Last week saw both the 55th anniversary of the release of the first Led Zeppelin album, and the 80th birthday of the band's founding member - Jimmy Page.
The 12th January 1969 was the launch date for the debut album from the most iconic of all the rock bands - but only in the US, strangely. Led Zeppelin I didn't come out in their UK homeland until more than two months later, at the end of March. The early US release was to capitalise on the upcoming tour that was planned.
Background and Recording:
Jimmy Page was the last of the three great British blues guitarists that had featured in the Yardbirds (after Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck), but the other band members, Chris Dreja, Keith Relf and Jim McCarty, had all departed for various reasons. Page was left on his own, with the rights to carry on using the Yardbirds name and a contractual obligation to tour Scandinavia.
He recruited experienced session bassist John Paul Jones, and then approach BJ Wilson to play drums and Terry Reid to sing. Wilson had committed to continue his work with Procul Harum, and Reid also declined, but suggested young Robert Plant as a possible vocalist. Plant and Page met up and instantly hit it off, while Plant suggested John Bonham, who was brought in behind the drum kit.
They ended up touring Scandinavia as the New Yardbirds, and it gave them an opportunity to hone some new material, whilst playing the older Yardbirds stuff. When they returned to London, the name was changed. The story goes that Keith Moon and John Entwistle of The Who had said of a proposed supergroup of Beck and Page, that it would go down 'like a lead balloon'. Peter Grant, manager of the Yardbirds and now this next project, liked the idea as a possible band name, but changed it up slightly.
You Shook Me - here
(Official audio only)
The album was laid down in sessions at Olympia Studios in London, in September and October 1968. The band didn't have a contract at that point, and the sessions were covered by Page and Grant. The album was produced and mixed by Page with his childhood friend, Glyn Johns - the legendary studio engineer who worked on things like Beggar's Banquet and Let It Bleed for The Rolling Stones, Who's Next? and the Get Back sessions for The Beatles (that would culminate in Let It Be).
The Album:
The record itself, was a mix of originals and reworkings of older blues tunes. They worked on several Willie Dixon numbers, I Can't Quit You Baby and You Shook Me, and they updated Howlin' Wolf's How Many More Years, turning it into How Many More Times. Babe I'm Gonna Leave You was there reinterpretation of a 1950s song, that had also been covered by Joan Baez in 1962. And, of course, there were some tunes that became well known down the years, especially Good Times, Bad Times and Communication Breakdown.
Babe I'm Gonna Leave You - here
(Live on Beat Club, 1969)
Despite Page's big name at the time, the album was not generally well received on its release. Rolling Stone was fairly typical of much of the reaction, thinking that it didn't add anything above what had already been heard on the Jeff Beck Group's Truth album, which had come out three months earlier. In fact, reviewer John Mendelsohn said that Page was "a writer of weak, unimaginative songs. The Zeppelin album suffers from his having produced it and written most of it (alone or in collaboration with his accomplices in the group)."
He went on to have a pop at Robert Plant as well, saying that "he may be as foppish as Rod Stewart, but he's nowhere near as exciting." There were a few celebratory voices, including Melody Maker, who declared that "Jimmy Page triumphs", while Felix Dennis in Oz, said that it was "so obviously a turning point in rock music."
The negativity seems to have been fairly short lived and that it was just that time was needed for people to take the album in and reflect on it properly, as it is now regarded as a classic of the heavy rock genre. It is also fair to say, that the general public obviously didn't take much notice of the poor reviews. They shipped 50,000 advanced orders in the US, before it eventually reached number 10 on the Billboard chart. It was also hit a more than respectable number 6 in the UK album charts.
Communication Breakdown - here
(Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1970)
A decade ago, when analysing it on its 45th anniversary, a piece by Consequence Of Sound published in Time magazine, came to a very different conclusion to those early naysayers. "Here we are 45 years later still marvelling over Led Zeppelin's eponymous first album, with a clear understanding that it is one of the most inspirational rock albums of all time. It is, quite frankly, transcendental." They would go on to gush over the arrangements being "often daring" and "sometimes semi-improvisational", but always "powerful and precise."
They perfectly summed up where this album, and the band, sit in the scheme of things. "It is the hard rock domino that lays the groundwork for everything the band would accomplish." But perhaps the best indication of whether it is any good comes from the more than 10 million sales it has racked up in the last five decades or so!
Good Times, Bad Times - here
(Live at the O2, 2007)
Happy Birthday Jimmy!
As we mentioned at the start, this was also an auspicious week for Jimmy Page.
He was born on 9 January 1944 in Helston, Middlesex, but grew up in Feltham and eventually in Epson, Surrey, where he did much of his schooling. There was an old Spanish guitar left lying around in the Epsom house when they moved in, and nobody seemed to know where it had come from. Page started playing aged 12, and while he did have a few lessons, he was largely self taught, with it not being unusual for him to put him up to six hours a day of practice.
He was first inspired by two of the greats that played with Elvis Presley - Scotty Moore and James Burton. But, like many other musically minded teens of the time, he also got into skiffle and blues artists like Elmore James and BB King. His teenage skiffle group found themselves on tv talent show, Huw Wheldon's All Your Own, in 1957. In a prescient response to the question of what he wanted to do when he got older, young Jimmy replied, "I want to do biological research [to find a cure] for cancer, if it isn't discovered by then."
He featured in several local bands, before spending several years with The Crusaders. He found his way into session work, going by the name L'il Jim Pea, and got to work with the likes of The Who, The Kinks, Marianne Faithful, the Nashville Teens and Them. He later worked as a house musician on Andrew Loog Oldham's new Immediate Records label, where he got the opportunity to play with Nico, John Mayall, Chris Farlowe, Donovan, Johnny Hallyday. Perhaps most impressive of all - he can be heard on Release Me by Engelbert Humperdinck.
From there he would end up in the Yardbirds, and the rest is history....
Happy 80th Birthday Jimmy!