The Led Zeppelin album that changed Robert Plant’s life: ‘It was so sudden’
Most rock fans felt the world turn on its axis when they heard Led Zeppelin. Everyone was still listening to giants of the 1960s with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but Jimmy Page predicted what the 1970s were going to sound like as soon as the needle hit the vinyl on their first record. This was the sound of hard rock starting to get its sea legs, but Robert Plant thought the group’s crowning achievement didn’t come until Led Zeppelin II.
At the same time, Led Zeppelin feels more like a good proof of concept than a fleshed-out album for half its tracks. That doesn’t mean it’s bad; Zeppelin’s debut could easily go toe-to-toe with any band’s finest hour and still hold its own. It’s just a little easier to see where the band were getting their influences, since a good chunk of the album is still made up of covers alongside incredible strokes of genius like ‘Communication Breakdown’.
Plant was also still getting used to his voice on the first album as well. While he never sounded more raucous than he did on the first outing, it’s easy to hear where every other rock vocalist until the end of time has gotten and subsequently will get their chops from. As for Led Zeppelin II, that’s a bit of a different animal.
Everything was still indebted to the blues, but how do you even categorise something like ‘Whole Lotta Love’? No one had a category for something that fell between rock and roll and blues, and Page’s insistent riff on the track put him one notch below someone like Keith Richards in terms of guitarists who could pull riffs out of the air.
In essence, Led Zeppelin II is a perfect rock album, showcasing every band member’s potential and one of the more eclectic track listings on any project. The blues is accounted for on ‘The Lemon Song’ and ‘Bring It On Home’, but where else are you going to find the kind of insanity in ‘Heartbreaker’ or John Bonham’s fantastic drum solo in ‘Moby Dick’?
While Zeppelin was one of the biggest attractions in England thanks to their debut, Plant remembered that their sophomore outing was the moment where nothing would be the same again, telling Louder, “Our whole lives changed, particularly me and Bonzo’s. It was such a sudden change we weren’t quite sure how to handle it. Bonzo was still in a council flat in Dudley, and he had a Rolls-Royce at the bottom of the lift. Somebody key’d it one day, and he couldn’t understand why”.
Then again, Zeppelin was bound to get much bigger than anyone had ever dreamed of. Whereas The Beatles and The Stones had their fair share of highlights throughout their career, Zeppelin started to be treated like the reigning gods of rock for the next few years. Led Zeppelin II was only the start of the roller coaster for them, and albums like their untitled fourth album and Physical Graffiti put them in the same breath as the legends they loved.
Everything would go up from here, but Zeppelin had the perfect balance of naivety and power on Led Zeppelin II. The more ambitious pieces were just ahead, but if they had decided to play this kind of music for the rest of their lives, they would have still been one of the greatest acts to walk the Earth.
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