Led Zeppelin

Essential Albums

  • Physical Graffiti (Remastered)
    Physical Graffiti (Remastered)

    Led Zeppelin were on a tear in the early part of their career, releasing a streak of riff-driven albums between 1969 and 1973 that set a new standard in hard rock. While each of those first five records was created during a concentrated period of recording, much of the sixth, the double LP Physical Graffiti, drew from material developed at earlier sessions. Tracks like the crunching “Houses of the Holy” (intended as the title track for their 1973 album) and the loose and lyrical “Down By the Seaside” (written in 1970 and reworked for the group’s fourth record, but ultimately not included) may have been meant for other projects, but they easily meet the band's exacting standards. And the odds-and-ends feel of Physical Graffiti is one of its strengths, showing every side of Led Zeppelin in a single sprawling package. The extended format means the band can indulge every whim and include experiments that might have been harder to justify on a single disc. The proggy, bluesy “In My Time of Dying,” slinking along on the back of some of Jimmy Page’s greasiest slide-guitar work, stretches past 11 minutes, shifting from a deathly crawl to a raucous double-time romp. Meanwhile, the gorgeous acoustic instrumental “Bron-Yr-Aur” showcases the group’s interest in mystical folk, and “Boogie With Stu” is a ragged and joyous jam on an old Ritchie Valens tune. Physical Graffiti has its share of rock radio classics too—see the haunting “Kashmir,” which mixes a punishing groove with Middle Eastern modes and features one of Robert Plant’s most unhinged vocals, and the supremely funky “Trampled Under Foot” (John Paul Jones credits Stevie Wonder as the inspiration for its clavinet-delivered stomp). In these brilliant and widely loved songs as much as in the lesser-known gems that surround them, Physical Graffiti proves that as the second half of the '70s dawned, Zep were still making more killer music than they knew what to do with.

  • Led Zeppelin IV (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin IV (Remastered)

    Years after Led Zeppelin IV became one of the most famous albums in the history of rock music, Robert Plant was driving toward the Oregon Coast when the radio caught his ear. The music was fantastic: old, spectral doo-wop—nothing he’d ever heard before. When the DJ came back on, he started plugging the station’s seasonal fundraiser. Support local radio, he said—we promise we’ll never play “Stairway to Heaven.” Plant pulled over and called in with a sizable donation. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the song, he said later. He’d just heard it plenty before.  It hangs together well enough as an album. But the real beauty of IV is as a collection of seeds, each sprouting in a different direction: gentle folk (“Going to California”) and nasty blues (“Black Dog”), the epic (“Stairway to Heaven”) and the concise (“Rock and Roll”). That fans have fought for years over the album’s perfect moment (it’s “When the Levee Breaks”) is a testament not only to the passion the band inspires, but also to how perfectly they capture their own internal yins and yangs. An entire ecosystem of music could be built on the songs here. And it was. Overstated? Yes—there are times when IV seems to exist to ask why you would overdub one guitar when you could overdub four. But if the flowery stuff doesn’t work for you (“The Battle of Evermore”), the dirty stuff (“Misty Mountain Hop”) probably will, and if you prefer your symphonies to stay in the concert hall, the band still sweats, pounds, and moans enough to scandalize company at levels polite and otherwise. The irony of IV is that it opened a new world for hard rock by embracing the color and variety of its natural enemy: pop.

  • Led Zeppelin III (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin III (Remastered)

    After the full-on assault of Led Zeppelin II, the band decided to take a step back and work through a milder approach for their third album. Guitarist Jimmy Page always had a deep interest in English folk music and while his reputation as one of rock’s most formidable electric lead guitar players was firmly established, he was also no slouch with the acoustic. The album opens on an anthemic note with the Nordic trample of “The Immigrant Song” and “Celebration Day” leading the heavy metal brigade.  However, from the traditional “Gallows Pole” through the excited grace of “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” and the genuine pastoral countryside shadings of “Tangerine” and “”That’s the Way,” Led Zeppelin nearly sound like a jam band. But the core of the group, Page and former ‘60s session extraordinaire John Paul Jones, perform with a deliberate mastery that captures the magic of the performance with the precision that can only be crafted in a carefully controlled studio. The group can veer near chaos (“Out On the Tiles”) and pull it back at just the right moment. Even in their quietest moments, their sense of tension leads them into further dimensions.

  • Led Zeppelin II (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin II (Remastered)

    Some numbers on the making of Led Zeppelin II. Studios: 13. Cities: five. Countries: three. Months between the band’s debut and the follow-up in question: nine. Number of those months spent on tour: seven. Days off? Zero—they found a studio. According to engineer Eddie Kramer, some of Jimmy Page’s guitar solos were recorded in hallways. In the interim, they dragged the album’s tapes between continents in a steamer trunk that got heavier at every stop. In other words, that Led Zeppelin II came to exist at all was a feat; that it was more radical, precise, dynamic, and fully realized than Led Zeppelin was—well, miracles are divine, and Led Zeppelin II was nothing if not the sound of earthbound hard work. What had sometimes felt blocky or conceptual the first time around—British blues rock rendered slower, heavier, louder—now felt seamless, the sound of four players finding fluency in a new kind of language. Time on the road showed: A couple of the tracks here—“The Lemon Song” (adapted from Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor”), the John Bonham drum spotlight “Moby Dick”—either originated or evolved live, while others (especially “Whole Lotta Love”) reflected a kind of ecosystemic relationship between the players that made the music much more direct. This also enabled them to take bigger, weirder chances: the frenzied breaks that punctuate the “The Lemon Song,” for example, or the way “Ramble On” moves from hearthside folk to bruising rock with an almost iridescent continuity. Or—of course—how “Whole Lotta Love” snaps from its noodly, avant-garde middle section to its borderline-pornographic guitar solo. (Parents beware: These boys are sensitive and nasty.) And while much has been made of the band’s liberal quotation of black American blues (including a 1985 copyright suit that dogged “Whole Lotta Love”), the reality—and legacy—was more complicated. Listen to Led Zeppelin II and you hear foreigners—young British men—absorbing blues not as a progressive pose but arcane knowledge, as gnarled and misty as the Celtic touches of “Thank You” or the Tolkien-inspired visions Jimmy Page leveraged into “Ramble On.” Put another way, Led Zeppelin II marked the moment that the band figured out how to wield blues as the sound of both this world and the world of a distant beyond. So while other luminaries of the counterculture gathered for Woodstock, Led Zeppelin played San Antonio; Wallingford, Connecticut; and Asbury Park, New Jersey, where they were described by the Asbury Park Press as “an interesting, hard-working quartet.” (The move, according to the band’s manager, Peter Grant, was calculated: Led Zeppelin wasn’t part of a movement, and didn’t belong under a broader cultural banner. Fair enough.) At the end of the month, Black Sabbath played their first show and gave heavy metal its modern grimace, all four Beatles sat in the studio together for the last time, and Led Zeppelin went to New York to mix Led Zeppelin II. Two months later, “Whole Lotta Love” was released as a single, which probably would have been a nice occasion to celebrate had the band not already started working on Led Zeppelin III. You know what they say about rolling stones.

  • Led Zeppelin (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin (Remastered)

    What started as an attempted reboot of groovy British Invasion rockers The Yardbirds ended as the stomping, yowling debut that changed rock history—a defining document of heavy metal’s first 24 months. Pyrotechnic Yardbirds guitarist Jimmy Page and three then-nobodies—teenage vocalist Robert Plant; explosive touring drummer for singer-songwriter Tim Rose, John Bonham; and fleet-fingered session bassist John Paul Jones—joined forces in a London basement in the summer of 1968. Their combustible, virtuosic energy was on tape within weeks thanks to a self-funded, nine-day session. Atlantic Records eventually offered to release the finished album, giving the band the largest advance ever paid to a new rock group to that point. Much of that album, 1969’s Led Zeppelin, features the leanest iteration of what became the band’s formula: American blues and British folk played with dizzying guitar solos and cyclones of drum chaos. “Good Times Bad Times” is propelled by Bonham’s rubbery right foot, and the down-stroked railroad chug of “Communication Breakdown” was powerful enough to influence Johnny Ramone. “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” takes a disconsolate folk song made popular by Joan Baez and explodes it into a flamenco-flecked bawler that practically invented the power ballad. Two pieces of vintage Chicago blues—“You Shook Me” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby”—lurch with slow-churning strutting, sex, and solos. There are even some early tastes of their more experimental inclinations—like the avant-garde bowed-guitar bad trip of “Dazed and Confused” and the pastoral British-folk-meets-Indian-tabla of “Black Mountain Side.”

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About Led Zeppelin

It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say Led Zeppelin invented heavy metal. Formed by latter-day Yardbirds guitarist Jimmy Page in 1968 (originally as The New Yardbirds), the quartet were among a wave of bands taking the blues-based British Invasion sound in a louder direction. However, no other group wielded their might with such an authoritative sense of groove and grandeur. In Page’s hands, blues-based riffs became as wildly complex as his solos, while the rhythm section featured a drummer (John Bonham) whose kick-pedal could leave craters and a secret-weapon bassist (John Paul Jones) who served as the industrial-strength glue that held it all together. If heaviness was Zeppelin’s only attribute, their place in rock history would still be assured. But their thundering sound was always balanced by a disarming delicacy—best exemplified by the quiet-to-loud ascension of their perennial classic-rock-radio countdown winner, “Stairway to Heaven.” Sure, the group’s golden-god frontman, Robert Plant, possessed a shriek that could summon a fleet of rampaging Vikings (see: 1970’s “Immigrant Song”). But his obsession with psychedelic-folk acts like The Incredible String Band yielded a deep well of tender acoustic serenades, and he swiftly outgrew the girl-done-me-wrong narratives of the blues to weave Tolkien-esque tales that presaged metal’s fascination with medieval mythology. Plus, Page was not only a redoubtable riff machine, but a visionary producer who reimagined the rock album as a widescreen war epic. You can hear that cinematic sensibility take root in the brain-scrambling breakdown of “Whole Lotta Love” (as avant-garde as blues-rock boogie could get in 1969) and achieve its apex on 1975’s “Kashmir,” an epic Eastern-inspired odyssey where Jones’ sinister, Mellotron-manipulated string arrangement proved heavier than any guitar-powered rocker in their repertoire. Zeppelin seemed to be entering a fascinating new phase with 1979’s synth-injected In Through the Out Door, before Bonham’s untimely death a year later brought the band to a sudden end. But through the hair-band wailers of ‘80s, the militant rap-metal of Rage Against the Machine, the battered blues of The White Stripes, and the 21st-century swagger of Greta Van Fleet, the aftershocks of Led Zeppelin’s seismic ’70s canon reverberate forevermore.

HOMETOWN
London, England
FORMED
1968

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