According to official certifications, Led Zeppelin are the fifth on the list of best-selling artists of all time, only behind the Beatles, Elvis, Michael Jackson, and Madonna. In fact, they were the most successful music franchise of the 70s. But above all, they became a fundamental influence for countless later bands, although their memory did not always enjoy the prestige it enjoys today.
Immigrant Song
The song is forceful stubborn with a Viking theme that at the time some of the critics insisted on comparing unfavorably with “Whole Lotta Love” (as if there was a need to compare!). The truth is that it serves as a powerful overture to the album (Led Zeppelin III) and reveals the inimitable timbre of Robert Plant’s voice.
Stairway To Heaven
The great jewel of the band’s repertoire, in whose arrangement and structure Jimmy Page was obsessively working until he obtained the result he had in mind. It is a perfect, fascinating, and absorbing song, probably the most inspired of his discography. This song opened the doors to a wider audience, initially alien to rock music, helping to cement a commercial status that threatened to outnumber any other artist of any style that existed in those years.
Rock And Roll
Another one of the Zeppelin’s universally known anthems, born on the fly in the studio when John Bonham began to play the opening drums on a Little Richard classic, Keep a-knockin ‘. Virtually anyone who has stepped into a venue where the DJ plays rock music will have heard people chanting that memorable chorus of “lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely time.”
Black Dog
The theme that opened the album (Led Zeppelin IV) would become one of the great workhorses of their concerts and one of their best-known songs, instantly recognizable for that guitar riff that thousands of teenagers all over the world must have imitated, those apprentices of Jimmy Page who used the music of Zeppelin to try to master the six strings.
Kashmir
The highlight of the album, the new gem Page had been obsessively working on, and surely the most “monumental” song in Led Zeppelin history, with permission from Stairway to Heaven. It is a long song divided into several parts, dominated by oriental influences, orchestral arrangements, and an exotic dreamlike aureole whose lyrics are inspired by Plant’s trips to the Moroccan desert.