“Height of emotions”: The album Jimmy Page called gruelling to work on
Led Zeppelin might have significantly broadened the scope of rock music, but the band has always been exemplary because of its team ethic, too. When forming his new group after the death of The Yardbirds, Jimmy Page knew that he had to get the lineup right, as he wanted a band composed of only artistic and technical brilliance with longevity. The Yardbirds had given him a taste of where he could take guitar music, and he wanted more.
It may have taken some time and a stroke of luck for him to put together Led Zeppelin, though. Robert Plant was not his first choice for frontman, and bassist John Paul Jones only joined after the original bassist, Paul Samwell-Smith, dropped out. However, during their initial jam session, it quickly became evident that the band’s combined talent was nothing short of monumental.
What ensued was a band that understood each other’s strengths and weaknesses and continued pushing each other to evolve. Despite the quartet being spiritually split in half between the West Midlanders and the middle-class southerners, for a long time, they were a band that always had more of a collective spirit than pretty much any other of their stature. Although things would eventually begin to split at the seams, with the cultural and personal faultlines cemented after Page and Jones didn’t turn up to Plant’s son Karac’s funeral after he died aged five in 1977, for a long time, nothing could get in their way.
Throughout their finest period, the quartet exhibited unyielding collective spirit, whether that be pressing on against the hate Led Zeppelin III received and going on to produce a masterpiece as its follow-up or the basic fact that they had the guts to take their bold formula public in the late 1960s when the zeitgeist was still very much psychedelic rock. However, arguably the most explicit reflection of their bond is 1976’s Presence, a record that is not only Led Zeppelin’s most underrated but also the one that sonically mirrors Page’s original vision most closely.
The album also represents a triumph in the face of adversity. It was written and recorded during the final part of 1975 when Plant was still recovering from the severe car accident injuries that very nearly claimed his life. Wheelchair-bound, this led to tours being cancelled and the band entering the studio instead, as he could still sing. With the frontman far from full capacity in terms of adding to the process, though, it meant that the others had to step up, with leader Page shouldering much of the burden and putting in double shifts to finish the record.
Despite it being a Herculean effort on Page’s part, when speaking to Guitar World in 1993, he revealed that Presence is one of his favourite Zeppelin albums because “we made it under impossible circumstances”. Put it this way: Plant had a cast on his leg, and no one knew whether he would walk again. It was a very fraught period, filled with uncertainty.
Remembering the record as a symbol of triumph over adversity, Page then delved deeper into the gruelling process behind Presence and how it reflected their heightened emotions during that era. He said: “It was a reflection of the height of our emotions of the time. There are no acoustic songs, no keyboards, no mellowness. We were also under incredible deadline pressure to finish the record.”
Remarkably, the album was complete in 18 days. Although Page pushed himself to the brink of making it, working an average of 20 hours a day, it offered him more creative freedom, with it mostly up to him to write all the songs. That is exactly why it is so guitar-heavy and, by extension, the closest to realising his towering vision for rock that the band made.
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