101. Led Zeppelin, "Led Zeppelin"

 


I guess there's a Led Zeppelin album for every type of stoner and this is not my Led Zeppelin album.  It's mostly a sludgy, plodding trudge through a bunch of recycled blues riffs and listening to Robert Plant start to develop his yowl.  It's a snooze but the kids used to love it.

Hey, do you think Zep would have been as big a success if they had kept their original name, "The New Yardbirds"?  It doesn't really sing, does it.  By the time this album was recorded, Jimmy Page was already famous for his work in the Old Yardbirds, and he and manager Peter Grant fronted the 1700+ pounds to pay for the studio time.  The band had already been playing together for a while, so the recording only took something like nine total days.

Lyrically, it's not inspiring.  The songs fall into three main categories: (1) you left me, and that makes me sad; (2) I plan to leave you, or I am in the process of leaving you, and that cheers me; and (3) I like to fuck.

(1) - "Good Times Bad Times"

Sixteen, I fell in love with a girl as sweet as could be
It only took a couple of days till she was rid of me
She swore that she would be all mine and love me till the end
But when I whispered in her ear, I lost another friend, oh 

(2) - "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You"

Babe, I'm gonna leave you
Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you
Oh, I can hear it calling me
I said don't you hear it calling me the way it used to do?

(3) - "You Shook Me"

You know you shook me, babe
You shook me all night long
I know you really, really did, babe
I said you shook me, baby
You shook me all night long
You shook me so hard, baby

I must say I do enjoy John Bonham's enthusiastic, imaginitive drumming, which he's just tentatively feeling out here.  He's got some great ideas and he's not afraid to break out of the bump-ch-ch-ch-bump-ch-ch-ch rock cliche, which is nice.  Page is Page, shamelessly mining the black blues artists for ideas and sounds.  Plant isn't anywhere near as obnoxious as he's gonna get down the road.

The best thing I can say about this record is that it is what it is.  I'm sure I owned it at some point, because it was a big record in my subset of 80s teens.  I'm sure I got high to it.  But I'm older now, and whatever purpose it served is no longer required.

So that's it!  We've done 400, and there are 100 left.  I initially thought this would be done by late 2022, but now I see that is not going to happen and this is going to go into 2023.  500 albums is a lot!

Is this album in my personal Top 500? Nope!

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