Although Led Zeppelin was active for only 12 years, the band faced many difficult problems and tragedies during their career. Before tragically losing the drummer John Bonham in 1980 at the age of 32, Robert Plant had also lost his five year-old son Karac, a victim of stomach virus. He said many times that Bonham’s, who was a really close friend, support was really important for him to put his feet on the ground again and continue to make music.
But before that, in 1975, in Rhodes Greece, Plant had suffered a car accident while vacationing with his family. His car spun off the road and crashed. The singer broke and ankle and elbow, which took two years to fully heal. He spent a lot of time in a wheelchair and many tour dates had to be canceled at the time.
The vocalist talked many times about the band’s discography over the decades and even revealed which is the album that in his opinion was their phoenix. Also praised one song from that album that according to him is insane and magnificent.
The Led Zeppelin song Robert Plant said is insane and magnificent
The Led Zeppelin song that the legendary vocalist Robert Plant called insane, magnificent and brilliant is “Achilles Last Stand”, which was released on their 1976 album “Presence”. In an episode of his podcast “Digging Deep” in 2019 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage), he praised the song and recalled he was going through a lot of bad things when he wrote the song. “With all these pieces of music, you can separate them.”
“You can kind of carve the songs up into performance, imagination and the kind of weave that holds it, that kind of keeps it together. Which could be melody, a little repeat of a lyrical line, or a guitar line. Or any kind of musical reference that comes back and pulls you back into stuff. Even Coltrane does that on ‘Love Supreme’ or ‘Blue Train’. So with ‘Achilles Last Stand’, the music I was so fortunate to be around.”
“So many amazingly gifted players and if you think about Led Zeppelin as being a trio, really with a kind of wedding singer, stuck up the front. I always saw the reality of what was going on, my enthusiasm was a good contribution but in truth those guys were amazing. I think ‘Achilles Last Stand’ was an uncomfortable time recording the album from which it arrived, which is ‘Presence’. It was a desperate time, I was in a wheelchair for seven months or whatever it was at that time.”
Robert Plant continued:
“But the music was continuing to be developed. Though ‘Presence’ is not always the most comfortable to listen, in the terms like ‘I think I will just settle down with my girlfriend, with a glass of wine and listen to Presence’. You might have to go and stand in the corner for a bit but the interplay. The melody and the musicality of those three guys in that track is insane. It’s absolutely insane, it’s magnificent. So magnificent I had a lady friend who I was playing it and it came on in the house loud. She said: ‘I don’t wanna be left in a room with this on my own’. Because it’s so intense, it’s brilliant.”
“So what I was going to do? I was lying horizontal in bed in a continental house in L.A., it was Halloween 1975. I was in a room on my own in this dodgy old hotel while the world was playing high jinks outside. The whole place was going in totally different to me and my bad leg and my bad arm. So I started writing about freedom and escape.”
He continued:
“The whole thing, the preparation, throughout the song is to be gone to a place which is a reward aesthetically in beauty, space, air. It was basically about the Atlas Mountains, about going back to Morocco. ‘Where the arms of Atlas hold the heavens from the earth’ is not a Yes song (laughs). It’s not something from ‘Tales of Topographic Oceans’.”
“But I was so desperate to get away from that. Being trapped in that environment to hop off the bad and have somebody to push me around. I was saying ‘Let’s get out of here!’. I rather be on the side of the mountains in Oregon or Morocco than be in the riot house. Mostly, wherever I am, even now, all these years later, I really wanna be there or its equivalent. So it’s about, lyrically I suppose, about the dynamic of the life that I lead. What we all put ourselves through as entertainers, musicians and writers. The panacea, the cure, the fix, which is what actually ‘Achilles Last Stand’ is all about really. ” Robert Plant said.
Plant said that “Presence” was Led Zeppelin’s phoenix
Especially because of that car accident, Plant said in a conversation with Interview magazine back in 1977 that the album “Presence” was the band’s phoenix. “‘Presence’ was our phoenix. Well, I know I’m talking. So it’s coming from me, but when you sit in a wheelchair and sing the whole album, the very fact that you’ve sung it is fantastic.”
“But for everyone, in that we got it together in such a short space of time under such odds not knowing what the outcome was going to be. Not of the album but of the future of the band. Because the doctors could never really quite tell me, all that time, about how inactive I might have been left from the accident. So we were just kicking it from the very depths of our determination,” Robert Plant said.
Released in 1976, “Presence” is not among the most successful Led Zeppelin albums. Like all the others, it was produced by the guitarist Jimmy Page but the most famous track is “Achilles Last Stand”. There are also a few fan favorites like “For Your Life”, “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” and “Candy Store Rock”.
It peaked at number 1 on the United Kingdom charts and United States Billboard 200 charts.