“Led Zeppelin” is the debut album of the legendary British band. It is the album that we are all used to referring to as “Led Zeppelin I”. It was recorded during October 1968, at the Olympic Studios in London and according to jimmy Page (sometime during the mid 90s), the recording sessions, mixes and all other production, was completed within 36 hours (!). It was released January 12, 1969, containing 9 tracks, seven of them original band compositions and 2 arrangements of songs by the legendary blues bassist and composer Willie Dixon. The raw sound of the album made Zeppelin particularly popular on both shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

Going back to the historic elements of this album, this is August 1968 when the Yardbirds are definitely history and their guitarist, Jimmy Page (who kept all the Yardbirds’s name rights), recruited John Paul Jones as a bassist, Robert Plant for the vocals and John Bonham on the drums, for a pre-arranged Scandinavian tour of the Yardbirds. The band toured as “The New Yardbirds” and performed Yardbirds original songs plus “Communication Breakdown”, “I Can’t Quit You Baby”, “You Shook Me”, “How Many More Times” and “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”. All of them were highly approved by the audiences. When the band returned from the tour, early October 1968, Page decided to change their name to Led Zeppelin and to record the new material.

Behind all these, there was Page’s manager Peter Grant who paid for everything since there was no label to carry the cost. He allowed the band to express their artistic desires, without any compromise to any label demands. When the outcome was ready, they took it to Atlantic Records, they signed immediately. Without going into figures, it is worth mentioning that the sales revenue from the album so far, have covered the recording and production costs by 2,000 times!!! On this album, Page performed with a Fender Telecaster, a gift from his friend Jeff Beck, while the acoustic parts were recorded using a Gibson G-200, loaned to Page by Big Jim Sullivan.

The album was produced by Jimmy Page with Glynn Johns (Beatles, Rolling Stones, Who) as the sound engineer. According to Page, this album was recorded live purposely. They changed the traditional 60s mic setup and more of them were added a little further away from the guitar amps with a deeper sound as a result, what we nowadays refer to as a space mic. This album was also, one of the first to be released as “stereo”.

The album cover depicts a black&white Hildenburg type zeppelin, just a few seconds after take-off. The zeppelin is on fire. In fact, this cover illustrates  the band’s name. Some time prior to the album release, Page, Beck, Keith Moon and John Entwistle from the Who where discussing about a future project and Moon joked about it saying “Ohhh, I would probably go over like a Lead Baloon” while Entwistle followed up with “ah…a, like a Lead Zeppelin”. The album’s photographer was Chris Dreja, rhythm guitarist for the Yardbirds. As for the cover itself, there could not be a better quote than that of Rolling Stone’s magazine editor Greg Kot, who said “this image does what it has to do before one discovers the sound in the album…it shows us the Hildenburg in all it’s fallic glory, going down in flames. Meaning sex, disaster and things burning…”.

During a research in 2003, conducted by the Rolling Stone magazine, “Led Zeppelin I”, was ranked as No 20 of the top 500 albums of all times. In 2001, VH1 ranked it at No 44 of the top albums of all times while Q magazine ranked it as No 7 on the list of music that changed the world.

A pretty interesting trick by Jimmy Page was to specify playing time for “How Many More Times” as 3 minutes thirty seconds (as it was printed on the back cover), while in reality it spans up to 8 minutes and twenty eight seconds. This was done in order to fool the DJs so that they keep it on their playlists.

In reality, you could go on and on for ages describing or commenting such albums. This is one of the colossuses of rock music that leaves an unparalleled legacy. It is the album that we usually is being referred to as the milestone for music turning from rock to hard rock and heavy metal. Is this not simply enough to make this album at least unprecedented? 

Track list:

Side A:

1.         Good Times Bad Times            (Bonham, Jones, Page)

2.         Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You     (Page, Plant, Anne Bredon)

3.         You Shook Me                       (W. Dixon, J.B. Lenoir)

4.         Dazed & Confused                  (Page)

Side B:

1.         Your Time Is Gonna Come        (Jones, Page)

2.         Black Mountain Side                 (Page)

3.         Communication Breakdown       (Bonham, Jones, Page)

4.         I Can’t Quit You Babe              (W. Dixon)

5.         How Many More Times             (Jones, Page)