(Credits: Alamy)
Thu 28 August 2025 22:30, UK
Any town would have considered it an absolute privilege to have Led Zeppelin come through their establishment in the 1970s. They were one of the biggest rock bands on Earth, and even if you didn’t like them, everyone would be given a healthy payday, but not even rock juggernauts are safe from a few sceptics along the way as well.
For starters, though, it’s not like Zeppelin were known to be choirboys behind the scenes. As much as people like Jimmy Page liked to focus on the music, everyone in the band liked to party, and it wasn’t long before John Bonham showed the rest of their entourage what a good time looked like by the time that the lights went out. For the time being, though, fans were going to settle for the music when they went onstage.
But even without a single to their name, Zeppelin made America their own by touring relentlessly. They didn’t need to have their songs blaring over the radio to get people singing along whenever they performed, and even if ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was considered too long by the standards of radio at the time, that didn’t stop classic rock stations from playing it everywhere once the new format was adopted.
Then again, there were going to be some downsides to booking Led Zeppelin as well. They were known to take no prisoners whenever they performed, but on the flipside, there was a mystique around them that no one knew about. There were pieces of info out there like Page’s fascination with Aleister Crowley and his dabbling in the dark arts, but that seemed to be enough for the bread basket of America.
While most of the US welcomed the band with open arms whenever they played, Page remembered being shown the door fairly quickly when they played in Memphis, saying, “I guess they didn’t like the looks of us. Shortly after, we were threatened to get the hell out of town as soon as we were done with the show. At the Memphis show, the kids were standing in their seats and were getting beaten down. We were part of a subculture they didn’t want kids to know about.”
Which must have been heartbreaking for what Page had grown up on. While the biggest names in blues had been making their way through his record collection ever since the 1950s, it was a much different story that the area that had lit his world on fire now wanted absolutely nothing to do with him based on the way that he looked.
But that was more of a generational divide than anything else. Elvis Presley had already been going through his roughest period, and while the South had always been proud of their native son, it was going to be hard for anyone to get on the bandwagon. Hell, this wasn’t even anything new, given the fact that The Beatles had been run out of town for John Lennon’s ‘Jesus’ comments a decade earlier.
But the fact that Zeppelin were so loved and hated at the same time is actually quite appropriate for the kind of music they made. They were always known to be a little bit offbeat compared to the average rock and roll, and at the time, playing a song like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ may have felt like dancing a little too close to the fire.
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