The album Jimmy Page said was Led Zeppelin “at the top of their game”
Having Jimmy Page pick his favourite Led Zeppelin would be like asking someone to pick their favourite child.
The band was Page’s baby from the beginning, and while it took a lot more people behind him for it to become legendary, he wasn’t going to roll over when the rest of the group thought something was merely good enough. Every record they made needed to be a bold new direction for the group, and he could acknowledge when the band absolutely knocked it out of the park.
If you discount Coda, though, there aren’t too many moments when the band completely struck out. There are bound to be those naysayers that insist that Led Zeppelin III was a minor step down because of how acoustic-based the whole thing was, but is anyone going to really look at their fellow Zeppelin fans and say that an album with ‘Immigrant Song’ and ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ on it is bad?
Granted, there are some records that the band feels more strongly about than others. Robert Plant made it perfectly clear that he felt that ‘Kashmir’ should be their definitive song, and while Page was proud of a lot of their best work, he would have admitted that an album like in Through the Out Door felt like a transitional album that wasn’t as clearly thought out as the rest of their material.
But their run from the start of the 1970s all the way to Physical Graffiti is pretty much untouchable. Every single song had the potential to be an all-time great, and while not all of them were exactly the easiest to dance to in the same way that The Yardbirds’ material was, that didn’t matter to Page so long as they could make albums with as much swagger as their fourth record.
While the record was tentatively untitled, Page figured that nothing could stand in their way when they made it, saying, “I must say that when you had four musicians that were really without doubt at the top of their game there and they played really superbly as a band and that whole aspect took on a fifth element – this alchemy of it that was really ripe for creation. We were able to do, collectively, so much. It was a wonderful vehicle to be able to develop.”
A lot of people might be able to judge an album by its best tracks, but that’s not really the true measure of a great album. If we’re looking at an album that should be spotless from top to bottom, it’s important to focus on what people consider the “worst” tracks on the record, and if the lowlights of an album like are hard rock juggernauts like ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ or the insanely creative ‘Four Sticks’, it’s hard to call any part of the record awful without splitting hairs a little bit.
But the reason why the band’s fourth record works so well is because of how varied it is. ‘Black Dog’ doesn’t sound anything like the freewheeling energy of ‘Rock and Roll’, and even when they delve into the acoustic material, ‘The Battle of Evermore’ is going for a far more mystical tone than anything that turned up on ‘Going to California’, despite both of them not featuring any major electric guitar pieces.
While most Zeppelin fans could take their pick amongst their catalogue and get their fair share of classics on every album, the fourth record is that perfect sweet spot for everything that you’d need to know. Anyone can claim to not be a Zeppelin fan, but it’s impossible to listen to half of this record and not at least respect the sheer weight that they had as a musical entity whenever they performed.
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