Led Zeppelin I [Import]

Led Zeppelin | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (December 16, 2008)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Wea Japan
• ASIN: B001H68K2Q
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #344,331 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Good Times Bad Times

2. Babe I'm Gonna Leave You

3. You Shook Me

4. Dazed and Confused

5. Your Time Is Gonna Come

6. Black Mountain Side [Instrumental]

7. Communication Breakdown

8. I Can't Quit You Baby

9. How Many More Times

Editorial Reviews

CD ALBUM

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good little blues-rock album, August 7, 2007

By 

finulanu ""the mysterious"" (Here, there, and everywhere) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Led Zeppelin I (Audio CD)

Let's not kid ourselves here: this is not the first heavy metal album. That genre was solidified in the '67-'68 time period by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Cream. The influence of those artists' work (particularly Beck's Truth) are felt on this album. Now, it is pretty heavy rock: I won't deny it's not a metal album, but it's certainly not the one that catapulted the genre into existence like some have claimed. It is a solid heavy blues-rock album with a bunch of interesting guitarwork from Jimmy Page, though.

Kicking things off is arguably my favorite sub-three minute Zeppelin song, Good Times Bad Times. Page, Paul Jones and Bonham's chemistry is remarkable here: Page delivers a short-but-sweet guitar solo; Paul Jones adds cool bass fills and Bonham hammers out bass drum triplets. Even Plant is tolerable for a change. Next up is my personal favorite, Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, a psychedelic folk-metal melodrama. Page's many guitar solos are very well worth hearing on this one. The song after would have been the best if it weren't for its coda: their underrated cover of You Shook Me, a scorchin' blues jam with some dirty lyrics courtesy of Willie Dixon. Page and Plant smugly tried to pass this song off as their own, even though it had been previously recorded by Muddy Waters and later recorded by Jeff Beck. No way did those two write it. That's one thing that bugs me about Jimmy Page: people talk about how good of a songwriter he is, when really his version of "songwriting" was often simply listening to a bunch of records and saying, "Hey, I like that riff/melody/lyric/whole song, I'll try to pass it off as my own!" Anyway, it's hard to knock the tune itself. Plant's drawn-out, guitar-mimicking vocals during the title phrase (later borrowed by AC/DC for their similarly named and similarly themed You Shook Me All Night Long) are a nice touch, as much as I dislike the guy's voice, and the instrumental section is something to hear, if just for the styles it blends: heavy guitar solo, jazzy organ chart, bluesy bit of harp. Good combo. As I said though, I'm not a fan of the end: Plant tries to hits the notes Page plays on guitar, and just because he can doesn't mean he should. You've all heard the similarly melodramatic Dazed and Confused: Bowed guitar, bass-drum call-and-response, and ominous descending riff add up to something great. Plant's generic sex-god moans and equally generic shoot-my-cheatin'-woman lyrics (alledgedly taken from Jake Holmes' song of the same name) do not, but I just tune out to those and let the band do their thing. And I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but I actually like Your Time is Gonna Come. At least the acoustic guitar, drums and pedal steel: Plant almost ruins it once again with his lyrics; and the opening organ sequence is dull and cheesy.

Now there's the bad bit, which is why I give this a mere four stars rather than five. The first is Black Mountainside, an experiment wih Indian folk music. I'm all for experimenting, but in this case it just sounds boring.

The next song is so bad I have to take an entire paragraph to criticize it. I don't care if it's still a radio staple today, I don't like Communcations Breakdown at all. The simplicity of the piece isn't just what bugs me: I like some punk, so I can't be too hard on a song for being simple, but The Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen has more chords than that song. What's entertaining about "DOO doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doot... doo doo doot?" Nothing. It literally is a three-chord riff, those chords being (in order) E, D and A - for bassists like myself, that's just three open strings. And you can bet it's in the key of G Major. Now, I liked the song back when I didn't know squat about music theory, and as I said before I don't hate all simple songs. But this one just flaunts its idiocy: Plant shrieks and moans bedroom lyrics; Bonham hammers away at his drums rather unimpressively; JPJ gets drowned out. And Page's guitar solo is unforgivably stupid, just a bunch of notes repeated at supersonic speed, obviously meant to impress the easily impressed. A twelve-year-old who was just learning guitar could've written that song and came back to it absolutely unimpressed a year later.

The next song is just a boring psychedelic blues again copped right from the Willie Dixon songbook. I Can't Quit You Baby is a hell of a blues song by Otis Rush or Dixon himself (as heard on his I Am the Blues LP), but Zeppelin totally ruins it for me, right from Plant's opening cry. The guitar solo is once again flash for flash's sake, piling on a bunch of rather uninteresting sound effects. I'll pass.

By all means the closing How Many More Times should be a failure also. It's basically an extended "Blues Song Rip-off" remix of Dazed and Confused: the lyrics from the verses are stolen from Muddy Waters' How Many More Years, while the "They call me the hunter" section is borrowed from Albert King's Hunter. By the way, they took King's song totally out-of-context: in the original, King is a promiscuous lover, not a fighter like Plant professes to be. Anyway, I actually like More Times a lot, as such things go: the bass introduction is better than Dazed and Confused's in many respects (dum dum da dum dum dum dum dum da dum... awesome!), and the army of psychedelic guitars are a treat for the ears. Plus I think the monologue gives it a lot of blues cred, and is unintentionally amusing (Eleven children, huh? Been gettin' it on in your spare time, Robbie?), and it does give the song a lot of blues cred.

Overall, this is one of the group's better albums: not brilliant like Houses of the Holy, but very enjoyable just the same.