The Ones That Got Away: Near Misses With Rare Records - #3 Led Zeppelin

Here’s another sorry tale of how I let a rare and valuable record slip through my fingers. Like the earlier pieces this one also concerns Led Zeppelin – their debut album, in fact. But unlike those other records I did actually own this LP for quite some time. Although that probably only makes this saga even more lamentable.

So what? you may say. LZ’s albums sold by the squillons after all. Not this version, however. In the strange and obsessive world of record collecting this could be the single most desirable Zeppelin artefact of all, at least among the records which were sold commercially (ie not promotional releases). I’m talking about the very first UK pressing of Led Zeppelin (Atlantic 588 171). To be specific, it’s the one with the album title and Atlantic Records logo printed on the front in turquoise, with a distinctive grey stripe/border along the bottom edge of the sleeve.

Why is this album so rare? It’s because only a very limited amount (at a guess, maybe just a couple of thousand copies, although don’t quote me on that) escaped into the world before the sleeve was reprinted and the turquoise print was replaced with the orange lettering we are so familiar with today.

I’ve never heard a convincing explanation as to why this variation came to be. Perhaps it was a mistake, but I like to think was something as simple as the printer running out of turquoise ink. Such slipshod cost cutting measures were not uncommon back in the 60s. It was only rock & roll, after all. Whatever the reason, this early version of the album sold out within weeks (if not days) making it incredibly rare today among those who value such things.

A change in the colour of the print may seem like a trivial thing to get all fired up about, but that kind of detail is meat and drink in the world of record collecting. And Led Zeppelin collectors are some of the most obsessive of all, probably second only to Beatles fans in that respect. I should mention that apart from the sleeve, there are several other tiny differences/discrepancies which distinguish the early pressings of this LP, but we won’t go there. Uncorrected matrix numbers and amended publishing credits are way beyond the scope of this blog, besides which, that way madness lies for sure.

But what of the record itself? It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the debut Led Zeppelin album. Released in early 1969, it was a towering achievement which swept all before it. “Communication Breakdown”, “How Many More Times”, “You Shook Me”, “Dazed and Confused” and the rest created shock waves which are still felt throughout rock today. Following on from the Mayall/Clapton “Beano Album” and Jeff Beck’s Truth debut, Jimmy Page saw a lucrative gap in the heavy rock market and claimed it for his own.

I’d seen Zeppelin play at Sheffield University on November 23, 1968, over four months before the album hit UK stores. Discounting a few warm-up dates in Scandinavia, Sheffield was just the 8th gig they ever played and, in fact, the advance posters were still billing them as “The New Yardbirds”, although the new name was in place by the time I saw them. Today it would be unusual for a band to tour without a record of some kind in the shops, but that’s exactly what Zeppelin did in late 1968.

I bought my copy of Led Zeppelin I (as it became known retrospectively) in mid-April 1969 at Bradleys record store in Sheffield city centre, just days after it was released. The price of a new LP at the time was around £2. I kept it for a few years before trading it in at Honest Jon’s record store on Portobello Road. You did that kind of thing back then. If you needed money to pay the rent on your grotty bed-sit, or cash to buy more records, you’d take an armful of LPs down to the local second-hand store. The turquoise sleeve variation meant absolutely nothing to me at that time. Rare records were not yet a thing in the early 70s, so the store gave you the going rate of one or two pounds for each album, if they were in good condition (and if you were lucky).

So that’s where my rare turquoise copy of the first Led Zeppelin LP ended up - traded in for a quid at Honest Jon’s. Today, things are very different, and in recent years we’ve seen the value of this record go stratospheric. The highest selling price I could find on Discogs was around £8,000 while several copies between £5,000 and £7,000 have been recorded on Popsike.com. In June 2024 esteemed music journalist and broadcaster Danny Baker sold his personal copy at auction for £2,800. In the Omega Auction catalogue notes Danny wrote:

"Bought, LATE 70S, in Greenwich upstairs in a commercial duplex that mainly sold old books and magazines. Long gone now. I didn’t have a copy of LZ at the time and had no clue about the colours on the cover. It was ten pounds and the man reiterated the price to me before putting it in a bag. It was ten times dearer than anything else in his racks."

Polydor handled the Atlantic label in Britain until 1971 when distribution switched to Kinney/Warner Bros. That’s when the Atlantic labels changed from their familiar plum/orange to green/orange (see below). Kinney was superseded by WEA Records in 1972.

While my turquoise copy may be long gone, I do still have three early vinyl copies of Led Zeppelin I (of course I do) comprising a couple of plum label pressings and an early 70s Kinney/Warner Bros issue, all with orange lettering, naturally. And that’s before we get to the many and varied CD variations. But that’s probably enough tedious information for one day.