Led Zeppelin had no more anything when they published in 1975 Physical Graffiti. “We knew it was a monumental work because of the streets we had traveled to get there,” says Jimmy Page in one of the Olympic Studios rooms in London where the double LP was mixed at the time. “It was a journey of discovery, a geographical exploration.”
After completing their very powerful rock-blues mixture and English folk in the previous five discs, the Led Zeppelin have transformed Physical Graffiti In a kind of lap of honor, as well as being the first record of the group published for their Swan Song label. In its 80 and passes minutes, Physical Graffiti contains some of their hardest pieces (The Wanton Song, Custard pie, Houses of the Holy), but also epic and psychedelic poems (Kashmir, Ten Years Gone) and turn up rock'n'roll (Black Country Girl, Boogie with stud). They are the most excessive and most fascinating Zeppelin LEDs ever.
When he talks about the origins of the album, Page recalls the enthusiasm tried to the idea of returning to Headley Grange, the 18th century English estate where the four had recorded Led Zeppelin IV. “I knew all the secrets of that place.”
Why did he electrify the idea of returning to you?
For the way we engraved the battery in the lobby for When the levee breaks. And then there certain pieces were born out of nowhere, such as Rock and roll in the fourth e Trampled Under Foot in Physical Graffitiwho jumped out of a riff. I was already waiting for it as I was traveling to go there. I was looking forward to that we were all there, to start elaborating the material I had or others had.
Before the start of the sessions you wrote things in your home. Was it at that time that you lived in the old property of Aleister Crowley?
No, I was in the countryside, in the Sussex, and it was a fascinated place. I had made a multitrack study install that allowed me to work on stratifications. I prepared there Ten Years Gonewith all the guitar orchestration, and I conceived The Wanton Song And SICK AGAIN. And there, in practice, the idea of Kashmir.
How did the session in Headley Grange started?
With me and John Bonham. I had at least half a dozen ideas and the first was Kashmirwhich I couldn't wait to feel made with the battery with that huge sound and then make us above the riff. I wanted to try the ideas I had for the part of the cascade brass and understand the rhythm of the guitar to put on it. I always thought that that part of guitar should be lined with an orchestra. Basically, it was nice to start with John, we worked well together.
Where it comes from Kashmir?
The ideas for the riff and the waterfall part, which in reality had played with a 12 electric string and on the disc is made by brass, I took them from something I was working on before even going to Headley. It was a completely different song. Just in the end, while I tried it, I played the part of acoustic guitar on the contrary and a kind of fanfare was released followed by the riff. I thought the piece would be built around the battery and that I would work on it with John. It was the first thing I tried with him, because I knew he would have liked it and it went just like that, we played the riff over and over again, it's like a cantilena for children. From a musical point of view it is a bit like Between Martinoon which many things can be added. The idea was to have this riff very intense and perhaps also majestic, but very intriguing. And the piece was to be built around the sound of Headley and the battery in that salon. This is how I heard it and displayed it, but I also thought of it with the orchestra in mind. It is our first song in which a complete orchestra is heard, in addition to brass and arches. We had used a small section of arches in Friendsfor the third album, but this piece had to be epic and full -bodied.
According to Robert Plant the text of Kashmir It is inspired by a journey that you two have made in Morocco. Riff also comes from there?
No. The piece had already taken a magnificent and solid shape when Robert told me about that text. It happened a lot after the structure of the song had already been defined.
It seems that In The Light has evolved more than other songs on the album.
Depended. Some pieces were good at the first take, like Custard pie or Trampled Under Foot. Same thing for In My Time of Dyingit's all there, 11 minutes. There are no changes or additions or overwritten in what you hear. Those are the Led Zeppelin who give us inside for the 11 minutes of a song, with all the variations and the musical structure that you have to keep in mind when you feel the four of the battery and the ribbon starts to turn.
Why did they care about the bords at the time?
At the opening of the concerts which then became How the West Was Wonthose in Long Beach and the Forum (of 1972, NDA), we used a border obtained from the recording of an acoustic guitar. And then I used the bow since the time of the Yardbirds and also for a while before. It was something I dedicated to myself a lot, with the electric guitar. I wanted to get the pastry, if we want, of an acoustic guitar with a particular tuning, and thanks to the bowing it grows everything until we achieve something orchestral or similar to what Krzysztof Penderecki did. He would have liked (laughs). However, the idea of using bords is preceding that album, but on that occasion it was really effective, this is certain. They were the dawn of ambient music, let's say.
I read that John Paul Jones said you've never played In The Light live because it would have been too difficult to reproduce.
We could have played it, perhaps later, on the tour of '77. Maybe we should have played it at O2, because I know that modern keyboards are much more advanced. But we never even taken it into consideration.
Returning to the disc, another song you recovered from previous session was The Rover. Did you take a lot to carry it out?
We started it in Stargroves, for Houses of the Holybut we worked on it when we arrived in Headley the second time, making guitar overwhelmed. Then she was mixed at Olympic. The strong point of The Rover It is its bold character, in particular the guitar, a bit like Rumble of Link Wray: it's pure aggression, isn't it? It's something I probably have in DNA.
Because, in the end, Physical Graffiti Did you come out as double?
To insert the material advanced from the first visit to Headley. There were three songs that remained outside the fourth album: Boogie with stud, Night flight And Down by the Seaside. It was not conceivable to replace any of the pieces of the fourth album with one of these. Everyone had his own charm and character. Therefore, with these and with the fact that the song Houses of the Holy It had not been included in the album with that title, we had four ready -made songs. We had the opportunity to dedicate ourselves to the bottom of writing and recording, I didn't want it to become a double with filler. I wanted a double in which all the pieces had character, in the way in which LED Zeppelin made their music, with a sort of ethics, if you want, so everything had to play different from everything else.
At the time you had to think about your label.
It would have been the first album [dei Led Zeppelin] To go out for the Swan Song label that Peter Grant, with Atlantic, had helped us to found. Having a label was an excellent idea, because it gave us the opportunity to make known artists that we liked and that we respected, such as the Paul Rodgers' band, the Bad Company, which was one of the first releases, and also the Pretty Things, which we all appreciated a lot. For me what they did on Swan Song was good.
More or less in the period in which you did Physical Graffiti You were also working on the soundtrack of Kenneth Angers's film Lucifer Rising.
Having that multitraccia at home, I was able to experiment with all the tools, treating them in different ways, so that they didn't necessarily have their typical sound. So the Tablas do not play like tabla and there is a huge tambur that sounds in a completely different way.
They have something in common Lucifer Rising And Physical Graffiti?
I knew that that was not necessarily the way that Led Zeppelin would take, even if the flu feels. Lucifer Rising It was like my personal notebook where I tried to do rather extreme things. I was going further, in every sense.
The title Physical Graffiti It's yours. What was the idea?
At the time they began to see graffiti on the walls. Usually they were quotes by William Blake, not the graffiti that we now know, those related to hip hop. However, they were appearing and I imagined that affecting music on tape, even if it is a magnetic tape, it's like scratching. Music as a physical manifestation.
From Rolling Stone Us. Originally published in February 2015.
