The last single ever released by Led Zeppelin
As Robert Plant was sitting on his sofa watching the 1978 World Cup, listening to the samba rhythms around the Argentine venues, he unknowingly was hatching an idea for what would prove to be the final single in the storied, decade-long run of Led Zeppelin.
It was a song he wouldn’t personally perform with a rock band until a quarter century later, when he joined Pearl Jam to revive the tune at a Hurricane Katrina charity concert in Chicago, and the track in question, of course, was ‘Fool in the Rain’, a not-so-fitting farewell 45 from a band that had led the hard rock revolution, and was now operating between tragedies.
The loss of Robert Plant’s son Karac in 1977 was hanging over them throughout the recording of their 1979 album In Through the Out Door, and the death of John Bonham the following year would spell the end of the group. In this pocket of time, then, with Jimmy Page battling a heroin addiction and Bonham in the final throes of alcoholism, it fell on the grieving Plant, along with John Paul Jones, to piece together most of their new songs. Suffice it to say, it was a struggle for Plant to re-focus.
“When my boy Karac died, I left Zeppelin completely,” he told biographer Chris Welch in 1993. “I left the mentality that you need to be a singer. My values changed then”.
Plant never really returned to his old stage persona after that, but he did eventually find the drive to try and make another Zeppelin album, albeit one that would bear little resemblance to most of their classics.
That World Cup summer of ‘78 had been a time of reflection; England weren’t even in the tournament, so rather than watching with a rooting interest, Plant found an unexpected inspiration in the sights and sounds around the pitch. He then put those ideas in his back pocket and carried them with him to Sweden later that winter, where Zeppelin were booked to reconvene in ABBA’s studio to try to be a band again.
“The trek to Sweden in the middle of winter, the studio had to be good, and it was,” Plant later said, “ABBA’s studio was very easy going, and the rooms beckoned for you to play good stuff and dictate the mood, along with the Swedish beer.”
Page, despite his own personal struggles at the time, did his best to encourage new experiments during the sessions, and embraced the samba sound of ‘Fool in the Rain’ without much hesitation, so much so that it eventually became the first and only US single from In Through the Out Door, released a year after it was recorded, on December 7th, 1979.
Not everyone was thrilled at the completely different tone and jazzy, piano-driven, almost Steely Dan-esque vibe on ‘Fool in the Rain’, but it was a radio-friendly track and connected with mainstream pop listeners more than a lot of past Zeppelin singles had. The joyous, street festival percussion break halfway through the song also felt like a hopeful, celebratory statement from the band that better days might be ahead. The single reached number 21 on the Billboard 200, and the outlook for the band’s adjustment to the 1980s looked promising, until on September 25th, 1980, news broke of Bonham’s death, and ‘Fool in the Rain’ never sounded quite the same again.
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