Why Robert Plant wants ‘Kashmir’ to define Led Zeppelin’s legacy: “It’s so right”
It’s never been easy to pin down how to define Led Zeppelin. Jimmy Page may have started off playing some of the hardest blues rock ever conceived, but listening back to some of their classics, there are always those subtle moments where they veer into uncharted territory or come up with something completely off-the-wall that spawns a genre of its own. While Robert Plant could sing his ass off through every facet of Zeppelin’s career, there were still a few Zeppelin songs that said it all for him in terms of what the band was all about.
But Zeppelin was never supposed to be strictly Plant’s band. The best moments of their career came when every one of them worked off each other, and even with Page being one of the masters of the guitar riff, there was an equal chance that John Paul Jones could switch things up or John Bonham could take a backbeat and turn it into the entire groove of the song.
Even if ‘Percy’ was the soaring voice above it all, none of Zeppelin’s material would have worked without him. The majority of their songs involved him reaching into the rafters to get the right note, but even when he was singing delicately, tracks like ‘Tangerine’ and ‘All My Love’ featured some of the best restraint seen from any hard rock singer. That said, Plant did have a few times when things started crumbling down.
Physical Graffiti marked one of the greatest moments in Zeppelin’s career, but the making of Presence feels like it’s ripped straight out of a nightmare. The majority of the album revolves around epics like ‘Achilles Last Stand,’ but since Plant was involved in a massive car accident prior to recording, it’s hard to make out what he’s saying on some of the tracks due to his condition.
Even when the band are firing on all cylinders, though, some of the tracks don’t hit in the same way that their classics do. ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ might get the job done effectively, but ‘Royal Orleans’ feels half-baked compared to everything else on the record. But for Plant, he could rest easy at night knowing that he got the right sound for ‘Tea For One’ by the end of the recording.
According to Jason Bonham, Plant said that one song was everything that encapsulated pure Led Zeppelin music, saying, “His favourite was… ‘Tea for One,’ he still loves, and ‘Achilles Last Stand.’ He said, ‘If I ever play somebody something from Led Zeppelin… This is it. Listen to this, this is what we had.’ He’s very proud of that. So that was a wonderful thing to have.” But none quite nestle themselves as the set of notes Plant would like scrawled onto the epitaph of Led Zeppelin’s tombstone.
Arguably, there is one song that Led Zeppelin will always be remembered for and ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is one of the most notorious rock songs of all time. When discussing it, Plant picked the track he’d prefer the entire world to remember Led Zeppelin by: “I wish we were remembered for ‘Kashmir’ more than ‘Stairway to Heaven’”, adding, “It’s so right; there’s nothing overblown, no vocal hysterics. Perfect Zeppelin.”
During a conversation with Rolling Stone, he shared: “It’s one of my favourites… that, ‘All My Love’ and ‘In the Light’ and two or three others really were the finest moments.” Plant explained why ‘Kashmir’ was better than any other song they produced, adding, “‘Kashmir’ in particular. It was so positive, lyrically. It’s the quest, the travels and explorations that Page and I went on to far climes well off the beaten track… That, really, to me, is the Zeppelin feel.”
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