“We knew where we wanted to go”: The Led Zeppelin album Jimmy Page wanted “to be extreme”
Released in January 1969, Led Zeppelin‘s eponymous first album featured long, exploratory tracks like ‘Dazed and Confused’ and was rooted heavily in electrified Chicago blues, with one eye still cast towards late-1960s psychedelia.
For those recordings, Page even wielded a psychedelically painted Fender Telecaster, a fitting emblem of a band still emerging from the technicolour swirl of the decade’s final years.
In late autumn 1969, with this debut moving up the US chart following their third US tour, Zeppelin took a short break from touring and reconvened at Page’s house in Pangbourne, Berkshire, to begin work on their second album. But the pull of the road soon beckoned them back, meaning that while album one was recorded across a couple of weeks, album two ended up being recorded over eight months, forged in transit and hammered into shape in snatched studio sessions across the UK and North America.
Ideas were born from live improvisation and captured before they cooled, with each song separately recorded, mixed and produced across a patchwork of locations, including Olympic and Morgan Studios in London, A&M, Quantum, Sunset Mirror Sound and Mystic Studios in Los Angeles, Ardent Studios in Memphis, and A&R Juggy Sound, Groove and Mayfair Studios in New York City.
The result was nothing short of monumental: Led Zeppelin II emerged as a beast of a record, defining the sound of hard rock and heralding a new musical era, crafted with total conviction and a sense of purist intensity (apparently, during the recording of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, Bonham played with the thick ends of his drumsticks for maximum impact).
As well as its savage urgency, the record was also miraculously coherent given that it was recorded across such a smorgasbord of studios, a feat that can largely be credited to Page’s clarity of vision. “When we came to put II together, I already had the construction for ‘Whole Lotta Love’,” he told Mojo a while back.
Adding, “We were working and familiarising ourselves with that. ‘What Is And What Should Never Be’ was the other song that we had, and that sort of tells you that we knew where we wanted to go from quite an early stage in the process.”
And Page’s intentional direction wasn’t just conceptual; it also extended to the very sound of the record. His tight control over the album’s sonic identity ensured that it sounded coherent, even if it meant cutting studios that didn’t meet his standards: “I wanted to record at Gold Star, but the rotary pots really weren’t very good,” he said, referring to the legendary studio where Phil Spector built his Wall of Sound and The Beach Boys crafted much of Pet Sounds, “We were going for studios where the acoustics were very good when you played the music live. I wanted it to be quite extreme and that’s what I was going for: something that showed all the peaks of what we could do.”
That extremity manifested in the album’s sheer physical impact, the towering volume, the violent dynamic swings, the dense, overdriven guitar tones and cavernous drum sound that seemed to leap out of the speaker to confront you, pushing blues-based rock into a new, more aggressive dimension.
Reflecting on the riffs that shaped him, Slash apparently once told Nikki Sixx: “My first favourite riff when I was a kid had to be ‘Whole Lotta Love’. For me, that was the soundtrack for what the 1970s were going to be. It was so driving, and it was sexy”, and he was right. When the album was released on October 22nd, 1969, it knocked The Beatles’ Abbey Road from the top of the US charts and went on to sell millions stateside before topping the UK chart in early 1970. If the ’60s had belonged to John, Paul, George and Ringo, the coming decade would be claimed by the extremity of Jimmy, Robert, John Paul and John.
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