speed of dark

Time Travel Tuesday celebrates the news (Rolling Stone, 10/15/07) that Led Zeppelin's entire discography is available (preorder) as a digital box set exclusively from iTunes for $99 (Yahoo News. All you have to do is listen to their earliest work to know why this is exciting.

In 1969, Led Zeppelin was THE must-have album. The four band members who arose from the ashes of the Yardbirds, fronted by the power duo of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, had taken the U.S. by storm with its electrified blues, folk, and funk. LZ are the only band to have had every album reach the U.S. Billboard Top Ten.

Although often labeled heavy metal--and certainly they inspired a couple of decades of big-haired arena-rockers--Led Zeppelin was much more than this. They fused a wide variety of influences from the Mississippi blues of Robert Johnson and Willie Dixon to eastern raga. Several songs on the first album were acoustic numbers, notably "Black Mountain Side." They were also among the first developers of the album as a single concept.


An astouding debut by any standards, recorded in a mere 36 hours of studio time, Led Zeppelin was followed in 1970 by Led Zeppelin II, recorded at various studios during their first American tour. The band was touring almost constantly in both the U.S. and the U.K. in its first year of existence, and a concert could last as long as three hours and include extended improvisations. By 1970 they were working on their third album. These days that kind of speed is hard to imagine, as we wait for years for bands to complete a new release.

Here are some tracks I have ripped from my vinyl LP of that first album. I played these albums to death, and I'm afraid that the pop/click filter left the drums sounding a bit tinny, but Page's ethereal blues licks are intact and still have the power to melt me. I never thought Clapton was god, but I did think Jimmy Page was. "Dazed and Confused," with Plant's vocals and Page's guitar wailing together, has no comparison.

One of the things I liked best about Led Zeppelin's albums was how the songs didn't seem to end as much as just flow from one to the other. When I was recording these from the LP, I meant to stop the recording after "I Can't Quit You Baby" and begin a new file for "How Many More Times." I don't know if it's like this on the CD version, but on the vinyl, there is no gap between them. And I just could NOT click the button to stop recording. Could not do it.

I have split them up here because the single file was just too huge, but do yourself a favor and play them together the way they were meant to be heard.

From Led Zeppelin (1969):
Communication Breakdown
I Can't Quit You Baby
How Many More Times

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