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Callan Carpenter interview 1 – Autodesk and social media

Steve Johnson — Wed, 19 May 2010 12:19:07 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, Angela Simoes from the Autodesk Corporate PR team invited me to interview Callan Carpenter, Autodesk’s Vice President of Global Subscription and Support. Callan is responsible for the sales, marketing operations and product support associated with Subscription. He is also Vice President in charge of Jim Quanci’s Autodesk Developer Network. This morning, we had a very extensive discussion about Subscription and other topics that I intend to publish in several parts over the next few days. Deelip has already published a Callan interview, but mine is quite different.

In this post, I will let Callan introduce himself and then move into some questions about social media that I asked at the end of the interview. In this post, both Callan Carpenter (CC) and Angela Simoes (AS) responded to my questions.

SJ: Callan, can you give me some background on yourself?

CC: I’ve been at Autodesk since November 2008. Prior to that, I spent 20-odd years in the semiconductor and semiconductor-CAD software business: technologies in many ways analogous to what we have for our manufacturing, civil and media/entertainment markets here. I was focused on semiconductor design, manufacturing, electrical properties and so forth. I’m an electrical engineer by training. I’ve spent about half of my time in startups and about half in big companies. Everything from designing silicon to sales and marketing to engineering to you-name-it.

SJ: It’s kind of unusual for me as a mere blogger to be approached by a Vice President, but I’ve had this happen twice in the past couple of weeks. Is there a move within Autodesk to engage more with bloggers and social media?

CC: We’re definitely more conscious of social media than we have been historically. We are becoming more cognisant of the power of social media, whether it’s tweets or blogs or other forms. Like any company we have to adapt to that, respond to that and participate in the conversation.

AS: There’s no doubt that the line between what you would call traditional media and social media or bloggers is really blurring, and has been blurring over the last 5 to 10 years. You can’t deny that there are some bloggers, like yourself, Steve, who are quite influential in their industries. So it’s a natural move for us to start engaging more closely with bloggers, especially the ones that are clearly using our product every day, have a very engaged audience, who are really discussing some meaty issues on their blogs. Because we want to ensure that you have just as much information and access to our executives as someone in the traditional media would. Yes, we’re absolutely engaging more closely with bloggers.

SJ: Is this a policy decision or has it just naturally happened?

AS: It just sort of naturally happened. I’ve been here for 4 years now and ever since I’ve been here we’ve always engaged with bloggers in some capacity. This has increased over the past 2 or 3 years, significantly.

CC: I think it’s fair to say that Carl, our CEO and Chris Bradshaw, our Chief Marketing Officer, are very cognisant, very sensitive to… we have to adapt to the way our customers, and our next generation and next generation of customers are using technology, using social networks. They challenge us to not stay stuck in the old paradigms. So there’s a lot of support from the top for engaging in social media.

AS: I think you’d be surprised how many people at the top actually read various blogs and follow what people are saying. They definitely pay attention.

SJ: I read an interesting article the other day about who should be running social media for a corporation; should they have a specific department for it or whatever? How is that happening in Autodesk? Is that a PR function or does everybody do it?

AS: We as a company across all departments have put a lot of effort into looking at what other companies are doing, what works for large companies, trying to find the model that fits best for us. We found that there were already a lot of people across departments participating in Twitter and Facebook, posting videos on YouTube, and so the coordinating functions will sit within marketing, but each department or industry division will have a representative on a social web council, where we are collectively making decisions together. But there isn’t one person doing all this.

CC: So for example, in my capacity with product support, there is an element of social media to our strategy there as well, starting with an improved set of forums and new methodology there that we will be unrolling there later this year as part of our new comprehensive remake of our self-help infrastructure. Then I don’t know where it’s going to evolve to, I think that’s one of the interesting things about social media is, who knows where this is going to end? But we’re definitely looking at it from a support perspective, a marketing perspective, a PR perspective, even from a sales perspective, so there’s so many different dimensions to it. It’s coordinated by marketing, but it’s starting to enthuse almost all aspects of the business and that’s a very interesting thing. Who could have predicted that 10 years ago?

AS: We want to make sure if someone is tweeting about a problem with a download, or somebody isn’t able to log in to the Subscription Center for some reason, or even can’t find information on a product they’re looking for, all of those are different problems to be solved by different groups, and so we are putting into place listening mechanisms so that we are listening to our customers and addressing their concerns and questions in a timely manner. And that does take a lot of coordination internally but we’re working hard at it.

CC: A good example was over a year ago, we did our first major software download for the upgrades in 3 trial countries. One of the feedback mechanisms we used to improve the design of the download experience was listening to tweets.

AutoCAD 2011 launch on 25 March

Steve Johnson — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:36:48 +0000

Just announced by Shaan Hurley via Twitter and Facebook:

Busy on the final details for a special Autodesk event next week in San Francisco with some bloggers. http://www.autodesk.com/webcast

Follow the link and you will find this:

Autodesk Webcast

Date: 3/25/10
Start Time: 9:00 SF/12:00 New York/16:00 UK/17:00 CET

Register today to join Autodesk CEO Carl Bass and Senior Vice President Amar Hanspal for an exclusive live webcast to learn about updates to Autodesk’s portfolio of design software for the AEC, manufacturing and general design industries.

In Autodeskspeak, “general design” means AutoCAD (AEC = Revit, manufacturing = Inventor), so you can expect this to be the same kind of thing as the AutoCAD 2010 launch I attended last year. (Note: ‘launch’ does not mean ‘release’). At this event, selected bloggers will probably get to see the big production effort that goes into the launch webcast (no, it’s not done on Shaan’s laptop webcam). They can expect to be transported, housed, fed and watered by Autodesk, which I trust we’ll see disclosed by everybody this year.

More importantly, they will most likely be given access to various significant Autodesk people, such as my video interview on the Autodesk Listening theme. These events are both worthwhile and great fun, and my best wishes go out to those bloggers who will be attending this time round.

For the previous three years, you will have seen bloggers reporting on the contents of the new release in early February, but this has not happened not this time. Why is the information being held back so long this time, with the launch 48 days later this year than last? I genuinely have absolutely no idea. Feel free to speculate.

Send your screen to Autodesk

Steve Johnson — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:21:27 +0000

No, I don’t mean Autodesk is now so impoverished that it is running short of monitors for its staff, I mean send a capture of your screen to Autodesk. Guillermo Melantoni, one of AutoCAD’s Product Managers, would like to see how you arrange your user interface for production use. As I’ve mentioned before, Guillermo is a very smart guy who is responsible for recent 3D enhancements to AutoCAD. He is open to listening to customers and trying to accommodate their needs. Here’s what he has to say:

I would like to ask all of you to send me screen capture of your AutoCAD in production. I’d like to understand how you organize the diverse components, how you use the Ribbon and/or the toolbars, if you display the command line or not, if you use tool palettes.

I’m very happy Guillermo is seeking to gain a fuller understanding of the diverse ways in which we use AutoCAD, and I encourage you to send him a screen capture of your working environment. If you have several workspaces, send him several screen captures explaining what each capture is showing and how often it is used. If you are a CAD manager or other person with access to several users who set up their interfaces differently, then please send in examples from those other users too.

There are many ways of creating screen captures, but the good old Print Scrn button should do the job fine here, capturing both screens if you use a dual-monitor setup. You can then fire up any graphics app such as Paint (e.g. in XP, Start > Run > mspaint [Enter]) and paste in your capture. Please don’t save it as a BMP file even if that’s the default, as that’s extremely space-inefficient. The PNG format works well for screen captures, being compact without losing quality.

Please send your captures by email to guillermo.melantoni@autodesk.com, and use a subject that begins with MyUI, to help Guillermo deal with what I hope is a lot of screen capture emails!

Autodesk’s Revit rebellion reaction

Steve Johnson — Tue, 26 May 2009 04:33:27 +0000

It’s time to examine how Autodesk has reacted to the widespread criticism of Revit 2010. Is Autodesk listening? To be more specific, is Autodesk’s Revit team listening?

The Good

It has been good to see extensive public participation by Autodesk people in various discussions in different places. The Revit team isn’t hiding. It is asking for feedback on the Autodesk discussion groups, the AUGI forums and its own blogs, and getting lots of it. Much of it is negative, but it is to Autodesk’s credit that I’m not seeing much in the way of denial, or demands that the criticism must be constructive. I’ve been trying in vain for years to convince some people at Autodesk that denial is counterproductive and that criticism doesn’t have to be constructive to be useful.

The sort of messenger-shooting that I’ve seen some Autodesk people do from time to over the years (*cough* R13, CUI *cough*) is generally absent. I’m not seeing Adeskers arrogantly accusing users of their criticism being based on a failure to understand the product. I’m not seeing asinine comments that infer that the negativity is simply a symptom of the critics’ resistance to change. Actually, I’ve seen one such comment, but it wasn’t from an Autodesk person.

Overall, the Revit team’s responsiveness, openness and level of public availability is impressive. It’s so good that it puts other Autodesk teams to shame. When was the last time you saw an Autodesk person respond to criticism of AutoCAD in the Autodesk discussion groups or AUGI forums? Revit people are doing quite a bit of it, and by looking back I can see that they have been doing it for a while.

There was one attempt at a traditional corporate “the product is great, we just need to review our communications” message. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work (read the comments). Denial, spin, obfuscation; these things never convince the people who need to be convinced, so why bother? While it’s good to see a reaction from somebody pretty high up in the chain of command, the people lower down have been doing a much better job of communicating with their customers.

The Bad

The trouble with all this communication is that it’s a couple of years too late. It’s no good putting a huge amount of effort into something, introducing it to users, then discovering too late that the users hate it. No amount of communication after the fact can make up for that kind of blunder. Exposing an early design to a handful of people in restricted circumstances can be useful, but it’s nowhere near enough. Lots of people need to be exposed to a product for a long time (as the Revit team now acknowledges – see an interesting Autodesk blog post here). The earlier it’s done, the better the product will be. As a bonus in these difficult times, this will lower the overall cost of development, because problems get exponentially more expensive to correct as the development cycle progresses.

From the public comments I’ve read, the Revit Ribbon was presented to beta testers as late as January, and by then it was very much a fait accompli. There was little chance of making it work significantly better, and none whatsoever of removing a bad design from the product before shipping. This scenario is, unfortunately, confined to neither Revit nor this particular instance. Although I can’t comment on my own Autodesk pre-release experiences, if you have read enough public discussions over the years you will undoubtedly have seen this kind of conversation a few times:

Angry user: “This feature is useless! The beta testers must have been blind to miss this!”
Beta tester: “Actually, we did see it and reported it right away. Autodesk just didn’t fix it.”

I would like to expand on this, but I am somewhat restricted by NDA. I’m not complaining about that (it’s a voluntary agreement), just stating the position I’m in.

Another thing that belongs in this category is the Revit team’s apparent disdain for its users’ wishlists. AUGI Revit people are convinced that their wishlists are being ignored, and I can see for myself that Autodesk’s own Revit wishlist discussion group is hardly a hive of activity.

The Ugly

Autodesk showed the cloven hoof with its exclusion of Phil Read from Autodesk University.* This reflects extremely badly on Autodesk. See here, here, here and here. Almost everybody seems to think this crude and futile attempt at censorship was a deplorable move, and I agree. Besides this being an example of messenger-shooting at its worst, it’s not a good look for the AU event itself. When you pay your AU fees, are you hoping to see the most knowledgeable, enthusiastic, passionate and inspiring speakers available? Or just the ones with opinions that align with Autodesk?

* My reaction is based on the assumption that this exclusion did take place. It has been widely reported and condemned, but not denied by Autodesk, so I think it’s a pretty safe bet. The only comment from AU management is, “Speakers for AU 2009 will be announced around June 15 – I cannot comment before.”

Revolt of the Revit Ribbon Renegades

Steve Johnson — Mon, 11 May 2009 07:26:12 +0000

I hesitate to cover this subject because my understanding of Revit is very close to nil. I’m going to cover it anyway, because it relates to the Does Autodesk Listen? theme that I’ve discussed here in the past.

Revit 2010 has appeared with a Ribbon interface, and many users don’t like it. Some well-known Revit users, including bloggers, former Autodesk employees and Revit founders, have railed against the new release. Autodesk has been accused of ignoring long-standing wishlists and pre-release feedback. Autodesk has (it is said) wasted precious development resources by introducing a badly-designed and poorly-performing pretty new face at the expense of solving long-standing and much-requested improvements to the core product. The main complaint appears to be that Autodesk didn’t do much with this release, other than introducing an interface that doesn’t work as well as the one it replaced.

All this will sound very familiar to AutoCAD users, but there are some significant differences between the AutoCAD 2009 situation and the Revit 2010 one. First, I think it’s fair to say (even based on my limited knowledge) that the old Revit interface was in some need of attention. It was basically an old NT-style interface that had been left neglected for some years. Revit users may have been mostly happy with the way the interface worked, but the way it looked must have been a bit embarrasing, especially for Autodesk. Second, AutoCAD 2009 left the old interface in place for those people who wanted or needed to use it; with Revit 2010 it’s Ribbon or nothing. There is no transition strategy.

I’m not qualified to make a judgement on whether the complaints about the usability of the new interface are justified. I should also mention that not every Revit user hates everything about Revit 2010, and there are positive comments from some about the new interface. However, I can say that the anti-Ribbon arguments have been expressed not only passionately, but also intelligently and persuasively. It’s not so much a matter of “change is bad”, but more “this change is bad, and here’s why”. Here are some examples:

One More Thing…
One More One More Thing…
A Well-Intentioned Road Paving
Don’t Confuse Change with Progress
Autodesk Bob
Humpty Dumpty Sat On a A Wall…
Dear Autodesk
Revit 2011 – the most significant release EVER

Some of the threads from the AUGI Revit – Out There forum (requires free AUGI membership sign-up to view):

Revit 2010 – New Ribbon UI
1st impression from Revit 2010…
What is your official opinion of 2010?
Who do we complain to?
2009 vs. 2010
Revit evangelist fatigue

Finally, here’s a Dilbert cartoon that was somebody else thought was a relevant comment on this situation.

In a future post, I’ll discuss how Autodesk’s Revit people have reacted to this criticism. Is Autodesk listening? Is it issuing corporate feelgood drivel? Is it circling the wagons and shooting the messengers as they ride by? Or is it doing all of the above?

Bartz the blogger

Steve Johnson — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:17:32 +0000

Autodesk’s Executive Chairman of the Board (who has one or two other little jobs, too) has made a Yahoo! blog post in which she promises to kick a donkey, or something.

Yahoo! if of only tangential interest to me; I don’t particularly care if it thrives or if it dies. However, it’s good to see Carol communicating directly in this way, and it’s good to see her emphasise the importance of looking after the customer, placing emphasis on efficiency over innovation for innovation’s sake, and promising to do better at listening. Welcome to the blogsphere, Carol.

Autodesk not listening? The response, part 2

Steve Johnson — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 10:06:38 +0000

In this second part of the interview, the Autodesk trio continues to respond to the question about listening to customers.

YouTube link.

Autodesk not listening? The response, part 1.

Steve Johnson — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:04:12 +0000

While attending the AutoCAD 2010 launch today, I took the opportunity to interview three Autodesk people: Eric Stover, Jon Page and Shaan Hurley. I raised the issue of Autodesk being seen as not listening to its customers, and was given a very comprehensive response. Here is the first of two parts of that interview.

YouTube link.

Disclosure: Transport, accommodation and some meals were provided by Autodesk.

Why do you think Autodesk isn’t listening?

Steve Johnson — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 04:27:08 +0000

I frequently see people remark that Autodesk doesn’t listen to its customers. I’ve made that remark myself in relation to certain specific items, most recently the botched discussion group update. Of the six Rate Autodesk polls, the Listening to its customers poll shows easily the biggest bias towards the wrong end of the graph.

Now I happen to know that Autodesk goes to some lengths to find out what its customers are thinking (more on that later), but still this feeling of being ignored persists among its customers. Why is this so? Why do so many of you hold this view? I have my own thoughts about this, but right now I’m more interested in yours.

I’d like to see some examples that make you think that Autodesk doesn’t care about your viewpoints, wishes and desires. If you can suggest ways in which Autodesk could do things better, let’s hear them. On the other hand, if you believe that Autodesk is listening, please provide examples that show that to be the case.

I will be asking some Autodesk people the same question very soon, in addition to any questions you pose in my Ask Autodesk a question post (more questions, please!). I will report back on the answers, so it will be interesting to compare your comments with what the Autodesk people have to say.

What a crock!

Steve Johnson — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:57:28 +0000

Just when I thought it wasn’t possible for my Autodesk discussion group experience to get any worse, it has. Much worse.

I stated before that in the 15 November update, some Einstein decided it would be fun to copy my private work email address over the top of my public user ID, automatically making it visible to all and sundry in many places. I should note at this point that publishing somebody’s email address without consent is illegal in some locations, including here in Australia. So to the best of my knowledge (not that I’m a lawyer), Autodesk is not only perpetrating a grossly irresponsible breach of privacy, it’s also breaking the law.

Attempting to fix this myself failed, because of some new introduced bug in the login system. When changing my user ID from my email address to “Steve Johnson”, the screen falsely claimed that the data entered was invalid. I have reported that here, on the newsgroups themselves, and as an official top-priority Subscription support call.

During one of my user ID fix-up attempts, a popup screen asked if I was changing the password (I wasn’t, I was trying to change the user ID) for user “Steve Johnson” or user “my email address”. I tried both in turn, but neither worked. That got me thinking that maybe the update may have created two versions of me; one with the correct name and one with my email address, with the latter being associated with my discussion group messages. So I tried changing the email address one to a name that wasn’t my email address and wasn’t Steve Johnson (SteveJohnson-blognauseam), in the hope that this would at least remove my email address from public view.

I was pleasantly surprised when this change was accepted, but my elation was short-lived. The change process logged me off automatically, and then refused to let me log back on. I can’t log on as SteveJohnson-blognauseam, I can’t log on as Steve Johnson, and I can’t log on as my email address. All attempts are refused as invalid. I can’t log on to chase up my Subscription support call. I can’t log on to erase my email address from the body of a discussion group message, which was automatically infected with my full-text email address when I edited it in an attempt to fix up some of the new formatting issues introduced to the awful editor by the recent changes. Not only that, but after all that, the change of my user ID didn’t “take” in the discussion groups themselves! It was all in vain! Strewth.

I’m stuck in the worst of all worlds. My Subscription access is broken. My email address is still visible. If anyone replies to any of my messages, that email address is likely to be reproduced in plain text in their message, and I’m not going to be able to edit it. I can’t even log on and complain about it on the discussion groups themselves. I don’t have access to my work email account for another 36 hours so I can’t chase up the Subscription people that way, and if they email me with instructions or a request for information I won’t see it. So the chances of this being fixed in a reasonable timeframe (i.e. before the spambots do their harvesting) are slim, to say the least.

Would the dolt or dolts responsible for this SNAFU care to come forward? No, I didn’t think so.

I am struggling to find words that adequately express my displeasure at Autodesk right now. It wouldn’t be quite so abysmal if it wasn’t a repeat of the exact same situation just a few weeks ago, for which I and many others roundly and justly slammed Autodesk at the time.

Autodesk is listening? Yeah, right. In this case, Autodesk is doing a great impersonation of a fence post.

Edit: overnight, my name change to SteveJohnson-blognauseam did actually “take”, so most of the email address instances are gone. Unfortunately, a spambot only needs one instance, and I’m still left with at least one message containing my email address in plain text. I still can’t log on using any of my 3 possible user IDs, so I can’t fix it up myself.

Edit 2: an Autodesk person kindly emailed me (which must have taken significant intestinal fortitude) to inform me they had reset my password, which allowed me to log on and remove what I hope is the only plain text instance of my email address. Other than a few marginal technicalities I described to the Autodesk person, that’s my email address hidden again. Now, what about everybody else in the same boat?

AutoCAD 2009 – Action Recorder needs action

Steve Johnson — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:13:38 +0000

One of the banes of AutoCAD over the past few years is the phenomenon of the half-baked feature. A new feature is added to the product with serious design deficiencies and/or bugs and other shortcomings that make it much less useful than it should have been. I’m sure you have your own favourite examples of this. I may expand on this theme in future, but for now let’s concentrate on one brand new and particularly undercooked feature, the Action Recorder.

The ability to record and play back macros is undoubtedly something that many users want, and has featured prominently in some wishlists. Autodesk has now provided the Action Recorder. Wish granted, right? A shining example of Autodesk listening to its customers and providing what they want and need? Not exactly. In fact, this wish has only been granted at the most superficial level.

Here is the wish as seen on the 2003 AUGI Top Ten AutoCAD Wish List (it’s number 6): “Provide a VBA Macro recorder.” Here it is as it appeared in the February 2006 AUGI Wishlist (it’s number 1): “The ability to record the process of a certain task and assign a quick key to it – similar to Microsoft’s macro recorder for office products.”

People were asking for something similar to what they had in Microsoft products. That is, something that not only allows actions to be recorded and played back, but to also create some kind of editable programming language code. Why would people want that? Because recorded macros can be easily examined, modified, combined, changed from one-off to repeating sequences, used as the basis for slightly different routines without requiring re-recording, incorporated into full-blown routines, and so on. The need for editable code is blindingly obvious, really.

So, how does Action Recorder store its macros? As VBA code? No, but that’s not surprising because Microsoft has dictated that VBA is doomed. LISP code, then? No, LISP is unfashionable at Autodesk. Script files? Nope. XML? Try again. It’s a new and proprietary format. It’s binary, not text. It’s undocumented. There is no known access to the code via AutoCAD’s other programming interfaces. In summary, it’s a closed format.

Does that matter if you can edit it using Autodesk’s tools? Yes it does, but in any case you can’t edit it in any meaningful sense. The only editing mechanism provided by Autodesk is the Action Tree, and it’s woeful. Pretty much the only things you can do with it are to delete whole commands and to change certain recorded actions to prompt for user input instead. You want to change a macro to set up certain layers before you start? Sorry. You want to add a command to the end of a macro? Nope. You’ve picked 3 times during a command and you want to change it to 2 or 4 times instead? Too bad. You want to use one macro as the basis for a whole series of macros, just changing a couple of things from macro to macro? No can do.

This lack of a useful editor isn’t just a problem for CAD Managers and power users. If anything, it’s even more of a hindrance for the novice users it’s obviously aimed at. Who is more likely to get an extended command sequence wrong? A power user with years of experience writing menu macros, or a new user? So who is most likely to need to fix up their macros after recording?

There are various other things wrong with the Action Recorder that go to make it a very frustrating tool. The way in which points with object snaps are recorded is unusable. The way in which zooms occur is bound to cause lots of surprises. The inability to record dialogue box operations is going to confuse and frustrate many users. The habit of the Action Tree in always pinning itself in place is annoying. Its inability to resize outside a very limited range is restrictive. The plethora of in-your-face warnings will have you groaning more than Vista’s User Access Control, and don’t think of turning them off in advance, that’s not allowed. Finally, if you’re not a Ribbon user, forget it. While the command line interface allows for recording and playing back macros, there is no way of editing them. So unless you want to do exactly the same thing in exactly the same location in all your drawings, you’re out of luck.

Don’t take my word for it, try it for yourself. Try to make a macro that does something simple but useful like rotating a piece of text about its insertion point, or inserting a block on a line and then trimming the line within the block. By the time you’ve worked out that it can’t be done, you could have learned about menu macros from scratch and written something that actually works, several times over. A word of warning; please make sure you lock up any pets or children before starting this experiment.

The Action Recorder is a “brochure feature” only; it serves as a marketing tool for Autodesk rather than a genuinely useful productivity tool for its customers. This wouldn’t be so bad if it was an isolated case, but it isn’t. Unfortunately, half-baked new features are now the rule rather than the exception.

Why is this so? Is Autodesk cynically trying to fool its customers in an evil revenue grab? Does the AutoCAD development team spend its time trying to come up with deliberately half-baked features? No. The developers don’t want to make these weak and useless things; they are human beings with the same urge as the rest of us to do well and be proud of their work. The problem is that there is simply not enough time to do a good job with a major feature and finish it off. It all comes down to the 12-month release cycle; it just isn’t working.

Music – Top 3 Debut Albums. Number 3: Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin

Steve Johnson — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:58:30 +0000

For this review of my third favourite debut album of all time, I dusted off the trusty old turntable so I could hear it as it was originally heard.

It seems that certain stock phrases must be included in all Led Zeppelin reviews. So before we go any further, here they are: primal scream, origins of heavy metal, The New Yardbirds, Keith Moon, supergroup, plagiarism.

I must declare a personal interest here. My late father knew John Bonham’s father. Dad once told me about “snotty-nosed little Johnny” running around in shorts in his dad’s garden. The man who would become the model for generations of rock drummers, the man whose sampled snare you will find on countless modern recordings, was born in the same town as myself and lived a couple of miles from where I spent my childhood. On the day of his funeral, I kept looking out of my high school’s windows to try to catch a glimpse of the funeral procession, but I never did. His grave lies about four miles north of my old home. Robert Plant is another local boy made good.

I remember as a teenager listening to this album while being driven by my brother in a Mini van at silly speeds in the dark along narrow English country lanes through that very area, and being impressed by the raw emotional power of the music and lyrics. Enough navel gazing, on with the review.

Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin

Amazon link (see disclosure)

Led Zeppelin’s eponymous debut album was recorded in 1968 and released in early 1969. It shows a variety of different influences including folk, psychedelia and even world music, but is primarily a blues-rock album. To say that it was a hugely successful and influential album would be understating the obvious, so I won’t say that. Instead, I’ll give some brief impressions of the tracks.

Good Times Bad Times
This short blues-influenced rocker includes a couple of short but fine Jimmy Page solos.

Babe I’m Gonna Leave You
A slow acoustic blues cover? Yes, but not just that. With Page driving the strings and Plant’s uniquely powerful yet emotional voice controlling the ebb and flow to perfection, this goes beyond the confines of traditional blues.

You Shook Me
More blues, a cover written by Willie Dixon this time, with a call-and-response section that became a live favourite. It features an interesting backwards echo production technique, where the echo is heard first!

Dazed and Confused
Another slow blues number in 12/8, this is essentially a leftover from Page’s Yardbirds days. The song contains an experimental psychedelic section with Page using a cello bow on his guitar. If listening without the aid of recreational substances (as I do), this drags on a bit. But all is forgiven when it leads into a blistering cymbal-driven guitar solo.

Your Time Is Gonna Come
At the time, this was something like a pop number, despite starting with an extended Jones organ solo. Not an outstanding track, it’s not a bad one either.

Black Mountain Side
This (arguably) stolen acoustic guitar instrumental with tambla drums is, for me, the weak point on the album. I think it would have been a better album without it.

Communication Breakdown
If this song isn’t the origin of the phrase “machine-gun riff”, it should be. Simple, heavy, fast, sweet. Another fine Page solo is crammed into this short song.

I Can’t Quit You Baby
A slow blues cover, again written by Willie Dixon. The fluid bass work is a standout here, but an otherwise unremarkable track.

How Many More Times
This track was listed as 3:30 long on the original record sleeve, apparently deliberately in order to trick radio stations into playing the song. It’s actually 8:28 long, and at the time that represented quite an epic. Shuffle, riffage, soaring guitar work, buildups, wind-downs, pauses, more psychedelic bowed guitar and snare-free drumming, inserted blues covers, sexually charged lyrics delivered with gusto, this song has the lot. If you’re of the opinion that an album should finish with a barnstormer, you should be happy with this one.

The album as a whole showcases Page’s varied guitar work, Bonham’s powerhouse drumming, Jones’ precise and fluid bass work, but more than anything, this is the album that introduced Robert Plant to the world. Things were never quite the same after that. The artwork is great too. Simple, iconic, brilliant.

Criticisms? The album was recorded in a hurry (35 hours) and in places it shows. Jimmy Page wasn’t as scrupulous as he should have been in giving credit to other people’s songwriting work. A couple of later Led Zeppelin albums reached greater heights than this. Jimmy Page, for all his towering achievements as a session musician and “guitar god”, was prone to be sloppy (especially live) and was technically bettered by several contemporaries (not to mention a million unheard guitarists today: guitar standards have come a long way in 40 years). Oh, and the rear cover would have been better (if less amusing) if John Bonham had been wearing something other than a cable-knit sweater that looks like it was a gift from his mum.

None of that matters enough to knock this debut album out of my top three. It’s still a great album.

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