10 Perfect Rock Albums Ruined By One Bad Song
5. Hot Dog - Led Zeppelin
One of Led Zeppelin's greatest strengths was being able to put the great blues legends into the context of a hard rock band. If you threw a dart at any of the songs from the start of their career, chances are you would land on something that took the foundation of someone like Willie Dixon or Muddy Waters and repackaged it as the distorted sound of rock and roll. When you get to the '80s though, you can tell that their power of interpretation was running dry on Hot Dog.
Outside of the killer songs on In Through the Out Door like Fool in the Rain or All My Love, Hot Dog just feels like the band are trying to make an Elvis Presley tune from the ground up. While every single rock band ever conceived owes something to the King, this is the kind of weird tribute that sounds like it's more suited to a discount Elvis at a seedy club in Vegas than to one of the greatest bands of all time.
It's not like Zeppelin can't work outside of their comfort zones either, with songs like the Crunge and Royal Orleans showing them making some heavy funk riffs into hard rock. But apparently Elvis is one of the few heroes of old that Zeppelin just can't make work.