Ok, having been born in the mid 1960s, is there any doubt what rock group I would name as the greatest in history?
No, The Beatles were pop. The Rolling Stones were rock, but never hard rock. The Who was hard rock, but never heavy metal. Only one group, amongst the Big Four in the pantheon of rock music super bands was all of those things, and a quick comparison of the catalogs of the four groups shows that Led Zeppelin was, by far, the most musically diverse and innovative.
The Beatles were great pop singers, but they did not invent pop music. The Stones were bad boys, but was Mick Jagger ever as bad as The Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis? The Who did invent something, but, well, rock opera is the sort of thing that was ripe for parody from the start.
But, only Led Zeppelin invented a genre, heavy metal, and while some contemporaries jumped on the bandwagon, and went even heavier (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple), none were as diverse. Led Zeppelin III (the first LP I ever owned) shows how great a band this was, and, ironically, it's often thought of as one of their worst albums.
But, The Song Remains The Same is still the ultimate rock concert film. Yes, the Beatles and The Monkees did 'rock' films, and the Stones filmed their Altamont concert, and Woodstock was a socially relevant film of the concert, but this film set the standard for rock lore; so much so that a decade after its release it was the basis for much of Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap mockumentary.
Watch it yourself and you'll see I'm right.
