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It was 1970 when Paul Hammond’s father began playing Led Zeppelin on the family’s reel-to-reel in Montco. Then-five-year-old Hammond wasn’t exactly a fan. “I was so scared of that music,” he says. “It was dark. I was much more comfortable listening to the Beatles, who seemed so … happy.”

Decades later, Hammond, who still lives in Montco, stands in for Jimmy Page in the most successful tribute band there is to Led Zeppelin, a group that hasn’t performed since a 2007 one-night reunion. Get the Led Out, in which Hammond plays guitar alongside singer Paul Sinclair and a lineup of four top session musicians from the Philly area (the two Pauls are the only original members), takes a break from a 50-city tour this month to play a three-night run at Collingswood’s 1,050-seat Scottish Rite Auditorium. And then they’re back in the area for shows at the Keswick in June.

In the early 2000s, Hammond and Sinclair weren’t exactly selling out theaters. They were working recording-studio jobs while playing a classic rock cover band’s monthly bar gig. Then, in 2003, Sinclair got a call from somebody who wanted to launch a Led Zeppelin tribute. The caller didn’t just want the band to sound the part. He wanted the members to look like Led Zeppelin, too. “Paul pretty much put his foot down when they said he should dye his hair blond to look like Robert Plant,” Hammond says of his dark-haired bandmate. They quickly abandoned the look-alike plan.

What would set Get the Led Out apart, the pair decided, was that their tribute band would perform, note for note, the album versions of Led Zeppelin songs, complete with vocal and guitar overdubs (which Led Zeppelin utilized heavily in the studio) and sound effects, such as the wild theremin-punctuated interlude in “Whole Lotta Love.”We play 130 shows a year. And not in small rock clubs — in theaters. It’s fair to say I don’t have to do anything else to live. This is it.”

Because Led Zeppelin was a four-piece band, and, well, because its members were likely inebriated much of the time, this was something the iconic original group couldn’t do had they wanted to. Hammond acquired and performs on the same guitar and amp models — down to the year — that Page used. Hammond says the value of one guitar is $25,000. The result is like you’re sitting at home listening to the album, except it’s being performed live. Meticulously. And it all seems to have worked.

“We really didn’t have to pay our dues,” says Hammond. “Nobody else was attempting it, and we were all virtuosos. So it just took off.”

In retrospect, Hammond confesses, he originally wanted nothing to do with a Led Zeppelin tribute — or any tribute, for that matter. “I just wanted to help out