Miles Davis. So he was taking it and working it into what he was feeling at that age and what he could do as a producer, writer and guitar player.
Can you explain how you walked the fine line between reverence and putting your own stamp on the material?
I knew I had to respect what was done. I couldn’t just kind of take it, fling it and do my own thing. Not with music like this. Same thing when I’ve covered Etta James or Billie Holiday. There has to be a level of respect or it’s not cool. But you can’t try and do a copy either because then that’s not cool. You’re not showing any kind of personal connection to it. The thing that was really important to do, like when I did the covers records with Joe Bonamassa, was to be able to see that, if I had to write the song, who it would have been about, what it would have been about, for me personally.
I remember reading, when I was 18, this wonderful book called The Tao of Leadership. It’s all based on Chinese religion, their faith and how they do things. Yin and Yang. One of the things it talked about was mastering something and it said ‘if you want to master something you have to learn exactly the way it was done and then completely let it go and make it your own.’ If you don’t learn exactly how it was done then there’s no foundation to make it your own. In other words, your straw house is built on top of sand instead of being built on top of a rock. So, respecting Zeppelin to a tee but also having a bit of your own feeling and making it your own a little bit. Making it personal.
Finally, can you tell me about the moment you heard what Rob Cavallo had done with the record?
The first song I heard was Babe and I just started crying. I’m dramatic and overly emotional anyway but, man, I lost it. I couldn’t believe what a phenomenal job he and everyone [had done]. How he made them sound. It made me feel like I did a good job because I was worried. You try and do your best but don’t know until you actually hear it. And when I heard what he did I hugged him on his knee, I was on my knees and he was sitting down on a chair, and I cried and said ‘thank you’.
I’m sorry I’m so emotional right now it’s just, fuck man, Covid’s been such a fucking bitch and then I got so lucky to get to do that record which was really frickin’ humbling, to hear the brilliance of that band. What they were able to do at such a young age and then to be able to work and have something to not only teach me but make me grow artistically. To have a way to get out of it and be creative and then have Rob capture me so beautifully. What an experience.
Beth Hart Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Thu March 09 2023 - BIRMINGHAM Symphony Hall
Wed March 15 2023 - NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE O2 City Hall
Fri March 17 2023 - LONDON Palladium
Sat March 18 2023 - LONDON Palladium
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