Early Days: The Best Of Led Zeppelin Volume One

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When The Yardbirds broke up in 1968, guitarist Jimmy Page and manager Peter Grant quickly hired three musicians to play the band’s remaining concert date. Page brought on John Paul Jone, who’d earned a sterling reputation as a session bassist and arranger, and filled out his new band with two ringers: A lithe hippie howler named Robert Plant, and his friend John Bonham—a drummer who was wild as Keith Moon, but who maintained the timing of a jazz veteran. Though the four musicians were essentially soloist, there was instant chemistry, and the quartet soon changed its name from the New Yardbirds to Led Zeppelin, and began recording the group’s eponymous debut album in a couple week. After Grant secured the band a legendarily lucrative contract with American label Atlantic—one that guaranteed creative freedom—the feverish and futuristic <i>Led Zeppelin</i> was released in early 1969. The album hit the Top 10 in the US, and set a standard for rock-bombast that future bands would either aspire toward...or despise. The word “fusion” isn’t often used to describe hard rock, but <i>Led Zeppelin</i>’s integration of Chicago blue, British folk, and San Francisco psychedelia—without credit to the originators—was unprecedented. Plant’s wails against lowdown, no-good women are rooted in the blue, but Page—the band’s sonic Svengali—understood the musical past not as traditions to be preserved, but as cool sounds and tunings and themes to reimagine. Combined with his gifts for mic placement and mixing, he dramatically expanded hard rock’s studio vocabulary. .

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