With only one exception, each album was arguably a surprise and an advance. (See the entry on “Stairway to Heaven” below for more on this point.) Yet they weren’t even entirely stupid, like Grand Funk, or Foghat, or Uriah Heep, or Mountain, or take your pick of the innumerable doltish bands of the era. The band didn’t lumber like Sabbath they weren’t effete, like Yes pretentious, like ELP or annoyingly intellectual, like the Who. Zep was not a psychedelic band per se, but they recorded several of the great psychedelic mélanges of sound, in songs like “Whole Lotta Love” and “Dazed and Confused.” Zep weren’t a singles band - they complained whenever Atlantic would issue a single - but they had radio hit after radio hit. Zeppelin soon became the ultimate uncompromising hard-rock band, imperiously traveling the globe to deliver pummeling concerts at ear-splitting volume, attend to the local womenfolk, and take away unprecedented paychecks - this last one with the help of the band’s canny manager, a baleful beast named Peter Grant. It created a sensation, and the group’s earliest tours began to spread the word of a uniquely powerful live assault. The first side of the band’s first self-titled album contained arguably the hardest-rocking, most thoroughly enjoyable set of songs any mortals had yet created. Plant brought along an old musical friend, a primitive drummer, almost Cro-Magnon artistically and socially, John Bonham. To sing, he found a striking howler from the Black Country, Robert Plant. There was an experienced multi-instrumentalist he’d met doing sessions, John Paul Jones. Page ultimately disbanded that group and began to experiment with what he called the New Yardbirds, which later became Led Zeppelin, filled with members he handpicked. He was then the final guitarist in the Yardbirds, a seminal British blues outfit whose previous guitarists were Jeff Beck and Clapton. There are enough conflicting accounts of the songs he’s played on to doubt some, but Page himself has said, for example, that that is not him on the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” but he is on the Who’s “Can’t Explain.” There was also work on a crazily diverse set of sessions: Van Morrison’s Them and Donovan, Tom Jones and Burt Bacharach, all the way to the blandest Muzak. Page was a prodigy of a new mold, a young man on the British blues scene who quickly became a coveted session player in the British pop factories of the time. The forest, in this analogy, was Jimmy Page. ( Rolling Stone’s critical history with the band was particularly - indeed, uniformly - clueless.) A lot of this had to do with not seeing the forest for the trees. Still, something big was going on, and many people at the time didn’t get it. Robert Plant’s lyrics - an amalgam of stolen blues lyrics, random and confused references to Norse and Tolkien mythologies, sullen misogyny, and utter nonsense - didn’t help matters. All the old terms used to explain this still apply: Zeppelin were a sledgehammer, a steamroller, a juggernaut, a leviathan, picking the music up, turning it into a club, and wielding it unmercifully, often on innocent bystanders and any nearby baby seals.
But the rock Establishment didn’t quite get the band at the time. Rock’s lumpenproletariat liked them a lot, and even those with finer sensibilities could not help respecting the band’s sonics, not to mention Page’s venturesome guitar chops.
The Modern Man’s Dilemma: Which Led Zeppelin Ringtone to Choose?īelow is my list of all of the band’s original studio albums, ranked from worst to best. The sound sparkles, and the many early versions and mixes of some fabled tracks will thrill fans. The final group of three albums - including Presence, In Through the Out Door, and Coda - is out this week. Now we have the latest (and definitive, we’re told) remastering of the band’s now-historic catalogue. Jimmy Page put an end to all of that with Led Zeppelin, the band that broke the blues and created something new - hard rock, heavy metal, whatever you want to call it. They were done with brio, but with probity and respect, too.
Rock bands always fooled around with doing the blues louder and with less finesse, of course, but beyond that, folks like Eric Clapton were the models, with their sincere embarkations into the music. The blues were a serious matter, meant to be played a certain way. It’s difficult to remember now how precious the blues seemed to rockers in the 1960s. Photo: Maya Robinson and Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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