Led

Led Zeppelin formed out of the ashes of The Yardbirds. Jimmy Page had joined the band in its final days, playing a pivotal role on the group's final album, 1967's Little Games, which also featured string arrangements from John Paul Jones. During 1967, the Yardbirds were fairly inactive. Whilst the band members decided the group's future, Page returned to session work in 1967. In the spring of 1968, he played on Jones' arrangement of Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man." During the sessions, Jones requested to be part of any future project Page would develop…

Led Zeppelin had a fully formed, distinctive sound from the outset, as their eponymous debut illustrates. Taking the heavy, distorted electric blues of Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, and Cream to an extreme, Zeppelin created a majestic, powerful brand of guitar rock constructed around simple, memorable riffs and lumbering rhythms. But the key to the group's attack was subtlety: it wasn't just an onslaught of guitar noise, it was shaded and textured, filled with alternating dynamics and tempos. As Led Zeppelin proves, the group was capable of such multi-layered music from the start…

On their first two albums, Led Zeppelin unleashed a relentless barrage of heavy blues and rockabilly riffs, but Led Zeppelin III provided the band with the necessary room to grow musically. While there are still a handful of metallic rockers, III is built on a folky, acoustic foundation that gives the music extra depth…

Encompassing heavy metal, folk, pure rock & roll, and blues, Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album is a monolithic record, defining not only Led Zeppelin but the sound and style of '70s hard rock. Expanding on the breakthroughs of III, Zeppelin fuse their majestic hard rock with a mystical, rural English folk that gives the record an epic scope…

With their first six studio albums not containing a single dud track, trying to neatly assemble a Led Zeppelin 'best of' must have been quite a daunting task. All in all, the folks at Atlantic did an admirable job when the first-ever, single-disc Zeppelin 'best of's' were issued in 1999 (Early Days) and 2000 (Latter Days), covering most of the essentials. For fans that wanted to buy both discs in one shot, both were packaged together in 2002, under the title of Early Days and Latter Days…

Recorded quickly during Led Zeppelin's first American tours, Led Zeppelin II provided the blueprint for all the heavy metal bands that followed it. Since the group could only enter the studio for brief amounts of time, most of the songs that compose II are reworked blues and rock & roll standards that the band was performing on-stage at the time…

"Studio 99" are a collective of highly talented and often famous session players and singers. It is not unusual for performers recorded on these albums to appear on major hits as backing musicians, singers or producers…