Led Zeppelin led the way to new world of rock music
Reissues of Led Zeppelin's first three albums confirm their status as the band who changed rock, writes Jack Hamilton
It's early 1969, and you are young. You hold in your hands an LP by a band with a strange name. The cover art is a black-and-white photo of the Hindenburg exploding, cropped and retouched to resemble some phallic, Nazi apocalypse. You remove the record from the sleeve and place it on your turntable. The sound of a guitar explodes into your ears, two quick bursts of a Fender Telecaster, each lashed to a violent drum hit. When it all ends you grab the needle and move it back to the record's edge, to confirm all this is real, and it all begins again.
That twin blast of an E chord is the opening sound of , the first track on , which would soon be known as once Led Zeppelin decided to name their next two albums after themselves as well. In 1969 it was a powerful shot across the bow of pop music. It was the sound of a new world being born, and the louder sound of an old world being destroyed.
, and have recently been given deluxe reissues by Atlantic Records. Each package contains a remastered version of the original album, along with a generous helping of bonus tracks. The first boasts a live set from a concert in Paris in 1969 while the other two include collections of rough mixes from the sessions from and .
The remastering is superfluous: these are, and always have been, three of the most perfect-sounding rock albums ever made. The rough mixes of and , though, are a revelation, casting light on Led Zep guitarist Jimmy Page's immense talents as a producer and giving us the opportunity to rediscover this band as they were: four absurdly gifted young people making music together, as opposed to the rock deities they'd forever after be imagined as.
Led Zeppelin's legacy is fittingly long and fittingly loud. Depending on your preference in white male hagiography, "modern" rock music is often said to have started with Bob Dylan's , or The Beatles' , but these myths are wishful, and overly fanciful: modern rock music started with Led Zeppelin. Their influence, for better and worse, over all that's come since is singular. Punk in the 1970s was a rejection of their pompous pretentiousness, metal in the 1980s an affirmation of their excesses, grunge in the 1990s a reclamation of punk that often sounded a lot like Led Zeppelin.
Led Zeppelin were the first significant band to emerge from a post-British Invasion world and effectively reversed its trajectory. They conquered America before even bothering with their home country: was released two months earlier in the US than it was in England, and on an American label to boot.
From the beginning, they had vocal detractors. One of the well-worn saws of Led Zeppelin lore is that they were universally loathed by the critical establishment. Like so much about the band, this is a partial truth that's been exaggerated. Plenty of critics liked Led Zeppelin and plenty more politely tolerated them (the British press were particularly enthusiastic - breathlessly declared them "a blitzkrieg of musically perfected hard rock that combines heavy dramatics with lashings of sex into a formula that can't fail to move the senses and limbs"). What is true is that an influential contingent of writers hated them. Specifically, magazine hated Led Zeppelin and hated them during a period in which the publication was consolidating its reputation as the world's most influential organ of rock journalism.
All that said, is Led Zeppelin at their most essential. It's big, loud, riff-driven, not terribly bright, and probably twice as long as it ought to be. It's also an incredible piece of music that creates a five-minute cauldron of volume, rhythm and sex about as effectively as anything ever has. It instantly became the iconic track of , which was predictable but also a bit of a shame, as it eclipsed the enormous strides the band made elsewhere on the album.
Like the band's first album, was produced by Page, and it marked his full emergence as one of the great studio architects in popular music. Every sound captured on the album is extraordinary. Instruments swoop between stereo channels, the bass and drums blend perfectly against each other, Plant sounds as if he's in the room with you even when he's off singing about Middle Earth. And the guitars - good lord, the guitars.
, released in October 1970, opened with , a screeching, pummelling anthem about Viking invaders. The only way could have sounded more like a parody of Led Zeppelin is if it were seven minutes long as opposed to two and a half. If you hated Led Zeppelin, confirmed everything you thought you knew, and you may have stopped listening there.
When victory did finally come for Led Zeppelin it came like everything else had - massively. In November 1971 they released their fourth album, which bore no title but would soon be known as . It contained the band's self-styled masterpiece, , along with their actual masterpiece, .
When drummer John Bonham died in 1980 the band called it quits, but the Led Zeppelin idea endured. By the time Led Zeppelin were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, they'd faded into archetype, open-shirted lead singers and Les Pauls slung around the knees having long since lost their ability to be thrilling or crass. And the three surviving members of the band have aged remarkably gracefully, with Page taking his rightful place as a public intellectual of the electric guitar, Plant reinventing himself as a Grammy-winning interpreter of high-end Americana, and bassist John Paul Jones enjoying family life (with his wife since 1965) while occasionally joining other Zeppelin-ish supergroups.
One of the most impressive achievements of the former members of Led Zeppelin is how deftly they've each disentangled themselves from Led Zeppelin. But they can't really, no more than any of us can. That murderous burst of guitar that opened did everything it was supposed to, and everything it wasn't: it changed the world.