The Beginning
Led Zeppelin formed in London in 1968. They started as an attempt to keep the Yardbirds alive. Guitarist Jimmy Page had joined in 1966 and when the band imploded two years later, he and rhythm guitarist/bassist Chris Dreja tried to resuscitate the group. When Dreja dropped out, Page formed a new band (initially called the New Yardbirds) which included John Paul Jones, a bassist and keyboardist who had worked on some Yardbirds’ sessions with Page. He also recruited singer Robert Plant and drummer John Bonham, who’d worked together in Band of Joy.
The newly christened Led Zeppelin (so named because of Who drummer Keith Moon’s proclamation that the band would go over like a “lead balloon”) signed to Atlantic Records in November 1968. Their “hard-edged” TM debut, released in January 1969, “suggested much of the preceding activity in British blues-rock had been child’s play.” TM
Recording the Second Album
Within six months, Led Zeppelin had become a headlining act. Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records, was eager to get a second album out and pressured the band to go back into the studio. GM-94 This led to the less-than-ideal circumstances of trying to write and record a sophomore album while also touring America and Europe.
From January to August 1969, they squeezed in recording time at thirteen different studios GM-100 in the United States and United Kingdom. The band spent nearly twenty days recording and two more mixing. By contrast, the first album was done in barely four sessions. GM-102 Unlike the first album, the band did not use any outside musicians on the second album. GM-102
Songs often grew out of improvisational jams on stage. As such, the songs reflect the “spontaneity and urgency” WK in which they were crafted. Jimmy Page served as producer and this album marked the first on which Eddie Kramer was an engineer.
Reinventing the Blues – and Inventing Heavy Metal
With little opportunity to write new material, the group tapped into the blues tradition of “borrowing” and “recast lyrics and melodic ideas from old blues standards” TM they performed in concert. AM “The true measure of Led Zeppelin is how far they transcended those influences.” TBThey may not have written the songs, but they came “to fully own them.” TM
The Heavy Metal Blueprint
The resulting Led Zeppelin II “doesn’t have the eclecticism of the group’s debut, it’s arguably more influential.” AM It “provided the blueprint for all the heavy metal bands that followed it” AM by foreshadowing “the basic guitar attack of heavy metal.” TM This is “macho metal the way it was meant to sound.” VB
Led Zeppelin II has been called “the birth certificate of heavy metal.” GM-92 With the album, the band recrafted the blues “into a startlingly visceral, grab-you-by-the-throat sound that changed rock forever.” TM They simplified the riffs, pumped up the volume, and added extended instrumental solos for a sound which is “heavy and hard, brutal and direct.” AM They “radically revamp the outlines of the music until it speaks with a bold, sometimes brutal fury.” TM They “caused a nation of hippie-dippie longhairs to put down their flowers and grab their crotches.” VB This was “a seminal disc that made clear that the soundtrack to the seventies was going to differ from that to the sixties.” GM-96
Hard Rock Meets Folk?
Led Zeppelin didn’t just wow audiences with their ability to rock, but their ability to mellow out. “Led Zeppelin II is an album to which you can go berserk or – and this is rare for a hard rock album – you could just sit down and listen. Either way it is rewarding.” TB
“Lighter, folk-tinged tunes” TM like “What Is and What Should Never Be,” “Ramble On,” and “Thank You” would “anticipate the mystical airs Zeppelin would pursue later, most successfully with the epic ‘Stairway to Heaven.’” TM
No Longer the “Page Project”
Plant demonstrated a desire as a lyricist on the second album to “broach personal themes (‘What Is and What Should Never Be,’ ‘Thank You’) and to guide the listener along the as yet little-explored byways of heroic fantasy (‘Ramble On’), not to forget the recurrent sexual metaphors (‘Whole Lotta Love,’ ‘The Lemon Song’), something Plant has in common with any self-respecting bluesman or rocker.” GM-96
“The involvement in the songwriting of Robert Plant…but also of John Paul Jones and John Bonham became such a normal state of affairs that Led Zeppelin could no longer be described as Jimmy Page’s group, rather as a group of four complementary musicians and partners.” GM-95 Still, the American media judged Plant’s “voice to be too shrill and his behavior excessive.” GM-95 Richard Cole, the band’s tour manager, even asserted that after the first tour, it was touch-and-go as to whether Plant would still be in the band. Whether true or not, “Plant would rapidly consolidate his position as lead singer and eventually steal the show from Page – to the guitarist’s great annoyance.” GM-95
The Cover
The album sleeve was designed by David Juniper, a young British artist. Jimmy Page tasked him simply with coming up “with something interesting.” GM-97 Juniper decided to rework a photograph of Jasta 11, a renowned German fighter squadron formed in 1916. He retouched the photograph, “giving the black-and-white image a sepia tint and then substituting the faces of the four members of the group for those of four of the aces.” GM-97
Page liked the concept and asked Juniper to retouch the other faces with those of Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant, tour manager Richard Cole, and bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, “something of a role model for the guitarist.” GM-97 They didn’t make the cut, replaced instead by jazz man Miles Davis, a muse of artist Andy Warhol’s (perhaps Mary Woronov), and the astronaut Frank Borman. GM-98
The end result earned Juniper a Grammy nomination for best album cover.
Reissue
A 2014 deluxe edition added a second disc with alternate versions of the songs.
The Songs
Here’s a breakdown of each of the individual songs.
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