10 Albums From The '60s That Changed Rock History
7. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin
Right as the British Invasion was happening with the arrival of the Beatles and the Stones, there was the British Blues Boom that wasn’t too far behind. For every band that was riding the wave of success like the Dave Clark Five, there was a band like the Yardbirds that were getting their rocks off making their own renditions of songs by Howlin Wolf. The blues can only take you so far though, and Jimmy Page had something a bit more heavy in mind when he assembled Led Zeppelin.
As much as their second outing may have kickstarted the next phase of what hard rock could be like, Zeppelin’s debut was the proper introduction that most of us needed. From the acoustic cuts to the barnburners, there’s a brewing intensity to every single song on this record, like the stretched out theremin section in the middle of Dazed and Confused or the pained screams from Robert Plant on Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.
Every single song feels like a powder keg ready to go off, and more often than not it does on songs like Communication Breakdown and Good Times Bad Times, as Jimmy Page lines up perfectly with every single snare hit from John Bonham. Those songs didn’t really fit into the modern realm of blues rock though. This was something new, and even if Zeppelin didn’t know it, they had planted the seeds for hard rock and heavy metal to come in the next few years.