Vinyl Bay 777, Long Island's Top Music Outlet, Looks Back at the Led Zeppelin Album That Started it All
On January 12, 1969, Led Zeppelin made rock music history
when they released their self-titled, debut album. It was a groundbreaking album
for many reasons, including the way it was released and, most notably, the new
rock music sound it ushered in.
When ‘Led Zeppelin’ was released, Led Zeppelin had barely
been calling itself by that name. In 1968, Jimmy Page, the sole member of The
Yardbirds, was looking to find a new band to finish out The Yardbird’s Scandinavian
tour. John Paul Jones, Robert Plant and John Bonham joined the band, which Page
named The New Yardbirds. Page ended up changing the band’s name to Led Zeppelin
after the tour, just before they entered the studio to record some of the new songs
they had been writing and performing together on the road.
The way ‘Led Zeppelin’ was released was ahead of its time.
To start with, the band released the album in stereo only, making it one of the
first albums to be released in such a way. Before 1968, most artists and labels
were releasing both mono and stereo versions of their work. The album was also
recorded before Led Zeppelin was signed to a label. This allowed the band to
retain creative control during the recording process. When the band came to
Atlantic, the album was completed and ready to be released.
‘Led Zeppelin’ also marked the beginning of hard rock as we
know it today. The sound brought together the blues rock that came before it
with a certain heaviness not heard anywhere else before. In the album’s
recording, Page used unconventional methods of creating certain effects, like
recording room ambiance by putting a microphone 20 feet from an amp and
cultivating a “reverse echo” by recording over the track backwards. What came
from it was as sound unmatched by any other band at that time.
It was the unique sound of ‘Led Zeppelin’ that would make
the album so iconic and influential. From this album and subsequent albums,
rock genres as diverse as prog rock and heavy metal were born. The album has
been named by many magazines and music sites as one of the greatest albums ever
recorded, including Rolling Stone, who after panning it when the album first
came out put it on their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time at number
29.
Led Zeppelin’s groundbreaking 1969 self-titled debut,
released 48 years ago today, created a new genre of rock that the world had
never heard before. Historic for its stereo-only release and unparalleled hard
rock sound, ‘Led Zeppelin’ will always be remembered for the legacy of great
rock music that it has influenced over the years.
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Find music from Led Zeppelin and more at Vinyl Bay 777 and
vinylbay777.com. The top new independent record shop on Long Island, we have
thousands of titles to choose from in store and online. We have a wide
selection of genres on new and used vinyl, CD, cassette and DVD, as well as
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