What Is and What Should Never Be

Zoo Freaks, settle in for a minute, because the Crew just dropped the needle on "What Is and What Should Never Be," the second cut from Led Zeppelin II, and this one has a story worth telling before the guitars start dancing from speaker to speaker. Jimmy Page has said the tune began in rehearsals at his house out in Pangbourne, written on an acoustic Harmony Sovereign, and it was one of the first numbers the band cut for the second album, right alongside "Whole Lotta Love." Basic tracks went down at Olympic Studio in London in April of 1969 with engineer George Chkiantz, the same fellow known for the phasing work on Hendrix records, and then the tapes rode the tour in a steamer trunk while overdubs and mixes got finished in New York. Page told BBC interviewer Brian Matthew that if you wanted one song that stood for the whole album, this was the one, because it had a bit of everything. They even aired a BBC version on John Peel's Top Gear months before the record hit the shops in October of 1969, and they tried it live that summer at the Laurel Pop Festival.

What makes the record so hypnotic is the way it was built. Page had switched over to the Gibson Les Paul by then, Plant's voice gets a soft phase on the verses, and the fade is full of flanging and stereo panning that sends the guitar and those little squeals bouncing from left to right like a dream you cannot quite hold. Eddie Kramer, who mixed the album with Page at A&R in New York, later said that kind of panning and phasing was exactly the vibe of Led Zeppelin II. Producer Rick Rubin once called the descending riff a bow being drawn back and then let go, and said the vocal rhythm almost feels like a rap, one of their most psychedelic moments. Plant got a writing credit here, one of the first times that happened, and the old story from biographer Stephen Davis is that the words grew out of a romance Plant had with his wife Maureen's younger sister, Shirley Wilson. The title itself is the warning in the middle of the wish: catch the wind, sail away, but the wind will not blow, and you really should not go. That is the tug between what is and what should never be, and the band kept the song in the set through the early seventies because it could turn a room quiet and then lift it again.

As for how Led Zeppelin themselves got started, it was Jimmy Page picking up the pieces of the Yardbirds. He had come into that band on bass, then moved to guitar beside Jeff Beck, and when the Yardbirds finally folded in the summer of 1968 there were still Scandinavian dates left on the books. Page needed a new group to honor them. A singer named Terry Reid turned the gig down and pointed him toward a young Robert Plant, then fronting Band of Joy up in the Midlands. Plant brought in his old drummer John Bonham, and session ace John Paul Jones, who had already played with Page on countless London dates, signed on for bass and keys. The four of them first played together in a basement room on Gerrard Street in August of 1968, rehearsed the new material at Page's house, and went out that September billed as the New Yardbirds, opening in a converted gym in Gladsaxe, Denmark. Page later said the early audiences were hardly ready for it. It was meant to scare the pants off you. Keith Moon had once joked, during a wild session with Page and Beck, that a band like that would go down like a lead balloon, and the name got softened to Led Zeppelin. By the time they came home they were cutting the first album, and the rest is the long, loud road the Zoo Freaks already know by heart.

If you want to wander further down the Zeppelin trail, the official home is ledzeppelin.com, with the timeline, the photo archive, and the forum where fans still trade stories. They keep a page on Facebook, post on Instagram, and run the official account on X. For the longtime faithful, Dave Lewis's Tight But Loose has been the fan magazine and website since the late seventies, and Led Zeppelin News keeps the clippings and links in one place. That is the map, Zoo Freaks. Now let the song spin.