The Led Zeppelin hit that the band found “frightening”
Tom Taylor
@tomtaylorfo
Tue 5 December 2023 16:30, UK
Amid the flowery zeitgeist of the 1960s, Led Zeppelin suddenly arrived like St Johns Ambulance staff to a stag do. They were sobering, scary, and offered a stark wake-up call. When they blared forth with their debut single, ‘Good Times Bad Times’, the next generation had to reconcile that things were about to get a bit darker, a bit heavier, and a trickier if you were a rock musician too.
There had always been virtuosos in the scene, but now four of them had come together in one group, and therein, they were about to layer in orchestral arrangements and occultism. “I consider Jimmy Page freakier than Jimi Hendrix,” Dave Grohl once wrote. “Hendrix was a genius on fire, whereas Page was a genius possessed. Zeppelin concerts and albums were like exorcisms for them. People had their asses blown out by Hendrix and Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, but Page took it to a whole new level, and he did it in such a beautifully human and imperfect way. He plays the guitar like an old bluesman on acid.”
The Foo Fighters frontman finalised his Rolling Stone appraisal of the Led Zeppelin axesmith by explaining: “Page doesn’t just use his guitar as an instrument. For him, it’s like some sort of emotional translator.” And therein lies the crux of the band’s appeal on all fronts; they took the blues to new compositional heights by pairing its solid foundations with flourishes akin to Franz Schubert. That much is certain. But they also offered a new emotional edge to rock, something dark and brooding, like being the man in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’.
One song that typified this approach was ‘Kashmir’ from the band’s sixth album, Physical Graffiti, released in 1975. Penned over a period of three years by Page and Robert Plant with contributions from John Bonham, the track showcased how they were throwing the kitchen sink at rock but avoided being “overblown” – as Plant opined, they were prone to – by building on a simple blues riff before wading in with exotic influences.
Plant has often described ‘Kashmir’ as perfect Led Zep; in fact, all of the members have expressed a love for the song at one point or another. For Page, the source of the love comes down to how happy he is with how his riff work was so foundational it provided potentialities of huge expansive scope, which were ultimately fulfilled. ”I suppose ‘Kashmir’ has to be the one. I knew that this wasn’t just something guitar-based,” he told Rolling Stone.
”In addition, all of the guitar parts would be on there,” he added. “But the orchestra needed to sit there, reflecting those other parts, doing what the guitars were but with the colours of a symphony. John Paul Jones scored that. But I said, ‘John, this is what it’s got to be.‘ I knew it, and I heard it.” And soon, the bellow came to roaring fruition and remains one of their biggest hits.
The song originated from Plant and Page’s trip to Morocco and incorporates several North African-inspired sounds. The result awed the band. “The intensity of ‘Kashmir’ was such that when we had it completed, we knew there was something really hypnotic to it, we couldn’t even describe such a quality,” Page recalled. In fact, he even found it “frightening” at first – the same can be said for many listeners.
