155. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin (1969)




















Track Listing

1. Good Times Bad Times
2. Babe I'm Gonna Leave You
3. You Shook Me
4. Dazed And Confused
5. Your Time Is Gonna Come
6. Black Mountain Side
7. Communication Breakdown
8. I Can't Quit You Baby
9. How Many More Times


Review

Yipeee! I like Zeppelins! And I love them in led, although the flying capabilites are severely impaired. This is a great album and we all know that, moving on.

Led Zeppelin are not the most ethical band in the world, and if I have an issue with this album is the fact that they didn't credit a lot of people who actually wrote the songs they cover here, which seems a little disrespectful to their blues roots. This has nothing to do with what you hear in the album however, and what you hear is a bunch of Brits rocking out like no one else before, and they do it near perfection here.

There is a lot of Blues influence, and with Page fresh from the Yardbirds this is not surprising. The versions here are superb however, creating the template to all Heavy Rock to come, to greater of smaller degrees of goodness. Plant's voice has launched a thousand crappier imitations in all the Heavy Metal bands in the world, but his voice manages not to be annoying. And the playing is just beautiful, Page is a genius, doing a good effort at imitating Hendrix, and although he never quite manages it, the cleanness and catchiness of his riffs are such that they cover his technical inferiority to Jimi. If you mixed Hendrix and Townshend from the Who you might just get Page, and that is a good thing. Just the stuff in Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, the Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon-like guitars in Dazed and Confused and Communication Breakdown would make this one of the best guitar albums in the world.

Page, my boy, if you are reading this, which I'm sure you are, I loves you. And could I please take a look at your Crowleyana collection? plskthankx. xxxx (I wanna have like a million of your babies)

Oh just buy it, from Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Babe I'm Gonna Leave YOu
2. Communication Breakdown
3. Dazed And Confused
4. Good Times, Bad Times

Final Grade

10/10 (Call me, Jimmy)

Trivia

Kirk/Spock to the sound of Babe I'm Gonna Leave You :



From Wikipedia:

While the album received generally positive reviews, some derided it, most famously John Mendelsohn of Rolling Stone magazine, who savaged the band for stealing music, mimicking black artists, and showing off. This marked the beginning of a long rift between the band and the magazine. Led Zeppelin rejected later requests for interviews and cover stories with the magazine as their level of success escalated.

Led Zeppelin's famous album cover met an interesting protest when, at a February 28, 1970 gig in Copenhagen, the band was billed as "The Nobs" as the result of a threat of legal action from aristocrat Eva von Zeppelin (relative of the namesake creator of the Zeppelin aircraft), who, upon seeing the logo of the Hindenburg crashing in flames, threatened to have the show pulled off the air.