Good Times Bad Times

“Good Times Bad Times” is the first track on Led Zeppelin, the band’s debut album, released on Atlantic Records in the United States on January 12, 1969. Track 1, Side 1. By then the band had been playing live since September 7, 1968, performing as the New Yardbirds and drawing from blues standards including “Dazed and Confused,” “You Shook Me,” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby.” “Good Times Bad Times” was not in that setlist. It was built in the studio, recorded October 3, 1968 at Olympic Studios in London, produced by Jimmy Page. What stopped listeners immediately was John Bonham’s bass drum. He played rapid triplet patterns in the verse using a single pedal, a technique that sounded physically impossible. Most people assumed two bass drums. It was one.

Fifty-eight years ago today, August 12, 1968, the four men who would become Led Zeppelin played together for the first time. The room was a small basement on Gerrard Street in London’s West End, wall-to-wall amplifiers with barely enough space for the door to open. They were calling themselves the New Yardbirds, fulfilling touring commitments Page had inherited from his previous band. The first song they played was “The Train Kept A-Rollin'.” Robert Plant remembered it this way: “It felt like we’d found something that we had to be very careful with because we might lose it. But it was remarkable, the power.” They had been in the same room for minutes.

The debut album was recorded in approximately 30 hours across a handful of sessions at Olympic Studios. It peaked at number 10 on the Billboard 200 in the United States. “Good Times Bad Times” was released as a US single on March 10, 1969, with “Communication Breakdown” on the B-side. It reached number 80 on the Billboard Hot 100, the band’s first chart entry as a single. Within a year of that basement in Gerrard Street, Led Zeppelin was selling out arenas on both sides of the Atlantic. The whole thing started in about 30 minutes on a Tuesday afternoon in Soho.