40 years ago today: Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin This has stood the passage of time remarkably well. Recorded by Jimmy Page over 36 hours in late 1968 it still sounds good. Lots of facts surrounding the recording of the album are on its
wikipedia page.
Around 1983 someone played Communication Breakdown on Radio 1, and that was my intro to this album. This sounded way more punk than anything else I had associated with the name Led Zeppelin, and even now it seems more in tune with the proto-punk of MC5 and the Stooges, both of whom also released their debuts (later) in 1969. It isn't very typical of the album though, which is a hugely eclectic mix of blues, folk, late 60s rock and what would become known as heavy metal.
They wear some of their influences on their sleeves, with two fully credited Willie Dixon covers (You Shook Me, I Can't Quit you Baby), and two lifted from the world of folk - the sublime Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, which the reissue did justice by including the original writer Anne Bredon on the credits, and the instrumental Black Mountain Side which has a Page credit despite being a straight lift from Bert Jansch's Blackwater Side. They kept up this trend of pilifering bits of folk and blues over their next few albums.
A few special things make the likes of You Shook Me stand out from the standard white-boy blues peddled by Zep's contemporaries. First of all it's the way the band gel together, there are fantastic individual performances but they play together so well for a relatively new unit. Secondly, it's Page's fantastically warm guitar sound, beefed up by some tape trickery he learnt whilst a jobbing session musician.
The blending of Page's sustained guitar notes with Plant's vocals influenced many early metal acts, as did the sinister passages on Dazed and Confused. This was the first one to give ammo to the right wing Christian lobby against Zep, that descending minor scale when we hear about that "soul of a woman was created below" was all too much for them.
Today the album is regarded as a classic rock centrepiece, surprisingly high in Rolling Stone's top albums of all time, although apparently it was poorly received by the initial critics. If you remember that this band was working under the title The New Yardbirds, perhaps Led Zeppelin was too big an eclectic leap for the older fans. Album closer How Many More Times starts like it could be late Yardbirds or the Jeff Beck Group, but those sneaky additional five minutes give LZ the opportunity for some improvisation and ad-libbing which was to become a feature of the live act until they called it a day. LZ's lyrics never were a highlight but on this extended section improvisation can be the only excuse for them. That said, this album holds up extraordinarily well. As well as being guilty for launching some heavy metal cliches, this also set a high benchmark for how rock music should be recorded, and for that reason it fits in well with many contemporary acts.
It may be 40 today, but I heard it about 25 years ago and I'm not sick of it at all. I wonder how many more veteran recordings I'll be saying that about in December.
