I picked up the newly-released Led Zeppelin 1972 live album, “How the West Was Won”, the other day and have been listening to it on my commute. This is a long-overdue glimpse of the mighty Zeppelin in their undisputed prime, just after their definitive fourth album. It is a welcome addition to the album charts and to any CD collection.

A couple of things are immediately striking. It’s really something to hear Robert Plant introduce a song by saying “this is one from our new album.” Nowadays, a band would probably take a four or five year break after a master-work like “Led Zeppelin IV” in 1971, but Zeppelin released the also-classic "Houses of the Holy” in 1973 while touring in between. I wonder too whether, in the age of Internet bootlegging, a band today would be willing to try out new material of the caliber of “Over the Hills and Far Away” and “Dancing Days” on stage. The prospect of embryonic songs being downloaded and splashed across cyberspace is a major disincentive to working out new songs in a live setting; an unfortunate side effect of technology which helps explain the decrease in quality of much of today’s music. The distinctive seventies flavor of this album also makes it a welcome time capsule; it is hard to imagine a modern-day, attention-deficient audience sitting patiently through a nineteen-minute drum solo like “Moby Dick.”

Above all, though, what shines through once again is the awesome musicianship of the four-piece Led Zeppelin. Their studio prowess, of course, was legendary, but even on stage they were a tight, coherent foursome and their music remains tuneful, adventurous and furiously powerful. For all the tales of their notorious decadence, Led Zeppelin were true professionals who produced a lasting and prolific body of music which retains the mysterious allure it cast over rock fans throughout the late sixties and seventies.

Post Script: Of course, as great as they were, Led Zeppelin were not always recognized as such in their time. On its web site, "Rolling Stone" magazine reprints an interesting 1975 interview of Page and Plant by then-reporter Cameron Crowe in which they seemed to be justifiably defensive about their legacy.