What's the origin of the name 'Led Zeppelin'?

Question

What I mean to ask is.. how did the band come up with the name?

thanks in advance for your answers :O)

Answer 1

Keith Moon said to them ~ when they were about to tour as The New Yardbirds ~

"You'll go down like a lead zeppelin"
{meaning 'lead balloon'}

At the end of the tour they remembered that, changed the spelling to 'Led' {so as not to confuse Americans, they said!}, and started a new life as

Led Zeppelin

Answer 2

Allegedly coined by Keith Moon of "The Who" the original group,Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jon Bonham formed as the "New Yardbirds" taking the name from the original "Yardbirds" since Jimmy Page had taken an offer to join them and who split up after he joined. When Moon was told what name they were singing under, he told them they'd "go over like a lead balloon." They just did a little work on the cliche words and out came LED ZEPPELIN, a zeppelin being a balloon like airship. Just before their first concert on October 15, 1968 at Surrey University, England, they were to be billed, for the first time, as Led Zeppelin. The rest is history!

Answer 3

Led Zeppelin started out to be a new version of the old rock band "The Yardbirds." A friend of Jimmy Page didn't think the public would accept the new group so he said, "That will go over like a lead zeppelin." (A lead zeppelin could never fly.) Page liked the expression and used it for the band name. He changed the spelling of course.

Answer 4

Keith Moon told Jimmy Page that the band would go down like a "Lead Zeppelin".

They liked the name but changed the spelling to prevent people confusing its pronunciation with the thing that you walk a dog with!

Answer 5

I believe that Jimmy Page was talking to Keith Moon the drummer from the who. He was telling him about the band he was putting together and Keith said that will go over like a lead zeppelin. He was referring to the flying zeppelins like the hindenburg.

Answer 6

It was Robert Plant's first time in a full-service recording studio. "I'd go back to the playback room and listen," he recounts. "It had so much weight, so much power, it was devastating. I had a long way to go with my voice then, but the enthusiasm and sparking of working with Jimmy's guitar...it was so raunchy. All these things, bit-by-bit, started fitting into a trademark for us. We finished the album in three weeks. Jimmy invested all his Yardbirds money, which wasn't much, into our first tour. We took a road crew of one and off we went...."

Their first British show took place October 15th, 1968 at Surrey University. They performed under a new name, Led Zeppelin, coined by the Who's drummer Keith Moon. (As in "you'll go over like a...") An early staple of the live show would be the song "Dazed and Confused", which featured an electric Page solo played in part with a violin bow. The bow later became Page's famous solo-signature, and it's an interesting historical footnote that the idea was first suggested to him during a session by the violinist father of actor David McCallum, of Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Answer 7

Led Zeppelin was originally called The Yardbirds 2, but a reporter told them, "That name is going to go over like a led zeppelin." that is how they got the new name.

Answer 8

They were originally the New Yardbirds, which rose out of the wreck of the Yardbirds.

Keith Moon of the Who said that the new band was going to go over like a lead balloon (not last long!) but sure enough the name stuck, and so did the band . . .

Answer 9

LED ZEPPELIN - Jimmy Page was drinking with Moon and Entwhistle, who were bitching about their band mates Daltrey and Townshend. They joked about the two of them starting a band with Jimmy, and one of them said "Yeah, that will go over like a lead balloon". When Jimmy formed his own band, he remembered this and thought "Lead Zeppelin" would be good, both from that conversation and the heavy/light contradiction similar to the band named IRON BUTTERFLY. They decided to drop the "a" so Americans wouldn't mispronounce it.

Answer 10

Keith Moon of the Who stated in an interview that after hearing "The New Yardbirds" play in the studio, they would "go over like a lead balloon".

And thus, the band embraced the irony. The "Led" misspelling was the idea of their manager, who felt the American audience would mispronounce it as "leed".