News The Led Zeppelin album Robert Plant called “wracked with pain”
Led Zeppelin was in a dark place in 1976. 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 was bringing 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.
Robert Plant noticed the difference in feeling. “The whole of that album, Presence, is absolutely wracked with pain,” Plant told The Guardian. “Plus, the fraternity of the band at the time was stretched to breaking point.”
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.”
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.
