Led Zeppelin Fantasy Draft Results

It was Good Times for one of us, Bad Times for the rest

2024 Rock and Roll Fantasy Draft™ Win-Loss Records:

1. Steve Leftridge 4-0

2. Justin Burch 0-4

3. Mark Manary 0-4

4. Spencer Marquart 0-4

Total 2024 Rock and Roll Fantasy Draft™ Standings (based on 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th place finishes)¹:

1. Steve Leftridge 16 (1st, 1st, 1st, 1st)

2. Justin Burch 11 (2nd, 3rd, 2nd, tied 2nd)

3. Mark Manary 10 (3rd, 2nd, 3rd, tied 2nd)

4. Spencer Marquart 4 (4th, 4th, 4th, 4th)

So it’s another celebration day for me and a heartbreaker for everyone else. Not to rub it in, but I ran away with this one, giving the other players no quarter, capturing a commanding 45% of the total vote. In fact, I had twice as many votes as the second-place finisher. That’s a good old-fashioned Bron-Y-Aur stomping. 

Before we get into the reasons that this was the Great Led Zeppelin Massacre of 2024, it’s worth noting that a Led Zeppelin draft presents challenges not present with the previous artists we’ve covered (Aerosmith, Willie Nelson, Fleetwood Mac). Namely, Zeppelin were not a band that pushed singles. Even with “Stairway to Heaven”—the band, the record label, and the fans knew that the song was an instant classic, yet Jimmy Page wouldn’t agree to a shortened radio edit of the song.² 

So since Led Zeppelin didn’t have many “hits” exactly, relatively few of their songs stand out as massive with regard to the rest of their catalog. Sure, they have a handful of songs that are clearly their most famous, and those—“Whole Lotta Love,” “Stairway,” “Kashmir,” “Black Dog,” etc.—ended up getting selected in the first couple of rounds. But so much of their catalog—virtually every song on their first five, and arguably six, albums—are all classics that are more or less equal in stature and recognizability to Zeppelin fans (which, of course, is any classic rock, hard rock, or heavy metal fan worth his or her salt). 

Speaking of her salt, our voting demographics this time reinforced what has long been obvious: Chicks don’t dig Zeppelin. Or at least most chicks don’t dig Zeppelin that much. The band’s fans have always been overwhelmingly male, and, consequently, almost no women participated in the voting this time. Not terribly surprising if you have ever, say, attended a Led Zeppelin tribute concert: Dudes make up 85% of the audience; the other 15% are their wives and girlfriends who are hoping to leave early. Just 7.5% of our voters this time were women, a new low for the Rock Draft™.

Incidentally, to prepare for this draft, I read the two best-known Led Zeppelin biographies: Stephen Davis’s notorious 1985 tell-all Hammer of the Gods, which I hadn’t read since high school. All three surviving members of Led Zeppelin hated that book and complained about its inaccuracies, unsurprising given that Davis’s primary source was the band’s psychotic, drug-addled tour manager Richard Cole. Much better is Bob Spitz’s Led Zeppelin: The Biography (2021), which also contains plenty of lascivious details about Zeppelin’s depraved behavior but is a far more detailed history of the band, a better chronicle of the music itself, and a more thorough piece of scholarship, as Spitz interviewed and accumulated hundreds of sources. 

Also, to determine the draft order this time, we assigned each other the four symbols from IV based on our primary roles in our bands (Asbury Park, Gateway). So guitarist Justin Burch was Jimmy Page's “Zoso” symbol; bassist Mark Manary took John Paul Jones’s circle over three interlocking ovals; drummer Spencer Marquart was John Bonham’s three-circle Venn diagram; I took Robert Plant’s circle around a feather. These, we drew out of a hat, which resulted in the following draft order:

Okay, so let’s get to it. Why did I leave the other teams trampled under (my) foot? I have broken down 13 reasons why the Led Zep draft represented good times for me, bad times for them. 

1. As expected, the first five Led Zeppelin albums dominated the draft. Every song on I, II, and IV was drafted, and only one song from III (“Hats Off to (Roy) Harper”) and one song from Houses of the Holy (“The Crunge”) went unpicked. As awesome as the last three proper Led Zep albums are (Coda doesn’t count), it’s clear that the average Zeppelin fan is most familiar with the first five albums. Aggregate any media outlet’s list of greatest Zeppelin songs, consult the most-played songs on Spotify or Apple Music, go see any Zeppelin tribute act: In each case, the first five Zep albums dominate. 

Accordingly, I took 12 of my 15 picks from those first five albums. Mark also took 12, which probably kept him in the running in the early going. Spencer took 10. Justin took just 8 of his 15 picks from the first five albums and lagged in the early voting but caught up to second place late. For the first 10 days of the draft, voting corresponded with the teams that relied most heavily on I, II, III, IV, and Houses of the Holy. The final tally is less correlative, but it’s one factor that kept me at the top of the standings. 

2. If the first five Zeppelin albums are the band’s most listened to, two of those five albums stand out as the most overall popular in terms of sales, critical acclaim, and fan lists: II and IV. And compared to the other three teams, I took the most songs from each of those albums. I outdrafted the other players on II (the Brown Bomber) with four songs and on IV with three songs. Again, given the distance between my first-place vote tally and the second-place finishers, the top of the standings correlates with which team drew most heavily from those two albums. 

3. Of all the players, Mark and I took the fewest songs (three each) from albums released after Houses of the Holy. Conversely, Justin had the most loyalty to the later albums, with seven post-Houses selections. Justin plucked a whopping four tunes from Physical Graffiti, his highest total from any album and double the next-closest competitor. Voters eventually rewarded him for it (most likely on the strength of “Kashmir”) enough to catch Mark, but it still kept him at a distant 2nd place. Spencer and Justin also took two each from In Through the Out Door, an album no one outside of Zeppelin’s die-hardest fans listens to.³

Here are the numbers of songs each team took from each album. The highest totals from each album are highlighted in blue.

 4. The round in which each song is selected matters. And I struck a clean sweep at the top of my draft, taking one song from each of the first five albums for my first five picks. I was the only player to do so. 

Other players were less deliberate with album representation in the early rounds. Mark waited until the 7th round to take something from III. Justin’s first Houses of the Holy track came in the 7th round, and he held off on I until round 8. Last-place-finishing Spencer held off on drafting from Houses of the Holy until the 8th round and didn’t get to III until the goddamned 10th round. 

As mentioned earlier, Justin showed a whole lotta love to the double album, distributing it uniformly through his team at picks 1, 6, 11, and 14. I took a more conservative approach, representing Graffiti halfway through (pick 7) and at the end (pick 15). And Mark and Spencer both treated Graffiti like an afterthought, taking just one song each and waiting until the 11th round (Spencer) and 13th round (Mark) to do so. The way the voting went, it would seem that picking two Graffiti songs was the sweet spot between Justin’s too many and Mark’s and Spencer’s too few. 

5. “Black Dog” and “Immigrant Song” (my first and second selections) are both heavyweights that could have been legitimately selected in the first round. “Whole Lotta Love,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Kashmir,” “Black Dog,” and “Immigrant Song” were almost certainly going to be the first five songs off the board, although what order they would be taken was anyone’s guess. So by drawing 4th in the overall draft order, and since we use a snake draft (meaning the 4th pick gets overall picks #4 and #5), I was guaranteed to get two of the top five songs. 

Going into the draft, the first three songs on my overall wishlist were those that were taken by the other teams as the first three overall picks: “Whole Lotta Love,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Kashmir.” So by picking fourth, my first-round selection (“Black Dog”) probably isn’t as strong as the other teams’ top picks; however, I was able to follow “Black Dog” with “Immigrant Song,” which resulted in my having, I would argue, the strongest overall 1-2 combo of the draft. 

Each draft position has costs and benefits. Having the first overall pick is nice, but then you must wait until the 7th overall pick to select again. (You also must negotiate the infamous “‘Walk This Way’ Stigma, which we will discuss in #13 below.) By going 4th, you lose the top three songs but compensate by getting the top second-round pick. In any case, in the 2024 Rock and Roll Fantasy Draft™ season, my draft orders have been 4th (Aersosmith), 1st (Willie Nelson), 3rd (Fleetwood Mac), and 4th (Led Zeppelin), and I’ve won all four times. So draft order is much less important than the other factors on this list, especially after the first two rounds. 

6. If you add up all of the teams’ running times, I have the longest playlist. Perhaps that shouldn’t matter, but the presence of long songs just might, at least in a Led Zeppelin draft. Fans associate Zeppelin with epic songs, and some of their most famous extend well past the seven-minute mark. 

Not only did I take the longest song in the draft (“Achilles Last Stand” at 10:26), I’m the only team to have two songs over eight minutes long. Furthermore, while “Dazed and Confused” clocks in at “just” 6:27 on the studio version, the song is famous for stretching out interminably during Zeppelin concerts: The version on the soundtrack for The Song Remains the Same, for instance, drags on just short of 27 minutes. So fans likely think of “Dazed and Confused” as a longer song than it is on the album.

Similarly, fans associate “Moby Dick” with its live versions on which Bonzo would fart around with hand drumming for 20 minutes or more. The “Moby Dick” captured on a Landover, Maryland bootleg (5/26/77) lasts a godforsaken 34:56. So not only does my team contain the longest songs, it reads like a list of even longer songs, which appeals to fans’ concepts of Zeppelin as makers of big, complex, consequential, grandiose tunes. 

On the other end of the spectrum, Spencer demonstrated a curious affinity for short songs. Over half of his songs (8 out of 15) do not reach the four-minute mark. Justin had just two sub-four-minute songs, and Mark and I each had only one song that short. All told, the final rankings in the draft correlated with total duration of each team’s songlist:

7. This sounds farcically obvious as determining factors go, but overall I picked more popular songs than everyone else. If we look at the most-streamed tracks on Apple Music, my team has three of the top five songs (“Immigrant Song,” “Black Dog,” “Ramble On”). 

Mark made a couple of early missteps in this regard. “Misty Mountain Hop” is a more popular IV track than “The Battle of Evermore,” yet Mark took the latter in round 5, and I was able to snag the former in round 6. I was flabbergasted when Mark picked “Evermore” because I just knew he would take “Dazed and Confused” as his 5th pick. When he didn’t, I did. 

Let’s take a look at where various publications rank “Dazed and Confused” on their lists of all-time greatest Led Zeppelin songs, plus the song’s streaming ranking on Apple Music.

 “Dazed and Confused” has an aggregated ranking of 9.5 on these lists, and yet I was able to select it as the 20th overall pick in the draft, a felonious steal. So when it comes to “Dazed and Confused,” my opponents were apparently both. 

Justin took some songs that were sure to get drafted,  but he promoted them to conspicuously early rounds, most notably “All My Love” in round 2 and “Ten Years Gone” in round 6. And Spencer made room for songs that may have had no business being drafted at all, like the sloppy-pickin’ throwaway “Hot Dog,” the two-minute instrumental segue way “Black Mountain Side,” and the second-class “Poor Tom” (from Coda, of all places). 

8. The Bonzo factor. When it comes to John Bonham’s writing credits, Mark led the field with six songs⁴. (Spencer and I had three apiece; Justin had two.) But nobody knows or cares which songs Bonham wrote. They do, however, care about the songs on which Bonham’s playing is most prominent and awesome. Bonzo’s cranium-shattering drums at the beginning of “When the Levee Breaks” is a major reason that the song made sense as Mark’s second overall pick. 

But I dominated the Bonzo Beats with “Achilles Last Stand” (Bonham’s greatest showcase), “Moby Dick” (Bonham’s most famous song), “Four Sticks” (with Bonzo playing in 5/4, using, yes, four drumsticks), and “The Ocean”⁵ (with Bonzo’s thunderous drum lines, which the Beastie Boys sampled on two different songs). 

Ironically, our drummer Spencer ignored Bonham entirely. He passed on “Moby Dick” in the early rounds, and while I held out hope that he’d select “Bonzo’s Montreux” from Coda late, Spencer did the equivalent of choking on his own vomit and took “Poor Tom” instead. 

10. How did voters feel about Zeppelin’s acoustic side? Again, the key was balance. Mark stayed away from Zep’s acoustic guitars almost entirely. Justin hit a few acoustic tunes, but they may not have been as recognizable as he would have liked: See #11 for that discussion. 

Spencer was the clear acoustic champion, going almost completely unplugged on the back half of his team: Three of his last four songs, and five of his last seven, are acoustic-based. One voter cited Spencer’s acoustic fetish as the reason he voted for Spencer’s team, but most voters were not similarly charmed. 

Like Mark, I went heavy with electric rock songs, but unlike Mark, I made two acoustic precision strikes near the top of my list: “Over the Hills and Far Away” (round 3) and “Ramble On” (round 4). That seemed to do the trick, scratching the itch of acoustic-Zep lovers while remaining predominantly loud and electric across the rest of the list.

11. There may have been an issue with song titles. Zeppelin are one of those bands that occasionally gives a song a title that never (or only glancingly) appears in the lyrics of the song itself. Most of their songs are obviously titled: “Stairway to Heaven,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Ramble On,” “All My Love,” “Tangerine,” lots of others. 

But some titles are completely elusive. Among those, some are such famous songs or have such unique titles that the songs are still highly recognizable. I had a bunch of those: “Black Dog” (named after a black dog that wandered into the studio while they were cutting the track), “Over the Hills and Far Away,” and “Moby Dick” (an instrumental). But those songs helped rather than hindered my vote totals since the songs are big enough that fans can still match the titles to a melody (or at least a long-ass drum solo). Same with “Trampled Under Foot” (no mention of that title in the song, but it’s the second most-popular song on Physical Graffiti) and “Achilles Last Stand” (ditto, but it’s easily the most-popular song on Presence). 

Then there are songs that have titles that (a) don’t show up in the song’s lyrics (or barely do in a variant form) and (b) are vague or indistinguishable enough titles that many fans may not recognize the songs by their titles alone. Mark had a couple of these—“Travelling Riverside Blues” and “Out on the Tiles,” which you’d know the second it starts playing, but you might not be able to conjure the lyrics or melody based solely on reading the title. Justin also had some in this category: “Friends,” “Thank You,” “The Rover.” They are huge Zep classics, especially the first two, but some voters might not have recognized them on the page if the song were not playing. 

12. Which team had the blues? Well, we know which  three teams got the blues after the votes started coming in. But which team showed the most love to Zeppelin’s famous high-octane reinterpretations of American blues songs? 

Mark did. He took four of them (“I Can’t Quit You Baby,” “How Many More Times,” “Traveling Riverside Blues,” and “When the Levee Breaks”). Did Mark’s allegiance to Zeppelin’s bluesiest material help or hurt him? He probably battled it to a draw. No reasonable person would argue against drafting “When the Levee Breaks” in the second round, but taking the last two plodding blues songs from the debut album and a non-album blues number probably did Mark no favors. 

The blues haters: Justin, who took just one (“You Shook Me”), and even held off on that until the very last spot (unless you count “I’m Gonna Crawl” as a blues song, which would be a stretch), and Spencer, who shit-canned Zeppelin’s blues songs altogether. So, again, I appear to have hit the sweet spot between Mark’s too many blues songs and Justin’s and Spencer’s too few. 

13. Can a song be too big? For our first-ever Rock and Roll Fantasy Draft™ (Aerosmith) back in July, Spencer drew the overall #1 pick. He made the obvious selection, “Walk This Way,” as any of us probably would have. After all, “Walk This Way” is without question Aerosmith’s signature song and the band’s all-time most-popular classic. And yet Spencer finished dead last in the Aerosmith draft. 

Of course, Spencer’s other 14 picks went a long way in deciding his team’s fate. But still—“Walk This Way” didn’t give him any boost. And maybe it even hurt him. One theory is that most artists have one song that is just so popular, so overplayed, so obvious that voters roll their eyes at it (or recoil from it) and move on to the next team. This is the Walk This Way Stigma: the phenomenon in which a song is paradoxically too popular to be popular. At least with Rock and Roll Fantasy Draft™ voters. 

In our second RARFD™ (Willie Nelson), Justin’s first pick was “On the Road Again,” which got saddled with the Walk This Way Stigma as polls opened and voters appeared to be rejecting Justin’s topline. Like “Walk This Way,” “On the Road Again” is a colossal smash that you’re always happy to hear in concert, but you’d never play it at a party to try to impress anyone, and no self-respecting band, if asked to pick one Willie song to cover, would choose something as obvious and oversaturated as “On the Road Again.” 

Fleetwood Mac didn’t really have a first-rounder with that same effect although three out of four teams were careful to avoid “Don’t Stop” after it wore out its welcome as the theme song for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. 

But Led Zeppelin certainly has a candidate for the Walk This Way Stigma, and I don’t need to tell you what it is. 

What is one to do about “Stairway to Heaven”? Mark had the first overall pick and sidestepped the Walk This Way Stigma by going with “Whole Lotta Love” instead. But with the second overall pick, Spencer went ahead and selected “Stigma to Heaven.” It was a stairway that apparently led him straight to the bottom of the standings. 

But did voters actually see “Stairway” at the top of Spencer’s list and immediately disqualify him for that reason alone? I’m skeptical. “Stairway” is still probably the consensus pick for Zeppelin’s greatest song, and I had decided beforehand that if I got the #1 pick, I would’ve selected “Stairway” too. Still, it’s clear that “Stairway” did little to help Spencer attract votes. I am, however, acquainted with a couple of notable exceptions. 

My truelove consort, Kristyn, voted for Spencer based solely on the fact that “Stairway” was the song to which she first slow-danced with a boy (some kid named Murphy at summer camp in Durango, Colorado in 1982). And my daughter, Logan, voted for Spencer’s team because “Stairway to Heaven” is the only Led Zeppelin song she had ever heard of. 

By the way, my mom also voted, heartily going with Team A (Mark), prefacing her vote with a confident “I’ve got this one!”

Given her firm declaration, I followed up and asked her what sold her on Mark’s list: 

It’s true that if my mom were forced to save her own life by humming any of the 60 Led Zeppelin songs from our draft, I would have to take her shopping for tombstones. My hunch is that she picked Team A after seeing the top song, “Whole Lotta Love,” and, romantic dreamer she has always been, figured it sounded like the title of something Paul Anka or Lou Rawls would sing. But, hey, in the Rock and Roll Fantasy Draft™, every vote counts. And, baby, I’m not foolin’. 

Next up: R.E.M. 

We will be just in time for the latest rock bio from the great Peter Ames Carlin, who has written the definitive biographies of Springsteen (2012’s Bruce) and Paul Simon (2016’s Homeward Bound). The Name of This Band is R.E.M., released this week, is available now wherever books are sold. We draft later this month. Thanks for reading and for voting. 

Team A (Mark Manary)

1. Whole Lotta Love 

2. When the Levee Breaks

3. Heartbreaker   

4. The Song Remains the Same 

5. The Battle of Evermore 

6. Communication Breakdown   

7. Gallows Pole

8. Travelling Riverside Blues

9. In the Evening 

10. No Quarter 

11. Celebration Day 

12. How Many More Times 

13. Custard Pie 

14. Out On the Tiles 

15. I Can’t Quit You Baby  

TEAM B (Spencer Marquart)

1. Stairway to Heaven 

2. Rock and Roll 

3. Good Times Bad Times 

4. What Is and What Should Never Be  

5. Fool in the Rain 

6. Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman) 

7. Babe I’m Gonna Leave You

8. Dancing Days  

9. Hey, Hey, What Can I Do

10. That’s the Way

11. Houses of the Holy 

12. Bron-Y-Aur Stomp

13. Hot Dog 

14. Black Mountain Side

15. Poor Tom

TEAM C (Justin Burch)

1. Kashmir 

2. All My Love 

3. Going to California

4. D’yer Mak’er 

5. Thank You

6. Ten Years Gone 

7. The Rain Song

8. Your Time is Gonna Come 

9. Tangerine

10. Nobody’s Fault But Mine

11. The Rover 

12. Friends

13. I’m Gonna Crawl 

14. Down by the Seaside 

15. You Shook Me  

TEAM D (Steve Leftridge)

1. Black Dog

2. Immigrant Song

3. Over the Hills and Far Away

4. Ramble On

5. Dazed and Confused

6. Misty Mountain Hop

7. Trampled Under Foot

8. Since I’ve Been Loving You

9. The Ocean

10. Achilles Last Stand

11. The Lemon Song

12. Bring It On Home

13. Moby Dick

14. Four Sticks

15. In the Light

1.  4 pts for 1st place, 3 pts for 2nd place, and so forth. 

2. Page even insisted on leaving the album that contains “Stairway” untitled. As you no doubt know, it is most commonly referred to as IV but sometimes called Four Symbols or Zoso or, as Mark called it when we were kids, Runes. Page wouldn’t even agree to put the band’s name anywhere on the album’s cover or packaging. Naturally, for our purposes here, we’ll refer to it as IV. 

3. I love that album, and I’m not proud of the fact that I came up empty from it in this draft. I had “All My Love” and “Fool in the Rain” on my to-draft list, of course, but Spencer took “Fool” early (round 5) and Justin took “All” very early (round 2). I considered “In the Evening” to be a last resort; regardless, Mark took it in round 9. 

4. Predictably, Mark, as a bassist, also led all teams with John Paul Jones writing credits with eight.

5. That’s also Bonzo’s voice you hear on the intro to “The Ocean.”