Dazed and Confused

Today is the 37th anniversary of the release of the first Led Zeppelin album in 1969. Thanks to my 2006 Fender Custom Shop Guitar Calendar for that bit o' trivia. Almost hard to imagine that an album that rocks that hard can be so old.

It's not their top-selling album, but it has topped 10 million copies. On Rolling Stone's "Top 500 Albums of All Time," this record ranks #29, ahead of all the others in the band's catalogue, including Led Zeppelin IV (#66), Physical Graffiti (#70) and Led Zeppelin II (#75).

To quote from the Rolling Stone blurb:

On their first album, Led Zeppelin were still in the process of inventing their own sound, moving on from the heavy rave-up blueprint of guitarist Jimmy Page's previous band, the Yardbirds. But from the very beginning, Zeppelin had the astonishing fusion of Page's lyrical guitar playing and Robert Plant's paint-peeling love-hound yowl. "We were learning what got us off most and what got people off most," said Plant, who was, in 1969, a relatively untutored twenty-one-year-old from England's West Midlands. The template for everything Zeppelin achieved in the 1970s is here: brutal rock ("Communication Breakdown"), thundering power balladry ("Your Time Is Gonna Come"), acid-flavored folk blues ("Babe I'm Gonna Leave You")."

Crank it up!