Fifty years ago, the greatest rock band of all time released their greatest album. In late February, 1975, Led Zeppelin put out Physical Graffiti. I realize of course that such a bold pronouncement is bound to piss off fans of the Beatles and Stones, as well as Zeppelin fans who prefer Led Zeppelin II or the iconic Untitled album (known these days as IV.) But I’ll stick by my statement. At least for now. Maybe we’ll revisit it at the end of this little remembrance.
Actually, Physical Graffiti was supposed to come out in 1974. The reason for its delay is a tiny little piece of why it is as great as it is. We’ll get to that in a bit too. It really has nothing to do with the actual music. It simply speaks to breadth and depth of what Zeppelin was doing at the time.
What they were doing at the time was being the greatest rock band in the world. In the six years leading up to PG (I hope you don’t mind – I’m going to abbreviate the title from now on), the band had released five studio albums. The first came in early 1969. It exploded out of the gate with “Good Times, Bad Times,” and climbed to number ten on the US album charts and number six in the UK.
Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti was magical
The next four albums all went to number one on both sides of the pond.
Untitled (or IV) – the one with “Stairway to Heaven” – came out in 1971 and ended all debate about who was the top dog in rock & roll. The Beatles were no more, and even though the Mick Taylor years with the Rolling Stones produced some amazing music, they always seemed to be teetering on the edge of collapse. (Taylor would formally depart a few years later.)
Four spectacular albums in less than three years and a heavy touring schedule was wearing the band down. They took a little extra time before releasing album number five – Houses of the Holy – in 1973. I like Houses quite a bit but not all their fans felt the same. It was somewhat softer than their typical fare.
It was even softer than Zepplin III, which heretofore had been considered by some hardcore fans as a step back from the hard-charging blues rock of the first two albums. (As if “The Immigrant Song” and “Celebration Day” were somehow “soft.”) If you read a lot of rock & roll journalism, the word you find most associated with Houses of the Holy is “relaxed.”
Was this a new direction? Did the boys need a break? What would the next album look like? More ominously, would there even be a next album? The band’s secret weapon – bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones – was worn out and thinking about leaving.
Jones recovered and there was. It proved to be titanic. 15 songs and 82 minutes branching out in new directions while still rocking as harder or harder than anyone on the planet. The nine songs they recorded at Headley Grange early in 1974 might have filled a single album had they been of typical length.
But three of the songs ran over eight minutes each – for a total of close to thirty minutes. The other six combined to run about the same length. Had they dropped one of the long ones or two of the shorter ones, the music would have fit on a single album.
The band was not willing to drop anything. They had just launched their own label, Swan Song, headed by their manager Peter Grant. They had the pull to make such a decision.
And so Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones, went through their back catalogue, looking for quality songs that for one reason or another had never made it onto an album. They found six such tracks. They had a complete double album.
It opened with two explosive hard rockers – the kind Zeppelin was known for. “Custard Pie” was brand new and “The Rover” was pulled from the Houses of the Holy sessions. “The Rover” may have been deemed too blues-heavy for the “relaxed” Houses. It was right at home on the new album.
Side one had one more track, and this is where early listeners began to get a sense that something special was afoot. They had played blues classics before, but “In My Time of Dying," taken from Blind Willie Johnson’s “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed,” was unchartered territory. Eleven minutes of blues, starting as slow as possible, then careening through tempo changes that could give any listener whiplash.
Everyone knew Jimmy Page was one of the world’s great guitar players. He simply added to his legacy when he began cranking things up at the four-minute mark. Jones and legendary drummer John Bonham handle the tempo changes effortlessly.
Side two returns to flat-out excellent rock. Listening to “Houses of the Holy,” it seems incomprehensible that they would leave the track off the album that was named for it, but what was the album Houses of the Holy’s loss became PG’s gain. It tees up the next two tracks, where Zeppelin’s sixth album moves from the very good to the sublime.
The back-to-back “Trampled Under Foot” and “Kashmir” form one of the greatest song pairings in rock history. “Trampled” features an impossibly catchy funk groove provided by Jones on the clavinet, channeling Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” And what can you say about “Kashmir,” eight-and-half minutes that bridged the gap between hard and prog rock as well as any song ever has?
The second disc is generally considered somewhat weaker than the first, containing more leftovers from previous sessions. I won’t argue that point. I’ll just mention that an album that has two gems like the hypnotic “In the Light,” (again driven by Jones’ clavinet) and “Ten Years Gone,” a power ballad supreme, would be considered a pretty good achievement.
Add in Robert Plant’s soaring “Sick Again,” the powerhouse punch of “The Wanton Song,” which is basically “Trampled Under Foot” without the same degree of funk, and the lovely “Down by Seaside” and you have a disc that would have been the envy of most other rockers at the time.
Back to the reason for the delayed release. Peter Corriston, who would be nominated for multiple Grammys for his package designs, devised a stunning cover. He found two haunting tenement buildings on St Mark’s Place in Manhattan’s lower east side. He came up with a cover that showed four stories of the side-by-side buildings with cutouts to allow for multiple interior sleeves that could display different images in the buildings’ windows.
He would do something similar for Stones a few years later with Some Girls. But in 1975 – or more accurately, 1974 – it proved a little more difficult to mass produce the design. Thus, the release was pushed to early ’75.
Small point, but a band with less gravitas than Led Zeppelin might have been pressured by their label to shelve the weird design concept and just get the album on the street. But the label, Swan Song, was the band, and when they sat down to discuss the matter, they found themselves to be in agreement with themselves.
Just as they refused to trim any of the original songs from the track list, they pushed back the release so they could have the cover they wanted. It's just a small example of why PG turned out to be as magical as it did.
Zeppelin toured extensively in support of the album. “Sick Again,” “In My Time of Dying,” “Kashmir,” and “Trampled Under Foot” were all concert staples. The album was a major hit and most critics loved it. But apart from Corriston’s packaging, it got no Grammy love. That is a badge of honor. For 1975, the Captain & Tennille won Record of the Year.
Besides, decades later, the band’s performance of “Kashmir” in the 2012 concert film Celebration Day would get the only musical nomination associated with PG when it was up for best rock performance. It lost out to Imagine Dragon’s “Radioactive.” (I think it was that huge breath that sealed the win.)
Of course, by that time, Led Zeppelin was long-broken up. The end came when drummer John Bonham died in 1980. For the Celebration Day performance, his son Jason was on drums.
So, back to the beginning. Is PG the greatest Led Zeppelin album? Based on my particular definition of “greatest,” it is. Untitled is the “best” Zeppelin album. It’s more perfect. It has no filler like the harmless-but-not-very-inspired “Boogie With Stu” or “Black Country Woman.” But its breadth – its ambition – is what makes it great. It aims higher, and that’s saying something because Untitled aims pretty damned high itself.
Zeppelin never got back to those heights again. The final three albums all had some excellent music, but none had the cornucopia of riches found on Physical Graffiti. Five years later, Bonham was gone and the band was no more. But fifty years ago, they achieved a greatness that few if any rock & roll bands ever equaled.