Led Zeppelin "Led Zeppelin II" Atlantic ?588198 A2/B2 1969 g/fold "lemon song"

	£		43
	$		56

Led Zeppelin ? "Led Zeppelin II"  Atlantic ?588198  UK pressing. Vinyl, LP, housed in a gate-fold sleeve, and released in 1969.
The vinyl does have a couple of surface marks but I have played the LP on my elderly stereo and they don't get in the way of the music at all. There is the odd crackle between tracks but no more than you might expect from a 50-year-old vinyl. The gate-fold sleeve has faint ring-wear to the rear, but is otherwise in great shape, with no rips or writing. The spine has some wear but it is intact and completely legible. Matrix / Runout Side One : 588 198 A ? 2  Matrix / Runout Side Two : 588 198 B ? 2 
"Led Zeppelin II" is Led Zeppelin's eponymous second studio album, released on 22 October 1969 in the United States and on 31 October 1969 in the United Kingdom by Atlantic Records. Recording sessions for the album took place at several locations in both the United Kingdom and North America from January to August 1969. The album's production was credited to the band's lead guitarist and songwriter Jimmy Page, and it also served as Led Zeppelin's first album to utilise the recording techniques of the engineer Eddie Kramer. Incorporating several elements of blues and folk music, "Led Zeppelin II" exhibited the band's evolving musical style of blues-derived material and their guitar riff-based sound. It has been described as the band's heaviest album.
"Led Zeppelin II" was a commercial success, and was the band's first album to reach number one on charts in the UK and the US. In 1970, the album's cover designer David Juniper was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package. Since its release, various writers and music critics have regularly cited "Led Zeppelin II" as one of the greatest and most influential albums of all time.
"Led Zeppelin II" was conceived during a hectic and much-travelled period of Led Zeppelin's career from January through August 1969, when they completed four European and three American concert tours. Each song was separately recorded, mixed and produced at various studios in the UK and North America. The album was written on tour, during periods of a couple of hours in between concerts, a studio was booked and the recording process begun, resulting in a sound with spontaneity and urgency through necessity. Bassist John Paul Jones recalled that "We were touring a lot. Jimmy [Page]'s riffs were coming fast and furious. A lot of them came from onstage especially during the long improvised section of 'Dazed and Confused'. We'd remember the good stuff and dart into a studio along the way."
Some of the recording studios used by the band were not the most advanced. One studio in Vancouver, credited as "a hut", had an 8-track set up that did not even have proper headphone facilities. The group's lead singer Robert Plant later discussed the writing and recording process, stating "It was crazy really. We were writing the numbers in hotel rooms and then we'd do a rhythm track in London, add the vocal in New York, overdub the harmonica in Vancouver and then come back to finish mixing at New York."
"Thank You", "The Lemon Song" and "Moby Dick" were overdubbed during the tour, while the mixing of "Whole Lotta Love" and "Heartbreaker" was also done on tour. Page later stated "In other words, some of the material came out of rehearsing for the next tour and getting new material together."
The album sleeve design was from a poster by David Juniper, who was simply told by the band to come up with an interesting idea. Juniper was a fellow student of Page's at Sutton Art College in Surrey. His design was based on a photograph of the Jagdstaffel 11 Division of the German Air Force during World War I, the famed Flying Circus led by the Red Baron. After the picture was tinted, the faces of the four members of the band were airbrushed on from a 1969 publicity photograph. Other faces added, according to Juniper, were either Miles Davis or Blind Willie Johnson, a friend of Andy Warhol (possibly Mary Woronov) and astronaut Neil Armstrong, although it is actually fellow astronaut Frank Borman. The cover also pictured the outline of a Zeppelin on a brown background (similar to the cover of the band's first album), which gave the album its nickname "Brown Bomber".
The album was released on 22 October 1969 on Atlantic Records, with advance orders of 400,000 copies. The advertising campaign was built around the slogans 'Led Zeppelin – The Only Way to Fly' and 'Led Zeppelin II Now Flying'. Commercially, "Led Zeppelin II" was the band's first album to hit No. 1 in the US, knocking The Beatles' "Abbey Road"  twice from the top spot, where it remained for seven weeks. By April 1970 it had registered three million American sales, whilst in Britain it enjoyed a 138-week residence on the LP chart, climbing to the top spot in February 1970.
The album also yielded Led Zeppelin's biggest hit with the track "Whole Lotta Love". This song reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1970, after Atlantic went against the group's wishes by releasing a shorter version on 45. The single's B-side, "Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)", also hit the Billboard chart, peaking at No. 65 in April 1970. The album helped establish Led Zeppelin as an international concert attraction as for the next year, the group continued to tour relentlessly, initially performing in clubs and ballrooms, then in larger auditoriums and eventually stadiums as their popularity grew.
Critical reaction to "Led Zeppelin II" was not positive originally. John Mendelsohn wrote a negative review of the record for Rolling Stone, in which he mocked the group's heavy sound and white blues, while writing that "until you've listened to the album eight hundred times, as I have, it seems as if it's just one especially heavy song extended over the space of two whole sides". Robert Christgau jokingly referred to the band as "the best of the wah-wah mannerist groups, so dirty they drool on demand", while complaining that "all the songs sound alike". He nonetheless conceded that "Led Zeppelin simply out-heavied everyone" in 1969, "pitting Jimmy Page's repeated low-register fuzz riffs against the untiring freak intensity of Robert Plant's vocal. This trademark has only emerged clearly on the second album, and more and more I am coming to understand it as an artistic triumph."
"Led Zeppelin II" has been cited by music writers as a blueprint for heavy metal bands that followed it.  Blues-derived songs like "Whole Lotta Love", "Heartbreaker", "The Lemon Song", "Moby Dick", and "Bring It On Home" have been seen as representing standards of the genre, where the guitar-based riff (rather than vocal chorus or verses) defines the song and provides the key hook. Such arrangements and emphasis were at the time atypical in popular music. Page's guitar solo in "Heartbreaker" featuring rapid-fire runs of notes tapped only by the left hand, was a major inspiration to the later work of metal soloists and "shredders" such as Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai. As such, the album is generally considered to be very influential on the development of rock music, being an early forerunner of heavy metal, and inspiring a host of other rock bands including Aerosmith, Iron Maiden and Guns N' Roses.
Since its initial critical reception, "Led Zeppelin II" has been acknowledged by many critics and music writers as one of the most influential albums of rock music, and has earned several accolades from music publications, frequently placed at or near the top of "best album" lists. In 1989, Spin magazine ranked the album No. 5 on its list of The 25 Greatest Albums of All Time. In 2000, Q magazine placed Led Zeppelin II at number 37 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 2003, the album was ranked number 75 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.