Led Zeppelin

             Led Zeppelin, a British rock group, was influential in propagating the blues/rock style that earlier British groups (like Eric Clapton’s group Cream and the Rolling Stones) had pioneered. While Led Zeppelin was undoubtedly influenced by the early blues styles as much as other British groups (and they indeed covered two blues songs on their first album), their original music was much heavier and more aggressive than Cream’s and the Stones’, and they were pivotal in forging the distorted, aggressive rock style that would pave the way for punk and heavy metal (an excellent example is Communication Breakdown). [1]

             Nonetheless, there are clear inflections of the blues in Led Zeppelin ’s aggressive rock style. Robert Plant’s wailing, syllabic vocal lines recall the vocal styles of blues singers like Howlin’ Wolf and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the field hollers of American slaves and black workers. The distortion that so characterized Jimmy Page’s guitar playing is indebted to the early bluesmen that experimented with recording levels and techniques that dirtied their sound (particularly on recordings on the Chess label), reflecting a musical tendency to distort otherwise clean sounds that can be traced back to the blues’ African roots. These and other features of Led Zeppelin’s music exemplify the types of blues influences that remained prominent in subsequent rock and popular styles that were not explicitly blues-based.

     Bibliography

      [1]  Led Zeppelin, studio recording of “Communication Breakdown” on Led Zeppelin [1], Atlantic 588171, 1969, compact disc.

