Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti Chalks Up Many "Firsts"

1974 would be the year Led Zeppelin worked on its sixth album, Physical Graffiti, as manager Peter Grant has decided. It would be their first double album and also the first to be produced under the group’s own label, Swan Song.

Other acts signed to the new label included Maggie Bell (along with Zeppelin’s protégé, Joe Jammer), Bad Company (with Paul Rodgers) and The Pretty Things – a band described by one of my interviewees as being “badder” than The Rolling Stones!

Also that year the group would work on its first film: The Song Remains the Same. During Zeppelin’s super successful U.S. and Canadian Tour of 1973, concert footage had been shot that would accompany fantasy sequences of each band member.

You can read a lot more about The Song Remains the Same (movie AND soundtrack) elsewhere on this site. After that 1973 tour, Led Zeppelin would take 18 months off from touring to work on these two projects.

Composing And Compiling At Headley Grange

Widely considered Led Zeppelin’s best-ever album, Physical Graffiti was yet another masterful mix of musical genres. The band first gathered at Headley Grange, East Hampshire to record in November 1973 but soon relinquished their studio time to Bad Company.

Recording resumed in January 1974. With engineer Ron Nevinson, Zeppelin laid down eight tracks that Robert Plant dubbed “The Belters”: Custard Pie, In My Time of Dying, Trampled Underfoot, Kashmir, In the Light, Ten Years Gone, The Wanton Song and Sick Again.

Rather than cut back on these numbers to fit the customary album length, Led Zeppelin’s musicians decided to add previously unreleased numbers from other studio sessions and extend the LP into their first double album.

They added The Rover, Houses of the Holy, the instrumental Bron-Yr-Aur, Down by the Seaside, Night Flight, Boogie with Stu and Black Country Woman.

photo credits

Influences Aren’t Always Musical

Robert Plant’s vocals on Physical Graffiti were especially hoarse and gravelly. Listen to In My Time Of Dying, In The Light, Trampled Underfoot, Kashmir. You’ll hear what I mean. The debut Led Zeppelin had a rawness too, but it’s different.

In 1988, Plant revealed in The Scotsman newspaper that he’d had an operation on his vocal cords and couldn’t speak for three weeks! This would have been in the period of fall/winter 1973/74, coinciding with when those tracks were recorded.

More location recording was done at Headley Grange in the fall of ’74, followed by final mixing at Olympic Studios. The Song Remains the Same project had long taken a back seat, although Zeppelin and Grant’s fantasy sequences were filmed.

Led Zeppelin’s first double-album was finally released in February 1975 just as the band was preparing for its tenth tour of North America.

Two More Firsts

Physical Graffiti was the first album ever to go platinum solely based on advance orders!

It entered U.S. charts at #3, soon soared to #1 and stayed there for six weeks. But then, incredibly, all five of Zeppelin’s previously released studio albums came back onto the Billboard charts! That had never happened before, either. Another first!

As I mentioned earlier, several songs on this album had been recorded earlier and elsewhere. They were added to the Headley Grange recordings to extend the LP to a double. Here are some examples:

Bron-Yr-Aur was originally composed during the Led Zeppelin III sessions; recorded in 1970 at Island Studios and Olympic Studios, both located in London.

Houses of the Holy, recorded in 1972 at Olympic Studios (London) and Electric Lady Studios (New York).

Boogie with Stu, featuring Rolling Stones manager Ian Stewart on piano, was recorded at Ronnie Lane’s Mobile, Headley Grange during the same sessions that yielded Rock and Roll for Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album. Mixing was done at Olympic.