four guys made these records

so much good in this article about led zeppelin:

It is early 1969, and you are young. You hold in your hands an LP by a band with a strange name. The cover art is a black-and-white photo of the Hindenburg exploding, cropped and retouched to resemble some phallic, Nazi apocalypse. …

The album’s centerpiece was the six-and-a-half-minute “Dazed and Confused,” a morass of shrieking chromaticisms and asinine misogyny. It would quickly become one of the band’s most iconic works, stretched to 20 or 30 minutes in concert, replete with gongs, vocal histrionics, tricked-out guitars played with violin bows. “Dazed and Confused” is a lousy song, the musical equivalent of plastering a horrific tragedy on your album cover and then asking your art department to make it look more like an erection.

four guys made these records:

Listening to the ragged life behind these recordings reminds us, on the one hand, that four guys made these records. It also reminds us, on the other, that four guys made these records. Sometimes being made human only heightens your immortality.

long been a proponent of “tangerine,”:

And then there’s “Tangerine,” a song Page had written years earlier that’s probably the prettiest recording Led Zeppelin ever made. The 12-string guitar sparkles, Bonham plays with uncharacteristic sensitivity, and Plant sings Page’s lyrics with a vibrato that’s almost Presleyan (a stylistic departure so striking that one criticspeculated it was a guest vocalist). “Tangerine” is one of only a handful of Zeppelin tracks that’s totally perfect, not a second too long, not a note unnecessary or out of place…