Ranking Every Led Zeppelin Live Album

To be so well-regarded as a touring band, Led Zeppelin certainly shied away from live albums.

They released just one official concert recording during their ’70s-era heyday, 1976’s bombastic, oft-criticized The Song Remains the Same. The LP was an international Top 5 smash, selling more than four million copies in the U.S. alone. But it was hardly definitive.

Led Zeppelin wouldn’t release another live album for more than 20 years. Even then, 1997’s BBC Sessions was as notable for what it didn’t include (like, say, the previously unreleased “Sunshine Woman”?) as what it did. An expanded version called The Complete BBC Sessions followed almost two decades later, very belatedly rectifying the problem.

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By then, two more Led Zeppelin albums had arrived, one from the peak of their powers (2003’s How the West Was Won, featuring material from a pair of 1972 concerts in California) and another in the autumn of their years (2012’s Celebration Day, from a December 2007 concert at London’s O2 Arena).

The multi-platinum Led Zeppelin, a career-retrospective release from 2003, completed their official live discography. Those four albums are joined by one partial reunion, 1994’s No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded, and Jimmy Page‘s Led Zeppelin-focused Black Crowes collaboration on 2000’s Live at the Greek.

It’s not much, especially considering that classic-rock contemporaries like the Rolling Stones and the Who have issued more than a dozen live projects apiece. Heck, Paul McCartney himself has released more than Led Zeppelin since leaving the Beatles.

Thankfully, more than one of those later-period live Zeppelin projects can be considered essential. It took a while, as this ranking of every Led Zeppelin live album shows, but they finally got it right.

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