Yup. LP covers we a genre of art for a time. Famously, the original vinyl issue of the Rolling Stones 1971 album "Sticky Fingers" included an Andy Warhol design of a picture of a man in tight jeans, and had a working zip that opened to reveal underwear fabric.
And in the Led Zeppelin category, we have III with the spinning wheel that would reveal various pictures through holes in the album cover, and Physical Graffiti where the windows on the building would open to reveal stuff. And finally, In Through the Out Door where you could wipe the inside cover with a wet cloth to reveal the color.
Many albums used the large area for some kind of physical interaction. Sadly we lost that starting with cassettes.
It makes me sad when computers represent things with lossy abstractions, like “album art is a square image,” and those abstractions end up widely supplanting the essential idea of what the thing is.
Another reason is the physical act of playing vinyl necessarily requires a certain level of reverence (to protect from clumsiness causing scratches) a sentiment sorely missing from much of the rest of our lives.
I actually picked up an original of that album in a charity shop for 20p in about 1985. It was in mint condition, looked like it had never been played.
Oh-so-barely related: today I found myself listening to "Baba O'Reilly" in the car and I took the opportunity to show my son the cover art for "Who's Next" because it always seemed like it was worth a mischievous boyhood chuckle.
...and then he and I stumbled upon a recent retelling of the circumstances around that photo shoot which was kinda interesting [1].
Crazy to see that they sold 37 Million albums way back then... It's the absolute hardest thing to get 40 views on music videos posted to a free social media site now, despite the entire Internet supposedly being "open to the entire world".
It's a bit like with cabbage: when it was the only thing people could get, cabbage was extremely popular. Nowadays you can buy any vegetable or fruit, grown anywhere at any time, so it's hard to get people interested in cabbage.
I like the analogy, but this kind of suggests there were other Led Zeppelins and the one we know is just the one that happened to be marketed. I find that hard to believe.
I think it's more like the cabbages are still there, but now you have to sift through a ton of wild varieties of bitter and tough brassicas yourself.
I would argue that any musician active at the time will know someone who was as good as Led Zeppelin, but never made it because they couldn't get a label contract at the right time. This is particularly true if you include black artists. It's not just marketing - production costs were very high.
There is an element of cargo-cultism in the boomer experience, as a result of scarcity and strict gatekeeping that lasted pretty much all the way to the early 2000s.
Limited bandwidth requires artificial selection methods. In one sense we've gotten rid of the bandwidth issue, but we've not solved the selection issue at all.
I have never quite got this band. Everybody says that they are the fathers of Heavy Metal and Hard Rock and this album especially should represent all that, but they are very light celtic tunes to my ear, and especially their most successful single Stairway to Heaven.
Black Sabbath are the fathers of heavy metal and hard rock, I think they must have had a bad promoter (compared to LedZep) and the fact that they'd play just 1h compared to Zeppelin 4h marathons also made them less relevant in the grapevine
I think they must have had a bad promoter (compared to LedZep)
Turns out there's a lot to this. Read Black Sabbath's Wikipedia entry. As a band, they were always a total mess, with bad management, lack of discipline, loads of wasted money and opportunity, and also a massive amount of turnover among the band members. It's almost a miracle that they were able to create what fans now think of classic rock albums, like Paranoid and Master of Reality.
Led Zeppelin, OTOH, was conceptually very strong, determined, and ambitious. They not only had the toughest, best and most protective businessman among rock managers (Peter Grant), they were like a well-oiled machine where each member was firing on all cyclinders and they were greater than the sum of the parts. Jimmy Page specifically conceived the band to not be like the Yardbirds where it was run by a bunch of mafia guys and producers and had a lot of turnover. That's why when Bonham died, the concept could not work with one guy not in the equation anymore.
I don't care who or what they are the fathers of, I just find that their music resonates with me in a very special way no other band's does. It has tension and & release on many scales and dimensions at once.
Black Sabbath seem pretty well-regarded, especially to those into that type of music. I mean, Ozzy Osbourne is a household name which you can't say about any members of Led Zeppelin.
Led Zeppelin are just different. They are just on the right side of musical for me. I really can't stand dissonance or noise in music. I also greatly appreciate dynamic range which they have an abundance.
They have a handful of Celtic-inspired songs, and tons of blues and blues-rock based ones. If you listen to them only expecting to hear the origins of metal, you're going to be disappointed. If you have an understanding of how heavy music was at the time, then you'll understand why they were considered so heavy.
"The late 19th-century picture of an old man carrying a bundle of sticks on his back on the front of the album was bought in an antique shop in Reading, Berkshire by Plant.[5][42] The picture was then juxtaposed and affixed to the internal, papered wall of a partly demolished suburban house for the photograph to be taken."
I grew up addicted to IV but since I discovered how much of their music is basically stolen (more so than most artists), I simply cannot listen to them. The originals are great though!
Ever watch a documentary called “Everything is a remix”? It might change your mind on the subject and let you enjoy the originals and the adaptations too.
usually the polite way of going about it is to credit the original artist in some way but it seems zeppelin didn't make any attempt whatsoever. dazed and confused is a good example. its not just copying a chord progression and taking it from there, it was the whole thing, the name, the melody
