Led Zeppelin

History

Jimmy Page did not set out to form a new band. In the summer of 1968, he was simply trying to honor a booking. The Yardbirds, whose ranks he had joined in 1966, first as bassist, then as lead guitarist, had effectively dissolved when vocalist Keith Relf and drummer Jim McCarty walked out, leaving Page and bassist Chris Dreja holding a set of contracted Scandinavian tour dates and little else. Dreja soon departed to pursue photography. What Page built from the wreckage would reshape the next decade of rock music.

The lineup assembled with unusual speed. Singer Terry Reid turned down the invitation and pointed Page toward Robert Plant, then fronting an obscure Midlands group called Hobbstweedle. Plant, in turn, recommended John Bonham, a drummer whose power behind a kit was already earning him a reputation far larger than his profile. The fourth piece came from within the industry itself: John Paul Jones, one of Britain’s most accomplished session musicians — the man who played bass on Donovan’s Sunshine Superman and arranged the strings on the Rolling Stones’ She’s a Rainbow — contacted Page directly, having heard through his wife that a new project was forming.

By mid-August 1968, the four musicians had convened in a cramped basement room on Gerrard Street in what is now London’s Chinatown. They tore into an old Yardbirds number and the walls shook. The chemistry was immediate and unmistakable.

Manager Peter Grant, who had worked with the Yardbirds, stayed on and proved as decisive to the band’s architecture as Page was to its sound. Under the name The New Yardbirds, the four completed the Scandinavian dates in September 1968, then returned to England and formally became Led Zeppelin. The name had circulated in rock circles as a joke: Keith Moon and John Entwistle of The Who had bandied the phrase about in the context of a hypothetical supergroup going down like a lead balloon. Page appropriated it, adjusting the spelling deliberately so American audiences would not mispronounce it as “leed Zeppelin.”

The Debut and the American Breakthrough

Before a record deal was in place, Page and Grant financed the recording of the debut album themselves. The sessions took place at Olympic Studios in London in September and October 1968, cost £1,782, and were completed in just 36 hours of studio time, with Page producing and Glyn Johns engineering. Grant then flew to New York with the master tapes and negotiated directly with Atlantic Records executives Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler.

The contract was signed on November 11, 1968. Atlantic had not seen the band perform a single live show. The deal secured not only a substantial advance but something rarer: full creative control. The band retained authority over artwork, and no single could be released without their consent.

Led Zeppelin began their first North American tour on December 26, 1968, opening in Denver and tearing through residencies in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and New York. The album shipped in the United States on January 12, 1969, while the tour was in progress, and word of their live performances — ferocious, sprawling sets that bore only a loose relationship to the recorded versions — drove it to No. 10 on the Billboard 200.

The press was slower to come around; Rolling Stone‘s John Mendelsohn dismissed the record as the work of a limited producer. The gap between critical skepticism and audience enthusiasm would define Led Zeppelin’s early years.

Led Zeppelin II arrived on October 22 of that year. It displaced Abbey Road from the top of the Billboard 200, held the No. 1 position for seven non-consecutive weeks, and topped the UK chart as well. The recording conditions, snatched hours between tour dates on two continents, gave the record a raw, pressurized energy that no amount of studio refinement could have manufactured. The band refused to issue commercial singles in the UK throughout its active career.

Bron-Yr-Aur and the World’s Biggest Band

In early 1970, Page and Plant retreated to Bron-Yr-Aur, a remote, electricity-free cottage in Snowdonia, Wales, to write without the noise of the road. The pastoral surroundings pulled the new compositions toward acoustic textures and folk structures. Led Zeppelin III, released on October 5, 1970, debuted at No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart and entered the Billboard 200 at No. 3 before reaching No. 1 the following week, but its acoustic half disoriented critics and segments of the fanbase who had been expecting another volume of the same assault. The press response was, by the band’s standards, subdued. It did not slow them down.

Their touring scale by 1970 had grown to match the ambition of the music. On June 28 of that year, Led Zeppelin headlined the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music at the Bath & West Showground in Shepton Mallet before an estimated 150,000 people. Weeks later, Melody Maker named them the World’s Top Group in their annual reader poll — a title The Beatles had held for most of the previous decade.

The Untitled Album and the Peak of Their Powers

The response to the critical mauling of Led Zeppelin III was characteristically defiant. The fourth album, released on November 8, 1971, carried no band name, no album title, and no text anywhere on its outer sleeve. The inner sleeve and record labels bore four symbols, one chosen by each member. Recorded primarily at Headley Grange in Hampshire, it was Page and Plant’s deliberate refusal to give critics anything to anchor their attacks. The refusal paid off on a scale no one had predicted: the album contained Stairway to Heaven, Black Dog, Rock and Roll, When the Levee Breaks, and Going to California — a single record that rewrote the terms of what a rock album could be.

Atlantic pushed for Stairway to Heaven as a US single in both 1972 and 1973; manager Peter Grant declined both times. The song became the most-requested track on FM radio in the United States throughout the 1970s without ever appearing on the singles chart. By 1991, it had been played on American radio an estimated 2.9 million times. The album was certified 24× Platinum in the United States and had sold over 37 million copies worldwide.

Houses of the Holy, released on March 28, 1973, pushed in the opposite direction. Where the fourth album had stripped the presentation back to near-anonymity, Houses of the Holy reached outward — funk rhythms, reggae inflections, and orchestral passages alongside the hard rock core. Critics were again divided; audiences were not. The album reached No. 1 on both the Billboard 200 and the UK Albums Chart and was later certified Diamond by the RIAA for ten million certified units.

1973: The Peak and the Cracks

The 1973 North American tour, launched on May 4 at Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta, represented the commercial apex of Led Zeppelin’s live career. At Tampa Stadium on May 5, the band performed for 56,800 fans, grossing $309,000 in a single night — breaking the single-concert attendance record previously held by The Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965. The 33-date tour grossed approximately $4 million in total, the largest gross in North American rock concert tour history to that point. The final three nights at Madison Square Garden were filmed for what became The Song Remains the Same.

On July 29, 1973, the night of the final Madison Square Garden show, road manager Richard Cole discovered that safe-deposit box No. 51 at the Drake Hotel had been opened and emptied. Approximately $180,000 in cash was gone. The locks showed no signs of tampering. The crime was never solved. The band played the show regardless.

Swan Song and Physical Graffiti

As their Atlantic contract expired at the end of 1973, Led Zeppelin established Swan Song Records, their own imprint distributed through Atlantic. The label launched in May 1974 and served both as a vehicle for the band’s own releases and as a home for artists including Bad Company, the Pretty Things, Dave Edmunds, and Maggie Bell.

Physical Graffiti, the band’s first release on Swan Song, arrived on February 24, 1975 in the United States and February 28 in the United Kingdom — a double album born of excess, as the new sessions produced enough material to overflow a single LP, leading the band to expand it with seven unreleased tracks from earlier recording cycles. Advance shipments exceeded one million copies, an unprecedented figure in Atlantic’s history, and the album debuted at No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart and climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

Presence and the Rhodes Accident

On August 4, 1975, on the Greek island of Rhodes, the rental car carrying Robert Plant and his family spun off the road. Plant sustained multiple fractures; his wife Maureen suffered a fractured skull, a broken leg, and pelvic fractures. Two of their children were also injured. Plant was flown back to England on a chartered medical jet. The accident forced the cancellation of the US and Far East tours that had been booked for that year and confined Plant to a wheelchair during his recovery.

The band’s response was Presence, recorded at Musicland Studios in Munich in November 1975. Plant sang from a wheelchair. The album was completed in 18 days — the fastest turnaround since the debut — in part because the Rolling Stones had the studio booked immediately afterward. Page completed all guitar overdubs in a single marathon session and mixed the record virtually without pause.

Released on March 31, 1976, it entered the Billboard 200 at No. 2 and reached No. 1 the following week. The Song Remains the Same, the concert film drawn from the 1973 Madison Square Garden dates, had its world premiere in New York on October 19, 1976, and opened there the following day, with its accompanying soundtrack reaching No. 2 on the Billboard 200.

Tragedy and Dissolution

Led Zeppelin’s 1977 North American tour was their last. Following backstage violence on July 23 involving members of Led Zeppelin’s entourage and employees of promoter Bill Graham, John Bonham, Peter Grant, Richard Cole, and security coordinator John Bindon were arrested on July 25 on misdemeanor charges related to the incident. Graham’s employees subsequently pursued a $2 million civil lawsuit.

Three days later, on July 26, Plant received a call in New Orleans that his five-year-old son Karac had died of a stomach virus. The remaining ten tour dates were cancelled immediately. Plant returned to England.

The band reconvened in November and December 1978 at Polar Studios in Stockholm, the facility owned by ABBA, and recorded In Through the Out Door in approximately three weeks. The record reflected a shift in internal dynamics: with Page and Bonham frequently absent from sessions due to substance dependency, the album’s compositions were driven primarily by Jones and Plant. Released on August 22, 1979, it entered the Billboard 200 and reached No. 1 in its second week on the chart.

On September 25, 1980, John Bonham was found unresponsive at Page’s home in Windsor (the Old Mill House in Clewer), where the band had gathered for rehearsals ahead of a since-cancelled North American tour. He was 32. The inquest at East Berkshire Coroner’s Court established that Bonham had consumed approximately 40 measures of vodka over about 12 hours. The cause of death was determined to be inhalation of vomit during sleep. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death.

On December 4, 1980, the surviving members issued a formal statement: the loss of their friend, and the deep respect they held for his family, made it impossible to continue as they were. Led Zeppelin was over.

Legacy

Coda, a posthumous collection of eight unreleased tracks drawn from sessions spanning 1970 to 1978, was released in November 1982. The title was chosen deliberately, as a closing passage. It reached No. 6 on the Billboard 200. On May 14, 1988, Page, Plant, and Jones gathered at Madison Square Garden for the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary concert, with Jason Bonham, John’s son, behind the kit. The under-rehearsed performance was uneven and was later criticized by Page and Plant themselves, less a reunion than a reminder of what had been lost.

The three surviving members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 12, 1995, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, presented by Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith. Led Zeppelin received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at a Special Merit Awards ceremony on February 12, 2005, and were formally acknowledged during the 47th Annual Grammy Awards the following day.

In May 2014, the estate of late Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe filed a federal copyright lawsuit alleging that the opening guitar figure of Stairway to Heaven had been plagiarized from Spirit’s 1968 composition Taurus. A jury cleared Led Zeppelin on June 23, 2016. A Ninth Circuit panel ordered a new trial in 2018, but the court, sitting en banc, reversed that decision in March 2020 and upheld the original jury verdict. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case in October 2020, leaving that judgment intact.

Page and Plant collaborated twice in the 1990s, both times without John Paul Jones. The first was an MTV Unledded special filmed in Marrakesh and Snowdonia, released later that year as No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded and debuting at No. 4 on the Billboard 200. A studio album followed: Walking into Clarksdale, recorded by Steve Albini at Abbey Road Studios and released on April 21, 1998, reached No. 8 on the Billboard 200 and No. 3 on the UK Albums Chart. Its lead single, Most High, topped Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and won the 1999 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance.

The catalogue kept finding new audiences. How the West Was Won, a live triple album drawn from 1972 performances at the L.A. Forum and Long Beach Arena, was released on May 27, 2003, and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Mothership, a 24-track career compilation released on November 12, 2007 in the UK and November 13 in the US, reached No. 4 on the UK Albums Chart and No. 7 on the Billboard 200.

The question of a genuine reunion was answered, once, on December 10, 2007. Page, Plant, and Jones headlined a benefit concert at the O2 Arena in London in memory of Ahmet Ertegun, who had died following a fall in October 2006, with Jason Bonham again on drums. Approximately 20 million ticket requests were submitted online for a venue holding around 20,000. The performance, released commercially as Celebration Day in 2012, won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album in 2014 and was the last time the three surviving members performed together. Led Zeppelin have sold more than 300 million albums worldwide. The RIAA lists 112.5 million certified album units in the United States.

What Led Zeppelin made between 1968 and 1980 did not belong to a single genre, and no single genre fully claimed it. Page’s studio instincts, Bonham’s physical force, Plant’s range, and Jones’s harmonic sensibility combined into an approach — extended blues form, dynamic extremity, the integration of folk and Eastern textures into hard rock — that shaped heavy music for the decades that followed. Hard rock, heavy metal, grunge, and stadium rock each drew from the same source without exhausting it. The catalogue is not simply an influence to be traced; it is the ground much of loud guitar music was made on.