The Long Shadow of Led Zeppelin

When the band returned to London in October 1968, Page took Led Zeppelin into Olympic Studios with engineer Glyn Johns (who had also worked with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who). Page simply wanted the sound forged in those early live shows; he didn't want anything that couldn't be reproduced live effectively with just the four of them. Even the aural effects of a track like "Dazed and Confused" could be rendered live without excess gimmickry. Part of the astonishing presence and depth of those recordings came from the way he placed amplifiers in the room, to get varying sounds of vibrancy and decay. "Distance is depth," Page told Johns. It was an idea as old as the sounds of the Sun and Chess blues and early rock & roll recordings, and yet in Page's hands it became something refreshingly extreme.

The band members spent roughly thirty hours of studio time making their first album. They knew they had something singular. They played a few nights at London's Marquee, to largely good reviews—and then the easy times stopped. In November, Grant visited New York, where he won Zeppelin a $200,000 advance from Atlantic Records—an unprecedented amount for a new act whose first album nobody had yet heard. Even more important, though, were the contract terms that Grant secured: Essentially, Led Zeppelin held all the control. They alone would decide when they would release albums and tour, and they had final say over the contents and design of each album. They also would decide how much they would do to promote each release (not that much beyond tours, though those would be extensive) and which tracks to select as singles (Grant and the band wanted none). A major band would be working for itself, not for a company or for management (Led Zeppelin had no contract with Grant).

However, the Atlantic deal created an image problem for Led Zeppelin that they never got past. The political sensibilities that had emerged in the mix of the counterculture, the underground press and the new rock culture held a great deal of mistrust of and contempt for power and wealth. The band's large advance and its contract cast it as mercenaries in the view of many critics. Even though they were an essentially unknown quantity, Led Zeppelin were being termed a "hype."

All of this took place before anybody had heard Led Zeppelin's first album. Once that changed, it was love or hate, and little in between.

The Atlantic deal had rubbed enough tastemakers on the British scene the wrong way that Grant couldn't get the bookings that he wanted in England. The band played a few dates at London's Marquee, but there were complaints that it was too loud. Grant decided to send the band to America instead—though this was possibly his intent all along. "By the time I got Zeppelin," Grant said, "I knew America inside out." Grant told Richard Cole—who had been the Yardbirds' tour manager in the U.S.—to guide the group through its American dates. Cole was a hard drinker and a hard guy who had been a road manager for the Who. He met the band members in Los Angeles on December 23rd, 1968, booked them into the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip and set about entertaining them in his fashion. Page was well-prepared for the libertine Los Angeles rock scene—he knew groupies from his earlier tours with the Yardbirds—but for Plant and Bonham, this was a whole new world. They were startled to see policemen carrying guns in public places, and they had never seen so many limousines on one street before.

Midway through that first U.S. tour, on January 12th, the group's first album, Led Zeppelin, was released in the U.S. It was pretty much unlike anything else. The arrangements were more sculpted than those of Cream or Jimi Hendrix, and the musicianship wasn't cumbersome like Iron Butterfly's or bombastic like Vanilla Fudge's. The closest comparisons might be to MC5 or the Stooges—both from Michigan—yet neither had the polish or prowess of Led Zeppelin, nor did Led Zeppelin have the political, social or die-hard sensibility of those landmark bands. What they did have, though, was the potential for a mass audience. Young record buyers loved the album, but there were others who did not.

This had to do with various concerns—the hype claim, a conviction that Led Zeppelin were another white British band exploiting black musical forms—but what bothered critics the most about Led Zeppelin was the sound, which was seen as a manifestation of anger and male aggression. Critic Jon Landau described a Boston show as "loud . . . violent and often insane." Plus, there was a trickier element: This was a younger audience than the one that had embraced the cultural and political epiphanies of the 1960s artists. Landau again: "Zeppelin forced a revival of the distinction between popularity and quality. As long as the bands most admired aesthetically were also the bands most successful commercially (Cream, for instance), the distinction was irrelevant. But Zeppelin's enormous commercial success, in spite of critical opposition, revealed the deep division in what was once thought to be a homogeneous audience. That division has now evolved into a clearly defined mass taste and a clearly defined elitist taste."

None of these concerns impeded Led Zeppelin's early success, which, as Landau indicated, proved phenomenal. Whereas the first album had formed in quick bursts in the studio, Led Zeppelin II was recorded piecemeal in various locales during the group's hectic 1969 touring schedule. Though Page had doubts about how it might all hold together, its impact, musically and culturally, was only bigger. Combined with the first album, Led Zeppelin II forged a new sensibility in rock & roll—or at least codified something that had been forming. Some called it hard rock or heavy rock; others dubbed it heavy metal (a term that would be used to denote bands like MC5, Blue Cheer, Deep Purple and Iron Butterfly, though both the term and the music would have far different dimensions in the generations that followed). It wasn't quite plain yet, but Led Zeppelin were effecting—or representing—a sea change in popular music and popular culture. They were, as Steve Pond once noted in Rolling Stone, the last band of the 1960s and the first band of the 1970s. In 1969 and early 1970, Led Zeppelin had competed with the Beatles' Abbey Road, the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed and Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water. Those were all epochal works, in part because they were summarizing or finishing an epoch. Led Zeppelin's albums were also epochal, because they were starting one.