What Is and What Should Never Be

Zoo Freaks, lock the kickstands and pour another cup of that strong stuff, because the Zoo Crew has Led Zeppelin II spinning and the needle just dropped on “What Is and What Should Never Be.” This is the kind of cut that makes a late-night ride feel longer and sweeter. If you want to ride along with the rest of the pack, keep it locked on THE ZOO, where hippie hearts and biker boots still agree that a great album track beats a three-minute single every time.

Jimmy Page once told a BBC interviewer that this song had “a bit of everything,” and he was not blowing smoke. When the band was still mixing the second record in 1969, a radio man asked him to pick one track that stood for the whole album. Page pointed straight at this one. He had started the idea on an acoustic Harmony Sovereign, then moved it over to the Gibson Les Paul that would become his trademark. The verses whisper and shimmer. The chorus slams the door. Engineer Eddie Kramer, who had already chased wild stereo pictures with Jimi Hendrix, helped Page sling the guitars from one speaker to the other until the fade-out felt like a motorcycle weaving through traffic. Robert Plant’s voice got that phased, floating treatment on the verses, which is why the song still sounds a little like a dream you are not supposed to tell anybody about.

It was also one of the first Zeppelin tunes that gave Plant a proper writing credit. Up to that point Page had been the architect, the session veteran with the maps in his head. On this number Plant started finding the rise and fall in his own singing. Years later he said that by the time of “What Is and What Should Never Be” and “Ramble On,” he was finally learning how to put some air and muscle into a line instead of just stating it. Producer Rick Rubin later called the descending riff “like a bow being drawn back, and then it releases,” and he said the vocal rhythm was almost like a rap. That is high praise from a man who has heard every heavy record worth hearing. Live, the band carried the song from 1969 into 1973. You can still hear the Royal Albert Hall 1970 version on the official DVD set, and another blast turns up on How the West Was Won. It was never the poster song. It was the one that showed they could be delicate and dangerous in the same four minutes and forty-seven seconds.

Rock writer Stephen Davis, in the old Hammer of the Gods book that every road dog has dog-eared, claimed the lyric grew out of a romance Plant had with his wife’s younger sister. Plant has never stood on a rooftop and confirmed the gossip, and the Zoo Crew is not in the business of dragging a man’s family through the mud. What matters on the air is the feeling in the words: temptation, a line you should not cross, and the heat that comes anyway. That is why the title still hangs in the room after the last cymbal dies. Page himself later described the track as the lighter counterpart to the riff monster “Whole Lotta Love,” still using Bonham’s drums for those power choruses. Soft, then smash. Whisper, then roar. That is Zeppelin in a nutshell, and that is why this song belongs on a station that still believes in albums instead of playlists.

The band that made it did not crawl out of a boardroom. It crawled out of a basement and a broken group. Jimmy Page, born James Patrick Page on January 9, 1944, in Heston, Middlesex, had already been England’s busiest session guitarist. He played on other people’s hits, got tired of the clock, and joined the Yardbirds in 1966 after years of watching Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck pass through that same chair. When the Yardbirds finally fell apart in 1968, they still owed a Scandinavian tour. Page kept the dates and started building what he first called the New Yardbirds. He wanted a singer with range and nerve. Terry Reid turned him down and pointed him toward a long-haired kid from the Midlands named Robert Plant. Page went to hear Plant and later admitted he thought the voice was too good to be sitting in small rooms. There had to be a catch. There was no catch. Plant came down to Page’s place in Pangbourne, they spun Joan Baez’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” and the spark caught.

Plant brought his old Band of Joy drummer, John Bonham, who was making a steady forty pounds a week with Tim Rose and did not want to gamble it away. Page and manager Peter Grant kept after him until Bonzo showed up. John Paul Jones, born John Baldwin, a fellow London session man and arranger, heard the chair was open after Chris Dreja stepped aside to take pictures. Jones called Page. The four of them met in a cramped room off Gerrard Street in London in August 1968 and tore into “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” Jones later said that as soon as he heard Bonham, he knew it was going to be great. They locked in on the first downbeat. Plant said he had never been so turned on in his life. That is not radio talk. That is four players realizing the chemistry is bigger than any of them.

They debuted on September 7, 1968, at the Gladsaxe Teen Club in Denmark, still wearing the New Yardbirds name. The joke that became the real name came from Keith Moon and John Entwistle, who said a band like that would go down like a lead balloon. Grant spelled it Led so nobody in America would say “leed.” By Christmas they were on a plane to the States. In January 1969 at the Fillmore West, Grant told Plant that if they did not crack it there, it was over. They cracked it. The first album was already in the can. The second album was written and recorded on the run, master tapes riding around in a steamer trunk from London to New York to Los Angeles while the band learned how to be the biggest new thing on the road. Page has said that once that rhythm section was in place, he already had a picture of how the records could keep changing. “What Is and What Should Never Be” was part of that picture: proof they were not just a heavy blues act, but a band that could float and then drop the hammer.

That is the story the Zoo Crew likes to tell when this song comes around. Not the private-jet folklore. The four guys in a small room who heard something none of them had heard before and decided to chase it across an ocean. If you want the official house of the catalog, the reissues, the timeline, and the discography that still lists Led Zeppelin II proud as ever, go to the band’s official site at ledzeppelin.com. Ride with them on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For day-to-day band news written by people who still care about set lists and tape boxes, Led Zeppelin News keeps the porch light on. If you like a big kitchen-table argument with other fans, the long-running Facebook group The Led Zeppelin is packed with folks who will talk riffs until the sun comes up.

So there it is, Zoo Freaks. A song built on a cheap acoustic, finished on a Les Paul, whispered and then detonated, written while a brand-new band was still learning its own name. Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham did not wait for permission. They took the leftover Yardbirds dates, found each other, and made a record on the highway. “What Is and What Should Never Be” is the sound of that first real freedom. Turn it up, let the stereo bounce around the room, and remember why this station still plays the album cuts. The Zoo Crew will be right here when the next side hits.