The Long Shadow of Led Zeppelin

Physical Graffiti and the 1975 concert performances displayed Led Zeppelin at an artistic peak. After a tenth tour of America and a series of triumphant May concerts at London's Earls Court, the group was set to leave England for a time, to avoid paying Britain's onerous taxes (up to ninety-five percent of their songwriting royalties). The day after the last Earls Court date, Robert Plant, his wife, Maureen, and their three children set out on a trip to Marrakech, Morocco. Page, Martin and their daughter, Scarlet, joined the Plants in June. The two families traveled through July and wound up on the Greek island of Rhodes. On August 3rd, Page left to check on some property in Sicily. The next day, Maureen Plant was driving her family and Scarlet Page in a rented car down a narrow road on the island when she lost control. The car hit a tree hard. Robert thought his wife was dead. His children were badly injured, though Scarlet was unhurt. Robert's ankle was severely broken. Martin had been following in the car behind. She called Richard Cole back in London: The medical care on the island might not be enough for Maureen, who had lost a lot of blood and might die. Cole arranged to get Robert and his family back to England, where Maureen would remain in the hospital for weeks; Robert, however, had to leave immediately, due to tax laws.

Doctors told Plant he would not be able to walk for months—in fact, they thought he might never walk again unaided. The group would not be able to tour for a year or more, if ever. Plant and Page sequestered themselves in Malibu and began writing material that was leaner and more hard-hitting. In November, Led Zeppelin traveled to Munich and recorded Presence. Released in April 1976, Presence conveyed the sense of a band up against bad odds, fighting back. The opening two tracks, "Achilles Last Stand" (about the car accident) and "For Your Life" (about hell and drugs and terror, and about how life inside the band may have been developing), featured the best solos Page would ever play—abstract, desperate, raging. "Presence was pure anxiety and emotion," Page said later. "We didn't know if we'd ever be able to play in the same way again. It might have been a very dramatic change, if the worst had happened to Robert. Presence is our best in terms of uninterrupted emotion."

Over the years, Presence hasn't sold as well as most of the band's catalog. It's more or less the forgotten album; its feelings are too hard, too intense and probably too insular to stay close to for very long. In effect, Led Zeppelin accomplished something akin to Eric Clapton's achievement on Derek and the Dominos' Layla: They forged the spirit and purpose of blues into a new form, without relying on blues scales and structures. Presence is clearly singular in Led Zeppelin's body of work, and it's likely the best album the band ever made.

"It was really like a cry of survival," Plant said. "There won't be another album like it, put it like that. It was a cry from the depths, the only thing that we could do."

On January 1st, 1976, Robert Plant was able to take his first steps without the help of a crutch or cane since the accident on Rhodes. Led Zeppelin didn't resume live performances, though, until their eleventh U.S. tour, in 1977. Page and Grant conceived it as the effort that would reassert Led Zeppelin as the dominant band of the decade—but it didn't go that way.

The tour started on April 1st, in Dallas, and was slated to extend for forty-nine concerts across America, for 1.3 million ticket holders. According to Richard Cole, Page, much of the road crew and Cole himself were using heroin, and Page sometimes seemed weakened as a result. On the third night of the Chicago shows, severe stomach pains forced him to leave the stage, and the show was canceled. After a couple of rest breaks, the band headed to the San Francisco Bay area for a pair of massive Oakland Coliseum concerts promoted by Bill Graham. Trouble, though, had been building—actually, storing up for years. Peter Grant had always been protective of Led Zeppelin, but early along, that protection turned into an impregnable shield designed to guarantee the band and its company a sense of impunity—to destroy property; to insult, attack or take advantage of people. "We made our own laws," Cole told Stephen Davis in Hammer of the Gods. "If you didn't want to fucking abide by them, don't get involved."