Led Zeppelin explain how they moved music on from The Beatles
When looking back on the 1960s era of music, The Beatles are responsible for the seismic shift of rock and roll. In just under a decade of recorded material, the Fab Four took every facet of the genre to new heights, bringing it out of the doldrums as mindless party music and making kids pay attention to the intricacies of the tunes they were listening to. As the band were bowing out gracefully with some of their best material like Abbey Road, rock and roll was also starting to go through its own change with Led Zeppelin.
In the heart of England, artists were following the lead of acts like The Rolling Stones, crafting songs or covering tunes indebted to the American blues of a few years before. While Jimmy Page had found his niche in The Yardbirds, it wasn’t until Led Zeppelin came out in the late ’60s that the focus of the music scene started to change its course.
As opposed to the sing-along chants from The Beatles, Zeppelin’s tunes relied more on jams and getting into a groove as Page’s guitar riffs swirled around the speakers. Although Zeppelin was meant to be imitating the kind of bands they had seen when they were coming up, they still understood the changing of the audience.
In the wake of the hippy movement, fans were looking for something a bit more challenging than a three-minute pop song, and while The Beatles expanded the concept in their later output, Zeppelin was one of the first bands to give that shock to the system up close. Since The Beatles had vacated the road years before, fans saw Zeppelin in their natural habitat, constantly feeding off the energy they were giving in every performance.
During a TV interview around the same time, drummer John Bonham commented on how things were changing around them, remarking: “I think why the rules are changing is because the kids are changing. These days, the public are coming to listen to what you’re playing and not just to look at you. I remember when I saw The Beatles, it was to look at them. Today, it’s not what you are; it’s what you’re playing.”
Although Zeppelin could connect with their audience through their bluesy tendencies, the intense focus on expanding music appealed to them, using every album to dip their toes into other avenues. As much as Zeppelin was trying to move on from The Beatles, they never lost that desire to keep pushing the boundaries of what is confined to their genre, embracing the sounds of Eastern music on songs like ‘Kashmir‘ as well as creating grand epics like the immortal ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
It all worked in a cycle as well, with Zeppelin becoming one of the musical gods of the next decade before the punk explosion started to swallow them up, with The Sex Pistols shunning the notion of the lavish rock star lifestyle. For the time, though, records like Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin II were giving listeners a preview of what the 1970s were going to sound like.
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