Led Zepplin IV

What the Beatles were to the '60s, Led Zeppelin were to the '70s: a band so successful and innovative they wound up creating the prism through which their entire epoch was seen. Zeppelin ushered in the era of album rock -- they refused to release singles off their albums, even when they were garnering massive radio play -- and of arena rock, playing ever-larger stadiums as their ticket sales skyrocketed. Other bands played on a similar field but Led Zeppelin carried a unique mystique cultivated by cryptic album art, distance from the press, and, of course, their music. Drawing upon postwar electric blues, early rock & roll, and psychedelia, Zeppelin created a titanic roar in their earliest days but even then they weren't merely heavy. Underneath the wattage, there was a strong undercurrent of folk-rock and the quartet would soon thread in world music, funk, country, and synthesizers, creating an adventurous body of work that had a long, lasting influence on hard rock, heavy metal, and alternative rock.

Quite a feat for a band whose origins lie in the ashes of the pioneering British rock band the Yardbirds. Jimmy Page, a guitarist who made his reputation as a sessionman in the '60s, joined the band in 1966, functioning as the replacement for bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, but he soon split lead guitar duties with Jeff Beck and took over that position entirely once Beck departed. Page contributed heavily to the band's final album, 1967's Little Games, which also saw contributions from John Paul Jones, a bassist and string arranger who also ran in the same studio circles as Page; the two played on Beck's 1966 single "Beck's Bolero," which also featured Keith Moon. Under the direction of their new manager Peter Grant, the Yardbirds supported the album with a tour of the United States, but the group was in its final days. Just before the band's dissolution, Page filled the time with session work, including a spring 1968 session where he played on Jones' arrangement of Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man." During the sessions, Jones requested to be part of any future project of Page's. This future project materialized quickly. In the summer of 1968, the Yardbirds' Keith Relf and James McCarty left the band, leaving Page and bassist Chris Dreja with the rights to the name, along with the obligation of fulfilling an upcoming fall tour. Page set out to find a replacement vocalist and drummer. Initially, he wanted to enlist singer Terry Reid and Procol Harum's drummer B.J. Wilson, but neither musician was able to join the group. Reid suggested that Page contact Robert Plant, who was singing with a band called Hobbstweedle

After hearing him sing, Page asked Plant to join the band in August of 1968, the same month Chris Dreja dropped out of the new project. Following Dreja's departure, John Paul Jones joined the group as its bassist. Plant recommended that Page hire John Bonham, the drummer for Plant's old band, the Band of Joy. Bonham had to be persuaded to join the group, as he was being courted by other artists who offered the drummer considerably more money. By September, Bonham agreed to join the band. Performing under the name the New Yardbirds, the band fulfilled the Yardbirds' previously booked Scandinavian engagements in late September 1968. The following month, they recorded their debut album in just under 30 hours. Also in October, Dreja informed Page he had the rights to the New Yardbirds name for the live dates only, so the group switched its name to Led Zeppelin. Grant helped the band sign a record-setting contract with Atlantic Records in the United States before the end of the year; they were paid a reported $200,000 advance, at that date the largest sum for any new band. Early in 1969, Led Zeppelin set out on their first American tour, which helped set the stage for the January release of their eponymous debut album. Two months after its release, Led Zeppelin had climbed into the U.S. Top Ten. Throughout 1969, the band toured relentlessly, playing dates in America and England. While they were on the road, they recorded their second album, Led Zeppelin II, and that speed gave the record's loud, riff-heavy blues a palpable urgency.

Like its predecessor, Led Zeppelin II was an immediate hit upon its October 1969 release, topping the American charts two months after its release and spending seven weeks at number one. The album helped establish Led Zeppelin as an international concert attraction, and for the next year, the group continued to tour relentlessly. Led Zeppelin started to broaden their horizons with Led Zeppelin III. Recorded in a cottage in Wales and released in October of 1970, the album saw them weaving British folk into their heavy rock, a hybrid that deepened the band's sound. Led Zeppelin III reached number one in both the U.K. and U.S. but, comparatively, sales were softer for this record than the two previous blockbusters; it never earned a platinum certification in the U.K. but, over the years, it went platinum six times in the U.S., a sign of its reputation as one of band's most distinctive records. Despite Zeppelin's stated aversion to singles, they did support III with the release of "Immigrant Song" as a 7" in the States, backed with the non-LP "Hey, Hey What Can I Do," their only B-side to not appear on an album. Led Zeppelin didn't tour as heavily behind Led Zeppelin III as they did Led Zeppelin II, but they were well on their way to consolidating their status as one of the most popular attractions in rock. Their next record, an untitled record commonly referred to as Led Zeppelin IV, cemented that reputation. Released in November 1971, Led Zeppelin IV merged the heavy blues of II with the folk mysticism of III and at the crossroads of those two extremes lay "Stairway to Heaven," an eight-minute epic that encapsulated much of Zep's majesty. "Stairway to Heaven" was an immediate radio hit, eventually becoming the most played song in the history of album-oriented radio; the song was never released as a single. Despite the fact that the album never reached number one in America, Led Zeppelin IV was their biggest album ever, selling well over 37 million copies over the next four decades.

Led Zeppelin supported Led Zeppelin IV with their biggest tour to date -- biggest according to size, not dates. All around the world they made the leap into stadiums and sports arenas, pioneering a circuit that became commonplace later in the decade, leaving legends of excess along the way. After completing their 1972 tour, they retreated from the spotlight and recorded their fifth album, Houses of the Holy. Appearing in March 1973, Houses of the Holy found them weaving in touches of funk and reggae amidst their crunching rock and seven-minute epics. Once again, Zeppelin had another smash album on their hands and its success led to an American tour that broke box-office records -- most of which were previously held by the Beatles. The band's tour culminated in a three-night stand at New York's Madison Square Garden in July 1973, a stint that was filmed and released as the concert film The Song Remains the Same in 1976. Following this record-breaking tour, Led Zeppelin spent a quiet year during 1974, releasing no new material and performing no concerts. They did, however, establish their own record label, Swan Song, which released all of Led Zeppelin's subsequent albums, as well as records by Dave Edmunds, Bad Company, the Pretty Things, and several other acts. Physical Graffiti, a double album released in February of 1975, was the band's first release on Swan Song. The album was an immediate success, topping the charts in both America and England. Led Zeppelin launched an international tour with a five-night stint at London's Earls Court but on the eve of the American leg that fall, Robert Plant and his wife suffered a serious car crash while vacationing in Greece. The tour was canceled and Plant spent the rest of the year recuperating from the accident.

As Plant recovered, the band headed to Malibu to record a new album. The resulting Presence appeared in the spring of 1976 and while it debuted at number one in both the U.S. and U.K., sales lagged slightly, possibly due to the band's decision not to tour in support of the album. Instead, they released the film The Song Remains the Same, which appeared in the fall of 1976; its soundtrack peaked at number one in the U.K. and number two in the U.S. Zeppelin finally returned to the stage in the spring of 1977 with a tour of the United States (the U.K. was off limits, as the band decided to take a tax exile). The concerts raked in money but nearly three months into the tour, Plant's six-year-old son Karac died of a stomach infection. Led Zeppelin immediately canceled the tour and offered no word whether or not it would be rescheduled, causing widespread speculation about the band's future. For a while, it did appear that Led Zeppelin were finished. Robert Plant spent the latter half of 1977 and the better part of 1978 in seclusion. The group didn't begin work on a new album until late 1978, when they began recording at ABBA's Polar Studios in Sweden. A year later, the band played a short European tour, performing in Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Austria. In August of 1979, Led Zeppelin played two large concerts at Knebworth; the shows were their first English performances in four years and would be their last English concerts.

In Through the Out Door, the band's much-delayed eighth studio album, was finally released in September of 1979. The album entered the charts at number one in both America and England. In May of 1980, Led Zeppelin embarked on their final European tour. In September, they began rehearsing at Jimmy Page's house in preparation for an American tour. On September 25, John Bonham was found dead in his bed -- following an all-day drinking binge, he had passed out and choked on his own vomit. In December of 1980, Led Zeppelin announced they were disbanding, since they could not continue without Bonham.

Following the breakup, the remaining members all began solo careers. John Paul Jones returned to producing and arranging; for years, he remained in a behind-the-scenes capacity, waiting until 1999 to release his solo debut, Zooma. After recording the soundtrack for Death Wish II, Jimmy Page compiled the Zeppelin outtakes collection Coda, which was released at the end of 1982. That same year, Robert Plant began a solo career with Pictures at Eleven. In 1984, Plant and Page briefly reunited in the all-star oldies band the Honeydrippers. After recording one EP with the Honeydrippers, Plant returned to his solo career and Page formed the Firm with former Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers. In 1985, Led Zeppelin reunited to play Live Aid, supported by drummers Phil Collins and Tony Thompson, sparking off a flurry of reunion rumors; the reunion never materialized. In 1988, the band re-formed to play Atlantic's 25th anniversary concert, this time playing with John Bonham's son, Jason. During 1989, Page remastered the band's catalog for release on the 1990 box set Led Zeppelin. At the time, the four-disc set became the biggest-selling multi-disc box set of all time, which was followed up three years later by another box set, the mammoth ten-disc set The Complete Studio Recordings.

In 1994, Page and Plant reunited to record a segment for MTV Unplugged, which was released as No Quarter in the fall of 1994. Although the album went platinum, the sales were disappointing considering the anticipation of a Zeppelin reunion. The following year, Page and Plant embarked on a successful international tour, which eventually led to an all-new studio recording in 1998, the Steve Albini-produced Walking into Clarksdale. Although it received some positive reviews, the album wasn't a massive hit -- it went gold only in America -- and Page and Plant ended their union shortly thereafter; Page went on to tour with the Black Crowes, while Plant resumed his solo career. Further Zeppelin archival releases saw the light of day in the late '90s, including 1997's stellar double-disc BBC Sessions, plus Zep's first official hits compilations -- 1999's Early Days: The Best Of, Vol. 1 and 2000's Latter Days: The Best Of, Vol. 2 -- and How the West Was Won, a 2003 compilation featuring live highlights from Zeppelin's Los Angeles concerts in 1972. That same year, the band released an acclaimed 2003 double-DVD set of live performances from 1969-1979. A full reunion of the surviving members of the band, with Jason Bonham filling in for his father on drums, took place in 2007 when the group played a historic concert at London's 02 in memory of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. The set was filmed and recorded, and finally appeared as a commercial release under the title Celebration Day in the fall of 2012.

In 2014, Led Zeppelin launched a massive catalog campaign supervised by Jimmy Page, containing newly remastered versions of all their albums, available on CD, high-resolution downloads, and vinyl. Additionally, there were Deluxe Editions containing previously unreleased material from the vaults. The first round of reissues contained the band's first three albums and appeared in June 2014; the last round appeared in July 2015. The group also released The Complete BBC Sessions in 2016, an updated and expanded edition of their 1997 collection BBC Sessions. The compilation included eight previously unreleased recordings, among them a long-lost radio session featuring the tracks "You Shook Me," "Sunshine Woman," and "I Can't Quit You Baby." In 2018, an expanded version of How the West Was Won appeared in March and a Super Deluxe Edition of The Song Remains the Same showed up in September.

— Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Encompassing heavy metal, folk, pure rock & roll, and blues, Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album is a monolithic record, defining not only Led Zeppelin but the sound and style of '70s hard rock. Expanding on the breakthroughs of III, Zeppelin fuse their majestic hard rock with a mystical, rural English folk that gives the record an epic scope. Even at its most basic -- the muscular, traditionalist "Rock and Roll" -- the album has a grand sense of drama, which is only deepened by Robert Plant's burgeoning obsession with mythology, religion, and the occult. Plant's mysticism comes to a head on the eerie folk ballad "The Battle of Evermore," a mandolin-driven song with haunting vocals from Sandy Denny, and on the epic "Stairway to Heaven." Of all of Zeppelin's songs, "Stairway to Heaven" is the most famous, and not unjustly. Building from a simple fingerpicked acoustic guitar to a storming torrent of guitar riffs and solos, it encapsulates the entire album in one song. Which, of course, isn't discounting the rest of the album. "Going to California" is the group's best folk song, and the rockers are endlessly inventive, whether it's the complex, multi-layered "Black Dog," the pounding hippie satire "Misty Mountain Hop," or the funky riffs of "Four Sticks." But the closer, "When the Levee Breaks," is the one song truly equal to "Stairway," helping give IV the feeling of an epic. An apocalyptic slice of urban blues, "When the Levee Breaks" is as forceful and frightening as Zeppelin ever got, and its seismic rhythms and layered dynamics illustrate why none of their imitators could ever equal them.

— Stephen Thomas Erlewine

With Led Zeppelin, there was no break-in period, no "early phase" where they figured out what kind of band they wanted to be. They were fully formed from the first repetition of the "Good Times Bad Times" riff, and they powered along through their first half-dozen albums crushing everything in their path. Zep never had their Sgt. Pepper's, their Exile, their Who's Next, because every album was more or less that good—for a while, anyway. This was a band that knew the music it wanted to make and executed it with ruthless precision. The second trio of Led Zeppelin reissues (the fourth album and Houses of the Holy came out last fall, Physical Graffiti this week) found the band inhabiting what Neil Tennant once described (and Tom Ewing fleshed out) as their "imperial phase." Riding on their massive initial success, and pushed even further by the game-changing success of "Stairway to Heaven", everything they tried during these years somehow worked.

If you grew up on classic rock radio, you sometimes felt like you were listening to Led Zeppelin's fourth album on shuffle. It has eight songs, all of them are huge, and one, "Stairway to Heaven", frequently lingers near the top of lists of the Greatest Rock Songs of All Time. Given its place in culture, IV can seem like an album of moments more than songs. Individual parts have been selected, cropped, amplified, and dropped into both songs by other artists and into our collective unconscious. Every song has two or three sections that are instantly identifiable and always seem to be playing somewhere nearby. The circular guitar figure in "Black Dog"; the chiming mandolin in "Going to California"; Bonham's cymbal bashing on "Rock and Roll". It's hard to hear "When the Levee Breaks", by now, and not think of hip-hop. If Led Zeppelin's music formed the DNA of anything that could remotely be called "hard rock," IV is a petri dish overflowing with stem cells. The debut was darker and moodier, II was heavier, and III was prettier, but the fourth album is a triumph of form meeting function.

"Stairway to Heaven" is so ubiquitous that it cycles through phases of deep reverence and self-parody, and the movement between these two poles is so rapid it all becomes a blur. This happens both for individual listeners (I'm going to guess the very young still discover this song and have their idea of what a rock song can be expanded considerably) and on the level of mass culture. It's both a marker of religion and an instant punchline, a singularity that sucks in a world of experience and observation and jeering laughter and sincere tears and compacts it all into an infinitely dense point. Like many who both love it and hate it, I pretty much never need to hear it again. But "Stairway" aside, IV is their least weird album. It's basically their stab at perfection, and they get there, but this band was always at its most interesting at the margins, when they had the possibility of failure.

By 1973, Zeppelin's only competition for Biggest Band in the World was the Stones, who were losing their hunger. Later that year, the Stones would put out Goat's Head Soup, beginning a period of drift they wouldn't return from until 1978's Some Girls. The field was clear, with the '60s starting to recede in the rearview, but punk was still a couple of years away, Zeppelin didn't waste the opportunity. Houses of the Holy, their fifth album in four years, takes the most powerful moments of the fourth album and amplifies them, and also adds some oddball experiments that flesh out the Led Zeppelin story.

They are most in the zone on "Over the Hills and Far Away", which is on a very short list of best songs Zep ever wrote, which is to say that it's among the best rock songs ever written. Everything they ever did well—pastoral beauty, crunchy riffs, stop/start changes, monster drum grooves—could be found on this single track. "The Ocean" features what could be Jimmy Page's single greatest riff. "The Rain Song" is a masterful study in the power of guitar tone, both for its full acoustic strumming and the electric guitar work that has always evoked the weather of its title. John Paul Jones' gorgeous Mellotron passage is one of the definitive uses of that strange instrument. And "No Quarter" is a disorienting bad-vibes epic, archetypal of the '70s, capturing the bleak interiority of a certain kind of drug experience.

Houses of the Holy is a perfectly reasonable choice for best Zeppelin LP, even if it had signs that the band couldn't last forever. "The Song Remains the Same" is the first sign of Robert Plant using a more pinched sound for his upper register, adapting to that gradually disappearing top octave by contorting his vocals into a strange squeal. By the last two Zeppelin records this would be his default approach when singing in this range. "The Crunge" is a sour version of funk, a weirdly fascinating half-song complete with a groaner of a James Brown joke. John Bonham supposedly disliked "D'yer Mak'er" so much he refused to write an interesting drum part, sticking instead with the first shuffle beat that came to mind. It was Zeppelin's stab at reggae, and though they never try to breathe any space or light into the mix, it's impossible to dismiss the song's easy catchiness, its affection for doo-wop melody, the motion of Page's spindly guitar.

Houses of the Holy might be Zeppelin's most impressive album on a purely sonic level, and this particular remaster reinforces that notion. The best remastering jobs always offer a subtle improvement—a touch of EQing here, a bit more volume there without overdoing it. Taken together, they hopefully offer more detail, and these versions make the grade. The bonus discs, however, continue to be disappointing. From one angle, there's actually something admirable about how little Led Zeppelin left in the vaults. It was a testament to their brutal efficiency as a rock machine. But aside from the live set released with the debut, the bonus discs so far have been the definition of "fans only."

They are mostly filled with "alternate mixes," which is a strange concept. Mixes freeze in time a single moment that is the end result of many individual decisions; they document fader settings. Alternate mixes showing what could have happened are literally infinite; all these mixes are said to have been created while the album was being mixed, and there is no reason to doubt that, but the truth is Page could just as easily make an "alternate mix" of any one of these songs this morning and no one would know the difference. The fact that a mandolin was briefly considered to be slightly louder for a given sound is basically a stray fact and nothing more. All it provides is a chance to hear familiar performances in familiar songs in a way that sounds slightly unfamiliar.

Among the first six records, aside from III, Physical Graffiti suffers least from overfamiliarity. It's Led Zeppelin's White Album, the one they made when they were at their creative peak and had a million ideas, but were also under a tremendous amount of strain and saw the end starting to come into focus. It's also, to my ears, their best album, even if it's not as unified or complete as some of what had come before. Why their best? First of all, there's more of it. The previous two albums were awesome, but each had just eight songs; Physical Graffiti has 15. It's math—when you are talking about songs from this period of the band, that makes it roughly twice as good.

But Physical Graffiti is Zeppelin's best album ultimately because it felt like a culmination. In some senses it was literally so, since its tracks had been recorded over the course of the previous few years and, in some cases, were leftovers from the previous few records. (The best of the new material was still too much for a single record, so they went back to unreleased songs and decided to flesh out a full 2xLP. The songs are all over the place, but the band makes it all work together.)

Iconic riffs abound—"Custard Pie", "The Wanton Song", and "Houses of the Holy" alone have more hooks than most rock bands manage in a career—but here they are just the beginning of the story. "In My Time of Dying" is Zeppelin's ultimate blues deconstruction, mixing the open-chord slide of acoustic Delta blues with electric heaviness and extending the whole thing past 11 minutes. Pastoral instrumentals had been in the mix for Zeppelin since the first album's "Black Mountainside", but Page never managed another one as beautiful as "Bron-Yr-Aur", a crushingly brief two minutes of guitar bliss that every rock kid who picked up an acoustic guitar in the next 10 years dreamed of playing. And their non-Western dabbling crested with "Kashmir". But Physical Graffiti's greatest strength is its looseness and general sense of playfulness. Here and there, Zeppelin showed comfort with pop. The bounce of "Trampled Under Foot" owes everything to Stevie Wonder; "Down By the Seaside" has an easeful lilt; and "Night Flight" twinkles with a bright optimism.

The song I returned to most here is also the simplest—"Boogie With Stu", an interpolation of Ritchie Valens' "Ooh My Head" (his mother gets a songwriting credit). It makes me think of what blues and early rock'n'roll meant to a certain generation of young men growing up in England during the 1950s and '60s. You hear one story after another about lives being changed by a rock'n'roll record. In a famous quote, John Lennon summed up his musical taste to Jann Wenner in a 1971 Rolling Stone interview: "Sounds like 'Wop Bop a Loo Bop'. I like rock and roll, man, I don't like much else."

When the members of Led Zeppelin get together with famed session pianist/long-time pal Ian Stewart on "Boogie With Stu", you can hear five people who speak the same language. It's drunk on the joy of the discovery. Whatever else they have going on in their lives, they can sit down and play a chugging 12-bar song and have a fucking ball, because they remember when they first heard a song like this as kids and realized that song was a portal to another world. On Physical Graffiti, the end point of Led Zeppelin's incomparable initial run, they are living deep inside that new world, still finding new things to discover, taking it all in.

— Mark Richardson, Pitchfork