Led Zeppelin

Jimmy Page walked out of what was left of the Yardbirds in 1968 with a plan, and the plan was volume. They started out as the New Yardbirds, but the band he put together in London was something else entirely: Robert Plant, a singer with a banshee wail; John Paul Jones, a bass player who could handle the keyboards too; and John Bonham, who hit the drums like they owed him money. Atlantic Records signed them on terms that left them free to do as they pleased, and they did.

What they pleased was blues and folk run through a wall of amplifiers until it came out heavier than anybody had a name for. The 1969 debut brought "Good Times Bad Times" and "Dazed and Confused"; Led Zeppelin II, the same year, gave them their first number-one album and the lumbering stomp of "Whole Lotta Love". III opened with the war cry of "Immigrant Song". The untitled fourth album is the monster: "Black Dog", "Rock and Roll", "The Battle of Evermore" with Sandy Denny, and "Stairway to Heaven", which starts as a folk song and ends as a thunderstorm. Houses of the Holy and the double album Physical Graffiti, home of "Kashmir", followed.

Page wrote most of the music and Plant most of the words, and on the road they were a law unto themselves, playing record-breaking tours with a reputation for excess to match. The later '70s were rougher going, and it all stopped in 1980 when Bonham died. The critics who sneered at the start came round in the end: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted them in 1995 and the Kennedy Center Honors followed in 2012, and rock radio's listeners have kept "Stairway to Heaven" at the top of their all-time countdowns ever since.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.