Led Zeppelin’s history is clouded with legend and folklore, and today, we're busting a lot
of the myths surrounding the band.
From epic songs to their alleged pact with Satan, here are a few false things you might
believe about Led Zeppelin.
One of the most persistent rumors swirling around Led Zeppelin is their supposed Satanism,
including the rumor that they sold their souls in exchange for their immense success.
This rumor was inspired by three things.
There was lead guitarist Jimmy Page's interest in the occult, specifically occult leader
Aleister Crowley.
There was the band's refusal to ever issue any sort of official denial, likely because
they felt the rumors only added to their allure.
And then there was the crazy idea that there were backwards messages praising Satan hidden
in their songs, including "Stairway to Heaven."
The band's image didn't help, either.
Between Page's obsession with witchcraft and singer Robert Plant's fascination with The
Lord of the Rings, not to mention their notoriously hard-driving rock 'n' roll lifestyle in the
early 1970s, Satanism didn't seem out of place.
But while Page's personal philosophy lined up with Crowley's "do what thou wilt" mantra,
Crowley himself wasn't actually a Satanist, and there's zero evidence that Page, or anyone
else in the band, was either.
Led Zeppelin certainly isn't the only band rumored to have embedded secret backwards
messages in their songs through a technique known as backward masking, but they're pretty
closely associated with the alleged activity.
While rumors of Satanism and other occult practices swirled around the band almost since
their inception, the idea that they were using these backwards messages to subliminally influence
the impressionable teen fans didn't spread until the early 1980s.
That's when an anti-rock televangelist named Paul Crouch began talking about the technique.
The most famous example of these supposed messages is in "Stairway to Heaven."
Supposedly, if you play an early part of the song backwards, you can hear Plant singing
lines that begin,
"Here's to my sweet Satan."
And it sure does sound like that when you play it backwards.
Kind of.
If you use your imagination, which is the point.
See, there are various psychological reasons we think we hear something coherent in what
is clearly a slur of backwards sound.
Human beings are primed to seek meaning from sounds, even if they're not actually forming
words.
By the time Led Zeppelin released their fourth album in 1971, they were arguably the biggest
band in the world.
Their combination of heavy guitars, blues-influenced rock, and extreme technical capabilities had
made them hugely popular, and the album remains the best-selling record in their catalog.
After all, it contains both "Black Dog" and "Stairway to Heaven," the two Led Zeppelin
songs that even people who hate Led Zeppelin know.
Now, you probably think the title of the album is Led Zeppelin IV or Zoso or an unpronounceable
series of symbols...but you're wrong.
The album has no title at all.
The album cover also doesn't identify the band in any way, and they were advised that
this was "professional suicide."
But as it turned out, it was the opposite.
According to Rolling Stone, Jimmy Page refused to title the album in part to get back at
rock music journalists and reviewers he'd come to view as enemies due to incessant bad
press and poor reviews.
He figured having an untitled album would make it more difficult for them to write about.
The fact that the packaging also enhanced the band's mysterious image was probably also
a motivating factor.
To this day, people will swear that they saw Led Zeppelin perform live on television in
the 1970s, which would be news to the band.
The band did perform a very, very early show on Danish television back when they were still
known as The New Yardbirds in 1969.
They even appeared on Japanese television later that same year.
But once they were the band we recognize as Led Zeppelin, they were done with TV.
Zeppelin's infamous manager, Peter Grant, refused to allow the band to appear on television
because he regarded it as a giveaway.
He wanted people to buy a ticket for a concert, not see one for free in their living rooms.
And yet the rumor persists because, in a way, Led Zeppelin was on TV, on a show called Don
Kirshner's Rock Concert, which featured bands playing live back in the days before MTV.
On September 29, 1976, the show aired footage from Zeppelin's concert movie, The Song Remains
the Same.
Plenty of people with murky memories of this event will swear that Zeppelin played live,
but it isn't true.
The band never appeared on TV after March 1969.
It's easy to understand why there might be some confusion over the credits for a lot
of Led Zeppelin songs.
After all, the band had a bad habit of adapting old blues songs and conveniently forgetting
to credit the original artists, leading to a flurry of lawsuits over the years.
But if you bought a copy of their debut album and came away believing that their hit song
"Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" is a traditional folk song that Jimmy Page arranged, you were
bamboozled, and, it turns out, so were they!
The band first heard the song because they were huge fans of Joan Baez, and she played
the song in her shows all the time.
She even included it on her 1962 album Joan Baez in Concert, where she mistakenly credited
it as "traditional," meaning it had no author.
When Zeppelin reworked the song for their debut album, they used the same listing, crediting
Page for their arrangement only.
But the song was actually written in the late 1950s by Anne Bredon, who drifted out of the
folk music scene and was completely unaware of Zeppelin's version until a decade after
it was released.
Considering they were one of the biggest bands of all time and yet were only together for
12 short years, it's not surprising that a Led Zeppelin reunion is high on a lot of rock
fans' wish lists.
With the exception of a few live performances for charity, however, the three surviving
members of the band, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones, have never agreed to
a formal reunion.
That holdout makes the rumor that Richard Branson offered them $800 million to get the
band back together in 2014 believable enough.
The details of the rumor are a little strange.
Supposedly, it would have involved hundreds of concerts but only three cities, and Branson
intended to use his expertise in the airline industry to recreate Zeppelin's legendary
touring plane, The Starship.
The rumor goes on to claim that Robert Plant, who's never been interested in a full-scale
reunion, considered the offer for a night, then theatrically ripped up the contract in
front of everyone the next morning.
But it turns out none of this is true.
Both the band and Branson confirmed that it was just a rumor, no doubt boosted by legions
of fans thirsty for a Zeppelin comeback.
Even if your musical taste ranges far, far from 1970s hard rock, you know the drums from
Led Zeppelin's 1971 song "When the Levee Breaks."
The drums have an epic echo and delay that makes them sound absolutely massive, and other
artists have been sampling the beat for decades.
What you probably believe about this drum track is that Jimmy Page got that huge sound
by putting John Bonham's drum set in a stairway at the drafty old cottage the band was recording
in, Headley Grange.
According to legend, the massive reverb is all natural, the result of the room's acoustic
qualities and not any sort of effects device
"This is the hall where the drums were set up and where 'Levee Breaks' was recorded."
Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to actually be true, even though there are multiple interviews
where Jimmy Page perpetuates the story.
According to Andy Johns, the recording engineer who worked on the song, they used a device
called a Binson Echorec to give the drums that sound.
Still, that doesn't make the track or the drumming any less incredible.
Led Zeppelin was huge.
And they still are.
According to Forbes, they've sold over 300 million albums.
They're also one of a handful of bands that have name recognition outside their given
genre and time period, and they're part of an even shorter list of bands from that era
whose music is still widely played and sampled.
Some of those songs are so recognizable, so embedded in pop culture, that it's easy to
understand why people think they had at least one number one song...but they never did.
First of all, they didn't release a lot of singles because their manager, Peter Grant,
wanted to force people to shell out for the entire album if they liked a song.
In fact, they only released ten songs that made the Billboard charts at all, and the
closest to number one they ever got was when "Whole Lotta Love" hit number four in January
1970.
You might think the name Led Zeppelin was meant to sound cool, but that's only because
they made it cool.
It was originally a joke.
By the late 1960s, Jimmy Page was an established and successful musician who'd played on plenty
of recordings by big name artists like The Who, The Kinks, and The Rolling Stones.
In 1966, he joined The Yardbirds with his old friend Jeff Beck.
Just before that, he played guitar for a song Beck was recording as a solo artist, with
Keith Moon from The Who on drums and fellow session musician John Paul Jones on bass.
Page looked at the talent around the room and thought about forming a "super group"
of established, genius musicians.
According to legend, when he pitched the idea, Moon joked that they should call the band
"Lead Zeppelin" because it would go down like a lead balloon.
A few years later, Page began putting together his super group idea after The Yardbirds broke
up, recruiting singer Robert Plant, Jones, and drummer John Bonham.
The band originally toured Europe as The New Yardbirds as they rehearsed and perfected
their performance.
According to writer Mick Wall, when the band returned to America, Page got a cease-and-desist
letter from Yardbirds guitarist Chris Dreja, who claimed to have the legal rights to the
band name.
Page remembered Moon's joke from a few years before and decided to call the band Led Zeppelin,
changing the spelling from L-E-A-D to L-E-D because he worried people would mispronounce
the first word.
You can't be blamed if you think Led Zeppelin straight-up stole the intro to "Stairway to
Heaven" from a band called Spirit.
For one thing, the list of musicians Led Zeppelin allegedly stole from isn't exactly short.
As Rolling Stone notes, the band has been successfully sued over songs such as "Dazed
and Confused," "Whole Lotta Love," and "Boogie with Stu."
For another, the band's been embroiled in a lawsuit over "Stairway" since 2014 with
the estate of Randy Wolfe, whose band Spirit released a song called "Taurus" in 1968, several
years before "Stairway."
If you listen to the two songs side by side the similarities are obvious, but the band
denies being aware of "Taurus."
And to be fair, in other cases where the band's been accused of borrowing elements of their
songs, they've usually admitted it and expressed exasperation before eventually giving credit
or settling a lawsuit.
Plus, as The Guardian reported a few years ago, music experts say that both songs are
using centuries-old structures and chord progressions that are being re-used to this day.
In other words, Zeppelin can't be guilty of stealing this particular bit because what
they're really guilty of is being very, very basic when it comes to their music composition
skills.
"Bach used it!
You can find it in dozens of pieces."
That's certainly better than paying Wolfe's estate the 55 million dollars that Forbes
estimates the song is worth.
Robert Plant is known for the mystical, slightly goofy lyrics he writes.
But if you look at the credits for Led Zeppelin's first album, you probably think he didn't
write any of the material because he has no credits whatsoever.
That isn't true, though.
In fact, it's kind of impossible.
The band's songwriting was usually a collaboration, and Plant was a very improvisational singer,
so imagining he had absolutely nothing to do with the composition of the songs on the
first album is kind of strange.
Plus, Plant was already a songwriter in his own right back then, and he never seemed especially
shy about expressing his own creative vision.
The truth is, Plant probably should've been credited as co-writer on most of the songs
from the first album.
The problem was that he was still under contract with CBS Records for previous projects and
thus was legally prevented from being part of an Atlantic Records deal.
As a result, his name was officially left off the composition credits for technical
reasons.
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