The Led Zeppelin album Robert Plant said they couldn’t make again: “A cry of survival”
Every album that any artist makes will be a reflection of them at a particular moment. Even though it’s hard to get some of the biggest stars in the same room to create magic, it’s absolutely spellbinding once all the planets are aligned and things seem to fall into place. Led Zeppelin were one of the few that could turn any of their albums into grand spectacles, but they admitted that the energy captured on Presence wasn’t something that anyone could have reproduced.
If you were in a band like Zeppelin at the time, chances are that anyone would have been burned the hell out. The group had been through the wringer as rock stars and indulged in some of the biggest excesses that anyone had ever done up until that point, along with the massive tour that saw them taking their bluesy hard rock to the next level.
Looking at the last album, Physical Graffiti, it felt like the band had almost done everything they could possibly do. Things might have started off with the group playing a bunch of bluesy tunes, but they had turned into the kind of group that made hard rock seem orchestral now, especially on their more adventurous pieces like ‘Kashmir’.
While there’s no real place to go but down once you hit the ceiling like that, Presence had a much better reason to sound so strained. After Robert Plant was involved in a major car accident, he could barely stand upright when it came time to record his vocals for the project, even walking with a cane halfway through the sessions.
That doesn’t mean every song is necessarily bad. A track like ‘Candy Store Rock’ probably doesn’t deserve to be placed on the same pedestal as ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or anything, but ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ is a major highlight, and ‘Achilles Last Stand’ is the grand scope of Zeppelin’s music taken to its most epic conclusion, clocking in at just over ten minutes.
Zeppelin could still capture the magic, but Plant thought that this kind of record could never have been done the same way again, telling Rolling Stone, “It was really like a cry of survival. There won’t be another album like it, put it like that. It was a cry from the depths, the only thing that we could do.”
If anything, the dark shadow surrounding this album was probably the first sign that the wheels were starting to fall off for the group. Although there was nothing wrong with an album like In Through the Out Door, hearing them adopting softer styles on works like ‘Fool in the Rain’ and ‘All My Love’ signalled that the same band known for songs such as ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Heartbreaker’ were going to be going through a significant change.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but the real tragedy is that we never got to hear what that version of the group would sound like. John Bonham’s death had already left a gaping hole in their sound, and the missing links of Zeppelin’s sound would have to be reserved for Plant’s solo career or Jimmy Page’s various other groups like The Firm.
Still, Presence still feels like a bittersweet record for that period of Led Zeppelin’s development. It’s far from a bad record, but after spending time licking their wounds, you can hear each band member inching towards a newer sound that they would never get the chance to capitalise on.
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