Led Zeppelin Presence (Swan Song, 1976) By Tim Dunbar dunbar@mscd.edu

   Thirty years ago, while Americans were gearing up for their bicentennial celebration, Led Zeppelin was celebrating the release of its seventh album, Presence.
   Recorded in just three weeks in November 1975, during which the band spent up to 18 hours a day in the studio, the album was a departure of sorts from previous Zep works. Presence could almost be considered a scaled-down model of Led Zeppelin, as it was lacking the variety of sounds—keyboards, strings and anything acoustic—normally heard on the quartet’s other, more ambitious albums.
   And for good reason. Aside from its speedy production, Presence was recorded while the band was on the move between Malibu, Calif., where lead singer Robert Plant was recovering from a car accident he’d had on Aug. 4, 1975, in which he’d broken his ankle and elbow, and Munich, Germany, where the LP was recorded. Plant, because he was still in a plaster cast, was forced to sit during the recording of his vocals. Anyone who’s ever seen Led Zeppelin, the band that featured the best front man in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, can imagine how difficult it must have been for the singer to pull off.
   The album opens with the epic, “Achilles Last Stand,” a fitting, yet ironic title. Achilles was the hero of Homer’s “The Iliad,” whose mother had the idea of making him immortal by bathing him in the river Styx. She held her son by the heel, which became his vulnerable point; Achilles was shot in the ankle by an arrow during the Trojan wars and killed as a result.
   Plant, presumably, had some empathy for poor Achilles as he sat in a wheelchair during the recording of this song, which was featured in live performances until Led Zeppelin disbanded in 1980. Guitarist Jimmy Page plays a Gibson Les Paul throughout “Achilles,” giving it a harder sound than its Eastern-influenced predecessors “The Song Remains the Same,” and the blockbuster    “Kashmir,” and Plant’s vocals, in spite of his compromised position, are as punchy as ever.
If Page’s guitar is the mainstay of “Achilles Last Stand,” it is the pounding bass of John Paul Jones that carries Presence’s second cut, “For Your Life,” as far as it is able to go before it collapses into a maudlin whine-fest. Jones’ bass and John Bonham’s tight syncopation are the only saving grace of this song—the only audible weak point of the entire album—which finds Plant doing more moaning than singing.
   Some critics accused Zep of taking itself too seriously. Those critics probably never took a careful listen to “Royal Orleans,” a quirky tune about a member of the band waking up next to a drag queen. The song—named after a hotel in the French quarter of New Orleans, where the band spent time taking in the unique essence of the area—is based on a true story, but the band member and the drag queen, to this day, remain anonymous.
   Inspired by Blind Willie Nelson, who wrote similar lyrics in the 1920s, “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” opens with a bluesy, flanged guitar intro and features some of Plant’s best vocals, making it the strongest cut on the album. Sparse lyrics—some that make no sense whatsoever—help drive this guitar-heavy tune forward with all the force of the band’s touring plane, the Boeing 720B “Starship.”
If one song on the album sounds dated 30 years after its release, it is “Candy Store Rock.”    Composed in the studio and put together from fragments of barely-remembered Elvis Presley lyrics (which Zeppelin managed to turn into an ode to cunnilingus), “Candy Store Rock” contains echo-laden guitars, frantic vocals and Bonham’s signature drum riffs. Plant described “Candy Store Rock” as one of his personal favorites on the album, but that may have been due to the fact he recorded most of his vocals for the song during one 14-hour session. Plant’s hard work on this particular cut may have skewed his view of his own work.
   “ Hots on for Nowhere,” while being one of the most uptempo songs on the entire album, is also one of the most desperate and depressing. Plant lets out most of his disgruntlement with the world in this four minute and 44 second cut. With lyrics like, “Inside my tides dance the ebb and sway / The sun in my soul’s sinking lower / While the hope in my hands turns to clay,” it is clear that Robert Plant, at that point in his life, was not a happy man. Still, the song holds its own through the genius of Page’s guitar riffs and the Bonham/Jones combination on percussion.
   In the tradition of “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” from Led Zeppelin’s third album, and “I’m Gonna Crawl” from Physical Graffiti comes the closer of Presence, “Tea for One,” a slow, somber blues number that sounds as powerful today as it did when the band went into the studio to record it.    Derived from Plant’s homesickness and slow recuperation, the song was written when the singer found himself alone in a New York hotel drinking tea. His loneliness is palpable as he sings—but never moans—“How come twenty four hours, baby sometimes seems to slip into days? / A minute seems like a lifetime, baby when I feel this way.”
   The song clocks in at over nine minutes, but each guitar riff, each drumbeat, each bass stroke is so carefully crafted and engaging the lyrics become the antithesis of the song itself.
   Although it was recorded in near record time and under unfortunate circumstances, Presence, though not one of Led Zeppelin’s better-known albums, remains to this day one of their best.