As Page recalled , "[O]ne of the violinists came to me one day and he said, 'Have you ever considered playing a guitar with a bow? And he said 'Well here's my bow. Would you like to try? After that I went and bought my own bow. Page pulled out another weapon from his bag on "Your Time Is Gonna Come," the track that opens the second side, with a pedal steel guitar entering the mix during the first chorus. As with "Good Times Bad Times," the song didn't feature into their live set, with its only known performance coming at a show in Tokyo during the "Whole Lotta Love" medley.
The instrumental "Black Mountain Side" is another instance on the record where the folk process calls into question the authorship of the work. Bert Jansch, a fixture on the British folk scene, recorded his own version of the traditional Irish folk song "Down by Blackwaterside" in Page adapted Jansch's arrangement, added a tabla for percussion, gave it a new name and claimed it as an original.
By the time of Led Zeppelin 's release, Jansch had already formed Pentangle and released a pair of albums. A year later, Basket of Ligh t reached No. They split in , with Jansch eventually returning to his solo career, although several reunions followed until his death in But it remained a sore point with him throughout his life, particularly when his path crossed with Page's.
Or let's just say he learned from me. I wouldn't want to sound impolite. While much has been made about Led Zeppelin's influence on the development of '70s hard rock and metal, and punk's overall disdain for those styles, "Communication Breakdown" turned out to be influential on Johnny Ramone.
As Mickey Leigh of the Rattlers wrote in I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir , he performed the riff note-for-note for the future Ramones guitarist, and he dug how Page created the riff's power using only downstrokes. All of it! The focus of rock, in the wake of Sgt. Pepper , was just beginning to move from singles to albums. All of those factors together created the juggernaut that was Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin released eight studio albums, totaling nine discs, plus one extra single B-side, in a career of just a decade or so.
There was also a two-record live set, The Song Remains the Same , and an accompanying movie. Neither are celebrated, but it must be said that parts of the movie show a band of extraordinary power; these days, blistering footage of the group is all over You Tube.
After the death of drummer Bonham, Zeppelin disbanded, leaving only a motley collection of outtakes, called Coda , in its wake. The estranged Page and Plant reunited, Spinal Tap style, in the s, and released a couple of albums as a duo and even toured, to no little hype at the time, but Page, particularly, betrayed the signs of extended drug use, and their collaboration during this period produced no notable new songs. It was quickly forgotten.
The criteria? I hope the reasoning speaks for itself. The on-record result — the sounds, the playing, the meanings — are really what matters, though the historical importance of a few tracks counts as well. Some adjustments are made as we go along, as you will see. The list below sticks to the work the group recorded as a complete unit.
Please let me know in the comments if I made any mistakes. Coda is left off because it lacks even one notable extract from the archives, and would have found its individual songs clustered at the bottom. Years of legal wrangling followed this deliberate and vicious assault.
A footnote to the story is that Bonham had gone to the guy first — and kicked him in the balls without warning. The packaging featured a set of stock family photos with a mysterious obelisk added, courtesy of Hipgnosis, the go-to hep-rocker design firm of the time.
There are no significant songs on the album. Another forgettable Presence song, a halting, stop-and-start boogie with a chorus of forced jollity. The title describes the song adequately. Harper was a well-liked guitarist and singer who made quiet albums of interminably long, acoustic-y songs on them. Grant is an interesting case. He is a member of an important trio, along with Dylan manager Albert Grossman and David Geffen — the people who foresaw big, big money in the rock game and took steps to get as much of it as possible for their clients.
The bands deserved their money, of course, but by all accounts Grant was a brute not above hiring gangsters, beating up kids he caught taping concerts, and the like. And, of course, his role in the Oakland incident is beyond the pale. The account in the Bill Graham oral history is sickening.
Towering sweetmeats like Robert Plant aside, the world of hard rock was not known for its handsome participants. Even by metal standards, Grant looked a fright; he was an enormous blob of a man adorned with a thatch of grotesque facial hair that looked like it had been transplanted from the butt of a mangy hyena. And he spoke like one of the unintelligible supporting characters in a Guy Ritchie movie.
Still, he loved Page and his band uncritically, and can be said to have remade the music business in his career. Grant died in of a heart attack, one of those rare people whose death gives the net humanity of the world a solid uptick. Weird guitar sounds, even weirder lyrics. Neither Plant nor Page is convincing. A big slide sound, some cooing from Percy, an extended solo, some drums bashing. For six and a half minutes. On the second side of their debut, misogyny takes over on a track unsubtle lyrically and musically.
Some pretty organ work from Jones, though. A bruising post-blues workout with a live feel, another example of how the band blistered the genre. It would be the fourth album before they made their claim to greatness. This rumbling, endless, unconvincing rocker was a worrisome sign that the band was approaching their second decade with declining assets.
This was the lead track to the follow-up to the mind-blowing Physical Graffiti? The guitar solo — and worse, the guitar sounds — are pallid, and good lord: What is Plant singing about?
The title is obviously a reference to ancient Greece, but we get a name-check for New York early on, and then something about Albion, which is a fancy-pants word for England. Docked a half-dozen notches for being interminable. Nothing too special here, just some of those concussive bursts of solo, with some sound effects that seem to go a bit farther than had been heard at the time. A long, slow blues, delivered fairly straight aside for some screechy interludes.
This is in the realm of the sort of thing Fleetwood Mac, then led by the great guitarist Peter Green, was doing at the time, just louder a lot louder , and of course Plant, who is intermittently impressive here, is in a different class. A dumb song, you think — until a disconcertingly pleasurable instrumental break. Then back to the dumbness. Long, languid blues. It might have been one of the more winning tracks on Presence , but the uncharacteristically muddy production and extreme length sink it.
Why this track led off Graffiti , an important moment for the band, is a mystery. The lyrics? A mess of blues posturings, some of them stolen. An unmemorable grinder. But too many of the songs are subpar. The lyrics here are a wan mixture of hippie posturing and vague stabs at social import.
The backing track is boring. The band somehow lacked authority at this point, really, to keep our interest through such throwback-y stuff. Aside from the driven middle section, pretty non-notable and definitely filler, but on Graffiti it passes for a breather. But this is one of the more anonymous songs on the release. Too much of Graffiti lacks the sparkling production of the band at their best.
A nice shrieking chorus. Probably the least interesting song on Zoso. It grinds along, and we never find out why the owls are crying in the night. The band at theirmost charming, until you concentrate on the words.
A lot of it was received nonsense, and of course they were products of their time. But their inability to see beyond that is a strong part of the case against the band.
I find the muddled production and the tedious outro kills it, though. A real mess. The other is leaden, labored, and comes across as contrived. Then ending fanfare is swell, however, another examples of the Page throwaways that would be the pride of many other bands. There was a reason behind this too. Critics failed to recognize that this new band was in the process of birthing an altogether new kind of music and forging the way for Album Oriented Rock.
At the forefront of these visionless critics was Rolling Stone magazine. Rolling Stone has even admitted that throughout the s, the magazine and Led Zeppelin were always at odds with each other.
The only way that they managed to recover from the bad PR was through their good live performances and word-of-mouth. However, they did recover and their album Led Zeppelin became a commercial success.
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