Led Zeppelin "Led Zeppelin"

Led Zeppelin is the eponymous debut studio album by English rock band Led Zeppelin, released on 12 January 1969 in the United States and on 31 March 1969 in the United Kingdom by Atlantic Records. Featuring integral contributions from each of the group's four members, the album was recorded in October 1968 at Olympic Studios in London and established their fusion style of both blues and rock music. It also attracted a large and devoted following to the band; Zeppelin's take on the emerging hard rock sound endeared them to parts of the counterculture on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Although the album was not critically well-received when first released, it was commercially successful, and critics have since come to view it in a more favourable light. In 2003, Led Zeppelin was ranked at #29 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and keeping that position after the list was updated in 2012. In 2004, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

In August 1968, the English rock band The Yardbirds completely disbanded. Guitarist Jimmy Page, The Yardbirds' sole remaining member, was left with rights to the group's name and contractual obligations for a series of concerts in Scandinavia. Page recruited bassist John Paul Jones, vocalist Robert Plant and drummer John Bonham. During September 1968, the group toured Scandinavia as "The New Yardbirds", performing some old Yardbirds material as well as new songs such as "Communication Breakdown", "I Can't Quit You Baby", "You Shook Me", "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" and "How Many More Times". The month after they returned to England, October 1968, Page changed the band's name to Led Zeppelin, and the group entered Olympic Studios in London to record their debut album.

Led Zeppelin was produced by Jimmy Page and engineered by Glyn Johns, both of whom had known each other since teenagers in the suburb of Epsom. According to Page, "The first album is a live album, it really is, and it's done intentionally in that way. It's got overdubs on it, but the original tracks are live."

Page reportedly used natural room ambience to enhance the reverb and recording texture on the record, demonstrating the innovations in sound recording he had learned during his session days. Up until the late 1960s, most music producers placed microphones directly in front of the amplifiers and drums. For Led Zeppelin, Page developed the idea of placing an additional microphone some distance from the amplifier (as far as twenty feet) and then recording the balance between the two. By adopting this "distance equals depth" technique, Page became one of the first producers to record a band's "ambient sound": the distance of a note's time-lag from one end of the room to the other.

Another notable feature of the album was the "leakage" on the recordings of Plant's vocals. In a 1998 Guitar World interview, Page stated that "Robert's voice was extremely powerful and, as a result, would get on some of the other tracks. But oddly, the leakage sounds intentional." On "You Shook Me", Page used the "backward echo" technique. It involves hearing the echo before the main sound (instead of after it), and is achieved by turning the tape over and recording the echo on a spare track, then turning the tape back over again to get the echo preceding the signal.


The album was one of the first albums to be released in stereo-only form; at the time, the practice of releasing both mono and stereo versions was the norm.

Led Zeppelin's front cover, which was chosen by Page, features a black-and-white image of the burning Hindenburg airship, photographed by Sam Shere. The image refers to the origin of the band's name itself: When Page, Beck and The Who's Keith Moon and John Entwistle were discussing the idea of forming a group, Moon joked, "It would probably go over like a lead balloon", and Entwistle allegedly replied, "a lead zeppelin!"

The album's back cover features a photograph of the band taken by former Yardbird Chris Dreja. The entire design of the album's sleeve was coordinated by George Hardie, with whom the band would continue to collaborate for future sleeves. Hardie himself also created the front cover illustration, rendering the famous original black-and-white photograph in ink using a Rapidograph technical pen and a mezzotint technique.

Hardie recalled that he originally offered the band a design based on an old club sign in San Francisco – a multi-sequential image of a phallic zeppelin airship up in the clouds. Page declined but it was retained as the logo for the back cover of Led Zeppelin's first two albums and a number of early press advertisements. Most prints of the album have the band name and the Atlantic Records logo on the cover in red, but on some prints such as the iTunes Store release of the album they can be found in orange instead. During the first few weeks of the album's availability in the UK, some prints of the album sleeve featured the band name and the Atlantic logo in turquoise. When it was switched to the orange print later that year, the turquoise-printed sleeve became a collector's item.


The album cover received widespread attention when, at a February 1970 gig in Copenhagen, the band were billed as "The Nobs" as the result of a legal threat from aristocrat Eva von Zeppelin (a relative of the creator of the Zeppelin aircraft). Von Zeppelin, upon seeing the logo of the Hindenburg crashing in flames, threatened to have the show pulled off the air. In 2001, Greg Kot wrote in Rolling Stone that "The cover of Led Zeppelin … shows the Hindenburg airship, in all its phallic glory, going down in flames. The image did a pretty good job of encapsulating the music inside: sex, catastrophe and things blowing up."

In 2003, VH1 named Led Zeppelin the 44th greatest album of all time, while Rolling Stone ranked it 29th on the magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It is widely regarded as marking a significant turning point in the evolution of hard rock and heavy metal.