Led Zeppelin

Four men, formed in London in 1968, who took American blues and turned the volume up until it became something else. Jimmy Page came out of the Yardbirds with a plan and the studio fluency to execute it. He found Robert Plant singing in obscurity, a voice that could wail and then drop to a whisper. Plant brought John Bonham, a drummer who hit harder than the era’s recording gear was built to capture. And John Paul Jones, the quiet one, the arranger and multi-instrumentalist who held the architecture together while the other three burned.

What they built was loud and unusually careful at the same time. Folk picking next to crushing riffs. Eastern modes, English mysticism, Mississippi blues, all in the same record, sometimes the same song. They were enormous, distrusted by critics for years, and uninterested in explaining themselves.

The untitled fourth album, the one with the four symbols where a name should be, is where it all locked into place. They kept going through the seventies, a band that toured like a force of nature and recorded like obsessives.

It ended the only way it could. When Bonham died in 1980, the three who were left refused to carry on without him. They stopped.