March 22, 1975: Led Zeppelin still tops the charts with "Physical Graffiti" - Rolling Stone
In 1975, the question is whether Led Zeppelin is really the best rock band in the world, or if Physical Graffiti, which sits on the charts, remains one of the best rock albums of all time. Making Of
Physical Graffiti only confirms Led Zeppelin's pre-eminence among hard rockers and gives an impressive insight into the band's skills. The winning recipe? The perfect match between Plant's lyrics and Page's rich, dense, astonishing and virtuoso playing. There is however no chance that this album will be able to convince the skeptics, the reluctant and the allergic to the enormous sound of the group.
Robert Plant's postures are very present and John Bonham's lead rhythms continue to hammer the eardrums to the delight of millions of English fans: yes Led Zeppelin has its signature sound and no, that won't change, because this is how they conceive their work. Better still, this album is emblematic because by carrying out a quick flashback in the history of the group, Physical Graffiti presents itself as a synthesis of already five years of a career carried out with beating drums, and it is really the case to say it. There are blues ("In My Time of Dying") a cosmic ballad ("In the Light"), an acoustic interlude ("Bron-Y-Aur") and hard rock, real, hairy, huge guitars and a leaden rhythm, the group's trademark (“Houses of the Holy”, “The Wanton Song”); but there are also winks less supported than in the past to the heroes of the Twelve Measures, in particular to Bo Diddley (“Custard Pie”) a real tour de force.
What explains this? Nothing special apart from the fact that the recording of this album was spread over four years and even features covers of songs discarded from previous opuses. Hence its variety, its richness and a songwriting far above anything that was being done in rock at the time: don't sign “Kashmir”, the most powerful rock song in history, who wants to.
Inordinate ambitions
However, Houses of the Holy came very close to being Led Zeppelin's last album. By the end of 1973, after a year of long and rewarding American touring, Jones was tired of traveling. He wants to spend more time with his family and announces to the group that he is leaving them to become a choirmaster, which is more or less the exact opposite of "member of Led Zeppelin". Everything stops, it is announced that Jones is ill (what other plausible reason for wanting to leave such a group?). And then Jones changed his mind, and “we never talked about it again,” says their manager Peter Grant.
The past is already beginning to weigh, the group triggered riots at almost every concert, especially in Milan and Boston, gave sold-out concerts in Hong Kong and Hamburg. Each of their previous five albums has sold millions of copies. Better still, they set new concert attendance records, including attracting nearly 60,000 people for their one concert in Tampa, Florida, in 1973 and 120,000 people for six concerts in New York in 1975. On paper as in fact, Led Zeppelin is unquestionably the most popular rock band in the world. And the bootlegs to multiply like hot cakes, we want them everywhere and the pirates are exchanged by the hundreds of thousands.
And, with the release of this new opus, their sixth, the question arises. This two-disc set will be their Tommy, their Beggar's Banquet and even their Sgt Pepper. In early 1974 the quartet returned to Headley Grange. They are the most popular rock band in the world, and they need an act that definitively establishes their weight: they choose a double album, which has since become the yardstick of rock splendour. "We're talking about creating something as eminent as Beethoven's Fifth," Plant boldly explained at the time, envisioning an album "so colossal it would last forever." »
The big favorite
It took them eighteen months to finalize what is a bit like the Mont Saint-Michel of rock, a meticulous and immortal monument to the glory of greatness and myth. The album cover, a photo of a building in the East Village neighborhood of New York, is equally elaborate: when you remove the insert from the album, the windows reveal images of the group and their cohort. . For rock fans, it's a huge corpus that can be read and reread endlessly. Physical Graffiti is the first album owned by singer Jeff Buckley. Jim James of My Morning Jacket cites it as his favorite album. The Foo Fighters aspired to make In Your Honor their own Physical Graffiti. (But the appeal of this music surpasses the circle of male, macho rockers dreaming of emulating Plant's roaring glory: even Christina Aguilera cites it as one of her favorite records.)
Led Zeppelin had enough songs for an album and a half, so it was an opportunity to throw in some never-before-released tracks: "Bron-Yr-Aur," a brief acoustic guitar fingerpicking track that finds its roots without the sessions of Led Zeppelin III in 1970, as well as the eco-friendly "Down by the Seaside" (one of the first "green" rocks). "Night Flight" and "Boogie With Stu" are two tracks left out for the fourth album. Despite their diverse origins, the fifteen songs of Physical Graffiti have a unity. The album is sprawling, gruff, rowdy, confident, dense, quiet.
Stylistically, the range is wide. “Trampled Under Foot” opens with a funky Clavinet intro by Jones, similar to what Stevie Wonder did recently on “Superstition.” "Boogie With Stu", firmly rooted in the 50s and recorded with Rolling Stones pianist Ian Stewart (who played on "Rock and Roll"), mixes a country mandolin with a heavy and echoing rock song that evokes the hero of the group, Elvis Presley. And Page spits out riffs like a volcano. We understand better how the album sold 16 million copies: "Ten Years Gone", "Houses of the Holy", "Wanton Song" and "Custard Pie", among others, are recognizable after two guitar measurements.
Plant was still widely caricatured as a sex god, in part because of his penchant for tight-fitting jeans and gauzy feminine blouses, but the double album demonstrates some of his less widely recognized traits, such as his hippie idealism. , especially in the chorus "If we could just join hands" from "The Rover". Physical Graffiti is an often idealistic album, just like its central song, the one that goes the farthest and that the group will later cite as the peak of their career: "Kashmir".
ultimate nostalgia
“I had a sitar for a long time, and I was interested in modal tuning and other Arabic subtleties. I started with a riff, which I underlined with oriental lines,” explains Page. Similar influences have already appeared in rock songs, such as in the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" or the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black", in addition to Led Zeppelin's "Four Sticks". But "Kashmir" is not just a piece with Arabic accents: it moves entirely to another country. Plant, "constantly surrounded by music from Indian films" because of his wife of Indian origin, even imagines himself as "a traveler in space and time". (He wrote the lyrics while traveling through the desert of southern Morocco, imagining himself continuing to the Indian subcontinent.)
Against a background of heavy metal power chords, Page plays a chromatic rise that savors the tension. The bridge is based on Arabic scales while the strings, brass and Mellotron provide overwhelming mass. Engineer Ron Nevison treats Bonham's battery with an Eventide phaser, giving it three-dimensional breadth. Once the recording of "Kashmir" was finished, the excited band phoned their manager Grant and urged him to come immediately to Headley Grange (in his Porsche) to listen to the song.
Plant cites Physical Graffiti as his favorite Led Zeppelin album, and "Kashmir" as "the ultimate Led Zeppelin song", as it expresses "the journeys and explorations that Page and I have taken to heavens far off the beaten path." On another occasion, he confesses wistfully: "I wish we had been remembered for 'Kashmir' more than for 'Stairway to Heaven'." Many Led Zeppelin fans wouldn't agree with him.
Belkacem Bahlouli
