Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin II

It was 1969 and hard blues was born, known in history as HARD ROCK.

Its birth certificate is LED ZEPPELIN II (1969).

Its first cry is "Whole Lotta Love" (which takes its inspiration from "You Need Love" by Willie Dixon): a heart-pounding riff and vocal pathos.

In this album (which, along with Deep Purple's "In Rock," set the standard), the guitar, bass, and vocal surge in unison in "Heartbreaker," featuring a stunning solo by Page as the interlude; the marvelous lyrics in "Ramble On" and "Living, Loving Maid"; and Bonham’s legendary bare-handed drum solo in "Moby Dick" parallel the legendary bass lines stressed by Jones in "What Is And What Should Never Be" and the captivating "The Lemon Song," while "Thank You" is nothing but a splendid dedication from Plant to his wife, woven on twelve strings in the genius-infused fingers of Page.

The superb closer "Bring It On Home" announces what the next record offering will be.

Led Zeppelin III (although it contains the best blues piece these ears have ever heard: "Since I've Been Loving You") opens the door to alchemy and esotericism with Celtic folk atmospheres that dominate the latter part of the work (the old side "B" of the vinyl). These would be revisited ("Going to California" and "Battle of Evermore") and fused with hard rock ("Black Dog" and "Rock And Roll") in Led Zeppelin IV, which, thanks to the ballad "Stairway To Heaven", cements their status as rock legends.

But the masterpiece that contains the abc of hard rock remains Led Zeppelin II: the unique and true manifesto of the genre in the career of the legendary English group. The path is outlined by "Dazed And Confused" and "Communication Breakdown" in the debut album of the same year, where the shades of "psychedelic blues rock" ("Babe I’m Gonna Leave You", "I Can’t Quit You Baby", and "How Many More Times") of Anglo-Saxon origins, much loved by the likes of Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, Yardbirds (the New Yardbirds, later known as Led Zeppelin, were a contractual footnote imposed by the historical manager Peter Grant), are still very strong, along with bright reminiscences of traditional "folk" ("Black Mountain Side") and even "beat" ("Good Times Bad Times").

A review of their studio repertoire shows a musical development largely free from adherence to convenient musical labels and, in any case, to limit it to hard rock would be frankly reductive: but live, it was indeed, in every respect, the prototype of hard rock bands, complete with admirable escapes into endless improvisations (very often the concerts extended well beyond the setlist): the performances at Madison Square Garden, New York (1973) and Earl's Court, London (1975), remain legendary. Terms like "axe-man" and "front-man" would gain right of citizenship in the rock vocabulary after witnessing the guitarist Jimmy Page and singer Robert Plant dueting on stage. Bonham’s power mixed with creativity would influence the next generation of heavy drummers. Let's not forget the extraordinary contribution to the bass as well as keyboards from Jones. In short: the entire band would represent an indelible icon of hard rock, exalted "on the road".

The death of John Bonham would precede what seemed inevitable: the dissolution that effectively happened in 1982 with a compilation titled (unequivocally) "Coda," which would gather unpublished remnants from previous works in which ("Houses Of The Holy," "Physical Graffiti," and "On Through The Out Door") the quartet would remain distant (except for some moments in "Physical Graffiti") from the masterpiece in question. Ten years later, "Remasters" was released, while Nirvana's "Nevermind," released the previous year (1991), was fully unfolding its effects.

It was 1992, and the ailing Hard Rock received the coup de grâce from the overwhelming and equally ephemeral zeal of the "grunge" by Kobain and his merry band from Seattle (by merry band I refer to the "bandaradàn" commercial hub centered in Seattle that, through a marketing operation already tried twenty years before with punk, spread the illusion that a simple attitude was a real musical style).

Rock Profile (by Filippo Guzzardi)