From the outset, Led Zeppelin said they never wanted to release a single. And they didn’t – in the UK. (Until 1997, when “Whole Lotta Love” was released as their first UK single.) The band’s fearsome manager Peter Grant was assumedly able to intimidate the local office, but Atlantic headquarters in New York must’ve been a different story, as the US label released one single off each of the band’s first three albums, two off their fourth, and more as the albums continued coming.
As an on-going look at the band's 50th Anniversary, we take a dive into their first single “Good Times, Bad Times”/”Communication Breakdown” as it was released in the US.
The reason for the band not wanting singles was that they wanted people to pay attention to their albums, and of course, that happened anyway. But those singles are stand-alone classics, and their first one, “Good Times, Bad Times”/”Communication Breakdown” stands as one of the most revolutionary and exciting 45’s ever released.
“Good Times, Bad Times” is the track that opened Led Zeppelin’s first album, and is perhaps the closest the band ever got to recording a pop song. And it sounds like a 60s track, whereas you could be forgiven for thinking that everything else the band ever recorded was recorded in the 70s. Led Zeppelin are synonymous with the early 70s and battled with the Rolling Stones for the title of the Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the world in the first half of that decade, but let’s not forget that their first album, as well as Led Zeppelin II, was released at the tail end of the 60s.
Indeed when the first album was released, the Beatles were still together, and Woodstock was still months away. Led Zeppelin itself had only existed for a matter of months, having been formed by Jimmy Page to continue the work he was doing with the Yardbirds, the great English band of the 60s whose lead guitarists before Page had been Eric Clapton and then Jeff Beck.
“Good Times, Bad Times”, the first track on their first album and the A-side of their single, is the one Led Zeppelin track in which you can hear where they – or at least Page (and John Paul Jones, who as a session man played on numerous 60s hits) - came from. The Yardbirds had been one of the great singles bands of the 60s. “For Your Love,” “Heart Full of Soul,” “Evil Hearted You,” “Still I’m Sad”; the list of hits goes on. And while the hits had pretty much dried up by the time Page joined, there were a couple of lesser singles including “Little Games” and some wonderful Page-driven tracks that have only been recently released that pushed the band in dynamic new directions. A brilliant pop song that sounds tailor-made for the radio, “Good Times, Bad Times” sounds like an extension of those late Yardbirds’ tracks; opening Led Zeppelin I it served as a recap before the band got down to the business of creating something bold and new.
And that something bold and new was there to be heard in all its glory if you flipped the single over. “Communication Breakdown,” which was tucked away in the middle of Side 2 on the album, sounds like it had been written and released for release on a 7” single. Clocking in at under 2 and a half minutes – every second a stunner - “Communication Breakdown” is the birth of modern heavy metal, hard rock, punk rock and even, jumping forward by a decade, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and the post-punk hard rock era, all in one incredible knockout punch of track.
You can hear “Communication Breakdown” most clearly in Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” which came a year later. You can hear it in Deep Purple’s “Fireball” which came a year after that. You can hear it in the fast tracks on Iggy & The Stooges’ Raw Power album. You can hear it in the down-stroke attack of the Ramones (Johnny Ramone cited Page and “Communication Breakdown” in particular as an influence) and the flat-out drive of early Damned classics like “Neat Neat Neat” (and Page loved the Damned!). You can hear it in the post-punk era staccato riffing of AC/DC’s Alberts Records labelmates the Angels, and Iron Maiden. You can hear it in everything that these bands inspired.
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