1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 138. Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin (1969)

 

Hold onto your hats, the first wave of British Heavy Metal is on its way. Although, for their first album, there’s only really the driving down-stroke power chords of Communication Breakdown that are truly heavy metal, the rest is hard rock at best, and this particular Led Zep album is the most bluesy, especially You Shook Me and Dazed and Confused.

Although Jimi Hendrix and Blue Cheer got there first, the Zep put the stamp on the hard rock sound. Robert Plant’s rock wail of a voice, Jimmy Page’s frenetic guitar soloing, John Bonham’s hard and heavy drumming. But by gum are they a tight unit. This is fully on display with the start-stop composition of the album opener, Good Times/Bad Times, but is present throughout, with every part placed exactly where it needs to go.

Some tracks, notably Babe I’m Gonna Leave You and Dazed and Confused, develop into rock fantasia. Listening to it as part of the 1001 Albums in context, I can hear how some of the elements of jazz informs many of the tracks here, as they wander off from the opening verse/chorus into rock jams, often devolving into drum solos or Plant yowling onto the void, before they leap back into the groove with a bang. Page’s solos often utilise raga elements, and Black Mountain Side is, basically, a piece of sitar/tabla driven raga.

Between Page and Hendrix they basically write the book on rock guitar for generations to come – Jimmy and Jimi both coaxing sounds from the electric guitar that nobody beforehand has quite done – not Jeff Beck, not Eric Clapton, certainly not on anything on the album list so far. Plant’s voice meshes very well with Page’s guitar, and the two have some great call-response vocal-guitar sections (e.g. in You Shook Me).

Led Zeppelin are also pioneers in “stadium rock”, creating a sound large enough to fill a big venue. There are a lot of elements of them in Spinal Tap – Page’s later flights of Tolkienesque fantasy like Ramble On or The Battle of Evermore surely inspiring Tap’s daft mysticism of Stonehenge, or John Bonham’s tragic death through vomit aspiration inspiring one of the untimely demises of Tap’s many doomed drummers (“It wasn’t his own vomit, but they never found out whose it was – you can’t dust for vomit”), and where Jimmy Page uses a violin bow to play his guitar on some tracks on this album, the Tap’s Nigel Tufnel uses *a violin*.

You know you’ve made it when you become big enough to parody.