Led Zeppelin III (1970)

Led Zeppelin III is the third studio album by the English rock band Led Zeppelin. It was recorded between January and July 1970 and released on 5 October 1970 by Atlantic Records. Composed largely at a remote cottage in Wales known as Bron-Yr-Aur, this work represented a maturing of the band's music towards a greater emphasis on folk and acoustic sounds. This surprised many fans and critics, and upon its release the album received rather indifferent reviews.
Although it is not one of the highest sellers in Zeppelin's catalogue, Led Zeppelin III is now generally praised, and acknowledged as representing an important milestone in the band's history. Although acoustic songs are featured on Led Zeppelin III's predecessors, it is this album which is widely acknowledged for showing that Led Zeppelin was more than just a conventional rock band and that they could branch out into wider musical territory.

Many of the songs featured on the album were conceived in mid-1970 at Bron-Yr-Aur, an 18th century cottage in Gwynedd, Wales, on a hilltop overlooking the Dyfi Valley, three miles north of the market town Machynlleth. There, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant spent some time after an exhausting concert tour of North America to play and compose new music. This remote setting had no running water or electric power, which encouraged a slight change of musical direction for the band towards an emphasis on acoustic arrangements.

As Page later explained:

After the intense touring that had been taking place through the first two albums, working almost 24 hours a day, basically, we managed to stop and have a proper break, a couple of months as opposed to a couple of weeks. We decided to go off and rent a cottage to provide a contrast to motel rooms. Obviously, it had quite an effect on the material that was written... It was the tranquility of the place that set the tone of the album. Obviously, we weren't crashing away at 100 watt Marshall stacks. Having played acoustic and being interested in classical guitar, anyway, being in a cottage without electricity, it was acoustic guitar time... After all the heavy, intense vibe of touring which is reflected in the raw energy of the second album, it was just a totally different feeling.^[3]

Plant has expressed similar recollections:

[Bron-Yr-Aur] was a fantastic place in the middle of nowhere with no facilities at all-and it was a fantastic test of what we could do in that environment. Because by that time we'd become obsessed with change, and the great thing was that we were also able to create a pastoral side of Led Zep. Jimmy was listening to Davey Graham and Bert Jansch and was experimenting with different tunings, and I loved John Fahey. So it was a very natural place for us to go to.

After preparing the material that would emerge on the album, Page and Plant were joined by the other members of the band (John Bonham and John Paul Jones) at Headley Grange, a run-down mansion in East Hampshire, to rehearse the songs. With its relaxed atmosphere and rural surroundings, Headley Grange appealed to the band as the favored alternative to the discipline of a conventional studio.
The album was then recorded in a series of sessions in May and June 1970 at both Headley Grange and at Olympic Studios, London. Some additional work was put in at Island Records' new Basing Street Studios in Notting Hill, London, in July, then mixed at Ardent Studios, Memphis in August 1970 during Led Zeppelin's sixth American concert tour.^[1] The album was produced by Page and engineered by Andy Johns and Terry Manning.