One Offs, Even If They Founded A Genre

Another elderly rock album to revisit is the eponymous first album by Led Zeppelin. I saw them live on two or three occasions at festivals around 1969 / 70 and each time was irritated by them and the adulation that they received. I was going through a blues purist phase and they weren't Fleetwood Mac or Chicken Shack, I thought they were pulling the blues around far too much and being self indulgent in crowd pleasing pyrotechnics. I gradually realised that I was missing the point, Zeppelin never were a blues band nor anything like it, even if some band members particularly Robert Plant held a great affection for the genre. There are two more or less straight blues renditions on this first album but they are the weakest tracks. Those two tracks and the two short bursts of Good Times Bad Times and Communication Breakdown, which betray the band's origins as the New Yardbirds, are the kind of things often found on a first album but the way the band was to develop is already fully formed with the folky Black Mountain Side and the thundering Dazed and Confused and How Many More Times. As is often the case, Led Zep were far more musical and innovative than the myriad of copyists that sprung up in their wake and took the lowest common denominator from their sound.