‘Bring It On Back’: Who won the battle of Jimmy Page and John Bonham?
For a moment, it’s high noon at the Inglewood Corral. Two hot-shot gunslingers in their prime squaring off on main street with an entire town watching with bated breath. Morning sun hanging high as “Mystic” Jimmy Page and “Wildman” John Bonham eye each other, unblinking, both convinced this town is just too small for the other. The weaponry? Page’s Les Paul and Bonzo’s power plant-sized drum kit. The townsfolk? The 20,000 odd punters lucky enough to pack out the LA Forum on June 25th 1972. There’s even a harmonica, except this is no Ennio Morricone soundtrack. It’s pure Led Zeppelin, and there’s nothing quite like it.
As the recently released documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin shows, while the band were nominally from the United Kingdom, their spiritual home was the United States. It was the territory they were catapulted to success in mainly through the strength of their plutonium-powered live show. The typically highbrow English rock press had seen the sheer, awe-inspiring strength and length of their gigs as gauche. However, in the land where cheeseburgers can reach the height of wedding cakes, more is more. Led Zeppelin, it can’t be stressed enough, were more.
They were louder than everyone else. Heavier than everyone else. They were definitely more technically gifted than everyone else, and they had no qualms with showing off all of that with aplomb. If you’ve ever seen the bloated, unintentionally hilarious mess that is their 1976 vanity project, The Song Remains The Same, you can see where the snooty English rock press had a point. Especially when Page starts twatting his guitar with a violin bow. You can imagine the seeds for Spinal Tap were sewn at that very moment.
This is especially egregious because four years earlier, the band had a bootleg circulating of a pair of shows from the same year titled Burn Like A Candle, which shows the band at their undeniable best. The sheer, hammer-of-the-gods force of their music was amplified tenfold by the freewheeling, seat-of-your-pants chemistry fuelling it. The high point of the set comes with its closer, the band’s version of Willie Dixon’s ‘Bring It on Home’.
To illustrate just how much this is saying, this is a setlist that opens with ‘Immigrant Song’ and contains blistering takes on ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Yet it’s the closing number where you get something you don’t get on any Led Zep studio album. A pitched battle between John Bonham and Jimmy Page that is credited as a Led Zeppelin original by the name of ‘Bring It On Back’.
Page lays down searing licks, and Bonham matches him note for note with thunderous fills. However, its all well and good to set the scene, but who comes out on top? Like with any gunfight worth its snake oil, there can only be one winner, and to me, it’s Bonzo, and it’s not even close. Page is one hell of a guitarist, but it’s no secret that his playing in concert was more about the feel than the notes. Given bars to solo completely unaccompanied, you can clearly hear how scattershot this method is. Giving us as many moments of confused flailing as rock genius.
Bonham has an even harder job. He responds to and matches a pattern immediately set down by his guitarist and then translates it onto the skin. He does so with energy and clarity, making a truly energizing moment out of a trick that, later in the decade, would turn into a self-indulgent slog. However, this isn’t to say that Page lets the side down on this track, far from it. It’s just that his crowning moment comes earlier.
You see, the track actually begins as a fairly standard blues shuffle, until Page releases the hounds with a riff from the pits of hell itself that can knock an unsuspecting listener straight to the floor today. God only knows what it must have been like be in the room when he summoned a force like that. It makes sense, though; riffs were always where Page’s strong suit was on six strings. Sure, you’ve got your ‘Stairway’s, and they’re great. Give me the choice of that and the intro to ‘Whole Lotta Love’, though, and there’s no choice for me.
So, the “Wildman” takes this round, but out of respect, he only disarms the “Mystic”. This is because their true power would come from combining their talents. It’s only fitting, then, that the bootleg this all came from got an official release in 2003. One called How The West Was Won.