Led Zeppelin are the Steven Spielberg of hard rock and heavy metal, and this, their debut album, is their Jaws. Just as spectacle-driven blockbusters existed before Spielberg, horny white boys made suped-up blues before Zep but never on such a large scale and never to such immense popularity.
Consider the Led Zeppelins before Led Zeppelin:
Cream had Zep’s love of blues, and their indulgence for jamming it live for dozens of minutes. But they didn’t have Zep’s libido, attitude, or glorious hair. Hell, they didn’t even have a singer who could sing. Let’s face it, Cream were a bunch of band geeks, while Zep were most likely to fuck the teacher.
Bands like Blue Cheer, Vanilla Fudge, and Iron Butterfly cranked their amps like Zep, but didn’t have the songs. The Stooges and MC5 had the volume, the songs, and the attitude, but their shit was never meant for mass consumption. Zep wanted you to squeeze their lemons until the juice ran down their legs. The Stooges wanted to be your dog. That’s the difference between Tinder and FetLife.
The closest any band got to Led Zeppelin before Led Zeppelin was the Jeff Beck Group. They had the overdriven blues, a wiz kid guitarist in Beck, and a charismatic singer in Rod Stewart. Hell, Zep’s guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones even played on JBG’s debut Trust.
Alas, if the rest of Beck’s career is any indication, he didn’t want it. The mercurial musician always seemed to follow his own muse (and at points was more interested in tuning up vintage cars than guitars), and seemed disinterested in mass appeal. In fact, until his unexpected death in 2023 whereupon he entered Rock & Roll Valhalla (if Guitar Youtube is to be believed), Beck was known for making music that some musicians liked and just about no one else. Besides, although Stewart may’ve been one of the best frontmen in a club or barroom, to me, he seemed silly when playing arenas, whereas Zep’s Robert Plant looked right at home. Stewart could rock, croon, and joke around, but unlike Plant, he couldn’t wail.
Besides, a band called the Jeff Beck Group was never going to take over the world. Unless your name is Max Power or Dick C. Normus, that shit’s going to go over like a lead zeppelin. The Jeff Beck Group sounds like a sponsor of PBS.
The only true Zep before Zep was embodied in one man. Like Alexander the Great he conquered the world, died young, and his generals divided up his lands. Sly took the funk, Miles took the electric jazz, and Zep took the blues. I’m talking, of course, about Jimi Hendrix, who I have no doubt would’ve been one of the biggest artists of the 1970s had he not died nine and a half months into it. In an alternate timeline, Zep never became Zep because Hendrix was still Hendrix.
Led Zeppelin was Page’s show from its inception. After spending his teens and early twenties as one of London’s most in demand session musicians, he joined the Yardbirds, replacing, of all people, Jeff Beck, who left to start the Jeff Beck Group. While the Yardbird disintegrated, Page, who was playing out the last of the band’s contractual obligations, developed his vision for what would be Led Zeppelin: a singer who could play off the guitarist, extended improvisation, big choruses, big dynamic shifts, and largely stolen lyrics about women being liars and whores.
Page roped in fellow session man Jones, discovered Plant, and convinced Plant’s drummer buddy John Bonham (who turned down more lucrative offers because he liked the music) to join. When it came time to record Zep’s debut, Page put up his own money so that he could record it exactly the way he wanted to.
Although Page tops, or comes close to topping, lists of the greatest guitarists of all time, his innovations in the studio are arguably more influential. To capture the energy of the live band, Page ignored years of institutional thought from the rigid-minded engineers he had recorded with over the past decade. Instead of aiming for pristine tracks, he tried to capture the ambience around the band as much as the sound of the instruments themselves. This meant putting microphones not only next to the amplifier speaker cones, but ten or twenty feet away. It meant recording drums in places with natural reverb instead of dead sound booths. It meant allowing some sound to bleed from one track to another. Led Zeppelin weren’t aiming for perfection, but they found it in their imperfections.
It’s a little ironic that Page is now considered one of rock’s best soloists as it’s the guitar thing he’s third best at. On Led Zeppelin I, his solos are largely Hendrix-ian splatters. He can rip a quick banger as he does on “Whole Lotta Love,” but he gets lost in a soup of pentatonic noodling in “You Shook Me.”
His riffs, however, are majestic. The arrangements and production make them sound enormous, even though he’s playing them on a freakin’ Telecaster, a guitar more known for chicken pickin’ than heavy metal thunder. He would later switch to Gibsons, which have more sustaining, hard rock-friendly humbuckers, but on Zep I, it’s all Tele.
Page’s second best talent as a guitarist is his rhythm work on acoustic. Although the band lamented that critics mislabeled their band as “hard rock” when a third of their songs were acoustic, they’re misunderstanding that hard rock can be acoustic, too. Page’s muscular rhythm work isn’t gentle folk strumming. Besides, how can a track like “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” count as an acoustic song if it explodes into two minutes of pounding at the end? Joan Baez would never.
Speaking of Baez, she originally covered “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,” which, in Zep-speak meant that it was a traditional song, and that Page could snag its royalties for arranging it. It was not a traditional song, was not public domain, and was in fact written by folk singer Anne Bredon in the late 1950s.
Not everyone can write. Even Spielberg, who has directed over 30 films, has only co-written three. Among Page’s multifarious talents, writing lyrics is not one of them…which is why, on this album, the band relied so heavily on Willie Dixon cuts (both of which were correctly attributed) and some outright theft (“Babe” and “Dazed and Confused” were not, and were settled out of court).
Over the next couple albums, Plant would find his voice as a lyricist, which meant that hobbits and Gollum began appearing among the demonic women, horny broads, and cheating whores populating Zep’s lyric sheets. Furthermore, Plant’s infatuation with Tolkien and Page’s with the occult made hard rock and metal a safe haven for some pretty dorky interests. Within a couple decades, Bolt Thrower — who’re probably getting laid at this very moment — would churn out metal dedicated to their favorite tabletop game, Warhammer.
But that would come later.
Led Zeppelin I marks the moment where hard rock and metal coalesced into an indomitable marketing force. It was new rock for a new decade. Few people have, in conception and execution, hit a bullseye more squarely than Jimmy Page.
