Dear Nathaniel,
Hello my love. I miss you so much.
Today we're finally taking the plunge and listening to the greatest band that ever was. They left us with 8 brilliant albums and one decent album released after John Bonham died. This is their debut self titled album. Led Zeppelin songs always feel so perfectly crafted, produced and performed. There is a special care that Jimmy Page takes with everything he has control over. While Led Zeppelin has always been a collaborative effort Page was the driving force and quite importantly the producer of the band.
Jimmy Page knew what he wanted from an album and he almost always achieves this type of perfection. Of course most of the great tight sound comes from the fact that there's four brilliant musicians working in unison towards a shared goal. This is painfully obvious in live recordings of Led Zeppelin too. Everything just worked when they played together. Unlike the music we've been listening to recently, everything feels perfectly thought out and well planned in the way it comes together.
It's so hard to describe, but when you listen to Led Zeppelin after having listened to their contemporaries in the late 60's it becomes very obvious they were in a completely different league. Of course that's not meant as a slight on the other bands we've been listening to as the free form feel of other recordings can be refreshing at times, and in the end it comes down to what mood I'm in as to which I would prefer. Of course I don't think I could ever not be in the mood for some Led Zeppelin.
Of course now that we've listened to Led Zeppelin we've come full circle with former Yardbirds guitarists with Jimmy Page. Of course Jimmy Page technically never left the Yardbirds, everyone else did and he formed the New Yardbirds with John Paul Jones, John Bonham and Robert Plant to fulfill touring commitments. Of course the New Yardbirds was a short lived name and it was quickly changed to Led Zeppelin.
The reason the band itself is called Led Zeppelin was from an earlier suggestion of a supergroup with Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Keith Moon and John Entwistle where the latter two started it would go down like a Lead Balloon. The Lead was changed to Led so Americans wouldn't pronounce it wrong and the Balloon was changed to Zeppelin.
The instrumental Black Mountain Side from this album was inspired by a Bert Jansch arrangement which I'm sure I mentioned earlier when we were listening to Jansch's debut album. I love the juxtaposition between an acoustic guitar piece jumping straight into a very heavy song with Communication Breakdown. Since this there has always been a fascination with Heavy Metal and Hard Rock bands to experiment with quieter acoustic pieces and it almost always works incredibly well when a talented band experiments with an acoustic sound for a few songs or an album.
I absolutely love Jimmy Page's guitar solos on this album, they're just amazing. I hope you've enjoyed Led Zeppelin as much as I enjoy it, although I'm not sure that's entirely possible. I probably have listened to Led Zeppelin more than any other band but I still don't feel like I've listened to them nearly enough. I'm not sure if I should introduce you to all of their albums over the next week or so or if I should space it out. I was thinking of maybe having a tribute to the greatest year in music 1972 but then I realised we've already listened to so many of the classics from that year so I'm not quite sure what to do next we'll see my love.
Goodnight my angel Nathaniel.
Love from Dad.
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