{"id":191268,"date":"2025-06-17T08:59:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T08:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/191268\/"},"modified":"2025-06-17T08:59:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T08:59:09","slug":"the-led-zeppelin-album-paul-stanley-called-a-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/191268\/","title":{"rendered":"The Led Zeppelin album Paul Stanley called a “disaster”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Paul<\/p>\n

(Credits: Apple Music)<\/p>\n

Tue 17 June 2025 4:30, UK <\/p>\n

Rock stars talk a lot of bollocks, but every now and then, one of them accidentally lands on something true. In a 2014 interview on his official website, Kiss<\/a> frontman Paul Stanley went so far as to call Led Zeppelin\u2019s 1969 debut album, Led Zeppelin I, a \u201cdisaster\u201d.<\/p>\n

Now, hold on. Put your pitchforks down, he wasn\u2019t slagging it off. He was praising it. In fact, he meant it as the highest compliment imaginable. Because in Stanley\u2019s world, the best music isn\u2019t flawless: it sits on the brink of spontaneous combustion, teetering on the possibility of collapse, and is played with the kind of reckless abandon that gives mixing engineers night sweats.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019ve done is we replaced passion with perfection,\u201d Stanley said when asked what counts as bad music these days. He was lamenting the auto-tuned rinse-and-repeat cycle of contemporary pop. \u201cThe music that I loved, Motown, was full of mistakes. The first Zeppelin album was a disaster\u2014it\u2019s brilliant because Jimmy [Page] almost goes off the rails at times. That\u2019s what music is about.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not wrong, either. Released in January 1969 and recorded in just 36 hours, Led Zeppelin I doesn\u2019t so much start as roar into life like a steam-belching locomotive barely holding itself together as it leaves the station. Coughing out black plumes of hard-rock menace, \u2018Good Times Bad Times\u2019 thunders into view with John Bonham\u2019s double-time pedal work sounding like it\u2019s been welded together with brute force.<\/p>\n

From the meandering crawl of \u2018Dazed and Confused\u2019 to the full-throttle derailment of \u2018Communication Breakdown\u2019, Jimmy Page shovels bluesy guitar riffs into the firebox like an industrial footman, trying to keep the whole thing from flying off the rails with nothing but dirt under his fingernails. It\u2019s chaotic, unfiltered, and absolutely glorious.<\/p>\n

To Paul Stanley, this kind of barely-contained chaos is a dying art. \u201cMusic is about pushing the boundaries in search of ecstasy,\u201d he concluded. It may sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but sometimes the storm\u2019s rolling in whether we yell about it or not. In our modern era of EDM and trap-pop, it\u2019s worth remembering that \u201cecstasy\u201d doesn\u2019t come from a click track or a pitch-corrected vocal. Sometimes it comes from four young maniacs in a room with barely enough time to tune up.<\/p>\n

Even Jimmy Page, the alleged rail-leaver-in-chief, has always defended the rawness of early Zeppelin. \u201cYou can\u2019t overthink the music,\u201d he once said, adding, \u201cMood and intensity can\u2019t be manufactured. The spontaneity of capturing a specific moment is what drives it.\u201d In other words, if it sounds like it might explode, you\u2019re probably doing it right.<\/p>\n

Their debut album didn\u2019t just launch Led Zeppelin\u2019s career, but it forever redefined what hard rock was. Without it, you don\u2019t get Paranoid. You don\u2019t get Nevermind<\/a>. Just a lot less noise, and a lot less fun.<\/p>\n

So when Stanley calls Led Zeppelin I a disaster, take it the way he meant it, as a plea to bring back real, imperfect music made by actual human beings, and not computer plug-ins. He might front Kiss\u2014the world\u2019s most cartoonishly vapid band, who resort to make-up to distract from their terrible songs\u2014but about this point, he\u2019s dead right. It\u2019s not the mistakes that ruin music; it\u2019s the lack of them.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Apple Music) Tue 17 June 2025 4:30, UK Rock stars talk a lot of bollocks, but every…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[77,30929,21945,269,45124,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-191268","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-kiss","10":"tag-led-zeppelin","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-paul-stanley","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114697887858564324","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}