Neapolitan

I think that happened to Def Leppard too. With Jimi Hendrix it was reversed. He was bigger in the UK than America before "The Monterey International Pop Music Festival."

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Terrapin_Station

Now there's an example of a tune that's most definitely NOT mainstream in the US. In fact, I've never heard of it, or the artist, until you just posted it now.

Terrapin_Station

That's has nothing to do with whether they were mainstream or popular.

It's also not true that no one was doing music in the same vein as Zeppelin at the time, or that no one popular was doing music in the same vein as Zeppelin at the time, but whether anyone was doing music that was similar has nothing to do with whether they were popular.If you're referring to me, I didn't say anything like that at all. Zeppelin's career spanned the 70s. They were massively popular from the early 70s on. They weren't as popular when their first album came out, but who is? That doesn't mean they weren't popular, by the way, but they just weren't as massive until 1971/1972, when their fourth album was released (the fourth album was released in November of 1971). From that point on, they were huge.

The belief that Zeppelin weren't popular in the US in during the 70s is bizarre. But it's also a good gauge to see who is younger than someone who would have been a teen in the 1970s and/or to see who didn't live or spend much time in the US in the 70s.

Terrapin_Station

The charts--at least the singles charts--aren't at all a good way to check this. There are a few reasons for this, including that Billboard compiled singles charts primarily by using singles sales data during the 70s (well, that and the fact that you could buy chart placement in the 70s). Also, Billboard required that songs were available commercially as singles in order for them to be eligible for the singles charts. Zeppelin didn't release many singles. The band/the band's management didn't want to release any singles, but Atlantic released some anyway. Still, that wasn't their concentration.

Music radio, starting in the late 60s, and lasting through the early 80s, was dominated by FM "album-oriented rock" stations. Those were the most popular stations in all of the biggest markets. They included stations like WMMS in Cleveland, WSHE in Miami, and KMET in Los Angeles, all of which I listened to regularly, because I had family in all three places and spent part of every year in each locale. Album-oriented rock stations allowed DJs to make their own choices about what tracks to play from albums--a station would have every Led Zeppelin album, for example, and if you were a DJ and felt like playing "Out on the Tiles," you played "Out on the Tiles." And they often did things like playing entire album sides, too--"We've got side 1 of Led Zeppelin II coming up at 8 o'clock"). None of that is reflected on Billboard charts, especially since it's not as if Billboard had people monitoring radio stations all over the country and writing down what they played.

Blank.

I know what you're saying and agree a hundred percent. But since I wasn't born til 96, I have no other way to tell then with chart topping success.

Terrapin_Station

Well, you can just ask/listen to someone who was around and very involved with the music scene at the time. ;-)

My teen years mostly coincide with the 70s, and to a large extent music was my life already at that point.

Blank.

Chula Vista

I was born in 1960 for what it's worth. The first time I heard Zeppelin was on a jukebox in an arcade in 1970 - "Whole Lotta Love".

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Terrapin_Station

The death of album-oriented rock stations, by the way--which happened by the mid 80s--was the end of me listening to commercial music radio. Radio at that point became much more regimented, narrow, and "corporate." In retrospect, it's amazing that that didn't really happen until the mid 80s. Up until that point, radio was a great way of discovering new music, because of the freedom that DJs had to play whatever tracks they wanted to play, and from a really wide variety of artists. The same stations that would play Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Bad Company, Elton John etc. might play Kraftwerk, the Flying Lizards, the Ramones, Faust, Henry Cow, etc. too. That kept you listening, because you might only hear that Henry Cow track once, plus you waited for the DJ to say who it was so you could look for it at the store.

OccultHawk

Radio is still a great way to discover new music if you live near a university with a student run radio station. And there's still amazing radio shows being broadcast online. I often check playlists from college radio stations and then find it on Spotify.