Led Zeppelin - The Song Remains the Same
On October 22, 1976, "Led Zeppelin" released "The Song Remains the Same", their first live album and concert-film soundtrack. The film had premiered in New York two days earlier, on October 20, 1976.
In the summer of 1973, "Led Zeppelin" was at the height of its imperial power, an unstoppable force of nature that forever changed the rules of the global music industry. Following the release of their fifth studio album, "Houses of the Holy", the British quartet embarked on a North American tour that broke all sales and audience records previously held by The Beatles. On stage, far from the time constraints of studio vinyl records, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and legendary drummer John Bonham became a telepathic elite unit that stretched the boundaries of blues, hard rock, folk and psychedelia into realms of free improvisation and mysticism.
To immortalize this power on the big screen and on record, the band's formidable and loyal manager, Peter Grant, decided to document the three shows that concluded the American tour at Madison Square Garden in New York, between July 27 and 29, 1973. Alongside legendary sound engineer Eddie Kramer, who recorded the performances using Wally Heider's portable recording studio, director Joe Massot was hired to shoot a wide-format film that combined documentation of the performance with surreal fantasy footage that reflected the inner world of the four band members.
But behind the scenes of those three historic nights in New York, a drama unfolded that became one of the darkest legends "in rock" and roll history. On the last day of the tour, the band's hotel safe at the Drake Hotel in Manhattan was broken into, and $203,000 in cash, the proceeds from the concert, was stolen. The mystery of the robbery, which was never officially solved, along with technical delays, a change of directors with the arrival of Australian director Peter Clifton, and complex synchronization problems between sound and picture, delayed the completion of the project for three whole years. When the double album was finally released in October 1976 on the band's independent label, Swan Song Records, it captured the music world at a completely different point in time, just before the outbreak of punk, and became a monumental time capsule of the golden age of stadium rock.
The album opens with a direct electric shock with "Rock and Roll", where John Bonham's thunderous drums and Jimmy Page's sharp riffs send the New York crowd into overdrive from the first second. Immediately after, without a moment's respite, the band slides into "Celebration Day", where Jimmy Page's guitar work and John Paul Jones' racing bass demonstrate just how tight and hungry the band was on stage.
After the sweeping opening, the band takes listeners into the opening duo of their fifth album "Houses of the Holy", the show's theme song "The Song Remains the Same" and followed by the masterful ballad "The Rain Song". Here, Jimmy Page's genius with the double-neck Gibson EDS-1275 guitar comes to the fore, allowing him to switch between heavenly 12-string passages and piercing 6-string solos, while John Paul Jones envelops the hall with warm Mellotron sounds that give the song an exciting orchestral volume.
One of the album’s most mesmerizing moments is "No Quarter", with John Paul Jones at the electric piano. The original album performance lasts about twelve and a half minutes, building a dark, almost progressive atmosphere before Jimmy Page joins with a striking guitar solo.
But the most pulsating and ambitious heart of the original album lies on the entire second side, which is devoted entirely to an epic, nearly twenty-seven-minute rendition of "Dazed and Confused." What began on the 1969 debut album as dark psychedelic blues-rock became a multi-part shamanic ceremony on the Madison Square Garden stage in 1973. Page whips out his famous violin bow and produces ghostly wails and hypnotic dissonances from the guitar, before the band bursts into a fast, virtuoso jam in which Robert Plant's voice duels telepathically with Jimmy Page's guitar over the shifting rhythms of John Bonham and John Paul Jones.
The second half of the album continues to showcase the band's immense range, led by a moving, majestic, and expansive rendition of "Stairway to Heaven." Here, Robert Plant takes center stage and reminds us why he has become the archetype of the ultimate rock vocalist, leading the song with vocals that range from a fragile, mysterious folk whisper at the beginning to a rock 'n' roll scream at the end. Just before the song explodes into its final crescendo, Plant weaves in the most famous improvised line in the band's concert history, "Does anybody remember laughter?", a phrase that has become the mythological symbol of the entire album, while Jimmy Page improvises a long, melodic, and freer guitar solo than the one known from the studio version.
From there, the album continues with John Bonham's display of rhythmic power in the famous drum solo "Moby Dick", in which he puts down the sticks and hits the drums with his bare hands, and concludes with a fourteen-minute performance of "Whole Lotta Love", which develops into a sensual funky and bluesy journey that includes Plant's unbridled vocal theatricality, psychedelic games, and a string of homages to the blues and rock 'n' roll roots of Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker.
The original album contained nine tracks. In 2007, a new Kevin Shirley mix expanded it to fifteen, adding "Black Dog", "Over the Hills and Far Away", "Misty Mountain Hop", "Since I’ve Been Loving You", "The Ocean" and "Heartbreaker". The 2018 remaster, supervised by Jimmy Page, retained the expanded program.
The sleeve, credited to Hipgnosis and George Hardie, depicts an old cinema, visually linking the rock performance with the big screen.
Over time, "The Song Remains the Same" has become much more than a cult-film soundtrack. It preserves the scale, improvisation and ambition of "Led Zeppelin" on stage, inviting listeners back into the atmosphere of those three New York nights.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
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