Get The Led Out

Earlier today a member of an FB music group I belong to initiated a rather heated discussion of Led Zeppelin which got me thinking about that band. People in the discussion group were making list of their favorite Led Zeppelin albums. I've always had a love hate relationship with that group. There are some aspects of them that I love about rock music and others I find to be the most awful characteristics of AOR dreck. 

I was an obsessive reader of record reviews and articles about music. I read newspaper review and music magazines all the time. I loved the Yardbirds back in their time and was disappointed when they broke up in 1968. I was surprised when Jimmy Page reconfigured the band into Led Zeppelin and laughed when come critics scorned them for copying the name concept from Iron Butterfly who formed in 1966. That light and heavy thing.

I saw Led Zeppelin perform in 1969 in a hall that had been converted from a tire warehouse to a premier rock club in downtown Philadelphia that barely lasted two years before being shut down for "excessive drug use" a few months later that year. Actually I was not overly impressed with the show and at the time saw their performance as a copy of the Blue Cheer sound.

I did already have their first album and bought the second album when it came out in the fall and soon we were hearing Whole Lotta Love on AM radio which was weird. By the end of the year I was in the Navy and except for grabbing a cassette copy of the third album in 1970 I would not hear much at all of Led Zeppelin for four years because of so much time spent at sea. Then I came back but listening to rock music had changed with AOR radio and Led Zeppelin was becoming brainwash fodder that got worse through the mid to late 70's. It would be decades before I loved that band again.

So back to my favorites... Led Zeppelin III is definitely my favorite studio album followed closely by I & II. I never listened to IV, Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti until much later. I don't think I've heard the others. However, my real favorite is really How The West Was Won which may also be one of my all time favorite live albums. From the mid 70's on I avoided all classic rock radio which had ruined many fine groups IMHO and also concentrated way too much on mediocre copy sounding groups. That's also why I was making my own mixes. I didn't start listening to Led Zeppelin again until the early 00's. Now as an old man I still like to get the led out.

I should also note that I really like the Page & Plant No Quarter album and much of Robert Plant's solo albums especially Raising Sand with Allison Krauss.

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