I can't lie, I'm a little biased when it comes to zepp because I really can't stand Robert plant. He's one of the most overrated musicians I can think of. But page, bonham and jones were great, no doubt.

Robert Plant definitely ruins it for me as well. His vocal style isn't one I favor at all, and makes it very difficult for me to listen to Zep.

First of all, I strongly doubt that Iommi was the first guitarist to implement that tuning. Maybe he was the first to be recognized for doing so, but guitarists have been experimenting with and utilizing alternate tunings for ages. If a blues guitarist can tune to an open C chord for slide work then how much more common sense does it take to figure out that you can create a one-fingered barrable fifth by dropping your E string? Secondly, that tuning doesn't have nearly the same impact when your tone isn't saturated with gain, which basically reinforces my original point.

Are you forgetting how much pages playIng was saturated with gain? It was quite a bit. I know he did a lot of acoustic work, but other than that he used a lot of gain. "planet caravan" exemplifies iommi's less gainy, jazzy style. He could do more than just play with high gain.

Listen to a song called "you need loving" by the band The Small Faces. You'll not only see where Zeppelin ripped off "whole lotta love" (but the small faces also took it from muddy waters and Willie Dixon) but you'll also see wher Robert plant stole his vocal style.

I remember hearing at a lot of instances that Zeppelin stole a lot of styles and riffs from a lot of different songs.

They did, I admit it can be blown out of proportion a bit. A lot of bands did it, but zepp did it a lot.

A similar example would be the allman brothers. They took old blues songs and completely rearranged them, made them a lot more complex and basically made the music completely different to the point where you really couldn't tell it was an old blues song if it weren't for the lyrics. Even though they changed the songs so much, they still credited the original writers. If the allman brothers were like Zeppelin, they would have just changed the lyrics a little and taken full credit as the writer of song, the only difference is that the allmans altered the music of the original songs a lot more than zepp did.

Just because Iommi is missing a few fingertips doesn't necessarily mean he's Django Reinhardt. Planet Caravan is more the exception to the rule than anything else. I will give you that it does have a bit of a jazzy flair to it and it definitely showcases a different side of Iommi's playing, but here are many more examples of Page's work that are clean or acoustic than there are of Iommi's. It's true though, you don't really see Page diving into the jazz idiom at all. It just didn't fit into his style.

Yeah, when I learned that, I found it difficult to take them too seriously. Not a whole lot of originality.

I also don't see page mixing classical in his playing as much as iommi did, even if its presence wasn't all that strong. There are some acoustic examples of iommis classically styled work. He even worked it into his electric playing a little. He's more diverse than he seems sometimes.

And ya, he certainly isn't Django.