“Dazed and Confused” is a song written by American singer-songwriter Jake Holmes in 1967, It was described as “a stark, spooky folk-rock track with stinging reverbed lead guitar, Holmes‘ own pained vocals, and furiously strummed rhythm guitar that winds itself into an anguished climax. Holmes recorded the song for his debut album “The Above Ground Sound” of Jake Holmes and he performed it in the late 1960s and early 1970s on the New York City folk scene and the college coffee house circuit. The lyrics refer to the effects of a girl’s indecision on ending a relationship. This version from Live Supershow 1969 .
In August 1967, Holmes opened for the Yardbirds at a Greenwich Village gig in New York. According to Holmes, “That was the infamous moment of my life when ‘Dazed and Confused’ fell into the loving arms and hands of Jimmy Page.” When the track appeared on Led Zeppelin’s eponymous debut album in 1969, Holmes was aware of it at the time, but didn’t follow up on it: “In the early 1980s, I did write them a letter and I said basically: ‘I understand it’s a collaborative effort, but I think you should give me credit at least and some remuneration.’ But they never contacted me.
After hearing Holmes perform the song in 1967, English rock group the Yardbirds reworked it with a new arrangement. It became a centerpiece of the group’s tours in 1968, several recordings of which have been released. “Dazed and Confused” was further adapted later that year by Yardbirds guitarist Jimmy Page’s “New Yardbirds” group (soon to be rechristened Led Zeppelin) for their debut album, Led Zeppelin. “Dazed and Confused” became a concert staple with solos that sometimes stretched the performances to 45 minutes.
When the Yardbirds disbanded in 1968, Page planned to record the song in the studio with the successor group he had assembled that summer. According to Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, the first time he heard the song was at the band’s first rehearsal session at Gerrard Street in London, in 1968: “Jimmy played us the riffs at the first rehearsal and said, ‘This is a number I want us to do’.” The future Led Zeppelin recorded their version in October 1968 at Olympic Studios, London, and the song was included on their debut album Led Zeppelin (1969). “Dazed and Confused” was the second song recorded at the Olympic sessions.
Page recorded the song in one take with a Telecaster and violin bow as he had performed it with the Yardbirds. Singer Robert Plant wrote a new set of bluesier lyrics, according to Page, though Plant is not credited on the album. Other sources say Page wrote the new lyrics himself. Whichever the case may be, Plant’s vocal is raw and powerful, delivered with “unrelenting passion.”Other than the lyrics and vocal, the song remained very similar to that performed by the Yardbirds earlier that year.
This bolt of lightning likewise illuminates the already thick and portentous soundscape further setting a tone for the impending sonic onslaught. John Bonham (drums) sneaks in with a rock solid downbeat beneath Plant’s opening line. During the bridge [Bonham] explodes front and centre with his trademark blend of keen rhythmic gymnastics and straight-ahead swinging percussive support. The band collectively combust throughout the remainder of the cut as they alternate between scintillating and scorching.”
Limited Edition 7-Inch Single, Produced By Jimmy Page, To Be Released On Record Store Day Featuring Unreleased Versions Of “Rock And Roll” And “Friends”
Led Zeppelin are releasing something special for Record Store Day. Before the legendary band kicks off its 50th anniversary celebration this September, a special 7-inch vinyl single will arrive at independent record stores everywhere on April 21st from Atlantic Records and Rhino. The single, pressed on yellow vinyl, will premiere two previously unreleased studio mixes: the Sunset Sound Mix of “Rock and Roll” b/w the Olympic Studios Mix of “Friends.” Both of these tracks have been selected for this release by producer Jimmy Page.
“Rock and Roll” is only the third track released from the fabled Sunset Sound Mixes of Led Zeppelin IV. The studio mix of “When the Levee Breaks” actually made the original album, while the mix of “Stairway to Heaven” was included on the 2014 Deluxe Edition. The Olympic Studios Mix of “Friends” is described by the label as a “stripped-down version without the orchestration of the final mix, offering a true fly-on-the-wall feel from the band’s recording sessions for Led Zeppelin III at Headley Grange.”
This limited edition single will follow the release of the remastered How the West Was Wonin multiple formats on March 23rd including the first ever vinyl and Blu-ray Audio editions (with the Blu-ray containing hi-res 5.1 surround sound). The live album features performances from Led Zeppelin’s landmark California concerts at the Los Angeles Forum and Long Beach Arena on June 25th and 27th, 1972, as sequenced to replicate one entire concert.
When the overarching themes of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People are discussed, the first two things that come up are death and youth. There are songs that feature a woman on her deathbed (“Try Not to Breathe”), a mourning family (“Sweetness Follows”), a dead movie star (“Monty Got a Raw Deal”) and a person nearing the end of existence (“Find the River”). And then there are messages for the kids (“Drive,” “Everybody Hurts”) and lyrics wrapped in notions of childhood (“The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite,” “Man on the Moon”).
“Nightswimming,” Automatic’s penultimate track, exists near where these two themes meet – not quite at the intersection, but maybe a few blocks over. That’s because the song doesn’t deal in death exactly; it focuses on loss – the passing of youth. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe doesn’t sing from the perspective of a teenager (as opposed to the similar “Perfect Circle”), but the vantage point of an adult. He employs the only known way to time-travel: Memories. His DeLorean is a “photograph on the dashboard.”
This song, so wrapped in memory, appears to inspire conflicting recollections among R.E.M.’s members. There are some things on which they agree — such as, in an instance that ran counter to the band’s usual workflow, Stipe had the lyrics for “Nightswimming” written before the sessions for the previous record, Out of Time. While the singer usually wrote words to demos made by guitarist Peter Buck, bassist/keyboardist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry, this time the process was reversed. This time, he asked Buck and Mills for music that fit his lyrics.
“Being competitive bastards that we are, Mike and I started auditioning chord changes and tunes for Michael,” Buck wrote in the liner notes for In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003. “The two tunes of mine that Michael rejected eventually became ‘Drive’ and ‘Try Not to Breathe.’ Mike had a piano instrumental that he played to Michael. He listened once, nodded his head to hear it again, and on the second pass he sang the lyrics. It was ‘Nightswimming,’ exactly like the record we would record a year later. I was standing in the corner dumbfounded.”
While everyone seems to agree that this is what happened, Buck and Mills don’t align on where this took place. Mike remembers demonstrating his “circular” piano piece in February 1992 at John Keane’s studio in R.E.M.’s hometown of Athens, Georgia. But Peter thinks all of this happened a bit earlier, in late 1990 as the band were completing work on Out of Time at Prince’s Paisley Park Studios outside Minneapolis. Other sources appear to back up Buck’s story.
But even assuming that “Nightswimming” – or “Night Swim” as it was originally titled – did first come together at the Minnesota studio, there is a discrepancy regarding if the song might have been considered, even briefly, for inclusion on Out of Time. At times, Buck has said that R.E.M. weren’t thinking about adding to their seventh LP, only recording ideas for future B-sides or album tracks. But he also has remembered that others including Scott Litt – who produced both Out of Time and Automatic for the People – were open to finding room for “Nightswimming” on the former.
“That one was finished,” said Buck in 2011. “Scott Litt and everyone’s like, ‘Gosh, should we put this on the record?’ But the record felt done. So we just kind of went, ‘Well, this is a good place to start with the next one.’”
So “Nightswimming,” along with early versions of “Drive” and “Try Not to Breathe,” laid the foundation for the Automatic sessions. But again, memories complicate the truth. R.E.M. told multiple writers, both journalists and authors, that the final rendition of the song that appears on Automatic used the demo that Stipe and Mills initially recorded.
But Buck (as mentioned above), remembers recording the song again “a year later” – after the final Out of Time sessions. Mills recalls a key detail that, if his memory is correct, would suggest the album version was tracked in May 1992 at Criteria Studios in Miami – one of several locations R.E.M. visited to make Automatic.Mills memory sticks out, because he recalls recording “Nightswimming” on the same piano that Derek and the Dominos used for the epic coda to “Layla.”
“It was tricky. It’s a great-sounding piano, but it’s, uh, not in the best shape of any piano I’ve ever seen,” Mills said “But it had the provenance that you like in an instrument, and it was a thrill to play it.”
No matter if it was made in R.E.M.’s hometown, or in Prince’s studio or on the “Layla” piano, “Nightswimming” went from a simple piano-and-vocals composition to something grander when the band decided to adorn the recording with some orchestration. To do so, the guys got in touch with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, who agreed to arrange symphonic parts for the song (in addition to “Drive,” “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” and “Everybody Hurts”). At the end of May, Jones and R.E.M. met in Atlanta, where the accoutrements were performed by members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Deborah Workman played the oboe solo that comes in near the end.
The recording was completed, then mixed at Bad Animals in Seattle, and released as the 11th track on R.E.M.’s eighth studio album in October 1992. As Automatic for the People received an enthusiastic reception from fans and glowing notes from critics, journalists asked the band about the inspiration for these songs – specifically if “Nightswimming” was rooted in truth. Buck and Mills, who did not write the lyrics, felt that the song was based on the band members’ youthful indiscretions.
“We used to go swimming at night after rock ’n’ roll shows in Athens,” Stipe said. “We’d all go see Pylon or the Method Actors, then pile into a bunch of cars and go swimming in this pond. I think it was on private property, but we never really got into any trouble. It was all very innocent; we were only 19 or 20 years old.”
But Stipe, who penned the words, has contradicted himself a few times over about how personal “Nightswimming” truly is. In Reveal: The Story of R.E.M., he claimed that most of the song was “made up.” Yet in the liner notes for Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011, he wrote, “There’s a fairly autobiographical narrative to this one, and the part about the windshield really happened.”
And that’s not even taking into account Stipe’s 2001 claim that the song was first called “Night Watchman” and about a real man, but the singer changed it because he didn’t want to be sued. Caveat emptor: That same article carried a preface warning that half of the piece was made up.
If “Nightswimming” is – to paraphrase the title of an R.E.M. compilation – part lies and part truth, that’s all the better for a song about memories. “It describes something that I touched on a lot later on the record Reveal,” Stipe said, “which was kind of the summer as an eternity, and kind of an innocence that’s either kind of desperately clung onto or obviously lost.” In this song, the situation falls into the latter category. “These things they go away,” Stipe croons, “replaced by everyday.”
This bittersweet view of the past seemed to resonate with a wide range of R.E.M. fans, both casual and die-hard. Although the piano ballad wasn’t a big hit when it was released as Automatic’s fifth single in July 1993 (it did rise to No. 27 in the U.K.), it steadily built a reputation as one of R.E.M.’s most beloved works. “Nightswimming” has appeared on both of R.E.M.’s best-of collections that feature their Warner Bros. era work – nudging out fellow Automatic tracks that were, technically, bigger hits – showing the affection that the band and the fans share for this song.
Memories might not be perfect, but – many R.E.M. devotees would argue – “Nightswimming” is.
On November. 8th, 1971, Led Zeppelin released their fourth album. There was no title printed on the album, so it is usually referred to as Led Zeppelin IV, following the naming sequence used by the band’s first three studio albums. The album has alternatively been referred to as , Four Symbols, The Fourth Album (those two titles each having been used in the Atlantic catalogue), Untitled, Runes, The Hermit, and ZoSo, the latter of which is derived from the symbol used by Jimmy Page for the album sleeve. Page often had the ZoSo symbol embroidered on his clothes.
The album contains many of the band’s most famous songs, including “Black Dog”, “Rock and Roll”, “Going toCalifornia” and the band’s signature song, “Stairway to Heaven”, Led Zeppelin IV was a commercial and critical success. The album is one of the best-selling albums worldwide
To celebrate its 46th birthday of Led Zeppelin‘s masterful fourth album, which of its songs are the best and worst,
there’s hardly a wasted track on the fourth album release. Is it the best rock ‘n’ roll record ever made and, at the same time, not even the best Zeppelin album, Its amazing, emblematic of the band, but not their best work.
Maybe the ultimate testament to Led Zeppelin’s greatness is that an album as colossal and widely worshiped as IV actually has three or four legitimate challengers for “Best Album” within their amazing catalog. But if IV is not their best for groundbreaking reasons, Its influential, mould-setting reasons then whichever of Led Zeppelin’s first seven albums is playing on your stereo right now is the best record that’s ever been made. But I’d give IV the silver medal and save the gold for Physical Graffiti, which has even more range, weight and sophistication.
The best song on the album?
It changes all the time. The opening rush of “Black Dog” is one hell of a way to kick off an album, and “Stairway to Heaven” is such an expertly structured song. But “When the Levee Breaks” is the one that most often has me turning up the volume. Those drums! “Stairway to Heaven.” has become synonymous with Led Zeppelin you’ll find it’s astounding. Also, like the album itself, it’s emblematic of the band. It shows off what they do best:: creepy, Celtic folk, cryptic lyrics paired with haunting vocals, a bombastic crescendo with evil blues guitar and drum fills that define perfection. That said, the first 10 seconds of “Four Sticks” is probably the best thing they’ve ever done. that said, the first minute of “When the Levee Breaks” is probably the best thing they’ve ever done. which closes the LP with so much power and atmosphere, and maybe the heaviest drum sound ever captured, from the bottom of that stairwell at HeadleyGrange. I suppose, too, because it’s fundamentally a blues, it can represent Led Zeppelin’s musical bedrock in its most epic form , “Black Dog.” So powerful, so sexy, so smart. We’ve all read about the hard work and creative genius that went into making the song work, but it’s impossible to think of it as anything but purely instinctual when it’s playing.
“Four Sticks” is the only song that consistently feels sub-par when I listen to IV. The fact its named that way because Bonham played it with a pair of drumsticks in each hand doesn’t say much about the lyrics, which I’ve heard described by Jimmy Page as being abstract, and to me that sounds like another way of saying, “This was filler and we couldn’t even be bothered to tidy up the lyrics, so yeah, it’s so abstract, man.”
The hipster record clerk at my favorite record store insisted on calling it Zoso. Atlantic Records had it listed as FourSymbols or Led Zeppelin IV. If they wanted to break the pattern established by the numerical naming of their first three albums, they should have given it an actual title. it’s perfectly acceptable to occasionally and judiciously refer to it as “Zep IV.”
48 years ago today, on January. 12th, 1969, music changed for many people. It was on this day that Led Zeppelin released their debut LP . Of course, critics panned the record, but to the record buying public, well they never listened to critics anyway. It only takes the first two seconds of the first song on their first record for Led Zeppelin to make crystal clear exactly what they intend to do – and exactly what they intend to do to you. In the opening to “Good Times Bad Times,” the band drops a two-note attack that falls like a cartoon safe, clearing the air for JohnBonham’s syncopated groove, Jimmy Page’s swift-sword guitar and Robert Plant’s high-end howling about sex so loud it gets the neighbors talking. “It really wasn’t a pretty thing,” Plant later said. “It wasn’t supposed to be a pretty thing. It was just an unleashing of energy.”
just a few weeks before their album’s release — opening for Vanilla Fudge and Spirit. Although booking agent Ron Terry had to beg promoter Barry Fey to add Led Zeppelin to the already-sold out show, the band did not disappoint. “You didn’t have to be a genius to know that Zeppelin was going to be a smash,” he later said. “Oh, my God. People were going crazy!” Rock station KLZ was so jammed with calls the next day that Fey had to run a copy of the unreleased self titled album to them, where it played for an entire day.
We could go on for days on the impact that this record had at the time and still has to this day, but you all know that. Just 3 of the songs “Your Time is Gonna Come”, “Good Times Bad Times” and “Communication Breakdown” were Led Zeppelin originals. When Led Zeppelin debut album was released in January 1969, it went to the Top 10 in the U.S. and the U.K. charts, despite lukewarm reviews. The enormity of Zeppelin’s innovation wasn’t entirely easy to recognize. In an era of spiritual transcendence and tales of brave Ulysses, they’d flipped teenage rock & roll’s sex-zonked mania into something huge and seething and mythic- bestial. Eastern mysticism and Mordor and prom-ruling radio gold would all come later.
Page’s vision for the album was so clear that they recorded the entire thing in just 30 hours. “I financed and completely recorded the first album before going to Atlantic,” he later said . “It wasn’t your typical story where you get an advance to make an album: We arrived at Atlantic with tapes in hand.” The result was a new, uncompromising sound and unabashed rock star lifestyle, paving the way for everything from prog-rock to heavy metal.
Led Zeppelin was born from the ashes of the Yardbirds. They had disintegrated in the summer of 1968, leaving guitarist Jimmy Page with the rights to the name — and a series of shows in Scandinavia he was contractually obligated to complete .So he recruited Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham, and the four toured as the New Yardbirds. But by the time they entered Olympic Studios in London in late september 1968 , they had moved their sound away from English folk-rock, into the blues-influenced band Page had always wanted, and soon had a new name, Led Zeppelin, as well.
As with so many great records, when it first came out the critics didn’t care for it. Therefore many people knew it would be good.
On January. 12th, 1969, Led Zeppelin released their self-titled debut LP “Led Zeppelin” in the US. It wouldn’t be released in the UK until March 31st. The LP combined Blues and Rock and was very well received by music fans. A number of the songs were ‘borrowed’ from older Blues musicians who at first were not given any credit.
It was an incredible record that changed the way many looked at Rock music.
Robert Plant (vocals/production); Jimmy Page (guitar); John Paul Jones (bass); John Bonham (drums)
all four members of Led Zeppelin—JimmyPage, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham were recording together before there even was a Led Zeppelin. While still in mode, the four pre-Zeps took part in the August 1968 recording sessions for P.J. Proby’s 1969 album, “Three Week Hero”.
Page and Jones were successful session musicians at this point, and when Jones got the Proby gig, he invited his fellow New Yardbirds along. Jones recollects “I was committed to doing all the arrangements for the album. As we were talking about rehearsing at the time, I thought it would be a handy source of income. I had to book a band anyway, so I thought I’d book everybody I knew.” The sessions started August 25th, 1968, and led to an album that didn’t cause much of a stir when it was released the following April.
“The boys told me they were going over to play in San Francisco and all that, and I said, ‘Look, from what I’ve heard and the way you boys played tonight, not only are you not going to be my backing band, I’m going to say goodbye right now, because I don’t think I’m ever going to see you again’,” Proby has said .
“‘That’s how successful you’re going to be. You’re exactly what they want, you play all that psychedelic stuff and everything.’ I said, ‘You’re going to go over there and go down so great I don’t think you’re ever going to come home.’ They didn’t ever come back until they changed their name to Led Zeppelin and stayed over there and came back huge huge stars. … I said goodbye that day when I cut that album, and I haven’t seen one of them since.”
Is there any doubt this is Led Zeppelin? This is part of the eight-minute medley that closed the album.
Here’s track two “The Day That Lorraine Came Down” from the PJ Proby album, which was released on CD in 1994. It’s easy to imagine RobertPlant on vocals—not that there’s anything wrong with Proby’s voice.
Jimmy Page dug up several unheard gems for the recent batch Led Zeppelin reissues. But there’s one song that still remains unreleased “Swan Song”.
The fertile sessions for Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti album produced a number of landmark songs, including In My Time Of Dying and Kashmir. And among them was another track that had the potential to be a LedZeppelin classic. An ambitious, virtuoso instrumental titled Swan Song, it was sketched out and partially recorded during the album sessions but, frustratingly, never completed – even though, like many of his ideas, Jimmy Page would not quite let it rest.
The seeds of Swan Song were sown in early 1974 when Zeppelin reconvened to begin work on Physical Graffiti at Headley Grange, the 18th-century workhouse in Hampshire where they’d recorded their fourth album.
The band had endured a crisis the previous autumn when John Paul Jones announced that he was fed up with the relentless touring and was planning to quit the band. He even suggested, albeit with his tongue firmly in his cheek, that he was considering becoming choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral. It took all the efforts of manager Peter Grant to talk him out of it.
But by the time the four band members got back together they were once again firing on all cylinders. Reunited, they began pooling ideas. “Some of the tracks we assembled in our old-fashioned way of running through a track and realising before we knew it that we had stumbled on something completely different,” recalled Robert Plant.
By contrast, Page had grand plans for a lengthy new track he was calling Swan Song. The guitarist had already plotted out the instrumental piece at his home studio in Plumpton Place, East Sussex. Even at that early stage, his vision was clear. According to Page, it featured “a number of sections and orchestrated overdubs”.
The track was broken up into sections, two of which were recorded in late February 1974 (and which can be heard on various Zeppelin bootlegs and on YouTube). The first part opens with Page’s drifting acoustic guitar, before the John Paul Jones/John Bonham rhythm section kicks in with the sure-footed syncopation that characterised their greatest work. The second segment commences with Page again leading off, his descending riff hinting at the song’s majestic potential. Tantalisingly, he would later reveal that this epic-in-waiting would not necessarily have remained a purely instrumental track – there were plans to add other sections and even lyrics.
So why did they leave the piece unfinished? The simple truth is that Zeppelin’s creativity was at an all-time high during the Physical Graffiti sessions. At the same time, they had also been working on Ten Years Gone, another lengthy track that incorporated similar guitar orchestration. Faced with an abundance of quality material, they could afford to leave Swan Song for another time. Consequently, it was Ten Years Gone that ended up on Physical Graffiti.
But the Swan Song story didn’t end there. Zeppelin were planning to launch their own label and rumours abounded that it would be called Shag or Slut Records – a lewd reference to their notorious on-the-road antics. Instead, at a press reception in New York on May 7, 1974, it was announced that the new label would be called Swan Song, after their unfinished song. “I’d been recording this long instrumental and somebody shouted: ‘What’s the title?’” revealed Page. “I shouted back: ‘Swan Song’. And everybody stopped and said what a good name that would be for the album. From there it got carried over to being the name for our label.”
Never one to let go of a good idea, Page talked about returning to the incomplete song to finish it off. “I’ve spoken before about a long piece I’d written,” he said in 1976. “I wanted to orchestrate the guitar and put it through various treatments. The original idea was to have four sections coming back to the same theme each time. There would be four separate melody lines dealing with the seasons. Robert will do the lyrics. I know I can work the whole thing out from the trial runs I’ve laid down. It’s a really exciting prospect.”
Page continued to incorporate elements of Swan Song into his live improvisational piece White Summer/Black Mountain Side during Zeppelin’s 1977 tour. It would reappear again during the band’s Knebworth shows in 1979, and even as late as their final European tour, in 1980. Had Led Zeppelin not disbanded following the death of John Bonham on September 25,1980, there’s every chance that Page would have gone back to work on the song in the studio.
But even that wasn’t the end of his great lost opus. Page’s first major live appearance following the dissolution of Zeppelin was as part of an all-star nine-date US tour in 1983 in aid of the ARMS charity to help multiple sclerosis-stricken ex-Small Faces bassist Ronnie Lane. With Paul Rodgers on vocals, Page performed a lengthy song called Bird On A Wing, which featured some chord structures that clearly dated back to Swan Song.
By the time Page and Rodgers formed their blues-rock supergroup The Firm, it had been revisited once again. “It was reworked with Paul Rodgers, who supplied some inspired lyrics, and it became Midnight Moonlight,” said Page, referring to the song which closed The Firm’s self-titled album in 85.
Today, Swan Song has passed into Zep legend as one of the band’s great lost masterpieces – albeit one that has, tantalisingly, filtered into the ether in various incarnations. As with other unfinished Zep treasures such as Sugar Mama and Fire, it’s difficult not to wonder how significant Swan Song would have become had they actually finished it.
Robert Plant first came to the public eye in the late ’60s as a member of one of the biggest bands ever, Led Zeppelin. But long before the spotlight was on him, he was a member of The Crawling King Snakes which would prove to be pivotal as it put him in touch with John Bonham. Plant, like most aspiring musicians from England, was influenced by blues artists from America. In 1968 Jimmy Page was searching for a lead singer for the Yardbirds and after meeting Plant, he offered the gig to him on the spot. Collaborations between Page and Plant gave us some of the most memorable moments in rock history. With John Bonham on drums and session player John Paul Jones on bass, the band conquered the world with a mix of blues, folk and straight-ahead rock. Throughout the ’70s, the band released some of the most prominent records of all time. As a live act, they would often jam out songs 10 to 15 minutes beyond the originals as Plant would riff off Page and vice-versa. Robert Plant, like Roger Daltrey, had a golden mane, devastating good looks and incredible stage presence. Often performing in shirts that would show off his chest and arms, he became a rock god, and the band’s hotel stays while touring are legendary. In 1980, Bonham died after a night of hard partying, leaving the rest of the members no choice but to retire. Despite retirement, Plant has had an amazing solo career releasing ten studio albums. In 1984, he joined Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck in the super group the Honeydrippers who found success with such singles as “Sea of Love” and “Rockin’ at Midnight.” Plant would reunite with Page again on the 1994 project Unleaded which sparked a tour. Seemingly joined at the hip, the duo would release another album. No Quarter featured reworked versions of Zeppelin classics. To date, Jimmy, Jones and Plant received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1995 Led Zeppelin was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
News of the first Three Led Zeppelin albums to be reissued on the 2nd June 2014 has been revealed. the new versions of Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II and Led zeppelin III, will feature unreleased tracks, Live gig, and outtakes and backing tracks. All taken from the Zepp archive the etras will be on a second disc for all three albums. At present it is all work in progress with Alternative versions, rough mixes and tracks recorde at the time of each album sessions.
Led Zeppelin will include a Nine-song live set from a gig in Paris in 1969.
Led Zepplein II has five alternative mixes, backing tracks to “Thank You” and “Living Loving Maid” and a new previously unheard La La,
Led Zepplin III has seven studio outtakes, alongside “Jennings Farm Blues”, and “Bathroom Sound” plus the blues standards “Keys to the Highway” and “Trouble in Mind”
Released on Atlantic Records in 1973 Houses of the Holy was Led Zeppelins 5th album, It featured all original material with a running time at 40.58 minutes. The band were experimenting more with the production techniques and studio sounds, the epic scale of the band at this time, the loudest songs, the biggest tours and the largest tours.
the song “Houses of the Holy” was recorded for these sessions but was not released until the next album “Physical Graffitti” as it was felt it did’nt fit in . it also featured the “Song Remains the Same” and the reggae influenced “D’yer Maker”.
By 1973, Led Zeppelin had pushed themselves to deliver four stunning albums, but they were yet to see what could happen when you pushed the recording studio itself. A departure from their more simplistic sounds of earlier albums, Houses Of The Holy was an ambitious number that saw the group begin to experiment with production techniques, dividing their fan base almost straight down the middle in the process.
While the record was both a critical and technological success, some fans criticised the record for its rather unfocused sound which seemed to lack cohesion, while others praised the record as sounding exactly like the album that Led Zeppelin were born to make. While fans were divided upon release, almost 50 years laters, the record is considered not only one of the band’s finest moments, but also one of the greatest records of all time, and rightly so.
The Fat Angel Sings 