We continue our look back at the music of 50 years ago……
Is it the greatest hard-rock record ever? It would certainly occupy a place in any rock Mt.Rushmore. It is the 4th LP from Led Zeppelin…released in November of 1971. It is the best selling LP in their catalog at over 36 million copies and, more importantly, was the quality of the music which stills sounds great today.
The band had hunkered down in an old house at Headley Grange in Hampshire and the place became an intregal part of the sound of the LP. Especially for John Bonham’s booming drum sound.
How do you pick a favorite song from this pile of quality tracks. I know everyone is too hip to select ‘Stairway To Heaven” as their favorite but I’ll bet you still sing along in the car while beating out Bonham’s drum pattern on the steering wheel and wailing on your air guitar to Page’s amazing solo. Or maybe that’s just me.
Side one is outstanding. “Black Dog” to “Rock and Roll” to “The Battle of Evermore” (featuring Sandy Denny on 2nd vocal and Page on mandolin) to “Stairway”. Incredible.
And then you flip the record over and get Misty Mountain Hop, Four Sticks, Going To California (Page & Plant’s ode to Joni Mitchell), and “When The Levee Breaks”.
Levee is a re-make of an old Memphis Minnie blues song…
The sound of Levee is driven by Bonham’s drums but also the effects include everything but Plant’s voice being slowed down to achieve what they wanted. Many hip-hop artists have sampled the intro to this one.
Four Sticks is a tough song to play and is probably the least favorite song on the LP. The band reportedly only played it once in concert but The Bombay Symphony took a crack at it…
The band, to the chagrin of their record company decided to release the LP without the name of the band or a photo of the group on the cover. Jimmy Page said the band had been criticized for getting by on hype and wanted the music to drive sales on this one. The oil painting on the cover was purchased by Plant in an antique store in Reading.
Despite it selling millions, it never hit #1 on the album charts, as Sly & The Family Stone & Carole King kept it out of the top spot.
Critics loved it, calling it everything from a “monolithic cornerstone of the genre”, to a “fully realized hybrid of the folk and hard-rock directions. Mablen Jones wrote ” that the LP and particularly ‘Stairway To Heaven” “blended post-hippie mysticism, mythological preoccupations, and hard rock”. And that stuff was mothers-milk at the time for young rock fans.
There might be a reflexive bias against this album because of the saturation of it over the years. Just because you have heard something hundreds of times doesnt make it any less great. “Stairway to Heaven” is great…and so is this album.
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