All 74 Led Zeppelin Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best
Top Ten:
10. "All My Love," In Through the Out Door. A year after the release of In Through the Out Door, the band's seventh studio album, drummer John Bonham died, choking to death on his own vomit after a heroic day of drinking at Jimmy Page's mansion. It was a fitting end for this not-quite-human. To their credit, the other band members never considered moving forward. There was a wan, highly uninteresting album of outtakes, Coda, and in the nearly 40 years since, but a small handful of instances where the three members played on the same stage at the same time. In the context of the never-ending, highly commercialized retirements we've seen from greedy coevals like the Who and the Grateful Dead, that counts for something. But it also meant that the band never had the chance to grow old and start to suck. I go into all this to point out that In Through the Out Door is a remarkable work by a band of their age, and on this song and several others, you can see the entire band moving forward toward a more mature music, past the thudding guitars and preening sexism. This song, written by Jones and Plant, is case in point. You could have imagined Led Zeppelin growing old playing such music; delicate and somehow meaningful, with touches of the old grandeur, all put to the words of a serious song, a tribute to Plant's young son, who died in a car accident. I hear the sound of musicians having passed the point of needing to overwhelm their listeners. I hear a musician having passed the point of needing to overwhelm his listeners. John Paul Jones contributes a somber keyboard interlude, and then you can hear him and his master Page duet.
9. "The Song Remains the Same," Houses of the Holy. A blistering assault roughed up with sudden changes in dynamic and tone. Plant here is at his most squeally and porcine, but there is something riveting about Page's guitar work. The high-speed solos are articulate and true, and throughout he keeps layering on new guitar sounds.
8. "Immigrant Song," Led Zeppelin III. The leadoff track to III doesn't rest or flag for 2:26. This Norse mini-epic is perennially prized by metalheads (see, for example, Jack Black in School of Rock) for its attack, cauterizing even by Page standards, its straight-outta-Asgard lyrics, the wild sounds, and its being the source of the definitive Zeppelin aperçu— "Hammer of the Gods?!?!" — delivered by Plant with a hilarious Dr. Evil–esque lilt.
7. "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," Led Zeppelin. If you're going to have Brobdignagian rock, for heaven's sake, let it sound like this. This track is to my mind the most underappreciated in the Zeppelin catalogue. It's all so simple — soft-loud, soft-loud. So what makes it work? Well, for one, things get really loud; Page tries mightily to approximate the sound of a mountain being dropped on your head. Two, it's not a normal Zeppelin work. There's no real guitar solo here. And finally, there are the words. There is something direct, plaintive, and unmisogynistic about Plant's delivery. He's not happy about it, but he has to leave (or "ramble," as he puts it). He'll come back eventually, and when he does, well, the pair will go walking in the park. But right now, he's got to go away. Plant turns this simple situation into an emotional maelstrom of the first order. His singing, if anything remains of the blues idiom in it, is that idiom's apotheosis. It's also a match for Page's chording, which is saying something. Upped several notches for creating the sound of a mountain being dropped on your head.
6. "Over the Hills and Far Away," Houses of the Holy. The opening guitar lines for decades were played by every young boy and girl with dreams of guitar-herodom alive in their heads. Sounds best on 12-string, of course, but you can make an approximation with six. There's something charming in the acoustic opening's slightly offbeat rhythms and friendly fills. It's all there for another purpose, though — the blast of high-volume electric guitar that comes in at 1:27. Everything works, right up to the burst of abstract sound that sees the song out.
5. "Dazed and Confused," Led Zeppelin. "Dazed and Confused" beats the #### out of just about any hard-rock '70s classic you can name. Ominous beginning, another of those full-bodied Plant vocal performances, a half-dozen or so unique noises, Jones and Bonham both at top furious form — and the mother of all guitar barrages, too. Page does everything to a guitar you can do over the course of this song, from delicate harmonics to sawing it — and then beating it — with a violin bow. It's the best example of how Zeppelin created a drama in their songs that drew listeners in and fended off boredom. (Compare, for example, the Who at their supposed best, on the longer tracks of Live at Leeds. The Who were an impressive band, but a lot of their stuff is tedious.) Docked one notch for the line, "The soul of a woman is created below," artless even by Plant standards. Docked three additional notches for songwriting theft. There are almost a dozen instances where the band has been accused, with varying degrees of seriousness, of ripping off lyrics or guitar riffs. Of all of these, this is the clearest and most egregious. Page didn't just steal a riff from '60s folk singer Jake Holmes; he stole Holmes'swhole song. Page took the ominous opening, the melody, the structure and, most crucially, the dynamics — and, on the band's first album and the live "Song Remains the Same" set, solo songwriting credit. "Dazed and Confused" isn't a Led Zeppelin song; it's a cover of another artist's work. It's well established that Page got the song from hearing Holmes. It was even credited to Holmes on a live Yardbirds album Page played on! (One suspects that if Page had written the song, he would certainly have demanded a correction, and the royalties.) Yet he took the credit for himself on at least two albums that have sold untold millions of copies, earning something in the neighborhood of a half-million in sales royalties and radio play. Page has lied about it in interviews, too — but eventually settled out of court with Holmes. Doesn't take away from Zep's concussive production and playing on one of rock's all-time most-powerful tracks. Just means we should remember that Page as a young man was a petty (in this case, not so petty) thief, and as an older man capable of lying about it when caught.
4. "Stairway to Heaven," Untitled, a.k.a. IV. Like everyone else, I have lost my ability to hear this song, dragged down as it is by overfamiliarity. But I have to say that many times over the years — in a parking garage in Atlanta, on a freeway in Chicago, on a rainy afternoon in Berkeley, while running on the Mall in D.C. — it has come on when I didn't expect it, and I have been caught up in it again. High dynamics; a set of lyrics not entirely buffoonish by Plant standards; a restrained, then intense, then overwhelming band attack; and, finally, that solo to end all solos, Page at his most utterly articulate and dramatic, keening and at times so fast as to beggar belief. That speed, logic, lyricism, and intensity make all other guitar solos seem puny. I don't want to put too much onto blundering poesy of this sort (that "bustles in your hedgerow" is silly, indeed), but I will point out that the song has a point — you can't buy a stairway to heaven — and further that in its arcing, thrilling penultimate line, we can hear a statement of intent, strength, and resolve in the face of that other much more malleable '60s survivor band, the one that insisted on Rolling.
3. "Whole Lotta Love," Led Zeppelin II. A titanic recording; pace George Martin and Jimi Hendrix, this represented the farthest reaches of unquestionably pop-based studio sound and brauvura guitar-slinging of the era. Page's riff — implacable, huge, and priapic, more thunderous (and menacing) than "Satisfaction," more ominous than "Smoke on the Water," more primal than "Louie Louie," and delivered with a machinelike intensity — defines rock at its hardest. Plant's singing is a definitive set of authoritative declamations and howls of desire that pretenders like Roger Daltry, Ian Gilliam, and Ozzy could only dream of, and Page takes it to another dimension in the studio, everything from the backward echo you can hear if you turn the damn thing up to the fact that he keeps the drums off the tack for the first 30 seconds, making the hardest rock you'd ever heard suddenly even harder. Then there's the daringly long percussion break, culminating with paroxysms of noise, some heavy breathing from Plant, and then, almost matter-of-factly, the return of that guitar riff. Docked a notch for ripping off lyrics from Willie Dixon's "You Need Love" (which contains the lines, "Way down inside / Woman, you need love") and forcing the aging bluesman to sue them for credit.
2. "Good Times Bad Times," Led Zeppelin. In one sense this is a cartoon, and Zeppelin would outgrow such stuff. But it has to be noted that this is the sensational leadoff track to a debut album and career, the first echoing, crisp, very hard guitar chords heralding something very new. The cocky, knowing lyrics, the firehose of sound, and the très cool guitar work all announce that the terms of the debate have been changed; indeed, Page's flurry of notes at the end of the first verse ends the debate with a slap upside its head.
1. "Kashmir," Physical Graffiti. When the band's fourth album came out, Rolling Stonementioned "Stairway to Heaven" only in passing. When, three years later, Physical Graffiti came out, a grudgingly positive lead review in the magazine praised "Stairway" to the stars — and dismissed "Kashmir" in an aside as "monotonous." By this point, Page had plainly mastered the fast-slow, soft-hard dynamics of sound, with his guitar, in song construction, and in the studio. For "Kashmir" he decided to experiment with stasis. The song starts out at a high pitch and stays there, producing a hypnotic M.C. Escher staircase of a guitar riff; always moving upward, yet somehow always coming around to create itself again. And it's all built on a herky-jerky beat that Bonham (dismissed as "plodding" in the Rolling Stone review) uses to drive the band forward. No other hard-rock band of the time recorded a song like this, and no other group ever would — and it's probably the band's most popular song after "Stairway." A postscript: Remember the Sex Pistols, the band dedicated to tearing down the rock Establishment in general, and dinosaur rock bands like Zeppelin in particular, on the rise just as Physical Graffiti was released? Close to a decade after the Pistols' demise, their escapee leader, John Lydon, debuted his new live ensemble, a cacophonous aggregation called Public Image Limited. They opened their shows with a stunner: a grand, precise, sweeping, and wholly admiring version of "Kashmir" — a potent example of the respect from unexpected quarters that accrues to those who, you might say, decide to be a rock, and not to roll.
Got a lot of "albums" that way myself.
IVISION 11. Kashmir2. Going to California3. Hey Hey What Can I Do4. The Battle of Evermore5. Dazed and Confused6. Achilles Last Stand7. Houses of the Holy8. Gallows PoleDIVISION 41. Immigrant Song2. Over the Hills and Far Away3. Black Dog4. Misty Mountain Hop5. Heartbreaker/Living Loving Maid6. Since I've Been Loving You7. In My Time of Dying8. Ten Years GoneDIVISION 21. When the Levee Breaks2. Stairway to Heaven3. Good Times Bad Times4. No Quarter5. All My Love6. Communication Breakdown7. Traveling Riverside Blues8. The OceanDIVISION 31. Whole Lotta Love2. Ramble On3. Babe I'm Gonna Leave You4. Rock and Roll5. Fool In the Rain6. What Is and What Should Never Be7. Nobody's Fault But Mine8. In the Evening
