Trivia / Led Zeppelin

• Accent Depundent: Robert Plant was baffled when Americans failed to recognize "D'Yer Mak'er" as a reference to Jamaica.
• Black Sheep Hit:
  • While "Stairway to Heaven" is perhaps their most famous song, it is admittedly a pretty light song for the otherwise heavy-rocking band. Robert Plant once called it a "bloody wedding song".
  • The reggae-inflected "D'yer Maker" also gets a lot of airplay on classic rock stations.
  • "All My Love" is another lighter song that's played a lot.
• Bury Your Art: The band were hugely disappointed with their reunion performance at Live Aid with Phil Collins on drums. It was the first time they had played together since their dissolution, and the result was marred by faulty guitars, technical errors, Robert Plant's voice being shot, and Jimmy Page being higher than a kite. Consequently, they prevented their performance from being put on the official DVD release of the concert in 2004.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Robert Plant has come to abhor the band's classic song, "Stairway to Heaven" - and refuses to play it in concerts. His lengthy refusal to take part in a Led Zeppelin reunion was due to his disgust with the fact that he would inevitably be forced to sing it.
  • Jimmy Page has also stated that he hates "Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)" from Led Zeppelin II, saying it was just written as filler ^note It probably didn't help that his girlfriend ended up hating it as well and making it one of the few Led Zeppelin songs never performed live. Doesn't stop classic rock stations from keeping it in heavy rotation to this day (usually following "Heartbreaker", since there was no real gap between the songs on the original album).
  • Then, to round things out, John Paul Jones is said to have never been too fond of the song "D'yer Mak'er".
  • That leaves John Bonham as the only member who had no dislike for something ^note except sobriety. Though one song which, while not a backlash, he and Page had reservations about, given its rather soft sound, was "All My Love" (which instead Plant considers as one of the band's finest songs).
• Creator Breakdown: Presence was rush-recorded in eighteen days just prior to the arrival of The Rolling Stones, who block-booked the studio Zeppelin were working in to record Black and Blue, and in a period when Robert Plant was recovering from injuries sustained in a car accident in Rhodes, Greece which led to the him recording Presence in a wheelchair, and the band cancelling a major tour. The lyrics are filled with Plant's introspective lyrics on the rock and roll lifestyle, and his fears that the weirdness surrounding the band was jinxing him and his bandmates. He contemplated retiring from music at one point. This, along with the band's short time to record the album and the band's wishes to return to a harder-rocking sound gave the album a tension and desperation not present in any other album.
  • Doesn't mean it doesn't have awesome songs, though. Jimmy Page holds the opening track "Achilles Last Stand" in very high regard.
• Died During Production: John Bonham died in 1980, just before their American tour, effectively ending the band.
• Fan Community Nickname: Ledheads or Zepheads
• Follow the Leader: Try to name the number of rock bands (and noodling bedroom guitarists) this band hasn't inspired.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance:
  • Plant absolutely hates "Stairway to Heaven" and it is rumoured that the fact that he would have been pressured to perform it repeatedly is one reason Zeppelin's reunion did not last for very long, though in the mid Nineties, the first few bars were played alone during Page and Plant tours in lieu of the final notes of "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You", and in November 1994 Page and Plant performed an acoustic version of the song at a Tokyo news station for Japanese television.
  • Plant thinks of "Kashmir" as being their greatest song. That being said, there are many people who think likewise.
  • While Page doesn't dislike "Stairway" as much as Plant does, he regards "Achilles Last Stand" as their finest song. To be fair, this isn't an uncommon opinion among people familiar with it.
  • Although most fans consider Led Zeppelin IV to be the band's best album, Robert Plant considers Physical Graffiti to be their greatest work.
  • To many kids living in the The New '10s, "Immigrant Song" has become Led Zeppelin's best known and greatest song, thanks in large part to it being associated with the popular film Thor: Ragnarok and now becoming the character Thor's unofficial theme song.
• The Other Darrin: Jason Bonham, John's son, has filled in on drums in the handful of live performances the group has done since his death.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
  • The alleged Satanic messages when "Stairway to Heaven" is played backwards.
  • Another rumor about the band is that the members sold their souls to Satan in exchange for fame and fortune, and John Paul Jones was the only one who refused, which is why Jones is the only member of Led Zeppelin who hasn't suffered a horrible tragedy in his life, and also the member people often forget when talking about the band.
• Referenced by...: Roman Sadovsky performed to "Stairway to Heaven" for his exhibition number at the 2015 Canadian Figure Skating Championships.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: Led Zeppelin had a career that spanned little more than a decade, cut short by drummer John Bonham's death. Their impact on the rock genre is undeniable, and their sound was one of the precursors to Heavy Metal.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: When "Stairway To Heaven" was released, many called attention to the fact that the opening chords sounded suspiciously similar to the opening notes of "Taurus" by the Californian band Spirit. Led Zeppelin had opened for Spirit very early in their career which meant Plant and Page would have definitely heard Spirit play Taurus. Led Zeppelin was then taken to court in for alleged copyright infringement and a trial began in 2016. The band ended up winning the case, but two years later in 2018, another judge ruled there were errors in the previous trial, and threw out the verdict. A new trial took place in 2020 and the original verdict was restored, and an attempted appeal failed when the US Supreme Court declined to hear it. So the case is now closed, and if anyone fits this trope, it's the people who brought the suit for Spirit in the first place. Randy California, who wrote "Taurus", refused to sue, so it wasn't until after his death that his estate decided to sue. So yeah, it was the lawyers who won, no matter what side you are on.
• Throw It In!: There's many instances throughout their catalogue, to the point that you could say most of it is just the band jamming. Examples are on that page.
• Troubled Production: The band somehow dodged this trope for their classic first 6 albums, however it was on their seventh album, Presence, that things started to get dramatic. Vocalist Robert Plant suffered a serious car accident that left him having to recuperate in locations he was unfamiliar with for tax reasons. This delayed work on the new album, which disappointed fellow bandmates, who were eager to get back to recording. When recording finally started, they booked at a studio right before The Rolling Stones were scheduled to record, limiting the amount of time they had. This lead to Jimmy Page to work 18 to 20 hours daily to finish recording, doing all the album's guitar overdubs in one long shift. On top of that Plant seemed to be going through heavy amounts of stress from the accident. He became claustrophobic, had to perform from a wheelchair, missed his family, and was starting to re-think his priorities in life. The album was released in 1976 to mixed critical opinion. Though it's not as beloved as the first 6 albums, it's still very well liked within the fandom.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Peter Grant turned down an invitation for the band to perform at the original Woodstock, believing they would be just another band on the bill instead of a major headliner, and advised them to stick to their scheduled show in New Jersey.
  • A tour planned in August 1975 got cancelled when Robert Plant got injured in an accident in Greece. The group recorded Presence instead.
  • The planned XYZ project with Page, Plant, and Yes's rhythm section Alan White and Chris Squire. Didn't happen due to Plant's grief over Bonham's death and his dislike for the complexity of the music. It eventually turned into Yes's later reunion and 90125 album. Page did perform with Yes at one show in 1984 (of which an audience recording exists), and a demo tape of XYZ material can be found on the internet.
  • The follow-up to In Through the Out Door was to be a return to the band's hard rock roots.
    • And we did get a small taste with the original eight track Coda.
  • Prior to its finalised line-up, it was almost a supergroup comprising of Page, Jeff Beck, John Entwhistle and Keith Moon with Steve Winwood and Steve Marriott considered as vocalists. (They backed away from Marriott after the Small Faces' manager, Don Arden, asked them if they'd like playing guitar with broken fingerse.) Members of the never-materialised version took part in Jeff Beck's solo debut "Beck's Bolero".
  • Page's Yardbirds bandmate Chris Dreja almost became the bassist as he was involved in the early development of the group before departing to start a career in photography.
  • Terry Reid was Page's choice for lead singer before he declined the offer.
  • It was almost a new line-up of The Yardbirds before it became New Yardbirds and then ultimately taking its finalised name.
  • Prior to Bonham's death, the group was planning to tour North America in late 1980 with the possibility of doing additional West Coast and UK tours in early 1981. "Carouselambra" would've been performed live for the first time.
  • After Bonham's death, there were rumours that the band would continue by replacing him with either Cozy Powell, Carmine Appice, Barriemore Barlow, Simon Kirke or Bev Bevan.
  • After the success of the 2007 one-off reunion concert, there were plans to do a full reunion with Jason Bonham becoming an official member. Page and Jones were interested in doing so, while Plant declined the offer after that. Steven Tyler and Myles Kennedy were potential candidates to replace Plant with Kennedy confirming in a 2014 interview that he was offered to replace Plant and was interested in doing so before it was abandoned in early 2009.

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