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The truth behind naming Led Zeppelin’s fourth album

Thu 9 March 2023 22:00, UK

For as groundbreaking as Led Zeppelin were in their time, their album naming game was a simplified exercise. The band’s first three LPs were all self-titled, with the purpose being to let the music do the talking rather than focus on the deeper meaning behind the text on the front cover. That didn’t stop critics from speculating about them, and as the 1970s started and rock’s intellectualism blossomed, the connoisseurs of music were starting to write off Zeppelin’s music.

Although Jimmy Page and Robert Plant drew from blues traditions and turned them inside out, interested parties had a field day trying to pick them apart. Initially, they were met with unfavourable reviews, but they still became superstars. However, in a desperate bid to remove the limelight from their careers, Page suggested not to have any lettering on the front cover of their next record, instead showing a man with a massive amount of sticks on his back as the front cover.

Page discussed his decision with Rolling Stone, and said: “After all we had accomplished, the press was still calling us a hype. So that is why the fourth album was untitled”. While this might have been a jab at the critics, the untitled fourth record from Zeppelin bore four symbols on the back, each symbolising a band member. Though fans took to calling the LP, Zoso, based on what the symbols looked like, the record remains blank. However, the lack of cover art did not denote a lack of originality, and Zeppelin took their sound into bold new directions across every track.

As the tides began changing for rock and roll, Page perfected how to write amazing guitar riffs on this record, from the stone age stomp of ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ to knocking out a tribute to the old-school rock and roll they started with on the appropriately titled, ‘Rock and Roll’.

Contrary to the album’s plain cover, every song represents a different colour in Zeppelin’s palette. They take the sounds of folk music on ‘Going to California’, create an epic masterpiece on ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and then bring it back to the blues one more time on the album closer ‘When the Levee Breaks’. Since Zeppelin were filling arenas soon after this record, their take on the blues classic by Memphis Minnie goes past the blues and ends up sounding like it should soundtrack the apocalypse.

Though Zeppelin could have cared less about what the critics said, Page knew that he was on the verge of something big with the untitled record and what would become Houses of the Holy. When looking back on them 50 years later for Guitar World, Page mentioned reaching for different harmonies and trying to get the best from the band, saying, “I was pushing myself to explore new areas of harmony. I wanted to investigate those outside edges – maybe push myself over the edge! I’m surprised, really, that I’m here to tell the tale”.

Page had come out on the other side, and legions of aspiring guitarists were left with a blueprint for what hard rock should sound like.