1:31 AM EDT May 30, 2026:
Led Zeppelin - “For Your Life” From the album Presence (March 31, 1976)
Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm
Much in the same way that the lyrics to The Beatles’ “Glass Onion” acknowledged with a nod and a reluctant wink the gnostic cult of Paul-is-Dead, the packaging of Led Zeppelin’s Presence acknowledged the I’m sure at-least-somewhat-discomfitting fact that their group had long since become the most humongous rock band in the world.
By the time of The White Album, and by the time of Presence, respectively, things had gotten to the point where expedience was no longer expedient. The Beatles had tried not to feed the conspiracy theorists, and Zeppelin–modest at least in this one regard–had stayed away from licensing lunchboxes and appearances on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. But at a certain point, things get so big, and so plain, that they become the elephant in the room.
Presence seems to be Zep’s acceptance of their own status (beyond even their own control) as Big Dumb Object, an enormous artifact of unfathomable consequence.
That’s dumb as in “incapable of speech,” not as in “stupid,” just so we’re straight. But since we’re there, let me note that Presence perhaps more than any Zeppelin album save II demonstrates that a certain amount of stoopidity is unavoidable or even desired if you’re going to play the cock-rock game.
Plant’s lyrics to “Achilles” reference some etching or the other of William Blake’s, so my point is not to disparage Zeppelin’s obvious operational intelligence. Still, Zeppelin were all about contrast: I dare you to check out the live video from ‘77, and tell me that Plant’s suggestive mannerisms as he sings the band’s 11-minute epic aren’t a little stoopid … .
Ah, but I digress, ‘cause the key concept here is not “Dumb” but “Big.” Think thunder. Think “Hammer of the Gods,” if that helps.
After four albums where at least part of the idea had been to leaven the heaviness with keyboards or acoustic instruments, Presence was a return to the undiluted bombast of the second album. Guitar bass drums voice recorded in a mere 18 days–not necessarily simple, but certainly direct.
The instrumental contrasts that for good or ill had been there on III, IV, Houses of the Holy, and Physical Graffiti were absent on the band’s seventh album–and maybe that’s why it’s long been their least popular. Funny thought, that: maybe Zeppelin were so goddamned popular not because of the parts that rocked, but because of the parts that didn’t!
I don’t want to go overboard, however. I don’t want to make it sound as if Presence were a piece of the nascent pub rock of the time, because the very first track belies that. “Achilles” is the third longest studio track for the band and features perhaps Page’s most intricate guitar orchestration, with as many as 12 overdubs. It’s routinely described as proggy, or even Yes-like (and if you don’t believe that, consider that Dream Theater is one of the many acts who have covered the song). And note that Jonesy is playing an eight-string bass.
Leave it to this band of contrasts to feature a 10-½ minute song about a Greek demigod with painstakingly multitracked guitars on their back-to-basics record … Presence is perhaps Led Zeppelin’s most misunderstood album, but for Page Plant Jones & Bonham, that may have been The Object all along.
File under: The Object Of It All
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The elephant in the room is, as it were, an elephant cock. Actual cock, gay gay gay cock. Presence artwork is about having to keep it, the big gay cock of it all, hid in the world of stereotypical normie family values.
OP you are so so close with ‘as in no language’ but no fucking cigar.
The cover art is all about what cannot be said but which is by now completely fucking obvious.
Achilles is about Jimmy and Robert going to Morocco. Morocco is about Jimmy and Robert being so into each other they follow the established gay gay gay orientalist dream of running away from the closet to north Africa - but then they bail, and slink back to the circus and the wheels come off in an actual near fatal crash.
The title is a typical Robert joke about the horrible awful aftermath.
Achilles means he can make a joke about his busted ankle AND TALK ABOUT GAY GAY GAY at the same time. Achilles is the gayest golden demigod with an odd dark haired male lover you can lay your hands on with only a passing knowledge of Greek myth. Achilles is not in the song at all. They are.
The whole album is unusually written just by those two. It sounds different because it is not leavened by John Paul Jones’ arrangements. It has 12 guitar overdubs because Jimmy was out of his mind with tragic love, anxiety that his baby (Zeppelin) might not walk again, and he was not sleeping for 3 days at a time while he recorded them.
I wonder why people rarely wonder why when the instruction to wonder why is slapped on the front back like a huge penis saying LOOK BIG OMINOUS SECRET please wonder why. Signature move.
has this been done
