The Story Behind The Song: Led Zeppelin’s perfect epic ‘Kashmir’
There came a moment in rock history when Led Zeppelin almost seemed bigger than any traditional rock band. They still had the rudimentary pieces of what made a rock group, but every member seemed to have their own innate superpower to turn a song from good to great, depending on what it needed. By the mid-1970s, the age of excess had started, and ‘Kashmir’ was the crowned jewel of their time together.
If you were to look at where Jimmy Page had gone before Physical Graffiti, it’s not like we didn’t see this coming. The band had been making songs with bits and pieces of world music sprinkled throughout its runtime, and this wouldn’t be any different, especially with the kind of ominous chord progression anchoring everything down.
Given the fact that the band were operating at the peak of their powers, Robert Plant ended up pulling from more exotic topics when working on the lyrics, telling Classic Rock Stories, “I got to the Sahara, this atmosphere beckoned me to open my eyes in another way. I wrote the first verse before we had any music, I just started to write a poem, ‘Let the sun beat down upon my face and stars to fill my dreams’”.
If you have something that expansive, you need to respond in kind, but Page already had big plans for where the rest of the song would go. Outside of Page’s insistent riff, the moment belongs to John Paul Jones, who managed to work in string arrangements that brought the band to the same level as classical music.
The real beauty behind the song has to come down to its unconventional time signature. The riff is already in a waltz time, but since Bonham never breaks from the typical 4/4 pulse of most rock songs, there’s a bit of a poly-meter going on, which makes the riff sound like you’re getting pulled back down every time it tries to move forward.
For all of the tremendous musical touches that they put in, the track feels less like a song and more like a sonic landscape spread out across eight minutes. By the time you finish listening to it, it doesn’t really feel like you’ve been listening to music as much as you have been taken on a journey throughout the song.
In fact, there are actually some aspects of the song that actually improve on the band’s previous epic, ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Sure, ‘Stairway’ may have been much more iconic and has seeped its way into the minds of people who don’t even listen to rock and roll, but ‘Kashmir’ has a much broader scope, sprawling out and not having to rely on anything too flashy to get its point across.
All it needs is the riff, and that’s more than enough. Considering that there are no words in the section and sounds like a monster heading to tear people apart, it’s no surprise that the song would eventually get shoehorned into Puff Daddy’s ‘Come With Me’ years later for the reimagining of Godzilla.
Looking back on it, Plant just considered himself grateful to be in the right place at the right time with that song, saying, “It was a great achievement to take such a monstrously dramatic musical piece and find a lyric that was ambiguous enough, and a delivery that was not over-pumped. It was almost the antithesis of the music, this lyric and this vocal delivery that was just about enough to get in there”.
Whereas most artists would flirt with a longer track here and there, for Zeppelin to make a record like this was practically a statement of intent. This was where the band were going to be going from here on out, and nothing was going to stand in their way from becoming the greatest rock band in the world.
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