Released on March 31, 1976 Led Zeppelin’s 7th studio album Presence was the fastest album Zeppelin had done since their first, Led Zeppelin I in 1969. They did the entire album in less than 20 days all while avoiding tax issues in their home country of The United Kingdom. On top of that part of the album was done in Malibu and the other part in Germany. Singer Robert Plant did his vocals from a wheel chair while he was recovering from a car crash. Most of the album was written and mixed by guitarist Jimmy Page which he explained in Light & Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page.
“Nobody else really came up with song ideas. 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.”
On the anniversary of one of the rawest Led Zeppelin albums Ultimate Classic Rock is giving us a track by track look at the entire album.
“Presence was pure anxiety and emotion,” Page told Rolling Stone 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.”
“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.
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