Greta Van Fleet And Train: Two Led Balloons

Greta Van Fleet has been like a ghost hovering over The Skip Button since day one. At the time of the show’s conception, no band was more fun to hate on than the Michiganian troupe of brothers who were getting all kinds of press for their cheap imitation of Led Zeppelin. During the podcast’s pilot episode, as my friends and I discussed the disdain Nickelback used to receive from the rock community, it was inevitable that we would bring up the genre’s newest punching bag, comparing their reception to the absolute pummeling Nickelback took from rock journalists. Since that first episode, Greta Van Fleet has been the elephant wearing a deerskin vest in the room. At some point in almost every episode I’ve done - whether or not it ended up in the final edit - their name has been conjured, a shorthand for the worst that rock music can be.

Most recently, the band came up during my episode about Train, when PopMatters’ Colin Mcguire broke the news to me that the Pat Monahan-led band released a cover album back in 2012 entitled Train Does Led Zeppelin II, a run-through of Led Zeppelin’s 1969 album in its entirety. Since most of the criticism against Greta Van Fleet is that they are little more than a glorified Led Zeppelin cover band, it was only natural that the specter of the group was once again summoned.

Yet, despite the frequency with which they come up on my show, the band themselves had been fairly quiet since their debut almost three years ago. For a moment, it seemed as though their music - and the hate that accompanied it - was going to be little more than a fad of the late 2010’s. Then, while I was putting together the finishing touches on the Train episode, it finally happened: Greta Van Fleet dropped their new album, The Battle at Garden’s Gate. This happens a lot, where the universe almost seems to be on The Skip Button’s side: I didn’t learn that Genesis was going on a reunion tour until after I settled on Phil Collins as an episode topic; it was only during my conversation with Colin that I learned that the month I spent working on the Train episode was the same month as the 20-year anniversary of “Drops of Jupiter”, the hit that blasted them into the Milky Way; the same week that I released the Train episode, The Ghost of Skip Button Future released the follow-up to their infamous debut album, Anthem of the Peaceful Army.

Although I have thoughts on the group’s sophomore project that are independent of Train, it was hard not to compare The Battle at Garden’s Gate to Train Does Led Zeppelin II, an album I had only just discovered a few weeks prior. Of course, I processed these albums differently; it’s not exactly apt to listen to a Led Zeppelin cover album the same way one would listen to something that just sounds like a Led Zeppelin cover album. That’d be like comparing apples to pictures of apples. However, given that both of these albums are directly connected to the godfathers of hard rock, and given that both albums serve as fodder for people who hate their respective creators, listening to these albums so close to each other brought up questions about originality, musicianship, and the legacy of rock & roll music.

Before I get too deep into my comparison of these two albums, let’s first meet the players:

Greta Van Fleet is a constant suggestion for a Skip Button episode. The reason I haven’t done it yet is because I’m interested in the story arc: the highs, the lows, the fall-offs, the comebacks, etc. Greta Van Fleet’s career just isn’t storied enough yet for me to really sink my teeth into them. That being said, the amount of negative press they’ve received over just one album is fairly noteworthy. After they released Anthem of the Peaceful Army in 2018, Pitchfork went viral for their review of the album, which they gave a 1.6 out of 10, calling it “stiff, hackneyed, overly precious retro-fetishism.” I have no real counter-arguments to the review. It’s an album that glorifies the legacy of late-60’s/early-70’s rock music without doing anything to actively contribute to it. It plays like the soundtrack to a fake Led Zeppelin biopic that never procured the rights to the actual Led Zeppelin songs (a la 30 Rock’s Jackie Jormp-Jomp).

I’ll concede that I may have a bias. Music that peddles nostalgia can often make me uncomfortable. Even when someone like Bruno Mars does his best impression of New Jack Swing - and it is, in fact, an exceptional impression - it takes time for me to appreciate it as more than just a gimmick, a cheap way of putting listeners at ease. However, even people who have no issue with what Bruno Mars does still take umbrage with Greta Van Fleet’s over-romanticization of classic rock. Perhaps it’s the band’s hesitancy to own up to the influence Led Zeppelin has had on them. In an interview with Rolling Stone, lead singer Josh Kiszka admitted that he was a fan of Led Zeppelin, but stated he developed his singing style independently of his exposure to vocalist, Robert Plant. Does anyone who’s listened to more than 5 seconds of these two bands even remotely believe him?

The other quality that makes Greta Van Fleet’s music stand apart from that of Bruno Mars is its utter humorlessness. When Bruno Mars sang in desperation as animated raindrops showered his face in the music video for “That’s What I Like”, he knew exactly what he was doing. When Josh, on the other hand, took the stage at SNL in Native-American garb, curled his hands up in the air, and screamed in a British accent, “And the black smoke riiiiises/from the fire, we are told”, there was not an ounce of the same self-awareness. In fact, his eyes had a glimmer of intense conviction as if no one had ever done anything like this before.

As the video above points out, Greta Van Fleet is far from the first band accused of ripping off Led Zeppelin, one of 20th century music’s most successful rock acts. Yet, unlike bands like Rush, Greta Van Fleet show no signs of using that inspiration as a jumping off point. The music isn’t in conversation with Led Zeppelin, it’s simply parroting them.

And yet, despite comic levels of negative press, Anthem of the Peaceful Army served the band fairly well. After all, it got them an invite to play SNL. In addition, the album debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, and even earned them a couple Grammy nominations. It seemed as though the best their haters could do was rub their temples and hope the band would either disappear or do better.

Which brings us to The Battle at Garden’s Gate. (By the way, if there’s not a “Greta Van Fleet Album Title Generator” based on your birthday and last name or whatever, someone should really get on that. I’ll go ahead and say mine would be Treatise of the Famished Angels.)

Here’s the thing about Greta Van Fleet on their new album: they sound really good. Josh’s tenor is even more sonorous than before, sounding almost siren-like on songs like “Broken Bells”. The grooves are tighter, the guitar licks are more engaging, if nowhere near as virtuosic as Jimmy Page’s. Since their debut, the Kiszka brothers, along with drummer Danny Wagner, have clearly spent a lot of time honing their sound as a band. The question is, will people congratulate them for this? Should they? Because, despite what they may have told Zane Lowe in a recent interview, this album doesn’t find them moving much further away from the sound that had them pinned as Led Zeppelin copy-cats, it just makes their imitation more impressive. However, if the thing Greta Van Fleet does isn’t artful (which it isn’t), are they at least owed props for doing that thing well? I don’t know that there’s a concrete answer to this; it’s not my M.O. to sit here and judge the people for whom this album scratches an itch. However, if the people who still hate this band have a solid argument, it’s that if they wanted to listen to something that convincingly sounded like a Led Zeppelin song, they would just put on a Led Zeppelin song.

Which brings us to Train.

If you’ve listened to the Train episode, you’ll know that Train Does Led Zeppelin II is not Patrick Monahan’s first foray into Led Zeppelin covers. Monahan got his start singing with a Led Zeppelin cover band by the name of Rogues Gallery in the late ‘80’s. In fact, Monahan has said that he and his bandmates often start rehearsals by blowing through some of their favorite Zeppelin tracks. The band has a deep-seated love of Led Zeppelin that might surprise their casual listeners who know them for soft acoustic pop songs like “Hey Soul Sister”. Yet, as I listened to Train Does Led Zeppelin II, I started making connections I had never seen before, like the one between Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You” and “We Were Made For This”, a euphoric love song off of Train’s underrated California 37 album. Also, much like Josh Kiszka and Robert Plant, Pat Monahan’s voice at its best sounds like the right-hand side of a jazz organ. And while he every now and then puts a costume on that voice, adopting Plant’s iconic accent and mannerisms, those moments are fleeting; they’re brief instances of a man who has already built his own legacy tipping his hat to the legacy of a man who’s inspired him since the beginning.

Sure the album is unnecessary, but what cover album is “necessary”? Hell, what Train album is “necessary”? Train Does Led Zeppelin II is exactly what you would expect and perhaps even want from a cover album by a band slightly past its prime: it’s fun, gracious, winking and faithful. While I don’t respect Train any more for having listened to it, I do feel like I got to know them better. Experiencing this album is like stumbling into the band’s rehearsal room as they loosen up by jamming out to their favorite music. Even more so than Greta Van Fleet, this album made me want to be as big a fan of Led Zeppelin as Train is.

And that’s what both of these albums do with relative success: keep the names of their progenitors in the heads of their listeners. Which brings us to another figure in this equation we haven’t really discussed yet: Led Zeppelin.

Here’s where I need to lay my cards out on the table: Until I started writing this piece, I didn’t really know or care all that much about Led Zeppelin. Classic rock has been one of my many blind spots in pop music lexicon, having learned most of what I know about it from “School of Rock”. I vaguely understood songs like “Stairway to Heaven” and “Immigrant Song” to be cultural touchstones, but couldn’t tell you much about how or why. And honestly, it wasn’t a problem I ever thought needed solving until I listened to these two albums. However, after finishing Greta Van Fleet’s new record and Train Does Led Zeppelin II,I knew it was time to listen to the actual Led Zeppelin II.

Led Zeppelin’s second album was released the same year Patrick Monahan was born, and only a few months after the band rocketed to success with their debut album, “Led Zeppelin”. (It’s worth saying that Rolling Stone’s review of that first album asserts that the band “offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn't say as well or better three months ago.” So perhaps the argument that Greta Van Fleet rips off other bands is an outdated and short-sighted one, and when all is said and done, I’ll be on the wrong side of history.) Having listened to Greta Van Fleet and Train first, I found myself appreciating Led Zeppelin II through multiple lenses: as a product of a movement of young creatives in the 1960’s who were redefining western music, as a watershed moment for children like a young Patrick Monahan who were inspired by rock & roll culture, and as a legacy, an artifact that someone like Josh Kiszka could blow the dust off of and learn from as though it had materialized in that moment just for him. It was the most I ever enjoyed an album of its kind, and I’m glad I went on such a round-a-bout journey to listen to it.

I’m not happy with the people who are imitating Led Zeppelin, but I am happy Led Zeppelin is being imitated. We need the copy-cats. We need the out-of-touch rock stars making needless cover albums and the even more out-of-touch upstarts who don’t yet know enough about their source material to add anything meaningful to it. They inspire a fascination with a musical history we may not have known enough about, and make us think more critically about music that is actually important, even if that music isn’t being made by them.