Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin I

THE REVIEW

In the dream, I'm walking through the city center with a nice bag: inside are the first four Led Zeppelin albums. It's late, and from behind a corner, a thief appears, sees that I have some records, and pulls out a knife. I give him the bag, he looks inside and says "Led Zeppelin? What's that?" He's a fan of Gigi D'Alessio, so the goods don't appeal to him, yet he's not entirely bad and says to me: "I'll leave you one, but decide within a minute." It's a real mess. I reluctantly start to give up the Second: tightly packed, rock at 100%, great John Bonham in "Moby Dick," but it's the one that engages me the least. Now it gets tougher, but I have little time: the Third goes too, with great bitterness. I will have to part with the deadly screams of the superblues "Since I've Been Loving You," the acoustic enchantment of "Tangerine," but I have no choice, and I need to hurry to make the most demanding choice: Fourth or First? Sweating cold, I drop the Fourth, and thus I deprive myself of "Stairway To Heaven," which needs no comment, the hypnotic mandolin of "The Battle Of Evermore," and the sunny "Going To California." The thief leaves, dissatisfied as well, and I'm left with one record: "Led Zeppelin I."

To console myself, what can I do? Naturally, listen to it. And the more I listen to it, the more I'm convinced I made the right choice: in these nine tracks, everything that Led Zeppelin would become is already expressed at its best, there's already the decisive turning point that, starting from solid blues roots, will lead to the birth of pure and hard rock. If later on, hardness prevails over purity to the point of crossing into an infernal din, the blame is not on these four authentic musicians. Their airship will always fly a few thousand meters higher than everything that's sometimes too generously called hard rock. The blues roots: "You Shook Me" and "I Can't Quit You Baby," by Willie Dixon, immediately give an idea of what Led Zeppelin can do with the blues, that is, emphasize the inherent despair of this music to the point of making it a sort of "blues taken to the extreme consequences", a superblues indeed, where the relentless, spotless beat of John Bonham and the hysterical wail of Robert Plant tower (memorable the duet at the end of "You Shook Me" between Plant's howls and Jimmy Page's guitar: two coyotes under the full moon). In their own compositions, the essence of the blues is even more concentrated: "Dazed And Confused," with its wild accelerations and sudden rhythm brakes, is a fantastic progressive immersion into the murky waters of the unconscious, from which we're pulled out like a ray of sun piercing the clouds, like proof of the existence of God, the Bachian organ introducing "Your Time Is Gonna Come," a serene parenthesis that fades into a sublime duet of Indian percussion (tabla) and acoustic guitar, "Black Mountain Side."

The acoustic guitar becomes the absolute protagonist in the incredible "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You", for me the pinnacle of ecstasy in a record that offers quite a lot of it. Robert Plant's heart-wrenching voice pleads "Babe babe babe..." while Jimmy Page showcases his virtuosity in precious Spanish-flavored arpeggios, alternating with sudden and powerful rock outbursts that give it strength and substance: inimitable. In such variety, in the end, to represent the simplest rock, only the initial "Good Times Bad Times" and the frenzied "Communication Breakdown" remain. The acrobatic "How Many More Times" escapes any classification, which starts a bit jazzy, accelerates into rock, then slows down with effect pauses, in short, to cut it short, it's a constant change of rhythm and theme, and it closes gloriously a record that doesn't leave even a second, not even to say to get bored, but not even to get distracted.