Every album cover has a much bigger job than most people realize. Although it shouldn’t matter what the product looks like as long as the music kicks ass, there’s always that X-factor that jumps out at someone when they’re looking through record store shelves. For obscure artists, a good cover can make or break an album, but even when Led Zeppelin was in their prime, Jimmy Page had a few reservations about what happened to Led Zeppelin III.
Compared to what the band had done previously, though, their third outing was already a bit of a departure for them. Everyone had gotten used to their sexualized take on bluesy hard rock, but hearing them embrace the sounds of Eastern music as well as a folk tinge to some songs rubbed fans the wrong way almost immediately.
For everyone who turned off the album on the first listen, this is one of the few Zeppelin projects that rewards you on every repeated listen. Someone might not understand a song like ‘Friends’ at first, but hearing how they incorporate the classical instruments into the mix alongside Page’s ethereal guitar tuning is a lot more adventurous than many people give it credit for.
Such an experimental album needed a cover to wrap everything together, but what they got was a bit of a hot mess. Considering how many pages oversaw most of Zeppelin’s productions, he admitted that the cover was one of his least favorite parts of the record.
When speaking to Guitar World, Page believed it was a shadow of what he wanted it to be, saying, “[It was] A disappointment. I will take responsibility for that one, I knew the artist and described what we wanted with this wheel that made things appear and change… I was not happy with the final result — I thought it looked teeny-bopperish. But we were on top of a deadline, so of course, there was no way to make any radical changes to it.”
Page is right on the money on his teeny-bopper crack, too. Compared to the ominous cover of the Hindenburg disaster on the band’s first album and the still shot of the group for their second outing, this feels like the kind of warped animation design that would look a lot better plastered on someone’s school lunchbox than as a poster on some stoner’s wall.
If anything, the drastic departure from their previous output contained inside makes the cover look even worse. This album has softer songs like ‘That’s the Way’ and ‘Tangerine’ across the track listing, so why are we looking at a cover that promises the band will be making the kind of music that even Grandma would approve of?
If there’s one thing that the album taught Page, it was that he needed to have control over what the design would look like. By the time they got around to making their fourth record, the band had decided to shy away from the traditional promotion altogether, not putting their name on the album and letting most fans find it on their own.
Gross mishandling of the design aside, Led Zeppelin III is still home to some of the best Zeppelin songs, and if you fancy yourself an avid fan, you would be missing out if you didn’t include some of the tracks among the best they ever made. It may not have gotten the same appreciation from fans at the time, but Led Zeppelin III is the ultimate example of never judging a book by its cover.
