Led Zeppelin III - Release and Critical Reaction

Release and Critical Reaction

Led Zeppelin III was one of the most eagerly awaited albums of 1970, and advance orders in the US alone were close to the million mark. Its release was trailered by a full page advertisement taken out in Melody Maker magazine at the end of September, which simply said "Thank you for making us the world's number one band."

Although the band's expanding musical boundaries were greeted warmly by some, detractors attacked the heavier tracks as being mindless noise. In a representative review published in Rolling Stone, critic Lester Bangs praised "That's the Way" as "beautiful and genuinely moving", while characterising the band's heavier songs as crude and little differentiated from each other. Others criticised the acoustic material for merely imitating the music of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Page suggested that this comparison was inaccurate, stating in an interview he gave to Cameron Crowe that:

When the third LP came out and got its reviews, Crosby, Stills and Nash had just formed. That LP had just come out and because acoustic guitars had come to the forefront all of a sudden: LED ZEPPELIN GO ACOUSTIC! I thought, Christ, where are their heads and ears? There were three acoustic songs on the first album and two on the second.

Page has also said that the negative press given to the third album affected him so much that he did not give press interviews for 18 months after its release, and was also one of the reasons why the band's subsequent untitled album contained no written information on it at all. However, in more recent years, he has commented on the negative press reaction in somewhat more diplomatic terms:

ith hindsight, I can see how if somebody got Led Zeppelin III, which was so different from what we'd done before, and they only had a short time to review it on the record player in the office, then they missed the content. They were in a rush and they were looking for the new "Whole Lotta Love" and not actually listening to what was there. It was too fresh for them and they didn't get the plot. So, in retrospect, it doesn't surprise me that the diversity and breadth of what we were doing was overlooked or under-appreciated at the time.

Led Zeppelin III was a trans-Atlantic No. 1 hit. It spent four weeks at the top of the Billboard chart, while it entered that British chart at No. 1 and remained there for three weeks (returning to the top for a further week on 12 December). However, following the lukewarm, if not confused and sometimes dismissive reception from critics, sales lagged after this initial peak. As Plant said:

Led Zeppelin III was not one of the best sellers in the catalogue because the audience turned round and said 'What are we supposed to do with this?'—'Where is our 'Whole Lotta Love Part 2'? They wanted something like Paranoid by Black Sabbath! But we wanted to go acoustic and a piece like "Gallows Pole" still had all the power of "Whole Lotta Love" because it allowed us to be dynamic.

In spite of its initially indifferent reviews and lower sales than Led Zeppelin's other early albums, Led Zeppelin III's reputation has recovered considerably with the passage of time. The RIAA certified the album 2× platinum in 1990, and 6× platinum in 1999.