1969 went down as the year Led Zeppelin’s rock’n’roll supernova exploded, and it was impossible to look away. All of a sudden, this new star was blazing at full intensity. That year they built an incredible launch ramp and catapulted themselves into immortality, becoming hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. First came the debut studio album in January, then the second one in October of the same year. Through a run of concerts that were insanely energetic for the time, the band earned a reputation as a group embodying a sex appeal and rowdy swagger nobody had seen before, along with a shockingly raw take on rock’n’roll, heavily crossed with the rhetoric of the blues. In 1970 everybody was dying for the new record. In fact, the band’s third album, “III”, was the most impatiently awaited album of the year. Everyone was waiting for a new kind of Whole Lotta Love. And?
Months before the official release of “III”, John Bohnam “warned” the press that the next album would be “acoustic” and that the songs on it would be the best the band had ever shown the public. Nobody took that seriously enough. The album isn’t just acoustic. It’s so much more than that. Compared to its two predecessors, it’s even arty. Led Zeppelin themselves weren’t exactly surprised by it, while the world was in shock when it came out.
At a time when thunderously loud rock bands were already stomping across the planet, like Deep Purple with Deep Purple In Rock, Uriah Heep with their debut, an awakening Black Sabbath with two albums under their belt, or Ten Years After with “Cricklewood Green”, Led Zeppelin took a different road from the one the trends of the day were dictating. With their new record they showed that the band had far wider artistic potential and reach than anyone had predicted. Led Zeppelin of course served up rock and blues and a bit of grit again, as usual, but this time it was arranged far more carefully. The guitar no longer had to dominate, the arranging became more “democratic” and reconciled with itself, in other words balanced, and above all John Paul Jones could finally make use of his whole arsenal as a multilayered musician. Acoustic arrangements took priority, along with the integration of many instruments, from exotic percussion to plain old spoons, mandolin,… Besides his standard bass playing, John Paul Jones also used double bass and added strings and keyboards to the arrangements. In That’s the Way, for instance, he played the bass guitar with a thimble, which is a slide guitar technique. Robert Plant proved that his vocals can catch fire without much effort even when he’s just singing normally, without the frenetic hunting that on the previous two albums was mostly aimed, at all costs, at swinging between notes at the top of the fifth octave. The band expanded its rock and blues rhetoric to take in elements of folk, world music and country. They did it in a way that kept the Led Zeppelin character intact down to the last detail, while leveling it up in maturity through eclecticism.
In spring 1970, Page and Plant decided to take their families on a getaway to the Cambrian Mountains in Wales. A holiday. Nothing more. In the past year alone, the band had played 150 shows, and by the end of 1969 they’d already started writing new material. A break was badly needed. But it was definitely no ordinary break. It shaped the final character of “III”, which is also reflected in the special thanks to the location, Bron-Yr-Aur, printed on the album sleeve. The idea came from the then 22-year-old Robert Plant, who dug up childhood memories of visiting an 18th-century cottage called Bron-Yr-Aur with his parents. An old stone house, in other words, set in the middle of the mystical Welsh landscape of Snowdonia.
Robert Plant later said: “It was time for a bit of ‘stocktaking’, but we definitely didn’t want to lose the momentum of creativity and inspiration. The move was incredibly handy. Spending time with no electricity, by candlelight and with spring water.”
Jimmy Page adds: “We were so far ahead of everyone that people had a hard time understanding what the hell we were up to. Critics especially weren’t on the same wavelength as the album. While journalists were saying we’d narrowed our creative range with the new album, if anything it was the opposite. Artistically, we expanded with it.”
“I was maturing as a composer and performer, and at the time I found inspiration in a wide variety of music. In the company of an excellent band, I had the chance to try things I otherwise couldn’t have done that way,” Jimmy Page adds.
Precisely because of this misunderstanding in the media, the album fared worse on the charts. It also didn’t sell as well at the time of release as the previous two. It was recorded in London, at Headley Grange, with the help of the Rolling Stones Mobile studio, and at Olympic studio, and came out on October 5, 1970, on Atlantic Records. The album was produced by Jimmy Page, with Jeremy Andrew Johns and Terry Manning also contributing.
When it came out, plenty of people rolled their eyes at what they heard. The album was turned upside down compared to what everyone expected, and what, in the eyes of the public and the critics, should have been a hard rock injection with a heavy dose of testosterone excess. Exactly the thing that had lifted Led Zeppelin among the stars of the international scene just a year earlier. A full six songs on “III” build their arrangements out of phrases on Page’s acoustic guitar. The band tried absolutely everything that crossed its mind. From a traditional, folk and Celtic-sounding instrumental you could dance a jig to (Bron-Y-Aur Stomp), to country-blues tomfoolery (Hats Off to (Roy) Harper), to bluegrass (Gallows Pole), where neither acoustic nor electric banjo is missing. Beards grew to lengths hobbits would envy, assorted hats entered the stage wardrobe, and the band took on the look of rural farm dwellers. The nature of the album is often pastoral and it sounds as organic as can be. All of it was played by Led Zeppelin themselves. No guest musicians. A few effects were added, which is normal, but otherwise the album captured a fully raw and authentic sound during recording. The lyrics were also entirely the band’s own. Their author was Robert Plant through and through, who made decisive progress as a poet. The new album was a brilliant synthesis of rock’n’roll, folk and world music.
The critics’ bashing visibly irritated the band, and Led Zeppelin didn’t show particularly friendly relations with the media for the rest of their career either. Perhaps precisely because the media were never especially well-disposed toward them, and around the release of “III” that hostility was all the more pronounced. And yet. Anyone who knew the band really well shouldn’t have been the least bit surprised by what “III” brought. By the way. Page dragged his sitar to England long before George Harrison impressed audiences and radio stations with one. Already deep in the sixties, when Jimmy Page was considered one of the most respected studio musicians, the man absorbed absolutely everything that came his way, broadening his horizons and keeping in touch with current trends. Alongside the Chicago blues boom, Page was also enthusiastic about folk guitar virtuosos Bert Jansch and John Fahey.
A pinch of “exotic” spice in the rock’n’roll can already be detected on both previous Led Zeppelin albums. In Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, for example, quite a few different musical elements are woven together. From neo-classical, to a detour inside a solo played almost in the manner of flamenco, to near-metal phrasing. As if Joni Mitchell had married metal. Black Mountain Side also features a guest appearance by an Indian musician on tabla.
Immigrant Song, the heaviest track on the album, is actually a story about the Vikings and their invasion. On June 22, 1970, the band played in Reykjavik, Iceland. The stop there, with a day that shone for an incredible 24 hours, was just as important for Plant’s lyrical inspiration as the getaway in Snowdonia. Just a week later, Led Zeppelin played a festival on home soil, in Bath. Immigrant Song left such an impression on the four members that the band wanted to present it to the audience right away and opened the Bath show with it. The band played in front of a 150,000-strong crowd, played for more than three hours and delivered a whole five encores. Led Zeppelin hit the stage at sunset, with the day slowly fading right behind the stage. Manager Peter Grant made no secret of his satisfaction as he watched his charges’ successful show with delight. But what shocked the crowd and the public more than playing at sunset was the moment Page swapped his Les Paul for an acoustic guitar and John Paul Jones picked up a mandolin. Plant announced a song titled “The Boy Next Door”, which Plant and Page had finished only during their break in Snowdonia, and which Led Zeppelin renamed That’s The Way before the release of “III”. It was the first time Led Zeppelin had played acoustic in front of their home audience.
If we linger a bit longer on the other tracks, the intense yet mysterious Friends, for example, carries a tuning experiment by Page, who wanted to capture the vibe of the droning of traditional North African rhythms. The added Oriental tonality, as well as the string arrangements, even challenge Holst’s work Mars. With Friends, the band opened the door to one day creating compositions like Kashmir and/or Four Sticks. Stairway To Heaven and Over The Hills And Far Away also have their ancestors on “III”. The kinship can be found in the songs That’s the Way and Gallows Pole.
Since I’ve Been Loving You is the song that hinted at where the band would head in the future. Page said it was played in the spirit of the blues, while also reflecting the quartet’s shared awareness that it was moving toward new creative spheres. It is definitely “caught between twelve bars” in the blues tradition, yet it gives the feeling of constantly changing as it builds. From start to finish. With Jones’s Hammond.
And that droning sound bridging Celebration Day and Friends? It was added afterward, after one of the technicians accidentally erased John Bohnam’s opening drum bit, which had originally been intended for Celebration Day. Maybe Bohnam just didn’t want to play that bit again. Either way, the transition linking the two tracks is a brilliant idea.
That Page was fascinated by Aleister Crowley was no news by then. Later he even bought Crowley’s house and estate at Loch Ness and moved there. If The Beatles put Crowley’s image on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, Led Zeppelin went a step further. They worked some of his phrases (sayings) into the record itself. This was done in the final stage of mastering, and Terry Manning took care of it. They picked the phrases ‘Do what thou wilt’, found on side one, and ‘So mote it be’, found on side two of the record. The intent was to pay tribute to Crowley. Jimmy Page was of course not obsessed with the devil, but he’d always been drawn to the occult and black magic.
“III” isn’t among the band’s most commercially notorious achievements, but Page vividly summed up the spirit of the times in which the album was made and its artistic core: “We knew that what we’d set out to do was the right path. With this album we were really stepping onto new musical ground. It was like hacking through the jungle with a machete and discovering a temple that had been hidden for millennia.”
Once “III” came out and the dust had settled, Led Zeppelin simply moved on. As they always did, they started writing and creating new material, which ended up on their biggest album, “Led Zeppelin IV”. On that album too, Page leaned heavily on the acoustic guitar in his arrangements. You can’t miss it in the most beloved classics, led by Stairway To Heaven, Going To California, The Battle Of Evermore and Four Sticks. Go figure music critics.
Of all the Led Zeppelin albums, “III” surely keeps the most contemporary feel. It has a timeless relevance. Even when you listen to it in 2020, 50 years after its release. That means the band really created an artistic gem that stays inspiring all the time. On it they pulled off an extraordinary collision of folk, world music, rock and blues, which sounds downright unique and unrepeatable. Along the way, instinct and primal feeling, together with the quartet’s boundless talents, reached the highest level of heart and sincerity. Even 50 years after its release, “III” remains a truly special Led Zeppelin album. It’s the kind of album that grows with every new listen and grabs you more and more intensely. An album that rewards the listener with rich content full of detail inside bold, daring arrangements. An approach that brought incredible innovation to rock in 1970. That means Led Zeppelin were genuinely ahead of their time with it, and maybe time has only caught up with “III” today, 50 years later.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
