Led zeppelin’s third album, cleverly titled Led Zeppelin III, marked a shift in their style from harder-edged rock to a more acoustic sound. The first side, which kicks off with the hit ‘Immigrant Song,’ is a bit more electric, while the second side is extremely mellow.
The album was met with confusion and didn’t perform very well critically or commercially at first, but over time it has come to be regarded as one of the band’s better efforts.
When compiling my list of favorite 1970 albums, I was tempted to include Grateful Dead’s American Beauty. Every time I listen to this record I’m reminded just how great it is.
The problem is, I almost never listen to it. Maybe three times in the last decade. Granted, I don’t pull out Let It Be or Watertown on a weekly basis either, but I know both of those albums by heart because I did give them that level of attention at some point. American Beauty never earned its own obsessive phase.
Last week I counted down my five favorite albums of 1970, and while it was an excellent group of albums, the truth is I didn’t have many runners-up. I have a very cursory knowledge of that year’s music.
So over the next three weeks I’ll feature songs from other 1970 albums that received widespread acclaim. Could some of these crack my own top five if given the chance?
I owned my first CD player in the late 80s. It was a large black boom box with a cassette deck on the front and the CD unit on top. Something like this, but not quite as slick.
The first three CDs I bought were albums I had owned on vinyl but wanted to experience in this new, sonically superior format (I guess vinyl enthusiasts would quibble with the “sonically superior” part). One was U2’s The Joshua Tree, another was Paul Simon’s Graceland and the third was Peter Gabriel’s So.
The Random iTunes Fairy has a knack for serving up songs I’ve never heard. That’s a neat trick given that the source of these songs is my own music collection, and you’d assume I’ve heard most of that.
But over the years I have, through one way or another, come into possession of a number of albums or singles that I’ve never played. And if Random Weekends are the way to remedy that, so be it.
Meet Me In Montauk 
