Zep Eternal: Why Is Led Zeppelin Still Popular?

Rolling Stone ^ | July 28 | Brian Hiatt

[Mr. Blonde]

Thirty-seven years after Led Zeppelin's debut, their albums continue to sell in the millions, while their music inspires everyone from Aussie metalheads to Nashville punks

The studded leather bracelets and Napoleon Dynamite merchandise at Hot Topic target customers between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two—kids who weren't born when Led Zeppelin broke up in 1980. Nonetheless, the all-time top-selling band T-shirt at the chain's 700-plus mall stores is Zep's Swan Song tee—the one bearing the image of a naked, winged Apollo. "It's not like with the CBGB or Ramones T-shirts, where it was a fashion trend," says Cindy Levitt, vice president of music and marketing for Hot Topic. "Kids appreciate the music."

According to Nielsen Soundscan, Led Zeppelin have sold 20.2 million albums since 1990 alone. In the last four years, thirty-eight percent of all Zep sales were to fans under the age of twenty-five, according to the research firm NPD.

"There's almost a religious thing about Zeppelin—I got obsessed really badly when I was in high school," says Matthew Himes, a twenty-year-old college student from Los Angeles who has the four symbols from Led Zeppelin IV tattooed vertically along his right shoulder. "By my age, everyone has gone through their Zeppelin phase," adds twenty-one-year-old fan Dan Teicher, who credits the band with helping to lead him to major in music at Brown University.

Thirty-seven years after the release of Led Zeppelin I, the band also continues to inspire generations of musicians. "Led Zeppelin—I think that's the band we always looked toward," says Pearl Jam's Jeff Ament. The hot Australian trio Wolfmother draw on Seventies sources from Sabbath to the Stooges, but Andrew Stockdale's banshee vocals and the band's chordal riffs clearly pay tribute to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.

At age thirteen, before Stockdale had even heard of the band, he used to wear a tie-dyed Zep T-shirt to junior-high dances to impress girls. Then, when he was eighteen, Stockdale got into Led Zeppelin III. "I said, 'If someone started a band now that was just like this, it would fucking go off,' " says the frontman, now twenty-eight. Stockdale, who sings about unicorns and carnivals on his band's debut, was especially intrigued by Plant's lyrical approach. "People go onstage and pour their hearts out and no one wants to hear it—why not sing about 'Gollum and his evil ways' instead?"

Even Nashville punks Be Your Own Pet, whose squawky teenage riot couldn't sound less like Houses of the Holy, credit Zep as a touchstone and titled a song on their debut album "Stairway to Heaven." "Everyone I know in music is into Zeppelin—they're just such a necessary band to know about," says eighteen-year-old BYOP guitarist Jonas Stein.

And while the original punks saw Zeppelin as irrelevant dinosaurs (Clash bassist Paul Simonon once said, "I don't have to hear Led Zeppelin—just looking at their record covers makes me want to throw up"), Stein finds that hard to understand. "If no one had told me otherwise, I would have thought that some of the punk stuff is sort of influenced by Zeppelin," he says. "They're solid, they're concrete. Zep's music will last forever."

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

BUMP

[dfwgator]

When John Bonham died and Led Zeppelin quit as a group, hard rock (what was left of it) turned into heavy metal and the crappy big hair bands of the 1980's.

And the dreaded, "Power Ballad", because "Every bad boy has a soft side".

[Billthedrill]

I come from the land of the ice cream cone...

I will never again hear that song without this coming into my head. (Sobbing)

[HonkyTonkMan]

“Big ol Jed.left the light on... “

[Texas resident]

I listened to Led Zeppelin growing up but got to love the band “Dread Zeppelin”. Zep music done to a Jamaican beat with a lead singer dressed like Elvis.

Pegged the weird sh** o meter, but fun.

[MortMan]

They’re still paying installments on that stairway to heaven.