3 Reasons Led Zeppelin’s “The Lemon Song” Got Banned

The lyrics were too sexually explicit for 1969 radio standards. The repeated “squeeze my lemon” and other double entendres made stations either pull the song or heavily edit it.

It was a reworked version of Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues” with amplified innuendo. Led Zeppelin turned the blues classic into something unmistakably raunchy, and Robert Plant’s enthusiastic delivery made it worse.

It’s the most explicit example of classic rock radio censorship. While “Whole Lotta Love” also faced backlash, “The Lemon Song” is the one people cite to prove that classic rock wasn’t always subtle.