There is a multitude of reasons why Led Zeppelin managed to eclipse The Beatles as the most acclaimed band on earth, but none are as important as the songs themselves. From early cuts such as ‘Communication Breakdown’ to later efforts such as ‘Achilles Last Stand’ and by way of their much-maligned masterpiece ‘Stairway to Heaven’, there is no real surprise that the band resoundingly trumped the Liverpudlian quartet by the end of the 1960s. They did this by fearlessly pushing the boundaries of music creation and making it more grandiose than ever before.
Their most expansive offering is the eight-and-a-half minute leviathan ‘Kashmir’, the highlight of 1975’s Physical Graffiti. Not only is the riff one of guitarist Jimmy Page’s most famous, but it is also one of his most affecting. The band effectively ushered in their final chapter via the song’s otherworldly essence. This would see them finally realise the vision of their early years, with them now veterans of the scene.
Famously, when appearing in Davis Guggenheim’s 2009 film It Might Get Loud, Page revealed the origins of ‘Kashmir’ to fellow axemen The Edge and Jack White, who listened with focused wonder. He said that back in 1973, he was experimenting with the DADGAD tuning, one often used on the esoteric-sounding stringed instruments of the Middle East. One day when fooling around, he stumbled across the riff, and then the song slowly wrote itself over the next couple of years.
Drummer John Bonham helped bring the track to life by adding his thunderous drums in a recording session with Page at Led Zeppelin’s musical refuge, Headley Grange. Then, frontman Robert Plant penned the hypnotic lyrics whilst he and Page drove through southern Morocco’s share of the Sahara Desert. Finally, bass player and respected multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones added the orchestral arrangements the following year. The missing piece in the puzzle, they augmented Page’s riff and imbued the piece with the heavy dose of grandeur that has made it so everpresent in popular culture.
When speaking to journalist Richard Kingsmill in 1995 for a radio interview on ABC, Plant recalled the making of ‘Kashmir’: “It was an amazing piece of music to write to, and an incredible challenge for me. Because of the time signature, the whole deal of the song is…not grandiose but powerful. It required some kind of epithet, or abstract lyrical setting about the whole idea of life being an adventure and being a series of illuminated moments. But everything is not what you see. It was quite a task, because I couldn’t sing it. It was like the song was bigger than me.”