Looking back to when I started writing this blog, I realise I did a huge injustice to some of my favourite bands by only talking about the one song that is the definitive introduction to the band. But these artists have incredible catalogues and it would be criminal not to talk about all their other songs that I love so much. So, in the next few posts I’ll revisit some of these amazing artists – Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Neil Diamond, Boney M, Tull, Simon & Garfunkel….

Led Zeppelin are ……..  mind bogglingly incredible. In just three short years from Jan ’69 to Nov ’71, they released Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, Led Zeppelin III and Led Zeppelin IV. (clearly they were working so hard on the music they had no time for album titles 😂). Three years is all it took to create some of the greatest rock music of all time!!

Between us friends, I was a little scared of Led Zeppelin when first hear them in my very early teens😱. Their “Drugs, Sex and Rock ‘n Roll” image was too edgy for me. I heard the urban legends of hotel trashing, drinking, orgies, drugs, and satanic worship with a mix of horror and fascination. And, convinced myself that if I got into bands like this, I would end up with friends who would take me down the dark alley of drugs and violence (yes – I know I was a little goody-two-shoes😇). Of course, eventually I grew up – learned to love Led Zep – and became the guy my mother warned me not to be friends with!  😆

 “Whole Lotta Love” was my introduction to Led Zep. I remember it coming on late one Friday night on the radio. I then spent the next two days gathering the pieces of my mind (it was blown!).  Page’s opening riff. Then JPJ’s bassline comes in. Followed by that Plant trademark wail. And Bonzo’s drumming, just lagging the beat. Bloody hell! The music is so great that I completely missed all the overtly sexual lyrics – gimme a break, I was only 15!

“You’ve been cooling, baby, I’ve been drooling,
All the good times baby I’ve been misusing
Way, way down inside, I’m gonna give you my love
I’m gonna give you every inch of my love”
Yikes!! 😱

Led Zep are a band that has been “inspired” by a lot of songs, sometimes very directly. The “inspiration” for “Whole Lotta Love” was a ’62 song called “You Need Love”. Sung by Muddy Waters, lyrics by Willie Dixon (yup, the Man himself) and the melody by guitar genius Earl Hooker (cousin of John Lee Hooker) – it’s easy to see why this was a song to be “inspired” by! Anyway, one day early in their story, the band got together to jam and write some songs. Page had an amazing riff ready and as he played it, Plant “improvised” some lyrics to go with it…..grounded in the Waters/Dixon/Hooker original. Of course, Led Zep had a global hit! That riff, bassline, drum groove and vocal combination had to be a hit. But the hit was “very inspired”…so much so, that in 1985 Willie Dixon sued Led Zep and won an out of court settlement and got songwriter credit on the song.  Plant was sanguine about taking “inspiration”, saying “well, you only get caught when you’re successful. That’s the game”. 😂

Now, every once in a while, Gitanjali Iyer would also play the slightly less known (in India at least) Led Zep classics like “You Shook Me” and “Dazed and Confused”. These are the tracks where it all started for Led Zeppelin on their eponymous debut album. Plant and Page, like almost all ‘60s British Rockers, were truly inspired by American Blues giants like Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Earl Hooker and BB King. “You Shook Me” is originally a Waters/Dixon/Hooker song, with Page taking the Hooker slide guitar pieces and giving them his ‘60s psychedelic treatment. This is a song you have to listen to after a couple of glasses of Old Monk and an interesting ciggie – guaranteed to make you bob your head from side to side and profoundly exclaim “yaar, Led Zep are too good” 😂. To those of us who didn’t do that back when you were 18, well – I have news for you. Interesting ciggies are now legal in lots of countries 😆

The debut album, Led Zeppelin, is IMHO, one of the greatest debut albums of all time. It was, principally, the work of Jimmy Page. He arranged it, produced it, financed it and hawked it. In fact, to be fair, the whole band was the work of Jimmy Page. By 1965, Page was possibly the best session guitarist in England, playing on at least half the songs that become hits in the early 60s. He did have a dream of creating a super-group but he was so good and making such good money, that he turned down the chance to replace Eric Clapton in the Yardbirds – suggesting instead that his boyhood friend Jeff Beck join them instead! 😱 But the Yardbirds weren’t letting him get away and eventually Page joined in ’66, just as The Yardbirds were in their death throes. And then Jeff Beck quit suddenly in the middle of a US tour. For a while Page tried to keep the band together, but it all came crashing down. Page was not giving up though – he decided to keep the show on the road even if he needed to recruit a completely new band, naming this new group The New Yardbirds. The choice of bass player was simple – his session-musician buddy John Paul Jones asked if he could join!

But….Page still needed a Singer and a Drummer. He made offers to a number of great singers – Steve Winwood and Terry Reid amongst them – but they all turned him down, thinking it too big a risk. Terry Reid suggested Page should look at a guy singing with a band called Obs-Tweedle (I kid you not!) out in the West Midlands. At the end of his tether, Page made the trek out to Walsall to see this guy and figure out if he could sing. And found on stage, fronting this very mediocre band, a tall Greek god with flowing hair and skin-tight jeans ….and a voice the likes of which Page had never heard before – Robert Plant at his imperious best, all of 19, commanding the stage like a veteran! Page and Plant spent a few days listening to records, getting to know each other and talking about the new band that Page wanted to create. Plant suggested they should enrol his drummer buddy, one John Bonham. And the rest, boys and girls…is History!

The band went on tour to Scandinavia as The New Yardbirds to test out their chemistry and their music – and it was explosive! But for legal reasons they were told they couldn’t use the Yardbirds name and so Page changed it to Led Zeppelin (Keith Moon having suggested some time ago that any super-group that Page created would go down like a Lead Zeppelin!). Two weeks after the Scandi tour, Page had the band in a studio with a plan to just record the stuff they had been doing on stage. And in nine days at a grand total cost of £1,782, they had an album – Led Zeppelin! Good Times Bad Times, Communication Breakdown, You Shook Me, Babe I’m Gonna Leave You….one of the best debut albums of all time, even though lots of the songs were “inspired”, especially the fabulous “Dazed and Confused” 😎  (Jake Holmes, who wrote the original song, finally got songwriter credit from Led Zep only in 2003). What an album though – millions of college students owe a chunk of their degrees and their life lessons to this album!

Now for my final favourite from Led Zeppelin II – Heartbreaker. That riff – OMG!! I could listen to this song on loop for hours!! Now, Bonzo’s drumming on this song is just mind boggling but it’s Page’s solo that is an air guitarist’s dream come true! He really shreds – and you know it’s one of the greatest guitar solos of all time when Eddie Van Halen claims that it was this song that inspired his technique. The song has featured in Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Zeppelin II was created, recorded and produced in stolen moments of time while the band was on tour after the huge success of their debut album. It was recorded in studios across US and UK, putting onto vinyl improvs from their stage performances and new material that Page and Plant wrote while their genius was on fire! Page produced it, as he did their debut album, and, of course – it was an absolute, knock it out of the park, bona fide smash. The album cemented the Led Zeppelin blues-rock sound and got to No. 1, knocking Abbey Road off the top spot and “Whole Lotta Love” climbed up to No.3, giving engineering students all over India something to really sing about 🙃