Plant had told Page about a ramshackle 18th century cottage he remembered from a childhood vacation named Bron-Yr-Aur: Welsh for, variously, ‘golden hill’, ‘breast of gold’ or ‘hill of gold’, and pronounced Bron-raaar. Where the band was now – or where Page and vocalist Robert Plant were anyway – was halfway up a mountainside in Wales, the tiny principality that borders the west coast of England. To sum up where the band was now, not where it had been a year ago.” The whole point was not to try and follow-up “Whole Lotta Love.” We recognized that it had been a milestone for us, but the idea was to try and do something different. Until then the question was whether they would be able to come up with another “Whole Lotta Love”? But as Page later told me: “People that thought like that missed the point.
Head-shaking, album-oriented outcasts from the pop mainstream, blasting out whiplash riffs and singing tripped-out anthems about war pigs, fireballs and witchy women that squeezed your lemon till the juice ran down your leg. With monolithically heavy tracks like “Whole Lotta Love” and, from their first album, “Dazed And Confused now a staple of the hip new FM stations, for teenage, denim-clad, reefer-toking America, Zeppelin became the spearhead of a “second British invasion” that had begun with Cream and the Jeff Beck Group and would continue into the early 1970s with such no-quarter-giving rock goliaths as Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. The older, beard-stroking critics on Rolling Stone may not have gotten it, still too enthral to The Beatles and The Stones to take England’s latest hard-rocking exports even remotely as seriously, but the kids tuned into Zeppelin immediately. Led Zeppelin’s monumentally successful second album – simply titled “Led Zeppelin II” – had transformed them from promising hopefuls into fully-fledged superstars.
Photo courtesy Richard Kwasniewski/Frank White Photo Agency
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