![]() ![]() Page happily admitted that he had been a big fan of Bert Jansch, and that he’d utilised some of the guitarist’s tunings and finger picking techniques. Some of these songs would become the subject of scrutiny. Led Zeppelin I closed with a song called How Many More Times, an old tune that Robert Plant had sometimes used in his previous group Band of Joy, incorporating some lyrics and riffs from Albert King’s The Hunter. The band had also recorded their version of Willie Dixon’s I Can’t Quit You Baby, a song also covered by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers on their 1967 album Crusade, and You Shook Me, which was written by Willie Dixon and JB Lenoir. Written by John Mendelsohn, it claimed that Led Zeppelin had stolen some of their ideas, citing specifically Black Mountain Side as an uncredited reworking of Bert Jansch’s Black Water Side, and Your Time Is Gonna Come as a lift from Traffic’s Dear Mr Fantasy. Rolling Stone’s review of the record began a rift between magazine and band that lasted for some years. It is a landmark recording, and yet reaction to its release was equivocal. It’s a record that has become so familiar that it’s now impossible to imagine the raw impact of its arrival. Led Zeppelin’s first album was recorded in 36 hours of studio time at a cost of £1,750, a price that included the sleeve artwork. It remains a perfect example of how rock music would first feed upon itself and then grow. The Robert Johnson lyric that Robert Plant used at Surrey University would appear on the recording too. Hendrix took it one way, and Led Zeppelin took it another, playing it live many times before using it as the base for The Lemon Song on Led Zeppelin II. Albert King covered his song Killing Floor before Jimi Hendrix got hold of it. He brought some of that powerful physicality into his music. ![]() Howlin’ Wolf, a figure much admired by this new wave, was himself a huge man, 6’6” tall and close to 300lbs. “No-one had any idea what might happen next week, let alone next year”. “It was like the wild west,” one executive reflected. Record companies and music publishers had no concept of the revenue that such bands might generate. People were making albums that they thought might last for six months, not four decades. The London scene was fevered and organic. Ian Anderson’s Jethro Tull merged acoustic folk with blues riffs. The Earth blues band would soon turn some chords from Gustav Holst’s Mars into a song called Black Sabbath. Jimi Hendrix had electrified London with his attempts to combine what he called “earth” (blues and jazz) with “space” (psychedelia). Jeff Beck had just made a record called Truth that referenced George Gershwin and Willie Dixon. Eric Clapton had been tutored by John Mayall for his gig in the Bluesbreakers and he took what he’d learned into Cream, the first supergroup. ![]() He wasn’t the only young musician in London with a head full of other people’s records. Jimmy Page once said: “I’ve often thought that in the same way that the Stones tried to be the sons of Chuck Berry, we tried to be the sons of Howlin’ Wolf”. The blues songs that they played and recorded in their early years became the foundation for an entire genre of music in reusing them and spinning them in new and unheard directions, Zeppelin were extending a tradition that had begun with blues and folk music itself. And yet they repaid the debt by turning what they took into something more than the sum of its parts, something lasting. From their very first gig, Led Zeppelin took what they wanted from the existing canon of music. ![]()
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