Led Zeppelin by Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin is the debut album by the English rock band Led Zeppelin. It was recorded in October 1968 at Olympic Studios in London and released on Atlantic Records on 12 January 1969 in the United States and 31 March 1969 in the United Kingdom. The album featured integral contributions from each of the group's four musicians and established Led Zeppelin's fusion of blues and rock. Led Zeppelin also created a large and devoted following for the band, with their take on the emerging heavy metal sound endearing them to a section of the counterculture on both sides of the Atlantic. Although the album initially received negative reviews, it was commercially very successful and has now come to be regarded in a much more positive light by critics. In 2003, the album was ranked number 29 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. When Rolling Stone updated the list in 2012 the album remained ranked at 29th greatest of all time. Along with the group's two next albums, Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin III, the album was remastered and reissued by Page at the start of 2014. The reissue comes in 5 formats: a standard CD edition, a deluxe 2 CD edition, a standard LP version, a deluxe 3 LP version, and a super deluxe 2 CD+3 LP version with a hardback book. The deluxe and super deluxe editions feature bonus material from a concert in Paris recorded in October 1969. Bonus tracks consist of Live – Olympia, Paris, 1969 (tr 10 - 17)
Years after <i>Led Zeppelin IV</i> 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.<br /> It hangs together well enough as an album. But the real beauty of <i>IV</i> 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.<br /> Overstated? Yes—there are times when <i>IV</i> 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 scandalise company at levels polite and otherwise. The irony of <i>IV</i> is that it opened a new world for hard rock by embracing the colour and variety of its natural enemy: pop.
