You can pretty much judge this book by it’s cover – there’s not a big surprise with what you should expect to hear by a band named Lez Zeppelin. The all-female (duh!) four-piece has made a career of playing Led Zeppelin tunes, not note-for-note the way Messrs. Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham played ‘em, but, by bringing the passion and feeling to each song.

MP3: Dazed And Confused (from Lez Zeppelin I)

On Friday night, the ladies of Lez Zeppelin are going to bring that passion and feeling to Columbus as they’ll help Rock on the Rangers get pumped up for the big weekend-long hard rock festival at Crew Stadium. For my money, the pre-party to celebrate Rock on the Range’s 5th anniversary is better – and more diverse – than the festival proper.

Guitarist Steph Paynes, who started Lez Zeppelin in 2004, realizes her band has their work cut out for them as they are one of the few female acts taking part in Rock on the Range this year but she’s ready to blow minds with her Page-like guitar playing. Seriously, the ladies do an incredible job of paying homage to the real thing – it’s as if Led Zeppelin is being fronted by Roberta Plant instead of Robert Plant.

Paynes took a little bit of time one evening last week to answer some questions.

Does Lez Zeppelin do regular touring or are you just playing festivals such as Rock on the Range?

We have been touring endlessly for the last six years. I’m sort of changing the paradigm a little bit and try to get more bang for the buck and do bigger theaters and festivals. There was one year where we played more than 150 dates. The festival thing … this band is just tailor-made for things like that.

What’s your vibe on the Rock on the Range pre-party?

It’s really a different flavor than what comes afterwards. There’s this HEAVY stuff that fills the two days. I think the party thing is an interesting way to spin it, it should be really great. People should come and they’ll get psyched to get the weekend started.

Do you think of Lez Zeppelin as a tribute band?

When people talk about tribute band, I’ve always maintained that Lez Zeppelin is not a tribute band. When I started the band, I had no idea what a tribute band was. As naive as that sounds, it’s true.

In my mind, a tribute band is a band that goes all the way in the sense of trying to impersonate the original act – creating an illusion, if you squint your eyes, it’s like you’re seeing the real thing. That sometimes involves suits and wigs.

What we do is something different. We don’t impersonate Led Zeppelin. We’re all girls. As girlie as they were at times, nobody is ever going to think Shannon is Robert or that I’m Jimmy. What we really do is take this music – it’s just so incredible, I consider it the classical music of our times – and we bring our own musicianship to it.

With a band like Led Zeppelin, there was a lot of spontaneity and improvisation in their live shows which is really what we specialize in. We don’t do note-for-note recreations of their albums live. Live we do what they did live. There are four of us on stage and whatever that instrumentation allows at any given time is what we do. Sometimes we’ll jam on a song, like they did, for 20 minutes. You’re really creating in the moment that atmosphere and passion and feeling of what Led Zeppelin were.

I think that’s much more effective because you’re giving people the experience like what they would have had if they had seen a Led Zeppelin show.

I started listening to Led Zeppelin in high school – they were one of those bands that all of my friends, regardless of music tastes, would listen to. I never really stopped listening to them but as an adult I “rediscovered” them and really started to appreciate their music.

I had the same exact experience. Led Zeppelin has been gone for 40 years. We all heard this music, it’s still being played consistently. I heard Led Zeppelin when I was a kid and listened to it and liked it to a certain extent. I started to relisten to it. The impetus was that for a holiday present I got the box set of the remastered CDs in the late ‘90s and I was so struck by it and blown away. Listening to it again … as a more mature person and as a musician, I started hearing all the stuff they were really doing and started really appreciating it. I was just stunned. I was like, “This is just so beyond what I realized it was.” That’s when I became really obsessed with it. It just sounded so much better to me than anything else even though it was “old” music. It just sounded really relevant and held up against grunge.

When did you gain enough confidence in your Zeppelin playing that you were ready to take the next step and form a band and go out and play in front of people?

Sometimes I’m still not sure I can do it. Every night is an adventure. I still don’t think I’m good enough and I hope, in a way, that I never will because I think that’s the minute you die as an artist. It took a while to wrap my head and fingers around this music. I didn’t grow up playing Jimmy Page so to get my head around everything he was doing, it was a lot, there’s so much going into everything he does. It took me a while before I really felt comfortable enough to just let it go and play.

I interviewed the singer from ZOSO last year. He told me that the band rehearses regularly because they know that Zeppelin fans are very critical and expect every note to be played the way Zeppelin played them. Do you every worry that fans will call you out for playing the wrong note or “going off script”?

I can’t worry about that. Who even knows what they played? When we made the first record with (producer) Eddie Kramer, one of greatest things he ever said to me – it was great but was dissing both me and Jimmy (Page) at the same time – he goes, “You know, you’ve really got Jimmy down. You even play his mistakes.” He was jabbing at me. But, that’s part of it. The beauty of music like that is that it was of the moment. There were nights when they just weren’t good.

I believe deeply in the spontaneity and the momentness of being a musician and that live performance. Sometimes I don’t bother to learn something that well because it’s exciting for me to get up there and kind of see what happens. Believe me, I’ve fallen on my face a lot. But when you allow that moment, things will come out of your instrument that could not come out if you just study and it becomes a rote exercise of just spitting out some exact thing. There will be moments when your playing will just take you to places that you can’t imagine.

You’ve put out 2 CDs of Led Zeppelin covers, including your newest release which is your interpretation of Led Zeppelin 1 – song-for-song. Do you make any money off CD sales or do you have to pay it all back to Led Zeppelin for covering their songs?

We pay publishing royalties. For every song we record for every album, we have to pay something like $.08 a song for every album sold. They get a publishing royalty for every album we sell. But we don’t need permission to record that music. It’s hard to make good money at all on records these days. Our first record sold pretty well so we made all our money back. It was kind of an expensive record to make – we used big studios, we recorded the old fashioned way with a famous producer, and we recorded to 2-inch tape. Bands don’t do that anymore.

Do you keep tabs on bands like ZOSO and other Led Zeppelin tribute and cover bands?

Honestly, I don’t keep track of those bands. I’m aware of some of them. Some of them play the same places we do, that’s my business so I have to know that. But, I’m not really concerned with what they do.

I’ve always felt like Lez Zeppelin was it’s own entity. I had people that really wanted to package us with other tribute bands. There’s a whole circuit you can play but I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to steer us towards more of an original band course. There could be big money in the tribute band thing, but I’m not concerned with that.

Ultimately, it’s served the band well. We’ve done things that tribute bands have never done. We were the first so-called tribute band to play festivals like Download and I’m pretty proud of that.

The special Rock on the Range pre-party is free for Rock on the Range weekend ticket holders and takes place at Crew Stadium. Red Line Chemistry kicks off the show at 7pm, Lez Zeppelin follow at 7:45, Danko Jones plays at 8:35 and Steel Panther closes out the party at 9:30.

With that in mind, the next best thing out there is ZOSO, the premiere Led Zeppelin tribute band that has been honoring the godfathers of heavy metal since 1995.

Seeing a band that looks like the original in it’s prime for $12 in a smaller venue is probably a better experience than seeing the real band in 2010 and paying $100 for a seat in the upper deck at the back of a stadium.

I talked to Matt Jernigan, who plays the role of Robert Plant, earlier this week. If there’s one quote to take away from the whole interview, it’s this one: “You know what the beauty of this gig is? We don’t ever do a bad song.”

Interview after the jump.

Is there a difference between a tribute band and a cover band?

Absolutely! A tribute band puts a lot more into it. A cover band will just go up there and be like a jukebox. I think anybody can do it, but try to recreate it. It’s like, “yeah, you’re playing the right chords but you’re not having the right feel” as a cover band. Tribute bands execute it exactly like it was.

Getting the sound right is crucial but you also have to really get the look right too, don’t you?

The sound was always the most important thing. The look – we just kind of naturally looked the part.

How did you decide to become a Zeppelin tribute band?

Me and bass player and drummer were in an original band. We had a management company and were trying to get a deal. At that time the music scene was changing and they weren’t signing bands like us and they never have signed bands like us since. We were a throwdown, heavy blues-based rock band and at that time they were signing bands like Limp Bizkit, Korn and The Offspring.

It was actually a suggestion by the management company to do this. It’s kind of strange in life that that happens but that’s how the band came together. We pondered it for about 3 months before we decided to do it. We realized that we had something to work with and here we are.

Looking at your tour schedule, you’re mainly a weekend warrior band – doing shows Thursday night through Sunday night. Was there a point in time when you were touring in a van just like an original band doing 5 or 6 shows a week?

When we first started – the first 3 years – we were constantly living on the road. We did that until we became established. We used to hit a lot of smaller rooms that we won’t do now. We’re in a transition period now where we’re moving up another 2 or 3 notches. The past 5 or 6 years we’ve been playing more and more theaters, and performance arts centers, and even bigger festivals.

You’ve been doing it so long, it must be nice to have a built in crowd of people who love every song.

It’s a tough gig. There have been people who stand there with their arms crossed, but 95% of the people who have come to see us take their hats off to us which is overwhelming. We’ve worked really hard for it. We know we can play but it’s something we have to stay on top of every day. You’ve really got to stay sharp with it to give it the justice it deserves and not to let the fans down.

Do you change the setlist or it is pretty set in stone now?

We change the setlist constantly. Two of our old members were reluctant to play certain material. Why? It’s like, you get a job and you tell your boss “This is what I’m not going to do.” We had to tolerate things to keep things going. We had 50 songs on our list and we were only doing 38 because that’s all those guys wanted to learn. Up until this year [when the original band all got back together], we hadn’t done “Dazed and Confused” in 5 years because we took it from The Song Remains the Same so it’s 27 minutes but we cut it down to 18. It’s a lot of work and the old guys didn’t want to do the work.

Have you ever met any of the Zeppelin guys? Do they know ZOSO exists?

We’ve never met them, wish we do before they die. We know that Jimmy knows about us and Robert knows about us. Have they ever come to see us? If they have, they slipped in the back door and slipped back out.

ZOSO performs Friday night at the Newport. Tickets are $12 at the door. There is no opening act so expect ZOSO to play at least a two-hour set.

PromoWest has booked some big huge shows in 2009 but even they realize that Tuesday night’s Them Crooked Vultures is, if not the biggest, maybe the most anticipated – just one of 10 U.S. dates. The (truly) super-group featuring Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters) and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) started recording material for a debut this past summer though they’ve talked about working together since 2005.

This being the internet age, rumors of a release date for Them Crooked Vulture’s debut spring up on a daily basis but I haven’t been able to find an official release date (many are suggesting we’ll be able to hold a CD in our hands by late November – just in time for the holiday gift-giving season).

So … while the resumes of the members speak for themselves, is this project really worth plunking down $47.50 (plus services charges) to see considering you won’t know any of the songs and you shouldn’t expect to hear any songs by the bands these guys come from? Based on early reviews, it is worth is – TCV supposedly deliver an onslaught of RAWK and live up to the “supergroup” tag way more than a band like Velvet Revolver does.

If you want to do a quick cram session and get a (live) preview of what you’ll hear, there are a few bootlegs floating around. Here’s one from the Austin show this past weekend (can’t vouch for the quality). While I haven’t heard this one -the stuff I’ve heard definitely has a QOTSA vibe as can be expected.

WORD OF WARNING (from the Promowest website): NO CAMERA’S ALLOWED DURING THIS PERFORMANCE, INCLUDING CELL PHONES. IF YOU ARE CAUGHT TAKING PICTURES YOU WILL BE ASKED TO DELETE THEM. IF YOU ARE CAUGHT A SECOND TIME, YOU WILL BE ASKED TO DELETE THEM AND ESCORTED OUT OF THE BUILDING. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.