The Led Zeppelin album Jimmy Page thought could never be made again: “Working in a positive way”
Some of the greatest albums of all time manage to capture the time and place in which they were written. Regardless of how much dated vernacular might be sprinkled into every line, it’s easy to look at the most celebrated works of the 1970s and see a clear picture of what life was like then. Although some records have a timeless sheen behind them, Jimmy Page thought that Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti was far too ambitious to be made again.
Before they had landed on their double album, though, the hard rock legends already felt like they were building to something. It wasn’t an accident that every one of their albums was about expanding on the concept of what they could. Each of them had a different sonic face, and no matter how well it did or didn’t work, it was always expanding the palette of what they could i the studio.
And once Houses of the Holy arrived, many of those styles were on full display. Every Zeppelin record before it may have had stronger songs, but hearing them go from pure hard rock on ‘The Song Remains the Same’ to reggae on ‘Dy’er Ma’ker’ to full-on balladry on ‘The Rain Song’ was just a small sample of everything that they could do.
So now that they had a double album to work with, they had much more wiggle room to build their classic off of. There were still the traditional blues tunes that populated nearly every Zeppelin project, like ‘In My Time of Dying’, but there were also subtle differences that no one had considered before on tunes like ‘Ten Years Gone’.
And it’s almost impossible to gloss over ‘Kashmir’. Compared to their other epics both before and after this album, this delve into world music with an orchestra behind them is the closest that they ever came to making the same kind of grandeur of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in one track.
Even though Page was more than happy to be on top of the world by the time it was released, he knew that the days of making something of that size and scope were long gone, saying, “With Physical Graffiti, you can see all the different things that we were able to do that people can’t do now–constantly working in a positive way, for no other reason than making good music.”
Considering that the biggest names in music had started to shift towards glam rockers like David Bowie and Marc Bolan, Page got his point across just by being one of the most accomplished guitarists in the world. Most people relied on the flash and spectacle, but Zeppelin created their own theatre just by laying waste to any act that stood in their way.
There’s more than a little bit of excess to Physical Graffiti in more ways than one, but it was never at the expense of the music. This was the sound of the greatest band in the world on one of the greatest highs anyone had experienced, and they weren’t showing any signs of slowing down.
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