Jack Russell's Great White Set to Unleash New Led Zeppelin Tribute Album
Great Zeppelin II features 14 Zeppelin classics that'll knock you off your feet.
Thanks for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection. It seems like these days there are a lot of cover albums and re-recordings being done by various bands and I’ve told you about some of them in this newsletter. Well, there’s another one to tell you about that might appeal to fans of 1980s metal bands and/or Led Zeppelin.
This week, I spoke to Jack Russell, formerly of Great White and now the leader of his own offshoot, Jack Russell’s Great White. His band is working on its next release, but for now, Russell and his bandmates are set to release a new Led Zeppelin tribute in August. I hope you enjoy reading about it below.
Back in 1998, Great White recorded a live album of nothing but Led Zeppelin classics. That album, entitled Great Zeppelin: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin, featured 14 outstanding Zep covers was recorded live in December of 1996 at a show in California.
More than 20 years later, Jack Russell’s Great White is set to release Great Zeppelin II: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin, which features another 14 tracks (on CD, the vinyl omits five songs to fit on a single LP album) of the legendary rock band’s best material. Four songs appear on both releases, although the new tribute album from Jack Russell’s Great White, which is set for an Aug. 13 release, was recorded in the studio, instead of live, after the band had trouble with its mobile recording setup.
“It's live in the studio, but it was going to be a live album — like a live concert,” Russell said. “But unfortunately we had a lot of technical issues with our recording equipment, and we couldn't get the recording to work right. So, you know, we had three shows that we did and none of them came out quality enough to use for the album, so we decided to do it live in the studio, under controlled conditions. We knew that when you push record, it's going to record.”
Joining Russell in Jack Russell’s Great White are guitarist Robby Lachner, bassist Dan McNay, and drummer Dicki Fliszar. Michael Olivieri isn’t a full-time band member but helped out on the album of Zep covers. Lachner does a fine job handling the Jimmy Page guitar solos while Russell plays the role of Robert Plant.
The tracklist is a cross-section of some of Led Zeppelin’s top tracks:
Whole Lotta Love
Good Times, Bad Times
Misty Mountain Hop
Dancin' Days
No Quarter [CD only]
Kashmir
Houses Of The Holy
Trampled Underfoot
Moby Dick [CD only]
The Rover [CD only]
Stairway To Heaven [CD only]
Heartbreaker
Livin' Lovin’ Maid [CD only]
Communication Breakdown
Four of the CD-only tracks — “No Quarter,” “The Rover,” “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Livin’ Lovin’ Maid” — were on the original Great Zeppelin tribute album. The other, “Moby Dick,” is a new cover.
“The reason the songs appeared twice were because those were songs I felt really needed to go into the set,” Russell said of the four repeated tracks from the first Zeppelin tribute. “There were a lot of songs that I didn't get to do on the last album, as in “Whole Lotta Love” and songs of that ilk.”
The two Zeppelin tributes both feature the song that Russell said first grabbed his attention as a boy — “Stairway to Heaven” — because it broke all the rules.
“That was the first song that really got under my skin and just really blew me away,” he said. “That's when I really started to appreciate arrangements, because I thought, ‘here's a song that is just amazing from start to finish, but yet it has no chorus.’ There's no part that repeats itself lyrically and it breaks all the rules. A song shouldn’t be 12 minutes long. That’s just ridiculous. How are you gonna put out a song that’s that long?
“It really showed me there’s a different way to do things. You can break the mold. You don’t have to do things exactly — verse, B section, chorus, solo, chorus, out. You can stray from the formula, and yet not have to pay a price.”
With a recording career spanning well over 35 years, Russell has earned the right to do as he likes. He said that he’s been in the process of writing a new original album for Jack Russell’s Great White, which last released a studio album with 2017’s He Saw It Comin’, but he had been suffering a bit of writer’s block during the pandemic. Doing another Led Zeppelin tribute was a chance to get back to recording and to do something enjoyable.
“The band was all for it because they weren't involved in the last one — nobody in my (current) band was — so they were all excited to do it,” Russell said. “I said ‘what the hell.’ I mean, music to me should be fun, not just, ‘okay we have to do this, we have to do that, and this is contractual, and we need to put out so many records per calendar year, or so many original records. And I just want to have fun, you know, and I want to do things that I want to do musically, and if it's covering somebody else's songs, I really don't care what anybody else thinks. I want to do it and I want to enjoy it and that's exactly why we did this.”
The songs are more or less faithful representations of the originals by Led Zeppelin. That said, they’re also not painstakingly recreated using the same instruments used on the original songs.
“Everybody's comfortable playing their own axes,” Russell said. “I'm not gonna sit there and be a tyrant and say, ‘okay, you’ve got to play everything exactly the same way, use the exact same equipment,’ because everybody plays differently. And to get (Jimmy) Page’s sound you might have to use a different guitar. You may have to use a different amp than he used because you don’t play the same way.”
Don’t expect to see a lot of Zeppelin at an upcoming Jack Russell’s Great White show, however. There will only be a couple of the classic band’s covers in the setlist, according to Russell.
“It's just something we did for fun, and we're not out there trying to sell a million copies,” he said. “We sell what we sell and it's just for our fans. We're not trying to go up the charts with it or anything. It's just something we did, and if it sells, it sells, and if it doesn't, it doesn't, you know, so be it.”
While it would be a stretch to call Great Zeppelin II an essential album, fans of Great White and/or Led Zeppelin may find it an enjoyable addition to their collections. The songs are played well, sung well, and done with a lot of respect for the original source material.
My personal favorites from this collection are “Kashmir,” “The Rover,” “Trampled Underfoot,” and “Misty Mountain Hop,” but they’re all fun songs and good cover versions.
You can see my entire interview with Jack Russell below, where he talked about more than just the album. He also touched on his musical past, which other bands he’d like to cover, his relationship with his former Great White bandmates, his favorite album and song from his own catalog, and his sort of love-hate relationship with “Once Bitten Twice Shy,” which was a mega hit for Great White back in 1989.
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