Led Zeppelin

• 1. Introduction

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  Led Zeppelin sold somewhere between 200 and 300 million records, yet record executives at Atlantic Records signed them in November 1968 without ever having seen them play. The deal was a $143,000 advance, the biggest of its kind for a new band at the time. The recommendation came from singer Dusty Springfield, who was then finishing her own Atlantic album. Four men carried that gamble. Robert Plant sang. Jimmy Page played guitar. John Paul Jones handled bass and keyboards. John Bonham played drums. They formed in London in 1968 and broke up twelve years later. In between, they were called the heaviest band of all time and the biggest band of the seventies. How did a group that critics initially disliked become the progenitor of hard rock and heavy metal? Why did they refuse to release singles, shun television, and put no name on some of their album covers? And what happened on the night a North American tour was about to begin, that ended the band forever?

• 2. From The Yardbirds

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  Jimmy Page joined the Yardbirds in 1966 as a London session guitarist, replacing bassist Paul Samwell-Smith. He soon moved from bass to lead guitar, briefly forming a dual lead line-up with Jeff Beck. After Beck left in October 1966, Page became the band's only guitarist. The Yardbirds played their final gig on the 7th of July 1968 at Luton College of Technology in Bedfordshire. Drummer Jim McCarty and vocalist Keith Relf wanted a more acoustic path, eventually building the group Renaissance. Page wanted to keep going with the heavier blues-based sound. McCarty and Relf authorised Page and bassist Chris Dreja to use the Yardbirds' name to fulfil remaining concerts in Scandinavia. Page's first choice for lead singer was Terry Reid, who declined and suggested Robert Plant, then singing for the Band of Joy and Hobbstweedle. Plant accepted and recommended former Band of Joy drummer John Bonham. John Paul Jones enquired about the bass position at his wife's suggestion, after Dreja dropped out to become a photographer. Page had known Jones since their session-musician days and let him join. In August 1968, the four played together for the first time in a room below a record store on Gerrard Street in London. Page suggested they try "Train Kept A-Rollin'", a jump blues song popularised in a rockabilly version by Johnny Burnette. "As soon as I heard John Bonham play", Jones recalled, "I knew this was going to be great... We locked together as a team immediately".

• 3. The Name And The Deal

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  "Lead balloon" was the phrase that gave the band its name. One account holds that Keith Moon and John Entwistle suggested a supergroup with Page and Beck would go down like a lead balloon, an idiom for failure. Manager Peter Grant suggested dropping the 'a' in lead, so newcomers would not pronounce it "leed". The word "balloon" became "zeppelin", which music journalist Keith Shadwick said brought "the perfect combination of heavy and light, combustibility and grace" to Page's mind. Before the change, the group toured Scandinavia as the New Yardbirds, playing their first live show together on the 7th of September 1968 at Gladsaxe Teen Club in Denmark. They recorded and mixed their first album in nine days, with Page covering the costs. Dreja then issued a cease and desist letter, since Page had been allowed to use the New Yardbirds name only for the Scandinavian dates. The Atlantic contract gave the band rare freedom. They had the final say over album contents and design, over when to release records and tour, and over which tracks became singles. Atlantic was a label built mainly on blues, soul, and jazz, only lately taking interest in British progressive rock. The band formed their own company, Superhype, to handle publishing rights.

• 4. The Anti-Single Stance

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  The band saw their albums as indivisible, complete listening experiences and disliked re-editing tracks into singles. Grant pushed an aggressive pro-album stance, especially in the UK, where there were few radio and TV outlets for rock. Yet some songs went out as singles anyway, mainly in the US and without the band's consent. An edited "Whole Lotta Love" reached number four on the Billboard chart in January 1970, selling over one million copies. "Immigrant Song" was released as a US single in November 1970 against the band's wishes, reaching the top twenty. The group also avoided television, preferring fans to hear and see them in concert. Their 1969 debut peaked at number 10 in the US and number 6 in the UK, and Steve Erlewine called it "a significant turning point in the evolution of hard rock and heavy metal". Led Zeppelin II reached number one in both the US and UK, and Steve Waksman called it "the musical starting point for heavy metal". In 1970, Page and Plant retired to Bron-Yr-Aur, a remote cottage in Wales, to write Led Zeppelin III. Its acoustic, folk-influenced sound surprised critics and fans, and reached number one in the UK and US, though it stayed the shortest of their first five albums. The only single they ever released in their homeland was a 1997 edit of "Whole Lotta Love", which peaked at number 21.

• 5. Records And Riots

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  At Tampa Stadium in Florida in 1973, Led Zeppelin played to 56,800 fans, breaking the record set by the Beatles' 1965 Shea Stadium concert and grossing $309,000. Their fourth album, released on the 8th of November 1971, carried no title, only four symbols representing the four members, and has sold 37 million copies, making it one of the best-selling albums in history. By 2021 it had sold 24 million copies in the United States alone. Its track "Stairway to Heaven", never a single, was the most requested and most played song on American rock radio in the 1970s. The band's image grew flamboyant. Page wore a glittering moon-and-stars outfit, and shows used lasers, professional lighting, and mirror balls. They travelled in a Boeing 720 nicknamed the Starship and rented entire hotel sections, including the Continental Hyatt House in Los Angeles, known as the "Riot House". Stories spread of Bonham riding a motorcycle through a rented floor there, and of a destroyed room at the Tokyo Hilton that got them banned for life. Music journalist Chris Welch cautioned that it was a myth they were "constantly engaged in acts of wanton destruction". In 1974 they launched their own label, Swan Song, whose logo is based on a drawing called Evening: Fall of Day, made in 1869 by William Rimmer. Before the final night at Madison Square Garden in 1973, $180,000 of gate receipts was stolen from a safe deposit box at the Drake Hotel.

• 6. Decline And The End

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  In August 1975, Robert Plant and his wife Maureen were in a serious car crash while on holiday in Rhodes, Greece. Plant broke his ankle, Maureen was badly injured, and a blood transfusion saved her life. Unable to tour, the band wrote much of Presence during the forced hiatus, recording it as Page used heroin, a habit he had kept regularly since 1975. On the 30th of April 1977, an audience of 76,229 at the Silverdome set an attendance record the Guinness Book of Records called the largest for a single act show to that date. That tour was beset by trouble. On the 19th of April, over 70 people were arrested as about 1,000 fans tried to gatecrash Cincinnati Riverfront Coliseum. After a the 23rd of July show at the Day on the Green festival in Oakland, Bonham and crew were arrested over a beating involving manager Peter Grant and security man John Bindon. Two days later, as the band checked into a French Quarter hotel, Plant learned his five-year-old son Karac had died from a stomach virus, and the tour was cancelled. On the 24th of September 1980, John Bonham downed four quadruple vodkas with a ham roll on the way to rehearsals at Bray Studios, then kept drinking. After midnight he was put to bed on his side at Page's home, the Old Mill House in Clewer, Windsor. At 1:45 pm the next day, Benji LeFevre and John Paul Jones found him dead, the cause asphyxiation from vomit. His ashes were interred on the 12th of October 1980 at Rushock parish church, Worcestershire. The survivors disbanded, writing in a the 4th of December 1980 statement that "we could not continue as we were".

• 7. Reunions And Rifts

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  On the 13th of July 1985, Page, Plant, and Jones reunited at the Live Aid concert at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, with drummers Tony Thompson and Phil Collins and bassist Paul Martinez. Page called the performance "pretty shambolic" and Plant called it an "atrocity". They tried again on the 14th of May 1988 at the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary concert, with Bonham's son Jason on drums, but Page called it "one big disappointment" and Plant said "the gig was foul". The band's inner rift surfaced when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 by Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith. Jones, accepting his award, joked, "Thank you, my friends, for finally remembering my phone number", drawing awkward looks from Page and Plant. Jones was not even told of the 1994 "UnLedded" MTV reunion between Page and Plant. The most acclaimed reunion came on the 10th of December 2007 at the Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert at London's O2 Arena, with Jason Bonham again on drums. Guinness World Records 2009 recorded 20 million online ticket requests, a record demand. Critics praised it, and a film of the show, Celebration Day, premiered on the 17th of October 2012 and grossed $2 million in one night. A full reunion was abandoned in January 2009 after Plant chose to keep touring with Alison Krauss. "I told them I was busy and they'd simply have to wait", he recalled in 2014. "I would come around eventually... But it turns out they weren't. And what's even more disheartening, Jimmy used it against me".

• 8. The Sound And Its Reach

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  Muddy Waters, Skip James, and Howlin' Wolf shaped the band's early sound, which was rooted in the blues and built around the twelve-bar form on nearly every album. Scottish folk guitarist Bert Jansch helped inspire Page, who adapted open tunings and aggressive strokes from him. Musicologist Robert Walser described the band's sound as "marked by speed and power, unusual rhythmic patterns, contrasting terraced dynamics, singer Robert Plant's wailing vocals, and guitarist Jimmy Page's heavily distorted crunch". Page wanted music with "light and shade", an idea heard in "Stairway to Heaven", which opens with acoustic guitar and recorder and ends with heavy electric sound. Plant's pastoral lyrics drew on the Black Country landscape and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, while Page's interest in the occult fed claims of subliminal satanic messages, which the band dismissed. Along with Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, they have been called the "unholy trinity of British hard rock and heavy metal in the early to mid-seventies". Their reach ran from Rush, Queen, and Aerosmith to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, and to artists as varied as Madonna, Shakira, and Lady Gaga. They achieved eight consecutive number-ones on the UK Albums Chart, a record shared with ABBA, and five of their albums are certified Diamond in the US. They were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2006 and named 2012 recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors. The completed documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin, the first the members agreed to join, premiered in IMAX on the 7th of February 2025, the same year Forbes ranked them the best rock band of all time.