FEATURE:
Celebration Day
Led Zeppelin III at Fifty-Five
__________
THOUGH perhaps not as lauded…
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
as Untitled (1971) or Physical Graffiti (1975), there is no denying how transformative Led Zeppelin III was. In terms of broadening the sound palette of the band. Having released two albums to that point – 1968’s Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin II of 1969 -, you could feel them growing as a band. However, Led Zeppelin III was where there was a mix of acoustic, epic and the harder and more Rock-based sound of the first two albums. I think Led Zeppelin III is a perfect introduction for new fans, as it shows where the group came from and indicates where they would head. On 5th October (that is its U.S. release date), we mark fifty-five years of this extraordinary album. Much of the recording was done at Headley Grange, with additional sessions at Island Studios and Olympic Studios in London. Hard Rock influences on Immigrant Song fusing with more Folk-based sounds on Gallows Pole. That latter song is based on a traditional English Folk song. Hats Off to (Roy) Harper is a reworking of a Blue song. On this album, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham and John Paul Jones were at the top of their game. Even though they are perhaps more ambitious and spectacular on Untitled and Physical Graffiti, I think Led Zeppelin III is incredibly rich, accomplished and varied. The songwriting from Robert Plant and Jimmy Page so exceptional. The two working beautifully with one another. I am not sure how much people will mark fifty-five years of this album. Maybe an awkward anniversary to mark – we celebrate fifty and sixty years, but do we bother with fifty-five?! -, I wanted to spend time with Led Zeppelin III here. Opening with the classic, Immigrant Song, you are instantly hooked and intrigued! I want to get to some features about this album. Why it is so important and affecting.
Led Zeppelin III remains misunderstood. Maybe fans expecting something similar to the first two albums or not connecting with the acoustic and Folk touches. Perhaps not as many natural standout songs as you get on Led Zeppelin II and definitely would a year later for Untitled. Led Zeppelin III is integral to the band’s development. I will end with a couple of reviews for the 1970 album. Before that, there are two features to bring together. I am going to start out with a 2021 feature from Far Out Magazine. They argue how Led Zeppelin III is a misunderstood masterpiece. Hard to argue with that:
“On Led Zeppelin III, however, they split their audience and it remains to this day their most divisive record. The album is a gentle and cultured reimagining of their traditional sound and sees Zeppelin at perhaps their most daring.
Released on this day in 1970, the album ranks as one of the most controversial in the band’s canon. While much of what Led Zeppelin did is rightly revered to this day, the band’s third album has always had both its admirers and detractors within their fanbase. Some have simplified the album to simply “an acoustic record” while others see it as an inevitable fading of the band’s creative buzz following three intense years of making music. We, however, would argue it is one of the band’s best records for precisely this reason.
After Led Zeppelin had released their first two records, the hype surrounding the band’s third was almost impossible to withstand. Zeppelin had become the biggest band in the world and the decision to change direction musically would not land well.
It was to be expected, too, look at Bob Dylan’s decision to go electric and the heinous response that received. The group had just gone a long way to defining a brand new genre of heavy rock and just as they have got the whole world wanting more, they switch the delivery of their sound and move away from blues and rock and toward folk.
The previous albums had been flecked with elements of folk but now it had become the main priority and the whimsical potency was there for all to see. It may well have had something to do with the location in Bron-Yr-Aur. Much of the record was written in a remote cottage in Snowdonia with both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant needing time to recuperate from their extensive touring and excessive behaviours. They found respite in the hills but also a brand new sound along with it.
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting Snowdonia, you will know that the idea of picking up a lute and letting rip a folk song of the highest order is never too far from your mind when traversing the many different medieval sites that surround it. It played on Led Zeppelin’s sound too. It led the band to introduce almost every track with an inspirational folk line that always lands heavily on those track-skippers out there.
To do so would be to miss the point too. This album is Led Zeppelin showing their musical chops. They had already blasted away the cobwebs of the sixties while they were still in them and now they were ready to ditch being just a band and become icons. To do that, you need depth and to gain depth you need variances and it means the switch to folk wasn’t just warranted but wanted. It was a clear signifier to the world around them that Zeppelin wasn’t just ‘the biggest band on the planet’, a title they had only just stolen from The Beatles, they were artists too.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have some big thumping songs on there. In fact, it may well contain Led Zeppelin’s most deliberately heavy rock track in ‘Immigrant Song’. It also welcomes ‘Celebration Day’ and ‘Out on the Tiles’ as some rockier moments on the record. But it is safe to say, that the majority of the album turns its back on rock music”.
In 2020, Classic Rock wrote how Led Zeppelin III is their most misunderstood album. This note of apology and explanation! If critics were confounded in 1970, this album arguably brokered their legend. This is what Classic Rock write. Again, hard to disagree with that opinion! We need to give more represent to an album that took Led Zeppelin to the next level. If some felt it was them watered down or going soft, it was a band not sticking rigidly with one sound:
“Nineteen sixty-nine was one helluva year for Led Zeppelin. In the short span of 12 months they played close to 150 shows, recorded two best-selling albums, toured the US five times, and established themselves as one rock’s top box-office draws. In the harsh winter of ’68 they had been lucky to get $1,500 (around £883) for a club gig, but by the time 1970 rolled around, they were demanding as much as six figures a show.
The band’s meteoric rise had been breathless. While the music press weren’t particularly kind to them, their dramatic, sexually explicit hard rock was almost irresistible to a new generation of kids searching for something new and exciting that wasn’t “the same old Beatles and Stones”. But after a year of non-stop touring, recording and shagging, the band were ready to take a break.
It was singer Robert Plant’s idea to head for the hills – the Cambrian Mountains in Wales, to be exact. The 22-year-old remembered an 18th-century cottage called Bron-Yr-Aur he had visited in his youth, and felt it would be great place to temporarily escape life in the fast lane and commune with nature. Plant extended an invitation to his co-writer, guitarist and producer Jimmy Page, and in the spring, the two men took their women, instruments and supplies to the bucolic retreat to recharge their batteries and “get back to the garden”.
“It was time to take stock, and not get lost in it all,” Plant said later. And what better way to keep it real than at a place with no electricity, candles for light, water from a stream and an outside toilet?
The story of Plant and Page’s regenerative trek to Wales looms large in Zeppelin folklore, with many assuming that most of the acoustic-based songs that eventually appeared on Led Zeppelin III were written there. Page disputes that notion, but doesn’t dismiss the significance of the journey.
“When Robert and I went to Bron-Yr-Aur we weren’t thinking: ‘Let’s go to Wales and write,’” says Page. “The original plan was to just go there, hang out and appreciate the countryside. The only song we really finished while we were there was That’s The Way, but being in the country established a standard of travelling for inspiration and set a tone for Led Zeppelin III.”
While it might not have been conceived as a writing trip, the singer and guitarist’s stay in the Welsh mountains was deemed important and influential enough to be acknowledged on the album’s sleeve, stating: ‘Credit must be given to Bron Y Aur a small derelict cottage in South Snowdonia for painting a somewhat forgotten picture of true completeness which acted as an incentive to some of these music statements.’
Little did the band know that this ‘incentive’ and subsequent ‘tone’ would end up sending massive shockwaves throughout the rock world. Led Zeppelin’s pastoral third album was recorded at Olympic Studios in London and released in October 1970. It seemed almost self-destructively perverse – a 360-degree retreat from the testosterone-infused hard rock that had made them international superstars.
John Bonham teased the press about the band’s intended direction when Zeppelin regrouped for the first studio sessions of III in late May. ‘’We’ll be recording for the next two weeks and we are doing a lot of acoustic stuff as well as the heavier side,” he told the Melody Maker. “There will be better quality songs than on the first two albums.’’
The drummer wasn’t wrong. Six of the 10 tracks on the third album were built around the sweet ’n’ bitter strains of Page’s acoustic Harmony guitar as the band touched on everything from traditional bluegrass (Gallows Pole) to country blues (Hats Off To (Roy) Harper), to a folk song so upbeat you could square-dance to it (Bron-Y-Aur Stomp). To emphasise the rustic nature of the album, Zeppelin even changed their appearance, growing facial hair to Hobbit-like proportions and wearing clothes that made them look more like hippie farmers than sex gods. Fans and critics were dazed and confused, but the band stood their ground.
“We were so far ahead that it was difficult for people to know what the hell we were doing,” Page told journalist Brad Tolinski in the 2012 book Light & Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page. “Critics especially couldn’t relate to it. Led Zeppelin was growing. Where many of our contemporaries were narrowing their perspective, we were really being expansive. I was maturing as a composer and player, and there were many kinds of music that I found stimulating, and with this wonderful group I had the chance to be really adventurous.”
Soon after the album’s release, Page was keen to emphasise Zeppelin’s evolution. “There is another side to us’’ he said. “Everyone in the band is going through changes. There are changes in the playing and the lyrics. Robert is really getting involved in his lyric writing. This album was to get across more versatility and use combinations of instruments. I haven’t read any reviews yet, but people have got to give the LP a reasonable hearing.’’
Page would go on to read the reviews. Some writers went so far as to accuse the band of jumping on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young acoustic-rock bandwagon, which Page called “pathetic”, noting that acoustic guitars were all over the first two albums and arguing that they were at the core of everything the band did. The reviews so incensed the guitarist that he refused to grant any press interviews for the next 18 months after the album’s release.
Plant, at the time Led Zeppelin III came out, was more direct: “You can just see the headlines, can’t you? ‘Led Zeppelin go soft on their fans’ or some crap like that. But now that we’ve done [this album] the sky’s the limit. It shows we can change. It means there are endless possibilities for us to go in. We won’t go stale, and this proves it.”
The truth is, the third album should have come as no surprise to anyone paying full attention to the band. The radical seeds that sprouted onIII had been planted years earlier. Throughout the 60s, as Page toiled as London’s top session guitarist, very little escaped his attention. Like a musical sponge, he absorbed every lick the Chicago blues boom had to offer, took copious notes on contemporary folk-guitar virtuosos like John Fahey and Bert Jansch, and even purchased a sitar years before world music caught the attention of Beatle George Harrison”.
I am going to end with a couple of positive reviews for a titan of an album. Returning to Classic Rock for a review published in 2019, they got some words from fans. How this album has impacted them. Even though Led Zeppelin III is less bombastic than what came before (from the band) and maybe less so than what would follow for the rest of their career, that does not make their third studio album any less impactful and incredible:
“Some critics accused the band of jumping on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young acoustic-rock bandwagon. Page called them “pathetic”, noting that acoustic guitars were all over the first two albums and arguing that they were at the core of everything the band did. The reviews so incensed the guitarist that he refused to grant any press interviews for the next 18 months after the album’s release.
It was singer Robert Plant’s idea to head for the hills – the Cambrian Mountains in Wales, to be exact. The 22-year-old remembered an 18th-century cottage called Bron-Yr-Aur he had visited in his youth, and felt it would be great place to temporarily escape life in the fast lane and commune with nature.
Plant extended an invitation to his co-writer, guitarist and producer Jimmy Page, and in the spring, the two men took their women, instruments and supplies to the bucolic retreat to recharge their batteries and “get back to the garden”.
“It was time to take stock, and not get lost in it all,” Plant said later. And what better way to keep it real than at a place with no electricity, candles for light, water from a stream and an outside toilet?"
“We were so far ahead that it was difficult for people to know what the hell we were doing,” Page told journalist Brad Tolinski in the 2012 book Light & Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page. “Critics especially couldn’t relate to it. Led Zeppelin was growing. Where many of our contemporaries were narrowing their perspective, we were really being expansive.
"I was maturing as a composer and player, and there were many kinds of music that I found stimulating, and with this wonderful group I had the chance to be really adventurous."
What they said...
"What’s great about it, though, the Zep’s special genius, is that the whole effect is so utterly two-dimensional and unreal. You could play it, as I did, while watching a pagan priestess performing the ritual dance of Ka before the flaming sacrificial altar in Fire Maidens of Outer Space with the TV sound turned off. And believe me, the Zep made my blood throb to those jungle rhythms even more frenziedly." (Rolling Stone)
"While there are still a handful of metallic rockers, III is built on a folky, acoustic foundation that gives the music extra depth. And even the rockers aren't as straightforward as before: the galloping Immigrant Song is powered by Robert Plant's banshee wail, Celebration Day turns blues-rock inside out with a warped slide guitar riff, and Out On The Tiles lumbers along with a tricky, multi-part riff." (AllMusic)
"If the great blues guitarists can make their instruments cry out like human voices, it's only fitting that Robert Plant should make his voice galvanize like an electric guitar... Plant is overpowering even when Page goes to his acoustic, as he does to great effect on several surprisingly folky (not to mention folk bluesy) cuts. No drum solos, either. Heavy." (Robert Christgau)
What you said...
Warren Bubb: What an album. It just gets better with time like a fine wine. Immigrant Song is a great opening track in the vein of previous albums, then a change with Friends, Celebration Day and Tangerine. Still hate Hats Off To Harper though.
Damian Keen: Of course, it’s Led Zeppelin, and it’s one of the first six albums, so it’s one of the best albums of all time. Except for Hats Off To Harper. That’s terrible.
Philip Qvist: Not their greatest album but I still think it is a fantastic album in its own right. Immigrant Song is a great rocker that gets the pulse going, while Since I've Been Loving You is my favourite Led Zep song - and I still maintain this is Jimmy Page's best solo.
As for the rest - well who cares if the bulk of it is acoustic; with one exception they are mainly fine songs. Easily their most underrated album - a solid 8.5/10.
Dave Ferris: This album is like a never-ending treasure chest. I believe my first copy that I owned was a used cassette. I loved the intensity of the Immigrant Song as the opening track. I would settle into the album. I remember that I loved Gallows Pole from first listen, and how Bonham made a simple acoustic tune into a rocker by the end of the song.
Since I've been Loving You has always been a signature Zeppelin blues song. When the reunion album called Celebration Day was released I went back to the original track and came to love that. When Cameron Crowe made his movie Almost Famous, he wanted to include Tangerine in the soundtrack. Lastly, for me, I have come to love the harmony vocals on Bron-Y-Aur Stomp.
I started my journey as a Zeppelin fan in college in the 80's. But, with every listen, a new appreciation for a different track catches my attention. Pretty damn awesome for an "Acoustic" album.
Adrian Bolster: Not my favourite Led Zep album, but it does contain my favourite track, Since I've Been Loving You. What an astonishing track, squeaky pedal and all. When Tangerine is played in Almost Famous it makes the film almost perfect!”.
I will finish with a review from BBC. This word ‘underrated’ seems to be used in so many features and reviews. As Led Zeppelin III turns fifty-five on 5th October, maybe we need to reassess it and see it for the phenomenal album it is. One of the best of the 1970s:
“Although Led Zeppelin’s much-maligned third album remains divisive to this day, it’s now widely accepted that it was not, after all, the product of some collective brain fade or bizarre schizophrenic episode within the band. The persistent perception of it as an acoustic album is also an inaccurate and oversimplified view. But it’s easy to understand how misconceptions could arise, especially when it was first released.
The sense of anticipation surrounding Led Zeppelin III was simply enormous. The success of their first two albums (I, II) had transformed Zep into the biggest band in the world. It’s hardly surprising, then, that their decision to radically change tack would cause confusion and consternation. Where I and II were blues-rock workouts with acoustic and folk embellishments, III was essentially the opposite. The embellishments and embroidery became the central focus.
Much of the album was written at a remote cottage in Snowdonia called Bron-Yr-Aur while guitarist Jimmy Page and vocalist Robert Plant recuperated following an extensive US tour. The cottage had no electricity which encouraged the pair to explore the band’s mellower, pastoral side. That the results originally met with such a lukewarm critical response was unfair, if predictable. The acoustic introductions to so many of the songs continue to fool those casually skipping through the album just to make sure they dislike it as much as other people say they should. The reality is a little different.
Ironically, given the album’s generally laid-back feel, III features one of the band’s most blatantly overt big-trouser moments. Opener Immigrant Song, with its strident riff and macho subject matter, is proto-heavy metal at its best. It’s true that the bulk of the material doesn’t favour rock, with even Celebration Day and Out on the Tiles lacking the sledgehammer weight of previous efforts, but this is no lightweight fluff. The slow blues of Since I've Been Loving You and the touching That's the Way are other clear highlights which have earned their place on any genuine best-of collection. Elsewhere, the wistful folk rock of Tangerine and Gallows Pole – another Zep arrangement of a traditional folk song – bolster what is by any reckoning an underrated work”.
Turning fifty-five on 5th October, I do hope that someone writes about the album. Led Zeppelin III probably came with the weight of expectation following Led Zeppelin II in 1969. Maybe Untitled was a response to those who felt that there was too much acoustic and Folk on Led Zeppelin III. However, there are moments like this on Untitled (Going to California for one). We need to salute and give affection to…
AN album that deserves more respect.