This page is an devoted to the core studio albums of one of the greatest rock bands ever. From tearing up the Riot House on Sunset Strip, to mystifying audiences with their blazing guitars and passionate vocals, here is the collection of the classic albums of Led Zeppelin.
Although many compilations, solo projects and various performances have surfaced over the years, here you will find the 9 original studio albums plus the soundtrack from their classic film, The Song Remains The Same. Click each cover to view the artwork and track listings of each album.
Light and Shade
By Cameron CroweNOTE: The following is taken from the booklet included in the box set, Led Zeppelin: The Complete Studio Recordings.
Hollywood, 1973. It was only the second day of Led Zeppelin's stay in Los Angeles. Already, the word was out. Hordes of fans prowled the hallways of their hotel, the infamous Continental Hyatt House. The lobby was filled with photographers, groupies teetering on platform heels, even an impatient car salesman who'd come to deliver a hot-rod to drummer John Bonham.
The cold steel elevator door slid open to reveal the ninth floor. Two beefy security guards stood there, demanding a note of authorization. One had already reached in, ready to smash the button marked "lobby." Luckily, I had a note.
Nine floors up, there was no sense of the furor downstairs. Robert Plant, fresh from the shower, strode to the window of his suiteand looked out at the Billboards of Sunset Strip. He noticed the gloriously run-down hotel, the Chateau Marmont, where Zeppelin had first stayed upon their arrival in America back in 1968. Plant joked to Jimmy Page, the guitarist leader of the group, that his innocence looked like it needed a paint job.
Page had something else on his mind. A representative of their record company, he said, had just called to report that the sales of the new album, Houses of the Holy, "were spectacular. Page had been officially told that Led Zeppelin were the biggest-selling group in the world. A silent moment of triumph passed between Plant and Page. Across the hall, an Al Green record played on Jones's portable stereo.
"Well," said Jimmy Page, turning to the visiting writer. "What do you want to know?"
I wanted to say "everything." As a fledgling journalist still working at a record store, I'd fought for the opportunity to cover Led Zeppelin for the L.A. Times. The band had provided the soundtrack for my own adolescence, but I kept that to myself. I had a notebook full of questions, and as our interview progressed, Page and Plant seemed to warm from their notoriously press-wary stance. In the coming years, they would invite me to tour with them. We conducted innumerable interviews. Not many journalists were ever offered a front row seat to the Led Zeppelin experience, and years later my files are still bulging with volumes of transcripts and passionately-scribbled notes I can barely read.
The Zeppelin attitude had something to do with Peter Grant, their brilliant and imposing manager. A little bit to do with the wicked humor ot Richard Cole, their road-manager. Something to do with John Bonham thundering down the aisle of the Starship, performing Monty Python routines. With John Paul Jones, lost in dry-ice, playing "No Quarter." It had a lot to do with Page and Plant, side-by-side, sharing a single spotlight, ripping through "Over The Hills and Far Away."
The reverberations from those days run through most of what passes for rock and roll in the 1990's. Led Zeppelin has never been more popular, more pervasive, more... omnipresent. They broke up ten years ago, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the radio. Not since Elvis joined the Army has an audience so completely refused to acknowledge an artist's inactivity.
Zeppelin was also about the group's many, many followers. For a generation of kids, teenage angst was easily aided by a good set of headphones and a decent copy of Led Zeppelin II. Now that generation has their own kids, and the recordings sound even better.
22 years after their formation, the warm glow of myth surrounds Led Zeppelin. Few other than Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones remember what a truly difficult road Led Zeppelin traveled in their time.
London, 1968. Noted British session guitarist Jimmy Page had taken an offer to join the Yardbirds, only to see the group splinter on an American tour. He'd vowed to continue the band as The New Yardbirds, and set about rebuilding the group from scratch. Fellow sessionmate, bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones read an article in Disc Magazine after prodding from his wife and called Jimmy. Page had also gotten a hot tip on a young blues-singer from Birmingham, and he traveled there to see him perform.
"His vocal range "was unbelievable," recalls Page. "I thought, 'Wait a minute. There's something wrong here. He's not known.'" Page laughs. "I couldn't figure it out. I thought, 'he must be a strange guy or something.' Then he came over to my place and I could see that he was a really good guy. I still don't know why he hadn't made it yet...."
At Page's home, they explored each other's tastes by play ng favorite records — everything from Paddy Guy to the Incredible String Band to Muddy Waters and Elvis. Then Page broke out an odd choice. It was Joan Baez's dramatic version of the ballad, "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You." Page outlined a plan for a band that could play a song like that. "I'd like to play it heavy," he said, "but with a lot of light and shade."
It all made sense to Plant, who suggested they add his hometown pal and former bandmate, drummer John Bonham. The group's first get-together was in a tiny room below a record store on London's Gerard Street. The building has since been torn down, and the district reshaped as the city's Chinatown district, but Page remembers it vividly. "The room was about 18 x 30," remembers Page, "very small. We just played one number, 'Train Kept a Rolling,' and it was there immediately. An indescribable feeling...."
They rehearsed for several weeks at Page's home at Pangborne, on the River Thames. First on the agenda was a two-week tour of Scandinavia, a mop-up of some old Yardbirds commitments. Still playing under the name the New Yardbirds, they soon entered London's Olympic Studios.
It was Robert Plant's first time in a full-service recording studio. "I'd go back to the playback room and listen," he recounts. "It had so much weight, so much power, it was devastating. I had a long way to go with my voice then, but the enthusiasm and sparking of working with Jimmy's guitar...it was so raunchy. All these things, bit-by-bit, started fitting into a trademark for us. We finished the album in three weeks. Jimmy invested all his Yardbirds money, which wasn't much, into our first tour. We took a road crew of one and off we went...."
Their first British show took place October 15th, 1968, at Surrey University. They performed under a new? name. Led Zeppelin, coined by the Who's drummer Keith Moon. (As in "you'll go over like a...") An early staple of the live show would be the song "Dazed and Confused," which featured an electric Page solo played in part with a violin bow. The bow later became Page's famous solo-signature, and it's an interesting historical footnote that the idea was first suggested to him during a session by the violinist father of actor David McCallum, of Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Zeppelin performed their intense, bluesy show at several stops around England. The response from the press was mild.
America beckoned. Manager Peter Grant had a keen sense of U.S. audiences and the vast underground movement that was sweeping the country. Grant saw an opportunity when the Jeff Beck Group, managed out of the same office, cancelled out on an American tour with Vanilla Fudge. He called the upset promoters and talked them into a new group instead. Now all Grant had to do was convince the members of Led Zeppelin to leave their warm homes at the last minute, on Christmas Eve, for parts unknown.
They agreed with gusto. Page and Jones felt like warriors embarking on a new campaign. For Plant and Bonham, it was a long long way from the hills of the Black Country. The band flew straight to Los Angeles for a series of shows at the Whisky A Go Go. They drove to the Chateau Marmont, and came upon a good omen. Keith Webb, a friend from Terry Reid's band, was standing out front in the 80 degree weather. He extended glasses of champagne.
"Oh I say, chaps," Webb intoned. "Come on in, welcome to America, and Merry Christmas."
"Bonzo and I were amazed," Plant recalled in 1975. Seven years later, the sensations were still vivid. "We'd barely even been abroad, and here we were. It was the firsttime I saw a cop with a gun, the first tune I saw a twenty-foot long car. The whole thing was a complete bowl-over. It was Christmas and Christmas away from home for the English is the end of the world. I went wandering down the Sunset Strip with no shirt on. There were a lot of fun-loving people to crash into...and we started out on a path of positive enjoyment. Frank Zappa's girl group, The GTO's, were upstairs. We threw eggs, had silly water battles and had all the good fun that a 19 year-old boy should have. We met a lot of people who we still know, a lot of people who've faded away. Some of them literally just grew up. I don't see the point in growing up.... "
The first reviews of the album were surprisingly skeptical. It was a time of "super-groups," of furiously-hyped bands who could barely cut it, and Led Zeppelin initially found themselves fighting upstream to prove their authenticity. A critical drubbing by Rolling Stone would remain painful for years. It set an ominous tone for the group as they left Los Angeles and headed up to San Francisco to begin their tour.
Manager Peter Grant had a game plan. He'd avoided releasing any singles, and had studiously booked the group into key hotspots for progressive music. This group would not compete on AM radio with Gary Puckett or the Fifth Dimension. Led Zeppelin was more about an entire album. It would be a private experience, a word-of-mouth affair, something to be passed between friends like a good joint. The key piece of this plan would be their show at San Francisco's Fillmore West.
"The important thing," Plant said recently, "was that Peter told us if we didn't crack San Francisco, we'd have to go home. That was the place that was considered to be essential, the hotbed of the whole movement. It was the acid test, forget the Kool-Aid, and if we weren't convincing, they would have known right away. I said 'I've been singing for years. I'd be happy to sing anywhere. But he had his eyes set on something I couldn't even imagine."
The band was sharing the bill with Taj Mahal and Country Joe and the Fish. They arrived to find they'd been advertised only as "Supporting Act." The mission was clear—do-or-die - and Led Zeppelin took the stage that night with a''vengeance.
Jimmy Page could feel something happening in the audience, even from the stage. "It felt like a vacuum and we'd arrived to fill it," he explains. "First this row, then that row... it was like a tornado and it went rolling across the country."
By the time the band hit New York, they were headliners. The first album went top ten and stayed on the charts more than a year. They would tour the US three times in 1969 alone.
Led Zeppelin II was largely written and recorded on the road, no small feat considering the pace of their touring. The album sported more of a band personality—they were getting to know each other—and Plant had honed his vocal approach. "Whole Lotta Love," the explosive first single trom the album, would be the first big hit.
Today, none ot the band members is sure when the monster "Whole Lotta Love" riff first appeared. John Paul Jones ventures that it probably came from a stage improv during "Dazed and Confused." Says Plant: "Wherever it came from, it was all about that riff. Any tribute which flows in, must go to Jimmy and his riffs. They were mostly in E and you could really play around with them. Since I ve been playing guitar myself, 1've realized more than ever that the whole thing, the whole band really, came straight from the blues. Everything."
By 1970, Zeppelin's popularity had spread to England and parts beyond. They had even un-seated the Beatles in the prestigious annual Melody Maker readership poll. Singles were rarely released in the U.S., never in the U.K. Concert ads were rarely taken. To be a fan of Led Zeppelin was to be a member of an exclusive club. The information traveled not in newspapers, but in the back of cars, on the telephone and on the radio. Two of their rare BBC radio appearances appear on this set. "Travelling Riverside Blues" and "White Summer/Black Mountain Side" were high-profile early appearances for the band, but Page felt no nervousness about performing the intricate guitar parts for national radio.
"My basic attitude toward performing live is the same now as it was then," he told me in 1990. "I don't know if you can put it in print, but it's this — shit or bust. You do it. No nerves...you just do it."
Led Zeppelin toured for two-and-a-half years straight before finally taking a break. When a vacation was planned, it was a working vacation. Plant had the idea of traveling to a cottage in the mountains of Wales for a song-writing session with Page. (Plant: "I thought we'd be able to get a little peace and quiet and get your actual Californian, San Franciscan, Marin County blues without ever actually going there.") The name of the cottage was Bron Y-Aur, so-called for the stretch of sun that crossed the valley every day. "Bron Y-Aur" would become a title for a certain kind ot Zeppelin music — acoustic, bluesy, and soulful.
"It was the first time 1 really came to know Robert," says Page. "Actually living together at Bron Y-Aur, as opposed to occupying nearby hotel rooms. The songs took us into areas that changed the band, and it established a standard ot traveling for inspiration...which is the best thing a musician can do."
Led Zeppelin III contained echoes of Sunset Strip, of the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield, of Joni Mitchell and Moby Grape. Crossbred with their essential blues foundation, this was a new direction that truly pushed the envelope of hard-rock. They were rewarded with their least-selling album yet. It didn't matter to Jimmy Page. The stage shows expanded to feature the new material in an acoustic set. Led Zeppelin's concerts became legendary afairs. "Dazed and Confused," still the roller-coaster centerpiece, could last as long as 45 minutes. When the floodgates opened, it was sometimes difficult for Page to close them again. Likewise for John Bonham's nightly solo, "Moby Dick." The "boogie" section of the show came late in the set, and it tended to feature •whatever music the band was listening to at the time. (Some of the surprise songs played by Zeppelin: "Woodstock," "Shaft," "Feelin ' Groovy," and "The Star-Spangled Banner.") There were few effects, no tapes, just brute musical strength. Zeppelin live was a direct descendant from Elvis's early shows. aw, direct, a reminder of when rock was young.
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