Bibek Acharya
Every artist has that one moment where they go beyond the threshold of what they can do. As much as they like the idea of audiences eating out of the palm of their hand whenever they make a new record, there’s always more to explore in rock and roll when you set your mind to incorporating different genres into the mix. Although Led Zeppelin never liked the idea of being tied to one genre, they would always have the blues to come back to whenever Jimmy Page or Robert Plant got lost.
Then again, some of their legacy is wrapped up in more than a few lawsuits. Despite them being one of the titans of all things rock and roll, there are pieces of their catalogue that might not have been all theirs, having been either lifted from another blues legend or turned inside out and becoming unrecognisably stolen wholesale from one of their contemporaries, like Jake Holmes’s version of ‘Dazed and Confused’.
When working on those first albums, though, Robert Plant was still finding his voice as a frontman and a songwriter. There would be those handful of songs that pointed the way forward to something different like ‘Thank You’ and ‘What Is and What Should Never Be’, but seeing them in action back in the day was like watching them through an incubation chamber while they started moulding different pieces together.
And while Led Zeppelin III looked like it was going to be a trainwreck judging by the bonkers cover art, this was the kind of revelation that not many people realised the band was capable of. They had been doing some of their best work on electric guitars, and while ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ pointed towards a record like this, the unplugged nature of tunes like ‘That’s the Way’ helped showcase their singer-songwriter side a lot better as if Plant was channelling the genius of Joni Mitchell rather than Bob Dylan.
There are even a handful of moments that don’t seem to have a clear antecedent. Page may have considered himself a child of all his influences, but there was no one else in rock and roll pulling off a song like ‘Friends’, especially with the middle section that included the classical string section alongside Page’s strange open tuning, which makes the song sound like some strange ritualistic activity come to life.
Although Plant would eventually become ‘The Golden God’ on later records, he remembered thinking that they had reached a major turning point with their third outing, saying, “People would bring stuff to the table, but it would be worked on, up ’til then, in a four-piece rehearsal environment. So that was quite a breakaway. That’s only part of [III], but at least it got us off to some new place. And it was delightfully slated by the media.”
Even if the critics didn’t know what they had on their hands at the time, Zeppelin would prove why that experimentation was essential to their development. Not every song had to be a typical bluesy affair, and by the time they made Physical Graffiti, almost every one of their ideas was a runaway success, whether that was the grandiosity of ‘Kashmir’ or the strange trip through old-time rock and roll on ‘Boogie With Stu’.
It may not have been what Zeppelin fans expected at the time, but if you look at the band’s career timeline, Led Zeppelin III is a road map to where they would go. Had they decided to stay the course of blues rock for the rest of their careers, we may only be hearing the same three songs whenever they come on the radio.
