The marketing behind Led Zeppelin IV

dr.bollocko

Just came across this interesting piece.

Now seeing as I wasn't alive at the time I think that they frame the difficulty of the time for Led Zeppelin, coming off the back of two hard rock albums and one mellower one.

No Title? No problem

To appreciate the impact of Led Zeppelin IV, I think it’s helpful to understand the album’s historical context. As many rock historians have reported, Led Zeppelin was at a crossroads when it released the album that would help make Zeppelin “one of the biggest bands on the planet” in Hoskyns’s words.

On the one hand, the band had recently been voted Best Group in the annual Readers Poll of Melody Maker, ending the Beatles’s eight-year run at the top of the prestigious poll. And its live shows had gained a massive following.



Led Zeppelin unseat the Beatles: headline news on British TV

But on the other hand, the band’s loud, sexually charged music and its brash public image earned plenty of scorn among critics such as Lester Bangs, who characterized its most recent album, Led Zeppelin III, as “uninspiring material” and Robert Plant’s vocals as “some cannibal chorus wailing in the infernal light of a savage fertility rite.”

Even worse, Led Zeppelin III, although a Number 1 album, had been considered a commercial disappointment compared to the success of Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin II — possibly because people did not know how to react to the mellow, folk-rock songs of Led Zeppelin III (e.g., “That’s the Way,” “Gallow’s Pole,” and “Tangerine”), in contrast to the hard-rock feel of Zeppelin’s first two albums.



Sensing that the band needed to retreat from the rigors of touring and rebound from the disappointment of Led Zeppelin III, band manager Peter Grant urged Zeppelin to focus on creating the best album possible – triggering a period of quiet retreat from the public eye, which sparked rumors that the band was breaking up.

In the words of Mick Wall, author of When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin, “Their next album, whatever else it turned out to be, would be make or break . . . for Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin, there was much more than a mere million bucks at stake in whatever they did next; there was their entire future.”

No one knew what the band’s future would look like – possibly a return to the tested-and-true cock-rock sounds of “Whole Lotta Love” from Led Zeppelin II or perhaps more of the Joni-Mitchell inspired folk sensibilities of “That’s the Way” that appeared on Led Zeppelin III.

On November 8, 1971, Led Zeppelin responded. Fans began finding in record stores an album with the mysterious cover image of an anonymous old man and his bundle of sticks. The front and back covers together then revealed that the old man was really standing in the frame of a picture affixed to a crumbling wall set against the backdrop of a dowdy modern apartment building – a most interesting return for a band constantly dogged by critics for hyping its name over its music.



The inner packaging raised eyebrows as well. The inside gatefold revealed a pencil drawing of an occult-like hermit standing watch over a rocky incline.



The record sleeve contained some basic information about the song listings, the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven” written in an ancient script commissioned by Jimmy Page, and a small drawing of a man holding a book containing mystical markings.



As Hoskyns writes, the anonymous packaging enraged executives at Atlantic Records, responsible for distributing the album. An album without a name? “That’s crazy,” Hosykns quotes one executive. “It’ll never sell.”

But Led Zeppelin was not trying to commit commercial suicide. Lead guitarist and producer Jimmy Page would later explain to Guitar World the rationale for the design and packaging:

After all we had accomplished, the press was still calling us a hype. So that is why the fourth album was untitled. It was a meaningless protest, really, but we wanted to prove that people were not buying us for the name.

Hoskyns adds, “Releasing an album without ‘Led Zeppelin’ on the cover (or even on the spine) is a giant ‘**** You’ to anyone who ever accused them of being a ‘Superhype’ . . . Smarting from the negative press they’d suffered since the band formed in late 1968, Page wants to prove that their music can stand on its own merits.”

More on this here:
http://superhypeblog.com/marketing/the-marketing-genius-of-led-zeppelin-iv

I guess I wonder at the voracity of the claims of the author... that zepp were trailblazers with the anonymous looking album cover.

Very spinal tap.

4zn76tysfajdxp

It's a nice idea but... I mean, people obviously would've known it was a Led Zeppelin album cover before buying it anyway, right? Through word of mouth or just asking the person behind the counter whose album it was.

mike65

Stocking the album with all the other Led Zeppelin under L probably aided sales.

dr.bollocko

mike65 wrote: »

Stocking the album with all the other Led Zeppelin under L probably aided sales.

I believe it was under zeppelin, led.