When Led Zeppelin’s debut album was released in 1969, Peter Frampton was one of many musicians stunned by the power of the music.
The album also had a huge impact on an aspiring young guitarist named Neville Marten - now a contributor to MusicRadar.
Here, Neville recalls the experience of hearing Zeppelin for the first time as a teenager in ’69…
Although released in the USA in January 1969, Led Zeppelin’s debut album didn’t hit UK shops until March of that year. Prior to its release the band appeared on the legendary John Peel Sessions on BBC radio, a must for fans of great music. I heard the programme, was totally floored, and we got the record as soon as it came out.
Of course we were all into Cream, Hendrix and The Who, but many of the so-called ‘progressive’ bands that were coming along seemed flabby and pretentious. So when Zeppelin dropped it was a genuine shock to the system, just as it would be when punk arrived several years later.
As Peter Frampton wrote in his autobiography, Do You Feel Like I Do?, “I was at Glyn’s place [Glyn Johns, producer] and he said, ‘Do you want to hear this band I’ve been working on? They’re called Led Zeppelin.’ It was another Sgt. Pepper moment. When we heard the album we were speechless!”
Even the cover was unlike anything previously. Depicting the Hindenburg disaster of May 6th 1937, when Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s giant airship burst into flames, plus the obvious phallic nature of the doomed craft, was bound to appeal to rebellious young music lovers. It also hinted at what equally outrageous content might lurk within.
What also marked Led Zeppelin out was its musical variety, with more breadth of styles, instrumentation and production layers than many of its contemporaries. And with four equally impressive musicians at its core, the listener could focus on each one in turn or as a whole, witnessing them mine from a variety of musical sources and experience - notably Page and Jones’s life as session players.
Opener Good Times, Bad Times, with its catchy riff and daredevil cascading solos gave way to the beautiful acoustic Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You, which itself morphed into the avant-garde, almost psychedelic middle section that the band would later revisit for Whole Lotta Love.
It was clear too that many of the tracks were stage hardened, due to their tight but raw live feel and the obvious interaction between each musician.
Unsurprisingly for the times the album featured the occasional blues cover, such as You Shook Me (Dixon, Lenoir), and I Can’t Quit You Baby (Dixon), but again these were performed and produced differently to how The Bluesbreakers or Allman Brothers Band might have approached them. However Jeff Beck was miffed that Page ‘borrowed’ the You Shook Me arrangement from his previous year’s album, Truth, although in reality there’s little comparison.
Instrument-wise Page employed the 1958 Fender Telecaster which ironically Beck had gifted him while the two were in The Yardbirds, with a small Supro amp, Gibson J-200 acoustic, Fender 10-string lap steel, and a violin bow on Dazed And Confused and How Many More Times.
But it was the Tele, with its brighter, more in-yer-face nature, and Jimmy’s ability to coax so many tones out of it, that stunned guitarists. We also loved Page’s ‘always on the edge, skating on thin ice’ solos, especially in tracks like the stunning Communication Breakdown.
Album reviewers were unsure at first. Some, like Rolling Stone magazine panned the songs and the band in equal measure while others, like the UK’s Melody Maker, were more upbeat. We musicians, however, were all but unanimous in our adoration, and have of course been entirely vindicated. Led Zeppelin has since appeared in numerous ‘best album’ polls (including that of Rolling Stone!), and is regularly heralded as leading the hard rock charge.
This excited young guitarist and a zillion others painfully struggled with Jimmy’s solos to hone our own burgeoning lead guitar technique, and it was Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You that helped trigger my own love of fingerstyle acoustic guitar, although I never quite got to grips with the DADGAD tuning of Black Mountain Side.
Whatever else is said, Led Zeppelin remains one of the most impactful debut releases of all time. And I know I’m not alone in admitting that, 56 years on, it still sends shivers down an albeit rather more creaky spine!
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