The 1971 album Jimmy Page called Led Zeppelin’s greatest: “Perfect”
Every single Led Zeppelin album is like a musical child to Jimmy Page.
He was the one putting together every single piece of the mix whenever they walked into the studio, and even if Eddie Kramer helped him put together many of their hits, Page wasn’t going to let anything slide on one of their records that he didn’t give his seal of approval to. He knew that everything needed to sound like what he heard in his head, but he felt that some albums did a better job at explaining what the band were all about.
Because when people first laid their ears upon Zeppelin in the early days, a lot of them had no clue what they were looking at at the time. The British blues boom had been going strong for years, but no one had pushed the music to that kind of extreme before, especially with a singer like Robert Plant belting to the rafters every single time he performed songs like ‘Dazed and Confused’.
A lot of what they made came completely naturally to them, but it was going to take a while to work the blues out of their system. Page didn’t want the band to be simply another bluesy outfit, and later records like Physical Graffiti were a smorgasbord of everything that they had done. There were the traditional blues numbers, but there were also some fun experiments, the occasional acoustic ditty and even songs that defied categorisation like ‘Kashmir’.
But that kind of metamorphosis had already been going on for years before Page decided to make their double album. Led Zeppelin II had all of the classics that any other rock and roll band would need, and while the band’s third outing did have more than a few head-scratching moments with all of the acoustic material, it was a necessary stepping stone for the band to create their untitled fourth record.
And while the album was named as a middle finger to the establishment that claimed that Zeppelin were all hype, every track on the record was like a new adventure for them. ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is already the acknowledged masterpiece that doesn’t need to be talked about anymore, but ‘The Battle of Evermore’ is the amalgamation of all their acoustic work, and ‘When the Levee Breaks’ is the point where they had taken the blues to its heaviest conclusion on record.
They didn’t set out to make their definitive statement, but Page felt that no other record they made came close to capturing what the band were all about, saying, “The fourth album showcases perfectly everything to do with the band, whether it’s the individual performances or how it works collectively, the production and everything to do with it. It’s a really strong time capsule; that’s what it is and so different from the albums that came before. Collectively we made such fine music that it was as if fate put us together and decreed we made music that would change things.”
But even when you strip things back, Zeppelin were still a great rock and roll band at the end of the day. They could have spent the rest of their lives challenging the norms by playing with time signatures or messing around with traditional arrangements on ‘Black Dog’, but the fact that they could make a song that sounded as freewheeling as ‘Rock and Roll’ and still make it sound seamless was what they were all about.
Because outside of being one of the greatest rock and roll bands of their time, Page was looking to take the audience on a journey on all of their records, and their fourth record is one of the best journeys they could have gone on. Not all of the songs needed to be classics, but there’s hardly a dent in any song on here.
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