News Who is the old man on the cover of ‘Led Zeppelin IV’?
After forming in late 1968 from the ashes of The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin didn’t hang about. In January 1969, they released their hit debut album, already turning their focus to its November follow-up. These two early albums were aptly titled Led Zeppelin. In a shrewd move of marketing excellence, the band took its fans by surprise in 1970 by naming its third album Led Zeppelin.
By the time Led Zeppelin reached their fourth album, the joke was worn to the bone, but they had one last marketing ploy up their sleeve before acquiescing to convention with Houses of the Holy. The fourth Led Zeppelin album, often named Led Zeppelin IV for practicality, didn’t receive a name at all. Running a mile with Andrew Loog Oldham’s minimalist marketing tricks of the mid-1960s, they decided to omit words from the record labels and sleeve entirely, leaving prog fans confounded and ostensibly aroused.
This clever little trick left no mention of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham or, indeed, John Paul Jones. Instead, fans scratched their heads before an old, weathered man carrying his weight in twigs. Was this man a thatcher? A twisted fire starter? It really was anyone’s guess. Yet, most people could agree that this image seemed to have little in the way of connection to the musical content, which included the fabled ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
“I used to spend a lot of time going to junk shops looking for things that other people might have missed,” Page said not long after the album’s arrival. “Robert was on a search with me one time, and we went to this place in Reading where things were just piled up on one another. Robert found the picture of the old man with the sticks and suggested that we work it into our cover somehow. So we decided to contrast the modern skyscraper on the back with the old man with the sticks – you see the destruction of the old and the new coming forward.”
Often referred to as the “stick man”, this framed painting has been the subject of much conjecture over the past five decades. However, in 2023, historian Brian Edwards found the original photograph with notes describing the man in question as a Wiltshire thatcher by the name of Lot Long.
“As a fan, I had to pinch myself,” Edwards told Mojo at the time. “If you see something like that out of context, it takes a while for it to sink in. I had to have a reality check and show what I’d come across to my wife, but sure enough, it was our friend, the ‘stick man’.” After further rooting around, Edwards found the photograph to date back to 1892.
In a 2023 episode of Digging Deep with Robert Plant podcast, the iconic frontman likened himself to the “stick man”. “The old guy with the sticks on his back on Zeppelin IV — I’m now that guy!” Plant said jovially. “I pick up kindling everywhere I go and wrap it around with a piece of baling twine and shunt it on my back just in case anyone’s driving by, and they go, ‘There’s that bloke from the Led Zeppelin IV album cover!’”
How many albums did Led Zeppelin release?
Following their first four eponymous and/or untitled albums, Led Zeppelin went on to release four more studio albums: Houses of the Holy, Physical Graffiti, Presence and In Through the Out Door. Although the band dealt with internal friction through most of the late 1980s, things came to an abrupt end in 1980 following the tragic death of drummer John Bonham.
Led Zeppelin decided to disband out of respect for their late friend. In a press release on December 4th, 1980, the band announced to their fans: “We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with the sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.”
