Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	97
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Entertainment Weekly	A−
Pitchfork Media	8.8/10
Rolling Stone
Stylus	A−
Uncut

How the West Was Won is a triple live album by the English rock group Led Zeppelin, released by Atlantic Records on compact disc on 27 May 2003, and DVD-Audio on 7 October 2003. These original performances are from the band's 1972 concert tour of the United States, recorded at the L.A. Forum on 25 June 1972 and Long Beach Arena on 27 June 1972.

Guitarist Jimmy Page considers Led Zeppelin at this point to have been at their artistic peak, as is mentioned in the album's liner notes. In an interview he gave to The Times newspaper in 2010, when asked which performances from Led Zeppelin's career stand out to him now, he made reference to these gigs:

I think what we did on ... How the West was Won – that 1972 gig – is pretty much a testament of how good it was. It would have been nice to have had a little more visual recordings, but there you go. That’s the conundrum of Led Zeppelin!

For many years, live recordings of these two shows only circulated in the form of bootlegs, and even then only certain audience recordings were available to fans and collectors (for example, Burn Like a Candle). Though several soundboard recordings of Led Zeppelin concerts were circulated amongst fans after having been stolen from Page's personal archive some time in the mid−1980s, no soundboards of the 1972 Long Beach or LA Forum shows were taken, meaning the release of How the West Was Won was the first chance fans had of hearing the soundboard versions of these concerts.

The songs from the two shows underwent some extensive editing and audio engineering by Page at Sarm West Studios in London before being released on the album. Some songs which were played at the concerts, such as "Communication Breakdown", "Tangerine", "Thank You" and a rare version of "Louie Louie" from the 25 June show, were left off the album.

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