Led Zeppelin

The songs were rehearsed on the Scandinavian tour, so the band recorded most of the album live with overdubs. Sessions began on 25 September 1968 and the whole job, mixing included, took about 36 hours and cost 1,782 pounds, which Page and Grant paid before the Atlantic deal. Glyn Johns engineered and mixed it, though the cover does not say so. Page placed microphones as far as 20 feet from the amplifier to capture the room, and used reverse echo on You Shook Me.

The band first rehearsed together on 19 August 1968 and entered Olympic at 11 p.m. on 25 September. Page played a psychedelically painted Telecaster that Jeff Beck had given him, through a Supro amplifier, with a Gibson J-200 for the acoustic songs and a Fender pedal steel on Your Time Is Gonna Come. Plant took part in the writing but a contract with CBS Records kept his name off the credits, and he was credited later on several songs. Babe I'm Gonna Leave You reworks a 1950s song by Anne Bredon that Page knew from Joan Baez's 1962 live album, and Plant first sang it heavier until Page persuaded him to re-record it for light and shade. Jeff Beck had recorded You Shook Me on Truth in 1968 and later said he disliked Led Zeppelin copying his arrangement. Black Mountain Side is based on Bert Jansch's arrangement of the traditional Blackwaterside, and How Many More Times was improvised around Howlin' Wolf's How Many More Years. Good Times Bad Times, backed with Communication Breakdown, was the single released outside the UK.

Rolling Stone's John Mendelsohn was harsh on release and Melody Maker's Chris Welch was glowing. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine later called it a turning point for hard rock and heavy metal. It reached number 6 in the UK and number 10 in the US, and has been certified 8x Platinum in the US. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004 and was ranked 29th on Rolling Stone's 500 list in 2003.

The cover is Sam Shere's photograph of the Hindenburg on fire in 1937, redrawn in ink by George Hardie, and the back cover photograph is by Chris Dreja. At a February 1970 gig in Copenhagen the band were billed as "the Nobs" after a legal threat from Eva von Zeppelin. The album had 50,000 advance orders in the US and went gold there in July 1969. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson called it one of the most assured and fully realized debuts in music. The 2014 reissue added a live set recorded at the Olympia in Paris in October 1969, and two outtakes from the sessions, Baby Come On Home and Sugar Mama, appeared on the 2015 Coda reissue.