Do you consider Led Zeppelin a METAL band?

Do you consider Led Zeppelin a METAL band?
Not anymore. I did up until about 15 years ago.
Compared to all the metal bands now and all the sub genres, Led Zepplin is a hard rock band.

 

No, not metal. They covered a lot of styles IMO. Same with Deep Purple, rocked hard but not what I think metal is. It's like calling Greenday a "punk" band, I just don't hear it in the music or the lyrics.

 

Not anymore but we would have missed a lot of metal without them.

 

Metal, Blues, Prog, Folk, Psychedelic, Country, Cock-Rock - they covered lots of ground.

 

"proto-metal"

 

Go back to 1970. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were it. There was no such thing as classic rock, and the term 'Heavy Metal' was brand new.

 

Only to people over 40.

 

Led Zepplin is a classic rock band. They helped pioneer a branch of rock and roll that eventually became heavy metal, but nowadays, they are about as "metal" as the Who or the Doobie Brothers.

 

No. If anything, they lean towards the progressive side with their use of folk, country, Middle Eastern and Indian influences.

 

Not to mention all the Lord of the Rings references (Misty Mountain Hop, Battle of Evermore, Ramble On).

 

There are some who will even tell you that there are veiled references in "Stairway" and "Over The Hills"---but that's a topic for a different thread.

Yep--Zeppelin did the same thing with Tolkien that Rush did later with Ayn Rand and Samuel Delany.

 

Yes, Led ep Deep Purple Black sabbath, Uriah Heep, even Queen in the beginning were considerated metal bands. The "first wave". Then came the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and from then on things have gone harder and faster.
Today don't think there are many people considering them metal... I've come across people that consider Judas Priest (and one or two young people even Iron Maiden) Hard rock!!!

 

...what's the best blues-based arena rock for metal?

In all seriousness...this is one of THOSE questions that really has no answer. It's like what was the first successful "metal" band? I've heard people posit Steppenwolf, Deep Purple, Sabbath, and a bunch of others (for me, it's Judas Priest). Or for that matter, what's "metal" about most late period ballad-drenched Sunset Strip acts?

Metal is in the "eye" of the beholder

 

Genre labels are the invention of record companies and old-school broadcasters, and exist solely for shelving and marketing purposes. As musicians we should feel free to ignore labels and not get sucked into playing that game.

 

Jimmy Page doesn't consider LZ to be Heavy Metal.

 

Hard not to consider certain songs such as "Dazed and Confused" anything but metal, but more broadly I'd put them in the category of blues/metal and a pioneer of hard rock in general. I'd put the first three Rush albums in the same category before they went prog rock. To me the metal sound is a lot of distortion and humbucker pickups focused on groove versus melodies. Led Zeppelin may have helped invent it but Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were probably the first dedicated metal bands.

 

My 1983 book of Led Zeppelin basslines calls them "heavy metal." But I knew a guy in the early '90s who said they were "light rock," with Slayer and Megadeth being "hard rock" and some unknown bands he liked as "heavy metal."

I haven't seen him in a long time. I presume he perished in the war that followed the Great Core Schism.

 

Broadly speaking, I think they're hard rock.