If You’re Looking For Led Zeppelin at Their Peak, Jimmy Page Would Recommend This Album in Particular

Most Led Zeppelin fans will have one particular album that comes to mind when describing the band’s musical peak. For Led Zeppelin beginners, the band’s fourth untitled album is a great place to start. This album features all-time hits like “Black Dog”, “Rock And Roll”, “Stairway To Heaven”, and “Going To California”. (It’s truly a great album.)

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But according to the musical mastermind behind these albums, guitarist Jimmy Page, a different record highlights the band at its absolute best. Interestingly, it’s an album that came out in 2003. This was decades after the band split following the tragic death of drummer John Bonham.

Jimmy Page Called This Album a Peak for Led Zeppelin

As was often the case with rock ‘n’ roll in the 1970s, bootleg recordings of live Led Zeppelin performances circulated the market throughout their reign as one of the biggest rock bands of the decade. However, there were some show recordings that still hadn’t seen the light of day by the early 2000s. These performances were from the band’s 1972 North America tour. They included a June 25, 1972, concert in Los Angeles and another in Long Beach two days later.

Jimmy Page compiled and produced a triple album from these archival recordings, titled How The West Was Won. The album came out on Atlantic on May 27, 2003, over two decades after the band split. In a 2010 interview with The Times, Page said, “I think what we did on How The West Was Won—that 1972 gig—is pretty much a testament of how good it was. It would have been nice to have had a little more visual recordings, but there you go. That’s the conundrum of Led Zeppelin.”

Still, the Fourth Album Remains One of the Best

Considering how dynamic and improvisational Led Zeppelin’s concerts were, it’s unsurprising that Jimmy Page would find a live album to be their best. He often used these longer concerts to experiment with new lines and phrasing on the guitar. As he described it to The Times, “This whole musical entity locked together, and it would just sort of mutate over the course of the evening’s concert. Exploring and delving into that, it was just marvelous.”

How The West Was Won is fantastic. However, Page isn’t afraid to single out Led Zeppelin IV as another pinnacle of their career. “I must say that when you had four musicians that were really without doubt at the top of their game there and played really superbly as a band and that whole aspect took on a fifth element—this alchemy of it that was really ripe for creation.”

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