Credit: Far Out / Alamy

Jimmy Page explains why Led Zeppelin didn’t release singles

Thu 22 June 2023 17:30, UK

During their decade together as an active band, Led Zeppelin only released 15 singles. When discounting promotional singles that weren’t available to the general public to purchase, that number is reduced to just 11. If they had been able to have it their way, the legendary hard rock pioneers probably wouldn’t have released any singles at all.

Led Zeppelin was on the front lines of Album Oriented Rock, a relatively new revolution in music that put the importance of the LP at the very front of an artist’s work. The band’s influences – whether it was Little Richard or Muddy Waters – were more known for their individual singles. Albums would be haphazardly assembled by record companies, with most groups getting little say with regard to the contents. Bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had seen major discrepancies between the British and American versions of their albums, and Jimmy Page was insistent that the same thing not happen to Zeppelin.

Only one official single had been released from both Led Zeppelin I and Led Zeppelin II: the former had ‘Good Times Bad Times’, and the latter had ‘Whole Lotta Love’. In America, ‘Whole Lotta Love’ peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100, giving the band their highest-charting single. But as Page began to assemble the material for Led Zeppelin III, singles were the last thing on his mind.

“Certainly, within the written context of what was being presented to people to hear, everything was going to be moving forward,” Page told Total Guitar in 2020. “So when it went to the point of the more acoustic style of the third album, you can imagine our record company getting that in and going, ‘Where’s the ‘Whole Lotta Love?” If anyone had said that to me, I’d have said, ‘Oh that, that’s on the second album – this is the third album.'”

“You know how it is with A&R men going, ‘Oh, you’ve got to have a single.’ We had singles in America and other places, but I wanted to stay clear of that market and keep it as an albums thing,” Page added. “Right in the early stages, I demanded – after having done all the Mickie Most stuff – that we didn’t want to be a band that was known for singles. It was albums that we were going to be known for. And clearly, I wanted to make each album different from the one before.”

Page eventually acquiesced and agreed to release ‘Immigrant Song’ as a single along with ‘Hey, Hey, What Can I Do’ on the B-side. The song would be a top 20 hit in America, but Page and the rest of Led Zeppelin refused to soften their stance on 45-inch singles.

“I really knew what it was that I wanted to do,” Page asserted. “If you think about it, on the third album, there’s ‘Tangerine’, but I wrote ‘Tangerine’ back in The Yardbirds. So I’d waited an amount of time. I didn’t stick it on the first album or the second. I waited until it would fit in with the right texture of everything else. It fits great in the third album. So, yeah, I had a bit of a plan [laughs]. And not just for that one number, of course!”

Check out ‘Immigrant Song’ down below.