96. Physical Graffiti — Led Zeppelin

So, here’s a thing: Physical Graffiti generally considered to be the best Led Zeppelin album.

Here’s another thing: it clearly isn’t.

Now, there are some tremendous songs on this album, but there is a lot which is just fine. Taken as a whole it’s so obviously worse than Led Zeppelin IV that its standing is… confusing.

So how can people say with a straight face that it’s the best?

Answer: It is the favourite of people who are already Led Zeppelin fans. A newcomer is not going to fall in love with the band from this album. But if you’ve followed them through 4 other LPs, you can enjoy listening to the band stretch out and have fun messing around.

This can be your favourite Led Zeppelin album, but only if the other albums have already done the work in establishing the band.

Alternative and less charitable answer: any idiot can tell that Led Zeppelin IV is wonderful. The meandering Physical Graffiti will lose some people, so it’s an opportunity to distinguish yourself and your superior taste.

The Album

Physical Graffiti was created from 8 new songs, and a bunch of leftovers from the previous three albums. You can tell.

At their best, artists create works which are the ultimate version of that kind of art, the standards by which others are judged. Led Zeppelin did this a load of times. Immigrant Song, for instance, is surely the best version out there of its type of thing. Other songs, should they drift into that weird Viking space, will be considered more or less like Immigrant Song.

Led Zeppelin IV is full of these achievements; each song is a freshly minted new archetype.

Physical Graffiti has one sure example of this: Kashmir. Other people have done songs which sound like worse versions of Kashmir. But most of the album, particularly the second half, stays firmly in the possibility space marked out by other artists.

The Man and the Mythic

Led Zeppelin work best when through chutzpah and commitment they manage to persuade you that they are colossal, amoral, rock gods. When that illusion slips, the whole thing starts to fall apart. On this album they are more relaxed, revealing themselves. Though this is appealing to existing fans, to the newcomer it causes all kinds of problems.

The opening line of the song Houses of the Holy is “Let me take you to the movies…”

No.

This is not what Robert Plant is for. He should not sing about asking women out. He is not Buddy Holly. Instead you want glorious nonsense about mountains and massed armies. To give him his due, later he tries to digs his way out with some classic Plant bollocks, but a chink has been opened in the mythology.

From the houses of the holy, we can watch the white doves go,

From the door comes Satan’s daughter, and it only goes to show, you know

There’s an angel on my shoulder, in my hand a sword of gold,

Let me wander in your garden and the seeds of love I’ll sow.

This tension between Plant the man and Plant the aloof rock hammer is also present on album opener Custard Pie, which pretty much gets away with being a powerful and playful expression of male sexuality.

Drop down, baby, let your daddy see
Drop down, mama, just dream of me.

But then he starts using pie as a euphemism for vagina.

Your custard pie, yeah, sweet and nice
When you cut it, mama, save me a slice.

Cut it?

This fondness for innuendo is a reminder that most of these 70s rock heroes were only 15 years on from being English children. They might have excellent hair, but they all read the Beano, watched Carry On films and went on holiday to Weston Super Mare. Keith Richards does it too, in Coming Down Again. “Slipped my tongue in someone else’s pie…”

Grim.

Any weird feelings around Custard Pie are amplified by the album’s other bookend, Sick Again, which is about groupies (i.e. the sexual exploitation of underage girls).

From the window of your rented limousine I saw your pretty blue eyes One day soon you’re gonna reach sixteen

Painted lady in the city of lies.

And you’re forced to confront that these are real people, who (probably) exploited and abused everyone around them. You look up these men and realise they were married, and you wonder what their wives made of it all, and how they coped with it.

Surely these men are responsible for their own actions. And yet… how many 27 year old men would be unaffected by enormous wealth, unlimited drugs and complete protection from consequences? Easy for me to judge these men; I will never have the option to behave like that. I will never have girls sneaking into my hotel room. I will never be surrounded by a culture which endorses all of my impulses.

Maybe we’re only as ethical as the consequences we have to face. Is it Led Zeppelin’s fault for (presumably) behaving in an abusive way, or is it our fault as a culture for treating them as more than normal people? (Answer: both!)

Germaine Greer said of Plant:

The spring god Dionysus had arisen and was shaking his streaming red-gold mane on stage.

But he was not Dionysus. He was a young man from the Midlands. If we didn’t treat people like Greek Gods, then perhaps they wouldn’t act like them.

Is it better than Rumours?

Nope.

Standout track for the Spotify Playlist:

Kashmir the obvious choice, but I have a fondness for The Rover, so that’s going on.

Next up: Hard Again by Muddy Waters.

Originally published at 100greatestalbumsrevisited.home.blog on February 10, 2019.