The 1975 song Robert Plant called Jimmy Page’s best work: “It’s great blues”
There’s no way to script a better frontman than Robert Plant.
Led Zeppelin would have probably been doing just fine if Jimmy Page had got his wish of having Steve Marriott as the frontman of the group, but if you look at the kinds of moves that Plant was pulling onstage, it was as if he was becoming a musical genius before everyone’s eyes whenever he took the stage. He was more than willing to do everything he could to stretch out his voice, but nothing could compare with what the rest of the band was doing on their instruments.
Every member was an absolute powerhouse on every single instrument, and even if they had some downtempo moments every now and again, you could feel an intensity in just about everything they did. No one would expect that from a band that had a heavy emphasis on acoustic music, but with that strong beat from John Bonham behind them, songs like ‘Friends’ were far from the kind of tunes that you could sing around a campfire. These were works of art, and Plant was trying to keep up half the time.
But when Physical Graffiti came out, every member of the band seemed almost too big to fail. Their first four albums were already a treasure trove for hard rock, but this double album took everything that made the band great and shoehorned it into one album. There were sombre moments, heavy electric rockers, and songs that defied explanation like ‘Kashmir’, but if they wanted to truly show their stuff, everything ended up coming back to the blues after a while.
Then again, Zeppelin’s version of the blues had grown exponentially since their debut album. You could hear them working out the bugs of The Yardbirds a bit on their first outing, but no one could really explain what they did on ‘When the Levee Breaks’ or how they turned ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ into the single most epic blues experience that any rock band had ever played. Page may have been leading the charge on a lot of those songs, but Plant felt that his true genius didn’t come out until ‘In My Time of Dying’.
Page was pulling out the kind of slide licks that no one else was thinking of at the time, and Plant didn’t realise how great he was until he saw someone else trying to ape his sound a few years down the line, saying, “[I particularly like] The slide work on ‘In My Time of Dying,’ which goes on and on [laughs], but it’s great ramshackle blues slide. Straight off the top. I remember the shock I had with one of my favorite bands, Let’s Active, with Mitch Easter. There’s a track on [their album] Big Plans For Everybody with slide guitar, and it’s exactly the same.”
It probably doesn’t feel good seeing a band try to copy your sound, but since Plant wasn’t looking to reform Zeppelin any time soon, where the hell were we supposed to go? Jimmy Page was uncharacteristically quiet for years after the band broke up, and even if someone else was copying his sound, it was only a compliment for the kind of music that made Page one of the most respected guitarists out at the time.
The song itself is already one of the most epic in Zeppelin’s catalogue, but there’s a reason why Plant doesn’t usually include himself in the various compliments about the tune. What he did was unprecedented on the final version, but when you listen to them trying to perform the tune live, there’s a good chance that they were trying to preserve his voice by lowering the song so that he didn’t need to be reaching into the rafters every time he made one of his vocal leaps.
There’s only so much time that someone can make those kinds of vocal acrobatics sound good, but as long as Page kept his chops up, ‘In My Time of Dying’ would forever be an example of what made him a rock and roll god. Plant knew that the band were capable of great things even without him, but sometimes it takes a few years for people to really see what their bandmates are capable of.
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