{"product_id":"led-zeppelin_ii_2014_war","title":"II","description":"Led Zeppelin \"Whole Lotta Love.\" The music for Nike's new Super Bowl campaign has been revealed. A new masterpiece from Led Zeppelin and a true hard rock manifesto, this album almost single-handedly represents the genre's Ten Commandments, its ABCs, inspiring a plethora of aspiring musicians, particularly in the United States, a country traumatized by the release of this tour de force, the result of superb teamwork. This album earned the band their first number 1 hit across the Atlantic and in Great Britain. The first album was recorded by a band whose members barely knew each other and had not yet fully found their raison d'être. Now, these men have several concerts under their belts (they tour relentlessly) and have been able to assess themselves, truly discover each other, and figure out what they can play together and how to play it. Thus, it was literally during their free time, between two live performances, that they created \"Led Zeppelin II,\" whose sound has all the urgency and ferocity of their concerts. These, invariably brilliant, are often an opportunity for them to test their new repertoire. So, on March 9, 1969, they played two songs at BBC's Maida Vale Studios, \"What Is and What Should Never Be\" and \"Sunshine Woman,\" the latter remaining unreleased. Full of cleverness, \"What Is and What Should Never Be\" successfully passed the test, and Page decided to re-record it for the future album, adding some effects, including the famous stereo ping-pong. On April 26, at a concert at the Winterland in San Francisco, they performed as a final encore a variation of Muddy Waters' \"You Need Lovin',\" written by Willie Dixon and already covered on record by the Small Faces (of whom Plant was a big fan) four years earlier. Page having found a solid gold, stammering and in-your-face riff on this, Plant changed the lyrics, turning it into a proclamation of his young manhood, his hormones still seriously itching. From now on, it was called \"Whole Lotta Love,\" which became one of hard rock's absolute classics and, shorn of its famous \"bridge\" where Page played with all the console's buttons, even became a single, charting at number 4 in the United States. In early June, they were back in London, where they recorded the definitive versions of \"What Is and What Should Never Be\" and \"Whole Lotta Love\" at Olympic Studios, songs they presented to the English public in a new session for the BBC, on June 24. In the meantime, on June 19, they made a lightning trip to Paris for the television show Tous en scène, where they closed their mini-set with a version of \"Whole Lotta Love.\" After their BBC performance (where they played another new song, the magnificent \"Traveling Riverside Blues,\" which was in turn set aside), they went to Morgan Studios, where Ten Years After usually worked. There, they recorded the very mediocre \"Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman),\" a nasty song about middle-aged American groupies, which was nevertheless kept for the album. Decidedly less inspired, they then tried \"Sugar Mama,\" a mediocre boogie ripped off from John Lee Hooker and which Page quickly abandoned (in 1982, he would consider exhuming it for \"Coda,\" but the others had the good sense to stop him). Fortunately, they also had the magnificent \"Thank You\" up their sleeve, an almost medieval ballad, very classy, with an acoustic guitar and a very solemn organ. Romantic, Plant, who had improved considerably as a lyricist in a few months, dedicated it to his wife Maureen, some of the poetic phrases he used in his lyrics coming from JRR Tolkien's \"The Lord of the Rings\" and Page very distinctly provided backing vocals - shamelessly, the guitarist and producer again \"pumped\" for the arrangement, stealing the ending of Traffic's \"Mr. Fantasy.\" But it was in the United States, a land that particularly inspired them, that they wrote and recorded the bulk of the album, traveling with the masters of the tracks made in London in their luggage, not hesitating to make corrections or last-minute additions. They composed on the road, riffs being found during soundchecks or in hotels, where Plant also wrote his lyrics. Thus, still with \"The Lord of the Rings\" in mind, \"Percy\" (his nickname) had the idea for \"Ramble On,\" a superb song where he evoked some of the characters from what was then his bedside book, as it was for many hippies. It was in New York that this other classic was laid down, as was the very macho \"Heartbreaker,\" a Jimmy Page festival, with an overpowering riff, a bridge derived from Moby Grape's \"Fall on You\" and a very nasty and almost noisy solo. At Mirror Sound studios in Los Angeles, they finalized a cover of Howlin' Wolf's \"Killing Floor\" (a track already covered by Jimi Hendrix), to which Plant added some lyrics taken from bluesman Robert Johnson. They knew this song well, as they had been playing it live since their very beginnings, but they then had the audacity to sign it themselves and rename it \"The Lemon Song\": some pressings of the album would credit it to Howlin' Wolf alone, but the majority bears the signature of these four little rascals who definitely stop at nothing. Few bands could then boast of having in their ranks a drummer as complete and versatile as John Bonham, whose heavy yet agile drumming, inherited from the greatest jazzmen, was Led Zeppelin's secret weapon. So he was entitled to a track all to himself, based on his concert solo, which he played every night, introducing it as \"Pat's Delight\" (Pat being his wife's name). He then renamed it \"Moby Dick\" (an allusion both to Melville's novel and to the band Moby Grape), with Page adding an intro and a riff \"borrowed\" from Bobby Parker's \"Watch Your Step\" - he had already made a song out of it, played by Led Zeppelin on the BBC but left unreleased, \"The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair.\" In addition to featuring a passage played with bare hands, the originality of this solo is that it is never boring and does not sound pretentious. The idea is certainly not new (Ginger Baker, of Cream, had already had \"Toad\"), but Led Zeppelin's virtuosity and subtlety really make all the difference here, even if \"Moby Dick\" would at some point become a chore on stage. Finally, Willie Dixon, who could almost be called Led Zeppelin's fifth member at that time, was again copied on \"Bring It On Home,\" the first half of which is an almost note-for-note imitation of the song of the same name, performed on record by Sonny Boy Williamson, with Plant adopting the accent of an old alcoholic black farmer. Discreet but always infallible, John Paul Jones goes wild on the finale, a new illustration of what Led Zeppelin can do with a classic blues, which transforms into a true sonic hurricane. Since there is still some justice in this world, from the 90s onwards, on all reissues of the album, Dixon would be credited not only on \"Bring It On Home\" but also on \"Whole Lotta Love.\" But no matter: after all, don't they say that small artists \"copy\" and great ones \"steal\"? And here, Led Zeppelin steals, indeed: very far and very high.","brand":"Led Zeppelin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55431038632280,"sku":null,"price":20140602.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0898\/4943\/0360\/files\/0081227966409.jpg?v=1774294761","url":"https:\/\/vinyles.com\/en\/products\/led-zeppelin_ii_2014_war","provider":"Vinyles.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}