Day 400: Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin III
It’s my 400th day of Album a Daying, so I thought I’d give myself a little treat and listen to one of my all-time favourite bands – I listened to Led Zeppelin II on day 100, so I thought it’d be fitting to now listen to Led Zeppelin III. I was a big Zeppelin fan in my teens and I don’t listen to them enough these days, so it’s a good chance to return to an old favourite.
Album cover courtesy of Atlantic
For background information about the band, please revisit day 100, as I wrote more about it there – I was going to say that most people who visit an album review blog probably know about Led Zeppelin already, but I’m actually not sure if the younger generation of music fans know as much about them? In any case, Led Zeppelin III was released in 1970 after the group had been on their American tours following the success of Led Zeppelin II. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page decided to go the opposite way from their luxury-laden life on the road in a private jet and rented a cottage in Wales that had no running water or electricity to go write their new album.
The lack of electricity forced the pair to pivot more towards a folk-inspired acoustic sound, with Page saying that he was inspired by guitarists like Bert Jansch and Davy Graham and their use of alternative guitar tunings. Robert Plant also embraced a different way of working, saying that it was the first time he was moving towards speaking about things that mattered to him lyrically, rather than just going for things that sound good:
I’m concerned about Vietnam, I’m concerned about Paris in flames, I’m concerned about everything. I’m a dad for the first time in my life. But I don’t know how to express myself. I was fumbling into trying to say something proper … I was surrounded by the finest guys who could play like mothers, but I didn’t really have the state of mind or awareness to start talking about stuff. It came in, late on, in bits and pieces.
The resulting album was another huge commercial success for Led Zeppelin. It was highly anticipated, having had more than a million pre-orders, and when it came out it topped the charts in both the US and the UK. The new direction took a while for some critics to catch up to, but it has since been recognised as a seminal album within the band’s discography.
Rolling Stone famously panned much of Led Zeppelin’s earlier work, so I thought I should check out what they were saying about them at the time, and whoa nelly, they just don’t do snark like that anymore. Sure, maybe history proved the sneering elitism to be slightly misguided, but at least they were a little bit funny about it: “[Robert Plant] demonstrates his heaviness on “The Lemon Song.” When he yells “Shake me ’til the juice runs down my leg,” you can’t help but flash on the fact that the lemon is a cleverly-disguised phallic metaphor.”
Maybe they do lack a bit of subtlety, but there’s just something about Led Zeppelin as a band that is undeniable – they’re one of those acts where there’s something about them that just transcends words when they’re together, at least for me. I’m sort of glad that they haven’t done any reunion tours or comeback performances since Bonham’s death, I just think the magic wouldn’t be there anymore. But then again, I’d still sell an organ to see them live, so there’s definitely two sides to the issue.
It’s a fantastic album to listen to, it’s one of those that sounds just as good as it did when you listened to it when you were younger. “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is one of my all-time favourite songs, and “Tangerine” is a close second from this record. And I love the mellower sound of this album – I think there’s a limit of how many songs you can sing about the Middle Earth without embracing folk, it was bound to happen. They managed to successfully keep the elements that people loved about their sound while maturing and becoming a more fully realised version of themselves, which I’m sure isn’t easy to do, especially while being one of the most famous and talked about bands in the world.
I’m giving this one a 9/10, who doesn’t love a bit of Zeppelin. Maybe my midlife crisis could be some sort of a teenage re-enactment of becoming a Led Zeppelin superfan again, that seems like a fun way to waste some time.