Lez Zeppelin: one cover band of all girls, all Zeppelin & 'a whole lotta love'

03/31/09 -Led Zeppelin is legendary: this is obvious. Your parents like Led Zeppelin. Your older brother likes Led Zeppelin. Your friends like Led Zeppelin. And if the world doesn't crash and burn in the next few years, your children will probably like Led Zeppelin, too. It only makes sense that Led Zeppelin would have cover bands.

Now, cover bands are a weirdly compelling species. The vast majority of them are bizarre and terrible, cheap knock offs destined to crank out the same tired songs in seedy bars in a sad pantomime of stardom.

But sometimes a cover band is more than a cover band. Sometimes a cover band transcends its warped identity and takes the original material and injects into it a new and different sound and energy. It becomes a legitimate band in it's own right.

Led Zeppelin probably has more cover bands than is necessary or healthy, and one of these worshipful wannabes hit Boston's Paradise Rock Club Thursday night and, surprisingly, proved itself worthy of the weird hype surrounding it.

Lez Zeppelin. Yes, Lez Zeppelin. Attention grabbing? Yep. Unabashedly gimmicky? Absolutely.

But if you were expecting a stereotypical troop of butch lesbians complete with boyish hair cuts and clogs well . first of all most of the band members aren't actually gay. Second of all they're more sex kitten than lumberjack-like. For Lez Zep (whose motto is "All girls, all Zeppelin") pouting, prancing, writing and hair twirling were more the order of the day.

Rain drizzled outside, leaving Boston in a cloud of gloom, and the crowd came pouring in, a motley assortment of middle-aged men and women.

Surprisingly - or maybe unsurprisingly - there were also a good number of college-aged guys in attendance, who, I'm assuming, like Led Zeppelin and just wanted to see a group of hot quasi-lesbians play the infamous band's music.

The opening act was TAB the Band and the young group put on a solid set. Strangely, two of the members, Tony and Adrian Perry, are Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry's sons. TAB blasted through a set of catchy 1960s garage rock. TAB was pretty much your quintessential rock band, albeit with a surprising swagger. My only real gripe is the band's name, which is inexcusably awful.

Lez Zep finally took the stage around 10 p.m., to raucous applause. Beer bottles dropped and rolled across the floor as the band clad in corsets, faded jeans and heels introduced themselves.

Lez Zep got it rolling with "Nobody's Fault But Mine," and lead singer Kris Bradley growled her way through the bluesy tune, shimmying and whipping the mic around.

The band then stormed into a reverb-heavy rendition of "Ramble On." Bradley broke out a harmonica which was awesome, because harmonicas are probably one of the most underutilized instruments in modern music.

And then, about halfway through the set, the novelty of the whole thing hit: the energy was pure jet fuel. Weirdly, they sound like Led Zeppelin. while not being Led Zeppelin at all. They sound entirely female - there's no androgyny here - but they still somehow capture Zeppelin ... and it's awesome.

Expectedly, Lez Zep hit a lot of the high points of the real Zep's catalogue. They performed "The Ocean," "Whole Lotta Love," and "Kashmir" tightly and with a flashy sense of showmanship.

Drummer Leesa "The Squyre" kept the band on a heavy grind with steady, intricate, and above all, loud percussion. Guitarist Steph Paynes was equally adept, choosing to play her guitar with a bow at one point in a flourish during "Dazed and Confused." Bassist and keyboardist Meganx, for her part, moodily plunked away although she contributed less in the way of showmanship than the other three.

Lez Zeppelin may be a cover band but they're also, in many ways, more than a cover band. In the interest of full disclosure, they're not actually lesbians, for the most part.

There's a good deal of testosterone in Led Zeppelin's music so, at first it was sort of jarring to hear it filtered through a very female group. But then it kind of made sense.

When push comes to shove, rock and roll, in its purest form, is always about sex. And Lez Zeppelin, like any legitimate rock band, tries damn hard to be sexy.

They wring it for all it's worth and the crowd loved it. They loved it enough to cheer wildly for an encore, enough to scream like 13-year-olds at a Jonas Brothers concert, and enough to pack a venue for a show by a cover band.