The 1975 song Robert Plant says captured Led Zeppelin at their peak: “Perfect Zeppelin”
Led Zeppelin will always be a part of Robert Plant’s identity, no matter how many folk albums he makes in a bid to leave his past behind.
It’s a chapter of his life that he’s left behind, and Plant would prefer to spend his days looking forward rather than clinging to his youth by wheeling out the hits at shows. Instead, he’s taken the dignified route, even though it means playing much smaller venues than if he surrounded himself with veteran rock session musicians and played ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
However, Plant’s reluctance to live in the past isn’t because he wakes up with regret about his time with the band. Instead, he views their journey as perfect and believes it should remain untouched rather than tarnished.
For him, Led Zeppelin truly hit their stride in 1975 after half a decade of gradually improving with each record before hitting their zenith with Physical Graffiti, which includes his favourite song they ever made together.
The track in question is the timeless ‘Kashmir’, which could only have been made after years of honing their craft to reach those otherworldly levels. The grandiosely epic song is simply one they didn’t have the tools to make at the start of their career, and is eight-and-a-half minutes of Led Zeppelin at the peak of their powers.
It’s the one song that Plant wants the band to be remembered for, which is a source of annoyance that, for most people, it isn’t. “I wish we were remembered more for ‘Kashmir’ than ‘Stairway to Heaven’. It’s so right,” he once told Q Magazine. The singer continued:
“There’s nothing overblown, no vocal hysterics. Perfect Zeppelin.”
Plant has spoken in superlative terms about the track multiple times, including in a 2018 discussion with Dan Rather. “It was a great achievement to take such a monstrously dramatic musical piece and find a lyric that was ambiguous enough and a delivery that was not over-pumped,” said Plant.
Every member of Led Zeppelin brought their A-game to the recording process of ‘Kashmir’, blending classic rock with Eastern influences to create a song that sounds like nothing else that came before.
While Plant is full of admiration for everything that his bandmates contributed, John Bonham’s drumming is a particular aspect of the song for him. Bonham is typically viewed as a powerhouse who could drum harder than anyone else on the planet, it was the delicacy of his work that Plant appreciates the most on ‘Kashmir’, sharing, “It was what he didn’t do that made it work. It was almost the antithesis of the music, this lyric and this vocal delivery that was just about enough to get in there.”
It’s not just Plant from Led Zeppelin who views ‘Kashmir’ as their golden goose; Jimmy Page also has nothing but admiration for the creation. While artists don’t always immediately know whether a song will be a hit, Page has never felt more confident in anything than ‘Kashmir’.
“The intensity of ‘Kashmir’ was such that when we had it completed, we knew there was something really hypnotic to it, we couldn’t even describe it such a quality.”
Page further elaborated: “At the beginning, there was only Bonzo and me in Headley Grange. He played the rhythm on drums, and I found the riff as well as the overdubs, which were thereafter duplicated by an orchestra, to bring more life to the track. It sounded so frightening at first.”
After Bonham and Page began working on ‘Kashmir’, it was brought to John Paul Jones and Plant, who added their layers of magnificence to the table, enabling Zeppelin to strike perfection.
As much as Plant wishes that ‘Kashmir’ was the one song that people think about when Led Zeppelin springs to mind, it’s only a minor frustration in the grand scheme of things. His pride in making the track far outweighs any grievances he has about the popularity of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, which both contribute, in their own way, to the impeccable legacy carved by Led Zeppelin.
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