The 1976 Led Zeppelin album Robert Plant called “wracked with pain”
Led Zeppelin was in a dark place in 1976.
At the time, Robert Plant had suffered a car accident that kept him in a wheelchair throughout most of the previous years. Led Zeppelin lived for being on the road, so keeping them grounded brought spirits down across the board.
Even worse, Jimmy Page was beginning to descend into the throes of heroin addiction. When the group arrived in the cold basement of the Musicland Studios building in Munich, the camaraderie that the group had shared for most of their existence was more strained than ever. With a strict deadline to vacate the studio for The Rolling Stones to record after them, the pressure was on.
You can hear that tension bleeding through every second of Presence. Unlike the escapism of Led Zeppelin IV or the grandeur of Physical Graffiti, this was a record made by a band running almost entirely on instinct and exhaustion. Jimmy Page later claimed the album was recorded and mixed in just 18 days, and it sounds like it. There is very little softness anywhere on the record. Instead, the songs lurch forward with a nervousness, as though the band understood they were trying to hold something together that was already beginning to splinter apart.
Robert Plant noticed the difference in feeling. “The whole of that album, Presence, is absolutely wracked with pain,” Plant told The Guardian.
“The fraternity of the band at the time was stretched to breaking point.”
Robert Plant on the making of Presence.
A number of years after the album was complete, Plant was showing a new girlfriend the song ‘Achilles Last Stand’. “The two of us sitting in a little room on the Welsh borders, and me telling her: ‘If you want to know what I was like at the end of Zeppelin, really, this was it.’ After it, she said: ‘I don’t want to be left alone in a room with that. It’s too much.’ That’s what it was in the end: too much.”
What makes ‘Achilles Last Stand’ so unsettling is that, on the surface, it almost sounds triumphant. Bonham barrels through the track like a runaway train while Page layers guitars on top of one another until the whole thing feels enormous and unstoppable. Yet underneath all that power is something deeply frantic. Plant wrote the lyrics while recovering in Morocco after the car crash, and there is a palpable sense of somebody trying to outrun their own vulnerability. It is Led Zeppelin at their most heroic and their most fragile all at once.
The latter half of the 1970s would signal more pain and adversity for Led Zeppelin. Plant’s son Karac died in 1977, throwing the singer into personal turmoil. Unable to tour in Britain because of their tax exile status, Zeppelin were kaput for almost the entirety of 1978. They would eventually rally to complete another album, In Through the Out Door, before John Bonham’s death in 1980 put an official end to the band.
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