Led Zeppelin knitted dolls, outfitted in clothing from an early tour. From left to right: Jonesy, Jimmy (with a beard), Robert, and Bonzo.

Not every band inspires a busy and passionate fandom. Using Archive of Our Own as a bellwether, I noticed several things by looking at the stats.

One is the sheer amount of material. Excluding Elvis (450 stories) most of it dates from bands active from the early 1960s on. There’s no Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, or Bobby Darin here, no Shangri-Las or other girl groups, no Rat Pack. A generational divide, perhaps. Or more likely, the sixties were an age when rock artists rose to fame on the young side and there was plenty of media attention devoted to them, meaning a wealth of TV appearances, photos, and magazine articles. Not to mention, they toured frequently.

There are also few Country artists and even fewer Rap and Hip-hop ones. For all their present day (as of 2023) fame, Cardi B and Megan Three Stallion have not a single story between them, while Nicki Minaj has a scant 38. This may be because they are female; bandfics slant towards heterosexual female desires, which means male artists. But there are few male rappers and hip hop artists. Perhaps they are present, and I don’t recognize the names; perhaps fans don’t feel the need to write fanfic about them. After all, rap artists pretty much write their own fanfic. There’s also a lack of Latin artists. I recognized only Mago de Oz, Pitbull, and Menudo. Though, granted, since the bandfic list has a few thousand entries, it’s possible I missed someone.

Led Zeppelin matryoshka dolls. Jimmy, of course, is the dominant one and the largest. Note the tiny Peter Grant one on the far right!

The archive still has, in surprising numbers, plenty of boy band fics, some of which date from the turn of the century. One Direction has an astounding 70,218 and Hanson, The Jonas Brothers, Backstreet Boys, and N’sync contribute another 5,000. But these numbers are experiencing stiff competition from the current wave of K-Pop and J-Pop bandfics. Another band, 5 Seconds of Summer, has an astonishing 10,739 despite the fact I’ve never heard of them. (They’re Australian.)

So, if I’m allowed to generalize – and I will because it’s my weblog — I will say that the majority of the bands with creative, passionate fandoms are male, young, and good-looking. Or were young and good-looking at some point; after all, fanfic exists of the Beatles (6,365 stories) the surviving members of which are in their 70s. Needless to say, the bands must also make good music. Whether it’s truly their own, or manufactured, is immaterial. They must also be photogenic and there’s extra points for dancing ability and/or musical virtuosity.

I’ll make another divide here. There’s a stylistic and thematic one between the boy bands — including K-Pop/J-Pop — and rock bands like Guns n’ Roses, David Bowie, or The Arctic Monkeys. Boy band fandoms slant younger and the group members function somewhat like Barbie dolls for the writers, acting out various scenarios of everyday life and serving, occasionally, as characters in different settings and times. The stories may be sexually charged or not, but there’s a projection from the authors on their “boys” that their very blandness and inoffensiveness encourages. Rockfic bands are older and more experienced, and the fics may be set at any point in their histories, histories of which the writer is well familiar. The oldest bands, those of the 1960s like The Beatles, The Who, and The Rolling Stones, have been so well-documented through video material, interviews, and published biographies that it’s no wonder they continue to inspire up-and-coming writers, and the fics are especially rich.

A humorous interlude.

This leads me to wonder what the magic ingredients are, exactly, for prolific body of robust fan works.

• A rich and well-documented media history that is easily available to fans.
• Young and cute at some point, or at least not homely.
• Distinctive personalities for each member, ala The Beatles or KISS.
• Musical genius in singing, songwriting, and/or playing an instrument.
• Hit singles, airplay, top ten. (Not sure how this is measured these days, but you know what I mean.)

ALSO:

• An entourage of colorful auxiliary characters. For example, the Beatles side characters would include Brian Epstein, Yoko Ono, the Maharishi, and Allen Klein.
• A history full of dramatic or tragic events, such as a fatal accident causing the death of a band member.
• A narrative arc to their history: Rags to Riches, Flew too Close to the Sun, Recluse to Comeback, etc.
• A distinctive aesthetic. Guns n’ Roses had one, so did The Who.

(Of course, it’s also a mystery why some bands who on the surface have all of these languish, or, even worse, lose their fans. Indierock band Dandy Warhols had an active fanfic site in the late 1990s with a couple dozen stories, only to disappear. The Monkees, too, had an active fandom then despite being 30 years gone; now there’s nothing. Some of this may be because of websites folding or changes to the larger archives, such as fanfiction.net banning RPF and bandfics at some point. Or it may be due to fans that grow up and find other things to do with their time. But as fandoms cycle out, others cycle back. The 1960s bands have enthralled a whole new generation of fans.

Yet, I am still puzzled by the precariousness of fan attentions. One would think the dramatic, tragic, gender-bending Lou Reed, a cutie in his younger days and also decadent as hell, would have more stories than he does. (It’s a mere 58). Nine Inch Nails, fronted by hunky-yet-vulnerable Trent Reznor has 206, but unattractive creepazoid Marilyn Manson, 484. Party boys Van Halen have 24, yet Motley Crue, 1,172. I just don’t get it.)

My point in all this is that Led Zeppelin, as a band, makes all these marks, and then some, creating a very rich stew for fannish writings and art.

Led Zeppelin, by artist Matteo Palleli. As is typical of male-created fanart the figures are caricatured and slightly grotesque, though their musical prowress is undisputed. Bonzo and John Paul Jones are more recognizable than Robert and Jimmy.

When discussing rock band fandoms, there are two types.

The first is the “typical” one of love of the music, which also includes listening to albums, attending concerts, and discussing these with other fans who share the same passion. It can run along a scale. At one end are those who buy an album or two, at the other, those who obsessively track down every bootleg and foreign record pressing, buy every media item, and proudly display concert stubs in picture frames. I’ll call this the “male” fandom, even though it has both male and female fans. It’s a love of the band’s output, taken at face value. Creative endeavors, if there are any, are limited to playing the band’s music or creating worshipful artwork.

The other fandom is the “female” one of fanfic and fanart, using the band and its accumulated work, media presence, and history as a springboard for the creator’s own dreams and fantasies.

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, by Martyra Durska, an example of female-created Led Zeppelin artwork, colorful and fanciful with a delicate sex appeal.

These stories and artwork, likely first scribbled in secret by young teens, took off in the mid 1990s when the internet enabled communication and sharing between them. Unlike the male fandom which is centered on acquiring and discussing what has already happened, the female fandom flies off into creating what-ifs. It accretes on itself with every fresh creation. It is not static, but continuously evolving, and the evolution is shaped by its members. The love of the music and the band is still there, but the focus is on personalities, both of the band members and the band as a whole.

A more complete explanation of band fandom is here.

The first band to inspire widespread bandfic was undoubtedly the Beatles. The technology was not yet there to disseminate fannish creations, yet teens still sketched, wrote, and play-acted stories about the group between themselves. Supposedly some Beatle fan magazines of the 1960s accepted fan stories; yet it’s also safe to say that much of the material was lost to time. (The same could be said of other groups of the day popular with female fans, like Herman’s Hermits or, later, the Osmond Brothers and David Cassidy.)

It took the 1970s for printed fanzines to appear with the arrival of photocopiers and cheap offset printing. But even so, such material remained rare and obscure, until 1993 when listserves, mailing lists, and newsgroups came along, than AOL, Compuserve, and the first websites. Email and internet storage for college students, at least in the U.S., helped fandom along as well.

These days, there are perhaps billions of bandfic stories floating around, both those of the past, and those of the present. As of this writing, Archive of Our Own has the greatest variety, yet fanfiction.net is holding its own, and older archives like rockfic.com are still around. Where once stories were posted on Myspace and Livejournal now they’ve migrated to Tumblr and Wattpad. The platform changes, yet the stories go on and keep multiplying.

Yet, not every band inspires such devotion. In my next post I’ll take a look at what fandoms are trending and where Led Zeppelin fits into all this.