Despite being part of a tour that eventually evolved into violence and heartbreak, Led Zeppelin put it all together during their April 27th, 1977, stop at the Richfield Coliseum near Cleveland .
“Zeppelin-ologists claim this was one of Led Zeppelin’s best shows on the tour, And much like the 10th anniversary Springsteen concert at the Agora , this 1977 Coliseum show was one of the most bootlegged of LedZeppelin’s career.”
The best of those bootlegs remains the three-disc set “Destroyer”, which included the entire 18-song performance from the opening “The Song Remains the Same” through to a two-song encore of “Rock and Roll” and “Trampled Under Foot” that arrived more than three hours later. Better still, unlike lo-fi fare such as the fan-made bootleg Listen to This Eddie from later on during the same tour, “Destroyer” offered remarkably clear audio. The exceptional sound quality throughout the performance is described by some sources as “almost perfect”.] It was the first, and for many years the only, professionally recorded mixing desk tape to escape from the band’s possession
Led Zeppelin ended up running through an impressive setlist of fan favorites that night in Cleveland, including “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” “Stairway to Heaven” and “Kashmir,” while sprinkling in newer fare like “Achilles Last Stand” from their latest album “Presence”. A standout moment arrived courtesy of John Paul Jones . who led an improvisational run through “No Quarter” that stretched to 20 minutes in length.
“Working from both electric and acoustic pianos, John Paul Jones again impressed with his general versatility,” It was one of the best rock jams I’ve ever witnessed.”
The liner notes for “Destroyer”, issued by the Shout to the Top label, actually thank John Bonham for use of the tapes, though initial vinyl pressings incorrectly placed the concert at Seattle. Later, a bootleg of the bootleg appeared; it was edited down to two discs by omitting Led Zeppelin’s lengthy take on “Moby Dick.”
Together, these bootlegs seem to celebrate a band at the top of its game. A show held three days after this Cleveland stop went on to draw more than 76,000 fans to Detroit’s Pontiac Silverdome setting a record for an indoor arena at that time. In actuality, however, Destroyer documented the beginning of the end.
Dates in support of Presence, Led Zeppelin’s seventh studio record, had kicked off on April 1st, 1977, in Dallas, with 51 concerts scheduled. They’d never get there.
When Led Zeppelin reached the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati on April 19th, 1977, more than 2,000 fans without tickets attempted to crash the gates – resulting in around 70 arrests. Later, on June 3rd, a riot broke out in Tampa after an open-air concert was cut short by a thunderstorm, leaving behind scores of injured fans. Moving forward in a tense, drug-fueled environment, Led Zeppelin’s performances were criticized as increasingly overblown and inconsistent.
Then Robert Plant’s son Karac died on July 26th, 1977, after a a severe stomach virus . Already fearful that things were going off the rails, Plant took an extended period of time away to grieve. A tour originally intended to last through August. 13th abruptly ended.
“By 1977, I was 29, just prior to Karac’s passing, and that sort of wild energy that was there in the beginning had come to the point where we were showboating a bit,” Plant told Uncut magazine in 2008. “Unfortunately, we had no choice. We were on tours where places were going ape s—. There was no way of containing the energy in those buildings. It was insane. And we became more and more victims of our own success. And the whole deal about the goldfish bowl and living in it, that kicked in.”
Led Zeppelin eventually rallied to produce 1979’s album “In Through The Out Door” but by September. 24th, 1980, Bonham was dead aged just 32, and Led Zeppelin were no more. Already scheduled North American concerts, including a return to Cleveland on October. 25th-26, 1980, were cancelled.
That left a July 24th, 1977, date in Oakland, less than three months after Led Zeppelin’s heralded stop at the Richfield Coliseum, as their last-ever concert in the U.S.
Led Zeppelin, Cleveland, April 27th, 1977 Set List
“The Song Remains the Same”
“Sick Again”
“Nobody’s Fault but Mine”
“In My Time of Dying”
“Since I’ve Been Loving You”
“No Quarter”
“Ten Years Gone”
“Battle of Evermore”
“Going to California”
“Black Country Woman”
“Bron-Y-Aur Stomp”
“White Summer/Black Mountain Side”
“Kashmir”
“Moby Dick”
[Guitar Solo]
“Achilles Last Stand”
“Stairway to Heaven”
Encore:
“Rock and Roll”
“Trampled Under Foot”
Led Zeppelin were enduring a period meant to be spent celebrating their mid-’70s successes that instead had turned into a maze of tax issues, injury and drug use.
The band pushed forward, writing and recording an emotion-packed seventh album that returned the group to its hard-blues roots. This focus on urgency ran counter to the sense of experimentalism that drove their more recent albums, but there didn’t seem to be any other way. In some ways, nothing was going right. They wrote in Malibu and recorded in Germany, since the group had become tax exiles from their native U.K. Robert Plant arrived for the sessions in a wheelchair, while still recovering from a scary automobile crash in Greece. When time grew short, Jimmy Page was forced into a marathon of dubbing and mixing.
“Nobody else really came up with song ideas,” the guitarist said in “Light & Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page”. “It was really up to me to come up with all the riffs, which is probably why [the songs were] guitar-heavy. But I don’t blame anybody. We were all kind of down.”
“Presence” was the seventh studio album by the English rock band Led Zeppelin , released by Swan Song Records on 31st March 1976. The album was a commercial success, reaching the top of both the British and American album charts, and achieving a triple-platinum certification in the United States, despite receiving mixed reviews from critics and being the slowest-selling studio album by the band
“It was taken from the balls, you know,” Plant said of Presence. “It was a cry from the depths, the only thing that we could do.” It’s Led Zeppelin’s most tightly focused record: seven tracks, no acoustic songs, no keyboards, just jewel-hard power – from the frantically charging “Achilles Last Stand” to “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” a variation on a Blind Willie Johnson song where the band turns its firepower on itself.
“Presence was pure anxiety and emotion,” said Page in 2006. “We didn’t know if we’d ever be able to play in the same way again. It might have been a very dramatic change, if the worst had happened to Robert. Presence is our best in terms of uninterrupted emotion. Along the way, however, John Paul Jones receded into the musical background. He was moving toward a breakthrough on the Yamaha GX-1 synth, something that would define the next Zeppelin album, 1979’s In Through the Out Door. But in the meantime, his quieter demeanor served to hardened the album’s edges.
They had reason to be frustrated. After the August 1975 car accident that confined Plant to a wheelchair for months, Led Zeppelin had to cancel an American tour. Unable to return to England for tax reasons, they developed the core of the album “Presence” in rehearsals at Los Angeles’ SIR Studio in October, then headed to chilly Munich, Germany, to record in the hotel-basement studio Musicland. From the start, the group knew they wouldn’t have long (the Rolling Stones had already reserved Musicland to add overdubs to their forthcoming Black and Blue album in early December). So they blasted through the recording process in 18 days, with Plant often singing from his wheelchair.
Page asked the Stones if he could have a little more time to finish guitar overdubs; he reportedly stayed up around the clock for two days to get them done, with “Achilles Last Stand” occupying the first day and everything else the next. Though it didn’t come with any major hits, Page called it Zeppelin’s “most important album”: bleak, bruised and crackling with electric fury.
Like In Through The Out Door, Presence was recorded during a period of time when Robert Plant was recovering from a car accident, with the normally charismatic frontman recording his vocals from the confines of a wheelchair. Despite this, the record still sounds like classic Led Zeppelin, though its sales ended up being some of the worst the group had seen during their career.
Due to the strong presence of Jimmy Page throughout the recording of the record, the record sounds less like a group effort, and more of a bluesy solo record from the guitarist. With John Bonham throwing down some stunning rhythmic answers to Page’s blistering guitar-work on tracks like ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ and ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’, Presence still shows Led Zeppelin as the dominant force they always were.
Here’s a deeper dive into those tracks, as well as the five additional songs that make up “Presence”.
“Achilles Last Stand”
Plant alluded to Zeppelin’s tax-exile status in the song’s opening line, the first hint at how autobiographical Presence would become: “It was an April morning when they told us we should go, and as I turned to you, you smiled at me, how could we say no.”
He and Page had traveled to Morocco in the summer of 1975, drinking in exotic local settings and music that inspired the guitar parts – and some of Plant’s more esoteric musings on this track. But Plant’s working name for it (“The Wheelchair Song”) served as a sad admission. He also ultimately chose a title that winked at his car accident, which severely injured his ankle: Achilles, a hero of the Trojan War, was brought down by an arrow to the heel.
A one-of-a-kind Led Zeppelin studio project was underway. “There won’t be another album like it, put it like that,” Plant told Circus magazine at the time. “It was a cry from the depths, the only thing that we could do.”
Part of Page’s brisk post-production work included piling up no less than six guitars on “Achilles Last Stand.” “It was so focused,” Page said of the sessions in a 2015 talk with the Toronto Sun. “And it was defiant, if you like, to the set of circumstances.”
Jones, in a rare spotlight moment, added a distinctive alembic eight-string bass line. But they were no match for John Bonham, whose eruptive drum work serves as the lead instrument for roughly the first half of “Achilles Last Stand.” It’s a crowning musical achievement that opened the door for the kind of shifting time signatures that would dominate the next wave of British heavy metal.
“For Your Life”
Bonham was still front and center, unleashing monstrous but surprisingly limber polyrhythms on this heavy studio improv. With little unused material in hand, the narrative also dealt in the here and now. In fact, “For Your Life” was mostly arranged at Musicland, though it remained a furious attack on the now-empty excesses of the Los Angeles-era setting where Plant and Page composed the bulk of Presence. Plant darkly references plasticine relationships and rampant drug use that were so widespread in the “city of the damned.” He later described “For Your Life” as “a bitter treaty with rock ‘n’ roll.” Page matches Plant’s venomous attitude strum for angry strum.
“Royal Orleans”
Six of the seven songs on Presence were composed by Plant and Page, while the rumbling stop-start “Royal Orleans” is credited to all four members. In Led Zeppelin: The ‘Tight but Loose’ Files, Page said moments like this “proved to us once and for all that there was no reason for us to split up. I can’t think of many groups who have been going as long as we have, [and] who still have that spontaneity about them.”
Lyrically, Plant returns to raucous times out on the concert trail, with a title that references a signature French Quarter inn and a narrative that recounts a particularly salacious road story. “We rolled a joint or two, and I fell asleep and set fire to the hotel room, as you do,” Jones told Mojo in 2007, with a laugh. “And when I woke up, it was full of firemen!” Still, there’s something almost wistful in the retelling by a hobbled and homebound Plant.
“Nobody’s Fault but Mine”
In the 1928 original, Blind Willie Johnson worried that his sightlessness would draw the wrath of God, since he’d been rendered unable to read the Bible. Plant and Page transformed “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” into the stammering retelling of their own fall from grace.
If all of this sounds rather nostalgic, too, there’s no indication in the music: Plant’s positively vitriolic harmonica solo is anything but introspective. “‘Nobody’s Fault but Mine,'” he admitted in Jon Bream’s Whole Lotta Led Zeppelin, “was very spiky – a lot of clinched teeth.”
Meanwhile, Page seemed to have based this new arrangement on an acoustic version released in the late-’60s by the late John Renbourn. But he took things up a notch – actually several notches – by triple-tracking the intro, using a phaser while playing one guitar an octave higher. A song that can came off at times like a loose jam was actually a carefully constructed bit of choreography.
“Candy Store Rock”
Led Zeppelin had been carrying around the seeds of this song since their Houses of the Holy dates. Back then, they’d dabble in an improvisation during “Over the Hills and Far Away” that now found a home as the middle section of the ’50s-influenced “Candy Store Rock.”
Plant’s echo-heavy rockabilly approach is in tribute to Ral Donner, an unabashed Elvis Presley clone, and a needed moment of levity on such a serrated, brutally honest album. For Plant, it represented another kind of push back against the fates.
“Against the odds, sitting in a fucking chair, pushed everywhere for months and months, we were still able to look the devil in the eye and say: ‘We’re as strong as you and stronger, and we should not only write, we should record,'” Plant told Creem at the time. “I took a very good, close scrutiny of myself and transcended the death vibe – and now I’m here again.”
Though clearly an odd man out, “Candy Store Rock” ultimately points to the throwback sensibility that powered succeeding post-Zeppelin projects like 1984’s The Honeydrippers: Volume One and 2002’s Dreamland.
“Hots On for Nowhere”
One of the most hooky Led Zeppelin moments ever, “Hots On for Nowhere” also developed from an earlier scrap of an idea. Page’s riff appeared on the then-unreleased “Walter’s Walk,” but otherwise the track was the product – both literally and figuratively – of time spent in Malibu.
Plant clearly felt abandoned during his time of convalescence, mentioning friends who “give me their shoulder” or (worse) “who will give me fuck all.” No surprise that he’d subsequently describePresence as “really like a cry of survival.”
Page then quickly crafted a tough, if customary, solo – that is, until he unleashed an eye-popping twang in the middle, courtesy of the tremolo arm on a Lake Placid Stratocaster that was reportedly borrowed from Gene Parsons of the Byrds. The song’s odd time signature was later refashioned for “Pride and Joy,” from 1993’s Coverdale/Page collaboration. Page also returned to “Hots On for Nowhere” during U.S. tour dates with the Black Crowes in 2000.
“Tea for One”
Led Zeppelin’s self-titled debut found Page in firm control, as the band rekindled the purpose and fire of blues without resorting to the genre’s basic structures. Same here, as Led Zeppelin end a hard-charging album in the only way they could: with a harrowing exploration into the depths of alienation while separated from family.
“I was just sitting in that wheelchair and getting morose,” Plant later admitted. “‘Tea for One’ was very personal. I couldn’t get back to the woman and children I loved. It was like, Is this rock ’n’ roll thing really anything at all?”
Loose early tries found Plant quoting Willie Dixon and Cab Calloway, before the band leveled it up into a menacing blues. That meant a return to brutally honest autobiographical themes, while a double-tracked Page amplified every anguished cry.
“All our pent-up energy and passion went into making it,” Page said of Presence in Led Zeppelin: The ‘Tight but Loose’ Files. “That’s why there was no acoustic material there. The mechanism was perfectly oiled. We started screaming in rehearsals and never stopped.” The Band:
48 years ago today, on January. 12th, 1969, music changed for many people. It was on this day that Led Zeppelin released their debut LP . Of course, critics panned the record, but to the record buying public, well they never listened to critics anyway. It only takes the first two seconds of the first song on their first record for Led Zeppelin to make crystal clear exactly what they intend to do – and exactly what they intend to do to you. In the opening to “Good Times Bad Times,” the band drops a two-note attack that falls like a cartoon safe, clearing the air for JohnBonham’s syncopated groove, Jimmy Page’s swift-sword guitar and Robert Plant’s high-end howling about sex so loud it gets the neighbors talking. “It really wasn’t a pretty thing,” Plant later said. “It wasn’t supposed to be a pretty thing. It was just an unleashing of energy.”
just a few weeks before their album’s release — opening for Vanilla Fudge and Spirit. Although booking agent Ron Terry had to beg promoter Barry Fey to add Led Zeppelin to the already-sold out show, the band did not disappoint. “You didn’t have to be a genius to know that Zeppelin was going to be a smash,” he later said. “Oh, my God. People were going crazy!” Rock station KLZ was so jammed with calls the next day that Fey had to run a copy of the unreleased self titled album to them, where it played for an entire day.
We could go on for days on the impact that this record had at the time and still has to this day, but you all know that. Just 3 of the songs “Your Time is Gonna Come”, “Good Times Bad Times” and “Communication Breakdown” were Led Zeppelin originals. When Led Zeppelin debut album was released in January 1969, it went to the Top 10 in the U.S. and the U.K. charts, despite lukewarm reviews. The enormity of Zeppelin’s innovation wasn’t entirely easy to recognize. In an era of spiritual transcendence and tales of brave Ulysses, they’d flipped teenage rock & roll’s sex-zonked mania into something huge and seething and mythic- bestial. Eastern mysticism and Mordor and prom-ruling radio gold would all come later.
Page’s vision for the album was so clear that they recorded the entire thing in just 30 hours. “I financed and completely recorded the first album before going to Atlantic,” he later said . “It wasn’t your typical story where you get an advance to make an album: We arrived at Atlantic with tapes in hand.” The result was a new, uncompromising sound and unabashed rock star lifestyle, paving the way for everything from prog-rock to heavy metal.
Led Zeppelin was born from the ashes of the Yardbirds. They had disintegrated in the summer of 1968, leaving guitarist Jimmy Page with the rights to the name — and a series of shows in Scandinavia he was contractually obligated to complete .So he recruited Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham, and the four toured as the New Yardbirds. But by the time they entered Olympic Studios in London in late september 1968 , they had moved their sound away from English folk-rock, into the blues-influenced band Page had always wanted, and soon had a new name, Led Zeppelin, as well.
As with so many great records, when it first came out the critics didn’t care for it. Therefore many people knew it would be good.
On January. 12th, 1969, Led Zeppelin released their self-titled debut LP “Led Zeppelin” in the US. It wouldn’t be released in the UK until March 31st. The LP combined Blues and Rock and was very well received by music fans. A number of the songs were ‘borrowed’ from older Blues musicians who at first were not given any credit.
It was an incredible record that changed the way many looked at Rock music.
Robert Plant (vocals/production); Jimmy Page (guitar); John Paul Jones (bass); John Bonham (drums)
all four members of Led Zeppelin—JimmyPage, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham were recording together before there even was a Led Zeppelin. While still in mode, the four pre-Zeps took part in the August 1968 recording sessions for P.J. Proby’s 1969 album, “Three Week Hero”.
Page and Jones were successful session musicians at this point, and when Jones got the Proby gig, he invited his fellow New Yardbirds along. Jones recollects “I was committed to doing all the arrangements for the album. As we were talking about rehearsing at the time, I thought it would be a handy source of income. I had to book a band anyway, so I thought I’d book everybody I knew.” The sessions started August 25th, 1968, and led to an album that didn’t cause much of a stir when it was released the following April.
“The boys told me they were going over to play in San Francisco and all that, and I said, ‘Look, from what I’ve heard and the way you boys played tonight, not only are you not going to be my backing band, I’m going to say goodbye right now, because I don’t think I’m ever going to see you again’,” Proby has said .
“‘That’s how successful you’re going to be. You’re exactly what they want, you play all that psychedelic stuff and everything.’ I said, ‘You’re going to go over there and go down so great I don’t think you’re ever going to come home.’ They didn’t ever come back until they changed their name to Led Zeppelin and stayed over there and came back huge huge stars. … I said goodbye that day when I cut that album, and I haven’t seen one of them since.”
Is there any doubt this is Led Zeppelin? This is part of the eight-minute medley that closed the album.
Here’s track two “The Day That Lorraine Came Down” from the PJ Proby album, which was released on CD in 1994. It’s easy to imagine RobertPlant on vocals—not that there’s anything wrong with Proby’s voice.
There’s no denying that Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” has one of the best riffs ever in rock history. The song has inspired so many musicians and future generations, and will always be a landmark in music history. But unfortunately, the chances of us hearing the song performed with any remaining members of Led Zeppelin perform this gem live again, are pretty slim to none.
In the meantime, however the former, Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant has been playing this classic rock track solo for many years. During his return to Austin City Limits recently, Robert Plant and his band The SensationalSpace Shifters had this song in the setlist, but put an especially unique twist on the song .
This version of “Black Dog” that Plant plays has a Latin, bluesy and cosmic vibe. There are a few synths included, the song is drawn out to a longer length, there is added percussion and the riff is slightly altered. We must admit, it’s a unique spin on the song, but we love it! It definitely keeps the song fresh and allows it to touch on an alternative vibe!
The only thing that would make this any better, would be ifJimmy Page were playing guitar, John Paul Joneswas on the bass and Jason Bonham (John Bonham’s son) was kicking on the drums .
About Austin City Limits offers viewers unparalleled access to featured acts in an intimate setting that provides a platform for artists to deliver inspired, memorable, full-length performances. The program is taped live before a concert audience from The Moody Theater in downtown Austin. ACL is the longest-running music series in American television history and remains the only TV series to ever be awarded the National Medal of Arts. Since its inception, the groundbreaking music series has become an institution that’s helped secure Austin’s reputation as the Live Music Capital of the World. The historic KLRU Studio 6A, home to 36 years of ACL concerts, has been designated an official Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Landmark.
As we prepare for our West Coast tour, we decided to record a very appropriate cover: Led Zeppelin’s “Going toCalifornia.” You can watch the video right Here. We recorded it in Chicago at the venue where we played our first show five years ago, Schubas Tavern.
In other news, we’ve partnered with the NFL to bring you some limited edition Fort Frances-Indianapolis Colts shirts!. They will look good on you whether you’re kicking field goals or sitting on the couch.
The West Coast tour starts next weekend in Seattle.
Fort Frances covers Led Zeppelin’s “Going To California”
Robert Plant returned to Austin City Limits for the first time in 14 years for an hour-long episode that mixed reimagined renditions of his old band Led Zeppelin classics with material from his Sensational Space Shifters Band. “I didn’t remember it then, and I don’t remember it now,” the Led Zeppelin singer says the Moody Theatre performance, Plant said of the Sensational Space Shifters, “This is where the path has taken me. This is where we’ve gone. I am virtually and totally reliant on the magic that we’ve created. It’s a really, really great place to go. I’ve been in a lot of different incarnations of using my voice in the last 10 years, and this is a great place to be.”
The concert, recorded back in March at Austin’s Moody Theatre but not broadcasted until Saturday night on the long-running music series, kicked off with “The Lemon Song” and also featured spirited takes of Zeppelin’s “BlackDog,” “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” and a mash-up of “Whole Lotta Love” with the Willie Dixon-penned blues cut “I Just Want to Make Love to You.”
The October 22nd episode of Austin City Limits will be split between Florence + the Machine and Andra Day, followed a week later by Iggy Pop’s hour-long episode.
Robert Plant’s Austin City Limits Setlist:
“Lemon Song”
“Rainbow”
“Black Dog”
“Turn It Up”
“In the Mood”
“Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You”
“Little Maggie”
“I Just Want to Make Love to You/Whole Lotta Love”
Fresh off after their win in the “Stairway To Heaven” infringement trial earlier this summer, Led Zeppelin are looking forward to dropping their edition of The Complete BBC Sessions at the end of this week. The collection includes eight updated, newly remastered versions of unreleased BBC recordings, including three rediscovered songs from the previously “lost” 1969 session recorded between their first two albums.
One of those three never-before-heard recordings is another version of “What Is And What Should Never Be” from Led Zeppelin II, and today it receives the visual treatment. Noisy, trippy black-and-white images are cut with footage of the band shredding the song.
Nearly 20 years ago, Led Zeppelin introduced BBC Sessions, a double-disc set of live recordings selected from the band’s appearances on BBC radio between 1969 and 1971. The Complete BBC Sessions is an updated version of the collection, newly remastered with supervision by Jimmy Page and expanded with eight unreleased BBC recordings, including three rescued from a previously “lost” session from 1969. Highlights include the debut of a long-lost radio session that has achieved near-mythic status among fans. Originally broadcast in April 1969, the session included three songs: “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” “You Shook Me,” and the only recorded performance of “Sunshine Woman.” Also included are two unreleased versions of both “Communication Breakdown” and “What Is And What Should Never Be.” Separated by two years, the performances vividly demonstrate the young band’s rapid evolution over a short period of time. [Deluxe box set containing both CD and vinyl formats also available.]
Led Zeppelin The Complete BBC Sessions is out 16th September
Great cover of one of the greatest bands ever! by THE CULT OF DOM KELLER from the album: Dazed andConfused A Stoned-Out salute to Led Zeppelin (2.015)
The Cult of Dom Keller have been out in the wild ever since 2007, converting worshippers to their gargantuan mind expanding sound. Over the course of three albums to date, these so-called #FreakRockGothPsychAlchemists have woven together a spiralling wall of music, full of drones, harmonies and guitar crunch.
Their latest LP, “Goodbye to the Light”, was picked up by esteemed London imprint Fuzz Club Records (A Place To Bury Strangers, Dead Skeletons) and released to glittering reviews back in July. It’s an enticing mix of melody and black arts, all coated in a thick aural film.
Speaking of first single Broken Arm Of God, the band said ‘we wanted it to sound like a volcano giving birth to an atomic bomb’ which is a good indication of where their collective head is currently at. The band go out on tour this week to hammer their recent success home.
The Cult Of Dom Keller are,
Ryan (vocals/guitars/keys), Neil (vocals/keys), Jason (bass/synthesiser), Al (drums/percussion), an eight limbed psychedelic music making machine
Jimmy Page dug up several unheard gems for the recent batch Led Zeppelin reissues. But there’s one song that still remains unreleased “Swan Song”.
The fertile sessions for Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti album produced a number of landmark songs, including In My Time Of Dying and Kashmir. And among them was another track that had the potential to be a LedZeppelin classic. An ambitious, virtuoso instrumental titled Swan Song, it was sketched out and partially recorded during the album sessions but, frustratingly, never completed – even though, like many of his ideas, Jimmy Page would not quite let it rest.
The seeds of Swan Song were sown in early 1974 when Zeppelin reconvened to begin work on Physical Graffiti at Headley Grange, the 18th-century workhouse in Hampshire where they’d recorded their fourth album.
The band had endured a crisis the previous autumn when John Paul Jones announced that he was fed up with the relentless touring and was planning to quit the band. He even suggested, albeit with his tongue firmly in his cheek, that he was considering becoming choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral. It took all the efforts of manager Peter Grant to talk him out of it.
But by the time the four band members got back together they were once again firing on all cylinders. Reunited, they began pooling ideas. “Some of the tracks we assembled in our old-fashioned way of running through a track and realising before we knew it that we had stumbled on something completely different,” recalled Robert Plant.
By contrast, Page had grand plans for a lengthy new track he was calling Swan Song. The guitarist had already plotted out the instrumental piece at his home studio in Plumpton Place, East Sussex. Even at that early stage, his vision was clear. According to Page, it featured “a number of sections and orchestrated overdubs”.
The track was broken up into sections, two of which were recorded in late February 1974 (and which can be heard on various Zeppelin bootlegs and on YouTube). The first part opens with Page’s drifting acoustic guitar, before the John Paul Jones/John Bonham rhythm section kicks in with the sure-footed syncopation that characterised their greatest work. The second segment commences with Page again leading off, his descending riff hinting at the song’s majestic potential. Tantalisingly, he would later reveal that this epic-in-waiting would not necessarily have remained a purely instrumental track – there were plans to add other sections and even lyrics.
So why did they leave the piece unfinished? The simple truth is that Zeppelin’s creativity was at an all-time high during the Physical Graffiti sessions. At the same time, they had also been working on Ten Years Gone, another lengthy track that incorporated similar guitar orchestration. Faced with an abundance of quality material, they could afford to leave Swan Song for another time. Consequently, it was Ten Years Gone that ended up on Physical Graffiti.
But the Swan Song story didn’t end there. Zeppelin were planning to launch their own label and rumours abounded that it would be called Shag or Slut Records – a lewd reference to their notorious on-the-road antics. Instead, at a press reception in New York on May 7, 1974, it was announced that the new label would be called Swan Song, after their unfinished song. “I’d been recording this long instrumental and somebody shouted: ‘What’s the title?’” revealed Page. “I shouted back: ‘Swan Song’. And everybody stopped and said what a good name that would be for the album. From there it got carried over to being the name for our label.”
Never one to let go of a good idea, Page talked about returning to the incomplete song to finish it off. “I’ve spoken before about a long piece I’d written,” he said in 1976. “I wanted to orchestrate the guitar and put it through various treatments. The original idea was to have four sections coming back to the same theme each time. There would be four separate melody lines dealing with the seasons. Robert will do the lyrics. I know I can work the whole thing out from the trial runs I’ve laid down. It’s a really exciting prospect.”
Page continued to incorporate elements of Swan Song into his live improvisational piece White Summer/Black Mountain Side during Zeppelin’s 1977 tour. It would reappear again during the band’s Knebworth shows in 1979, and even as late as their final European tour, in 1980. Had Led Zeppelin not disbanded following the death of John Bonham on September 25,1980, there’s every chance that Page would have gone back to work on the song in the studio.
But even that wasn’t the end of his great lost opus. Page’s first major live appearance following the dissolution of Zeppelin was as part of an all-star nine-date US tour in 1983 in aid of the ARMS charity to help multiple sclerosis-stricken ex-Small Faces bassist Ronnie Lane. With Paul Rodgers on vocals, Page performed a lengthy song called Bird On A Wing, which featured some chord structures that clearly dated back to Swan Song.
By the time Page and Rodgers formed their blues-rock supergroup The Firm, it had been revisited once again. “It was reworked with Paul Rodgers, who supplied some inspired lyrics, and it became Midnight Moonlight,” said Page, referring to the song which closed The Firm’s self-titled album in 85.
Today, Swan Song has passed into Zep legend as one of the band’s great lost masterpieces – albeit one that has, tantalisingly, filtered into the ether in various incarnations. As with other unfinished Zep treasures such as Sugar Mama and Fire, it’s difficult not to wonder how significant Swan Song would have become had they actually finished it.
The Fat Angel Sings 