Why this Led Zeppelin album Paul Stanley called a “disaster”

Rock stars talk a lot of bollocks, but every now and then, one of them accidentally lands on something true. In a 2014 interview on his official website, Kiss frontman Paul Stanley went so far as to call Led Zeppelin’s 1969 debut album, Led Zeppelin I, a “disaster”.

Now, hold on. Put your pitchforks down, he wasn’t slagging it off. He was praising it. In fact, he meant it as the highest compliment imaginable. Because in Stanley’s world, the best music isn’t flawless: it sits on the brink of spontaneous combustion, teetering on the possibility of collapse, and is played with the kind of reckless abandon that gives mixing engineers night sweats.

“What we’ve done is we replaced passion with perfection,” Stanley said when asked what counts as bad music these days. He was lamenting the auto-tuned rinse-and-repeat cycle of contemporary pop. “The music that I loved, Motown, was full of mistakes. The first Zeppelin album was a disaster—it’s brilliant because Jimmy [Page] almost goes off the rails at times. That’s what music is about.”

He’s not wrong, either. Released in January 1969 and recorded in just 36 hours, Led Zeppelin I doesn’t so much start as roar into life like a steam-belching locomotive barely holding itself together as it leaves the station. Coughing out black plumes of hard-rock menace, ‘Good Times Bad Times’ thunders into view with John Bonham’s double-time pedal work sounding like it’s been welded together with brute force.

From the meandering crawl of ‘Dazed and Confused’ to the full-throttle derailment of ‘Communication Breakdown’, Jimmy Page shovels bluesy guitar riffs into the firebox like an industrial footman, trying to keep the whole thing from flying off the rails with nothing but dirt under his fingernails. It’s chaotic, unfiltered, and absolutely glorious.

To Paul Stanley, this kind of barely-contained chaos is a dying art. “Music is about pushing the boundaries in search of ecstasy,” he concluded. It may sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but sometimes the storm’s rolling in whether we yell about it or not. In our modern era of EDM and trap-pop, it’s worth remembering that “ecstasy” doesn’t come from a click track or a pitch-corrected vocal. Sometimes it comes from four young maniacs in a room with barely enough time to tune up.

Even Jimmy Page, the alleged rail-leaver-in-chief, has always defended the rawness of early Zeppelin. “You can’t overthink the music,” he once said, adding, “Mood and intensity can’t be manufactured. The spontaneity of capturing a specific moment is what drives it.” In other words, if it sounds like it might explode, you’re probably doing it right.

Their debut album didn’t just launch Led Zeppelin’s career, but it forever redefined what hard rock was. Without it, you don’t get Paranoid. You don’t get Nevermind. Just a lot less noise, and a lot less fun.

So when Stanley calls Led Zeppelin I a disaster, take it the way he meant it, as a plea to bring back real, imperfect music made by actual human beings, and not computer plug-ins. He might front Kiss—the world’s most cartoonishly vapid band, who resort to make-up to distract from their terrible songs—but about this point, he’s dead right. It’s not the mistakes that ruin music; it’s the lack of them.