1. Their guitarist used to be “Little Jim.”
As a prolific young guitarist playing on session work by the Who and the Kinks, Jimmy Page was called Little Jim to distinguish him from another session player, Big Jim Sullivan. In 1966, Page joined blues rockers the Yardbirds. “It was a hands-on apprenticeship,” he tells Blender.

2. Their bassist was a swashbuckler.
John Baldwin took the alias John Paul Jones from a 1959 film about a Revolutionary naval hero. An in-demand string arranger, Jones got to know Page on the session circuit. “There was a good scene in those days,” Jones remembers. “We’d say good-bye in the morning and meet up at the next session.” After Led Zeppelin, he arranged the string parts for such songs as R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.”

3. The singer and drummer were pains in the ass.
Frontman Robert Plant and drummer John “Bonzo” Bonham knew each other from playing in Birmingham groups the Crawling King Snakes and Band of Joy. “Nobody wanted to be around us, because we believed in ourselves so much,” Plant explained in 2002. “We were really unbearable.”

4. Their name was a joke …
Page talked about forming a supergroup with the Who’s Keith Moon and John Entwistle and Yardbird Jeff Beck, but they couldn’t find a singer. Moon suggested the name Led Zeppelin, from an old quip about an unsuccessful band going down like a lead balloon. “Keith was coming up with everything,” Page says. “It was a pipe dream, really.”

5. … but it was better than Obstweedle …
That was the Lord of the Rings–inspired group Plant was fronting when Page first came to check him out. “There was hardly anyone there,” Page remembers. “I immediately responded to the range and the power. He wasn’t whispering into the microphone.”

6. … and much better than the Nobs.
In Copenhagen in 1970, Zep were forced to play under an alias after Danish aristocrat Eva von Zeppelin threatened to sue. “They may be world-famous, but four shrieking monkeys are not going to use a privileged family name without permission,” said an aggrieved Frau Zeppelin.

7. Nobody messed with their manager.
Peter Grant, a fearsome former wrestler, earned a reputation for negotiating unprecedented royalties, threatening promoters and waging war on bootleggers. “He had some wonderful ideas, and he had the clout to get them done,” Page says. Adds Jones: “If you ask other managers, he’s a hero.”

8. America loved them …
Led Zeppelin made their name by touring the U.S. five times in their first 18 months. “When the door is cracked slightly, you don’t just peep through — you kick it open,” Page says.

9. … except for the critics.
Zep were panned throughout their career; rock writer and future Bruce Springsteen manager Jon Landau called their 1970 tour “loud, impersonal, exhibitionistic, violent and often insane.” “How can we be reviled in so many different generations,” Plant later protested, “and then find out we were the people’s favorite band?”

10. Don’t bring up Hammer of the Gods.
Stephen Davis’s unauthorized 1985 biography painted them as debauched rock pigs, thanks to anecdotes such as the notorious “shark incident,” in which Vanilla Fudge’s Mark Stein filmed tour manager Richard Cole inserting a live red snapper into a groupie. But don’t ask Page or Jones to sign your copy. “It’s a miserable book, and we don’t really want to talk about it,” Jones says flatly.

11. Jimmy Page: marked for death.
“I was once informed that someone was set on killing me while I was in the States,” Page revealed in 1973. “It was a real Manson situation. Eventually this guy was tracked down and got carted away to hospital. He would have definitely had a try, though.”