10 Albums That Changed Rock Music Forever

For as long as Jimmy Page had been a student of the blues, he didn't want to be in that one lane for the rest of his life. There were already millions of blues players in the London club scene, and Jimmy thought that the Yardbirds wasn't the type of band that was looking to expand beyond the down and out sounds of Muddy Waters. He had something a lot more heavy in mind, and what unfolded on Led Zeppelin's debut was rock and roll at its most primal form.

Though the blues sounds are still there in some of the cover songs on this record like You Shook Me, the main element behind this record is the sheer power of the music, from Robert Plant's throaty wail on songs like Dazed and Confused to John Bonham turning in some of the most animalistic drum performances in rock and roll, like the funk leaning grooves on Good Times Bad Times or How Many More Times.

Outside of the blues comparisons though, the sound of this record would be the face of what hard rock would look like in the years that followed, with Jimmy becoming one of the kings of the guitar riff either on acoustic or electric like Babe I'm Gonna Leave You and Communication Breakdown. Rock and roll had already been through the Summer of Love, but the next few years was where the genre was about to get a lot meaner than it was before.