Fifty years on, Led Zeppelin are still idols for aspiring rock stars

By J.T.

“THERE was just wall-to-wall amplifiers, and a space for the door—and that was it,” recalled John Paul Jones, Led Zeppelin’s bass guitarist, many decades later. “The whole room just exploded.” No tape has survived of that first rehearsal on August 12th 1968, which brought together a quartet who would sell more albums over the next 50 years than any band apart from the Beatles. But listening to live bootlegs of “Train Kept A-Rollin’”, the blues tune that they practised that day, it is easy to imagine how that first jam created heavy metal music.

First came John Bonham’s thundering drums, not just powerful but pacey. Then Mr Jones’s bass began galloping alongside; he said that the two rhythmists “locked together as a team immediately”, and they later picked interlinking rings as their respective symbols for the band’s artwork. On top was Jimmy Page’s guitar, which seemed to be playing about four parts at once: pummelling away at low strings, thrashing some chords, trying out the odd bluesy lick and then a blistering solo on the high notes. Finally came Robert Plant’s howling vocals, interrupted only when he blasted on the harmonica.

The band’s name was pinched from Keith Moon, The Who’s drummer, who had suggested in 1966 that a potential group involving him and Mr Page, without a quality singer, would go down like a lead balloon. Mr Page kept a note of “Led Zeppelin”, and thought it was perfect for a new band that would combine music heavy and light. Though the phrase “head-banging” was supposedly coined to describe their concerts, it was far from the only effect that they produced. Just as beloved were Mr Page’s tinkling acoustic guitar and Mr Jones’s keyboards and woodwind, which combined to produce the famed opening of “Stairway to Heaven”.

That song’s gradual crescendo, from gentle fingerpicking to hard rocking, was a staple of their compositions. The first of its kind was “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”, the second track on their debut album—which, like “Stairway to Heaven”, also attracted claims of plagiarism. The band later acknowledged that “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” was in fact written by a folk singer called Anne Bredon, rather than passing through generations as a traditional tune, and paid her royalties for it. But they denied that they had copied the arpeggios in “Stairway to Heaven” from “Taurus”, a similar-sounding song by Spirit, who once supported them on tour. A lengthy legal battle ensued; the band won in the first instance, but an appeal is still being fought in America’s courts. The band has also settled with Willie Dixon, a Chicago blues musician, after he alleged copyright infringements on “Led Zeppelin II”.

But if the group’s debts to folk and blues music meant that they often borrowed from others, they were hardly unoriginal. Mr Page in particular reinvented what the guitar was capable of. He experimented with strange tunings and odd techniques, including the Eastern-inspired rising chords of “Kashmir”, the screeching violin bow on “Dazed and Confused” and the reverse echo on “Whole Lotta Love”. He also popularised the use of the double-necked guitar—which apart from allowing him to switch easily between rhythm and lead parts, also made him look like the original guitar hero.

The band’s image, epitomised by Mr Plant’s open-shirted swaggering, certainly contributed to their appeal. They took to touring on a private jet, the “Starship”, and trashing hotel rooms. Bonham, the most bonkers of the four, use to drive his motorcycle through the lobby. But that sex, drugs and rock’n’roll lifestyle also heralded the band’s demise in 1980, when Bonham choked to death on his own vomit after consuming roughly 40 shots of vodka.

The music left behind was immortal. Each of the quartet is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in his field. Rolling Stone, which savaged Led Zeppelin’s early albums, has ranked Bonham as the greatest drummer of all time, Mr Page as third among guitarists, Mr Jones sixth among bassists and Mr Plant fifteenth among singers. The heavy-metal giants of the 1980s grew up worshipping them. Kirk Hammett, Metallica’s lead guitarist, described the band as the “soundtrack to my youth”: “they were pretty much the first band I actually sat down with a guitar and tried to learn the guitar solos and the songs.”

Half a century on, that eagerness of novices to nail the opening notes of “Stairway to Heaven” or the drum intro to “Good Times Bad Times” remains the band’s greatest legacy. The rawness of their recordings means that they are not quite as suited to easy listening as the beautiful melodies and harmonies of Queen or the upbeat power chords of AC/DC (see chart). But among rock bands of the same era, only the Beatles have had their songs looked up more often on UltimateGuitar.com, the most popular website for tablature (which shows a wannabe soloist which frets to use, rather than the crotchets and quavers of standard notation).

Some 22m of Led Zeppelin’s page views have been for “Stairway to Heaven”, a riff so hackneyed that it was banned in a guitar shop in “Wayne’s World”, a film from 1992. But even if you eliminated each band’s most popular tab from the sample, Led Zeppelin would still be a comfortable second on the charts. Fifty years on, the band continues to inspire a whole lotta love.