As it turned out, Led Zeppelin’s infamous 1969 debut album was indicative of the decade to come–one that, fittingly, this band helped define with its decadently exaggerated, bowdlerized blues-rock. In shrieker Robert Plant, ex-Yardbird Jimmy Page found a vocalist who could match his guitar pyrotechnics, and the band pounded out its music with [...]
As Basil Bunting wrote about Ezra Pound’s Cantos, “There are the Alps… you will have to go a long way round/if you want to avoid them.” Led Zeppelin’s work is the central fact of 1970s rock & roll; in its loving homage to and shameless piracy from the blues, its glorious and wretched [...]
