I’m not a big one for rock pilgrimages but on our first day in New York for our 10th wedding anniversary Mrs 1537 and I braved a bitterly cold and snowy East Village morning to find 96 and 98 St Marks Place. I may have lost two toes on my left foot, a nipple and all feeling from the hair downwards but at least we found the cover location for Physical Graffiti*.
It’s a funny beast Physical Graffiti, it reigns over all, lauded as the biggest, best and the most excessive-y of Led Zeppelin’s albums, the very apex of their grand imperial phase. Everything before led to this, everything afterwards has a slight taint of disappointment by comparison**.
Physical Graffiti is a difficult LP to write about, unless you are a (non wi-fi enabled) pole-dwelling ascetic from one of the more obscure reaches of the Gobi Desert you will have read approximately 29 different magazine features on its genesis, its resuscitating impact on the US record industry, 9 different interviews with engineers Andy Johns and George Chkiantz and how ‘Kashmir’ is amongst the greatest rock songs ever written^.
Like many such obelisks strewn about our internal interminable teenage wastelands, Physical Graffiti is difficult to write about. It’s too big, too embedded in how we view and interpret other music to gain any perspective on, because of when we first encountered it. It sits there enigmatic and weathered, as the lone and level sands stretch far away.
So for one night only with a daring sleight of hand I will, ladies and gentlemen, present to you a series of vignettes on a theme.
My mate Julian lived in a big house and when his parents were out we climbed out of his bedroom window onto the flat roof of the extension, mostly so he could smoke without leaving a trace. One sunny summer holiday day he asked me if I knew Led Zeppelin; I did, I loved Led Zeppelin II and IV and told him so. Then he pressed play on his boombox and said he would play me their best LP. I recognized the first track as a Beastie Boys sample from ‘Time To Get Ill’.
Later there was a strangely Eastern sounding track, that went on for ages. I remember that too.
Hundreds of years ago Kerrang! ran a series over 4 issues where they named the Top 100 rock and metal LPs. I’m guessing this was about 1989. It’s how I first heard about Starz, Mother’s Finest, Montrose and Foghat; these were heady days for me. Physical Graffiti was #1 and this was the first time I saw its cover and realised the esteem it was held in. My fertile teenage brain grokked it all.
One night both parents were away at a friends over night, in my head it may even have been this blessed New Year’s Eve. The BBC were running an Old Grey Whistle Test retrospective (or was it the last episode?). Anyways this is where I first heard Television ‘Marquee Moon’ and definitely where I saw the video for ‘Trampled Under Foot’.
It was brilliant, scenes from old dance movies cut to the piston rhythms of Zeppelin. It made a massive impression and it is still my fave track on Physical Graffiti as a result.
Fast forward another year and my parents had some friends around on a Saturday night for curry, reggae and beers. I was playing the none-heavier blues lament ‘In My Time Of Dying’ in my room. My bedroom was heated via the flue pipe of the range downstairs in the kitchen and so sound carried both ways.
As Robert Plant was reaching his full wailing, Jesus invoking climax as all the music smashed and scorched around him, I heard my dad’s friend downstairs say ‘phew, bit different up there isn’t it?’ I felt simultaneously a bit embarrassed (about the God stuff in the song) and very righteous. That stuck somehow.
Several years later in Leeds a girlfriend was playing that Zeppelin cassette with the crop circles on the front and ‘Kashmir’ came on. ‘This is the sexiest song ever made’ she told me. I agreed, it would be rude and probably in all the circumstances rather self-defeating not to.
Reader, I married her.
Jon Bonham carries the rep of being a bit of a pugilist behind the kit, an unparalleled heavy hitter. He was but he was so much more too and I think some of his contributions on Physical Graffiti really give the lie to this. Think of the smart shuffling ‘Trampled Underfoot’, the gentle lilting rhythm of ‘Down By The Seaside’ and the lopsided heaviness of ‘The Wanton Song’. There’s a reason folks call boxing the sweet science.
Years later again on a holiday with our kids in Snowdonia, out walking near Machynlleth one day we saw a sign for a house called Bron-Yr-Aur, ‘just like the stomp’ I thought to myself, without fully engaging my brain, or even mentioning it to Mrs 1537.
It genuinely didn’t occur to me until I was home 2 days later, such is my speed of thought^*, that we were within gawking distance of the most famous cottage in Wales. The most famous cottage in Wales where no fewer than three tracks were written for Physical Graffiti; ‘The Rover’, ‘Bron-Yr-Aur’ and ‘Down By The Seaside’. The most famous cottage in Wales …
Again, no photographs, I am a bit pants at rock pilgrimages.
Over the years I have gradually been drawn away from the obvious big beefy cuts on Led Zeppelin VI and find myself drawn to the burnished melancholy of ‘Ten Years Gone’ and the innocent fun of ‘Boogie With Stu’. I am still turning new corners and discovering new vistas despite being Thirty Years Gone.
My daughter asked me the other day if the Led Zeppelin LP with the house on the cover was worth a listen.
It is.
1181 Down (by the seaside).
*and the developing company lost my negatives when I sent them in to be developed. Thus ensuring I’ll have to go back there again. It’s not a problem I still have one working nipple.
**although in primo Four Weddings And A Funeral style I would just like to say how nice it is to see them all here today on that shelf.
^I disagree, it is amongst the greatest songs ever written.
^*I suspect I am the prototype forerunner for the next stage in human evolution, hence my astonishing mental powers.