Led Zeppelin Tournament Bracket



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So earlier in this self-imposed quarantine, some friends and I decided to make a 64 entry tournament bracket and fill it up with songs from Led Zeppelin. If you’re not familiar with the band, Wikipedia can give a better summary than I:

“Many critics consider Led Zeppelin one of the most successful, innovative, and influential rock groups in history. They are one of the best-selling music artists in the history of audio recording; various sources estimate the group’s record sales at 200 to 300 million units worldwide. With RIAA-certified sales of 111.5 million units, they are the third-best-selling band and fifth-best-selling act in the US. Each of their nine studio albums placed in the top 10 of the Billboard album chart and six reached the number-one spot. They achieved eight consecutive UK number-one albums. Rolling Stone magazine described them as “the heaviest band of all time”, “the biggest band of the Seventies”, and “unquestionably one of the most enduring bands in rock history”. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995; the museum’s biography of the band states that they were “as influential” during the 1970s as the Beatles were during the 1960s.”

But back to the bracket. I wanted to figure out a way to take my personal biases out of the seeding process, so I resorted to using the Spotify “number of plays” for seeding purposes. I ended up taking the top 7 songs by “number of plays” from each of their 9 studio albums. For the 64th entry, I looked at the songs that just missed the cut and took the one with the highest “number of plays” (I can’t remember which track it is.)

@Jalfrezi expressed some interest in doing this, and he looked at my list and had some suggestions about song additions/removals, particularly removing a few songs from Coda and adding a few in from Physical Graffiti so as not to punish the latter for being a double album. I agreed with his suggestions so here we are.

The four regions of the bracket are aptly titled I, II, III, and IV. Here they are:




So that this whole exercise doesn’t take 4 years, I’m going to post the polls for all 8 initial matchups in the “I” region, then for the “II” region and so on. As we start to weed out the riff-raff (is there such a thing for Zep?) and get into some really good matchups, I’ll slow down the voting to allow for more discussion (that’s not to say we can’t discuss early round matchups, but the voting will be quicker.) I’ll cross-post this to a few other threads so we can get some folks in here, and then I’ll set up the polls. Off we go!

8 Likes

Brilliant and quite an undertaking.

Zep fans I know… @Rivaldo , @pyatnitski, @microbet. Many others I’m sure, sorry. @suzzer99, @ChrisV both like a bit of 70s rock . Maybe @Rexx?

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I don’t think I can contribute but I look forward to railing. Cool idea!

This is going to be amazing!

ETA: Do all voters have to contribute write ups?

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I love zeppelin, im in.

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I won’t heavily contribute, but I will give every song a fair listen and vote accordingly.

I’m not much of a classic rock fan, so I may not have ever even heard of some of these songs.

a lot of the first matchups seem like slam dunks for higher seed, i got You shook me though in the small upset.

These polls for region I will be open until Wed night, then we’ll move on to region II.

  • 1 - Stairway to Heaven
  • 16 - Candy Store Rock

0 voters

  • 8 - Moby Dick
  • 9 - Houses of the Holy

0 voters

  • 5 - Tangerine
  • 12 - Custard Pie

0 voters

  • 4 - Over the Hills and Far Away
  • 13 - In the Light

0 voters

  • 6 - The Ocean
  • 11 - Gallows Pole

0 voters

  • 3 - Heartbreaker
  • 14 - Night Flight

0 voters

  • 7 - Ten Years Gone
  • 10 - How Many More Times

0 voters

  • 2 - Kashmir
  • 15 - Carouselambra

0 voters

No I don’t think that’s necessary. People can contribute as they choose. If you wanna fight for a particular song or whatever, have at it.

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need to show poll results live IMO, because people need to know if they need to implore people one way or another if its close

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It’s sort of close but I’m going the other way on that by dint of the innovative wandering bass and some supercharged rock n roll guitar breaks that show a deep love for scotty imo.

I’m spite voting against Stairway every chance I get.

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I told jalfrezi that I’m far from a Zeppelin connoisseur, so feel free to participate even if you don’t know the song(s) before now. But please at least listen to them before voting lol.

damn i just listened to lemon song for first time in a while and yea thats gonna be a tough one.

Great point. I just tried to edit and I can’t change polls after 5 min, but I’ll do that for all polls going forward. There shouldn’t be anything crazy this round anyway.

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I should be able to change it for you if you want me to.

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Damn, gotta find my own youtube links?

If it’s not too big of an ask, could you change them to always visible?

Another good point. I can add those going forward as well.

How is Moby Dick an 8 seed and all my love a 5?