Led Zeppelin played its first full reunion show since 1980, when the band split up after bassist John Paul Jones found drummer John Bonham dead in his bed after an evening of heavy vodka consumption. The mainstream media of the world hailed the show as part of a successful trend of reunions by artists like The Police, Van Halen, etc, but failed to recognize just how BIG this event was. In a way, it is fair to say that it simply could not get bigger than this. Elvis is dead and there's only two Beatles left. To fully understand how big the Led Zeppelin reunion was, just visit the RIAA website and research album sales.
Led Zeppelin are the heaviest of the elite recording artists who have sold in excess of 100 million albums in America....
Only The Beatles and Elvis Presley (and Garth Brooks in the modern country-pop sweepstakes) soar above Led Zeppelin. Dozens of classic rock radio stations around the U.S. "get the Led out" with all Zeppelin hours of programming. By contrast to the 110 million albums that Zeppelin have sold, other stadium giants of their day like The Rolling Stones (66M sales), Fleetwood Mac (49M) and The Doors (32M) have less than half the commercial potency. Only The Eagles come close at 94 million albums, with artists like Pink Floyd trailing around 74 million. Compared to their contemporaries of equal heaviness like Jimi Hendrix (23 million), The Who (20 million), Black Sabbath ( 15 million), and their Swan Song/Peter Grant management brothers, Bad Company (16 million), they are in a class by their own. The cultural legacy of Led Zeppelin around the world simply can't be ignored.
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