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Interviews with Jimmy Page - 2015.


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...THank you this link this Morning... there is no question, Jimmy is a Master Musician..........

And a genius producer. I love these latest interviews where he's talking about the musical construction of Kashmir and depth of field:

https://www.yahoo.com/music/led-zeppelins-jimmy-page-readies-physical-111324020781.html

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Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page Previews Deluxe Edition of 'Physical Graffiti,' Answers Fans Questions.

Craig Rosen,Writer.February 20, 2015.

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With the 40th anniversary and reissue of Physical Graffiti approaching next week, Jimmy Page previewed seven previously unreleased tracks from the album’s new deluxe version and answered fans’ questions Thursday in an exclusive Yahoo Live stream event from London’s Olympic Studios, the very place where the landmark double-album was mixed.

After fans were treated to first listens of such classic tracks as “Brandy & Coke” and the initial rough mix of “Trampled Under Foot,” as well “Driving Through Kashmir,” a rough orchestral mix of the album track, Page took questions from Mojo magazine editor Phil Alexander and fans on a wide variety of topics. Addressed in the hour-long chat was the writing and recording of the album, the inspiration behind its title and cover, meeting Elvis Presley, and how one particular track literally saved a fan’s life after he suffered a stroke a decade ago.

Dressed in all black with his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, Page affably fielded the questions, tossing off revelations about the legendary album’s backstory and inspiration.

He revealed that Physical Graffiti differed from the veteran British band’s previous five albums, because the band finally had some time off from the continuous grind of recording and touring and entered the studio armed with plenty of material. “It never felt like a year off to me,” Page revealed. “People say, ‘You had time off,’ [but] I remember working… I was really excited, I was chomping at the bit to get in [the studio], because I had quite a lot of material that I wanted to bring to the party.”

Some of that material, such as early versions of such seminal tracks as “Houses of the Holy,” “In the Light,” and “Boogie With Stu,” can be heard on the deluxe edition’s bonus disc. As Page noted, “You can hear just how well we’re working as a band” on the demos.

The guitarist/composer/producer also noted that the fact that Physical Graffiti was the first release on Swan Song, Led Zeppelin’s own label, was also particularly gratifying. “It was cool to have your own label,” he said, “because you could have people on their you respected,” adding the label’s initial signings included Bad Company, the Pretty Things, and Dave Edmunds.

Page said the band having its own label also gave Led Zep creative freedom. “To actually have your first release [on your own label] and to get to the point when it was a double-album and the mother of all double albums” was a thrill.

Along with the dramatic, world music orchestrations of “Kashmir,” Physical Graffiti also allowed the band to “get a little retro,” Page said, with such tracks as “Boogie With Stu,” “Down By the Seaside,” and “Night Flight,” all songs that had initially been cut during the sessions for Led Zeppelin IV, "but clearly they couldn’t have replaced any of the songs on the fourth album.

Speaking of going retro, Page recalled when he and the rest of Led Zeppelin — singer Robert Plant, bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham— had the pleasure of meeting Elvis Presley. “We got invited to his suite and we were all sort of sitting around there and he came in a connecting door and it was this fantastic moment, because we wouldn’t have been there without him. Elvis had just done so much. I was so aware of the fact of how brilliant he was, how incredibly he looked and his own musical vision. The stuff that he did with Scotty Moore and Bill Black just changed everything, didn’t it?”

The fans from around the world lucky enough to gain entry to the event at Olympic Studios appeared to be as thrilled to see Page as the members of the Led Zeppelin had been to meet the King — and a chosen few were given the opportunity to ask the Zep mastermind questions.

One women asked Page who came up with the album title and what it represents. “I’m only smiling because it’s me,” Page laughed. “I came up with the title.” He explained how he merged the two distinct words to form the title. “Around that point in time, there had been graffiti around London — not the sort of graffiti you see now, like hip-hop sort of graffiti; this was more slogans and things, like a quotation from William Blake.” When he presented the title to his band members, “there was no question about it. They got it. It was real physical music and it was graffiti in so much as you’re laying it onto the walls of the building you’re recording in… and also onto the magnetic tape, just physical thrusting.”

As for the album’s famous die-cut cover, Page explained the idea was an extension from the wheel that graced the cover of Led Zeppelin III. “The reality of that was that you’d never actually see everything that was on the wheel,” Page said. “I’m sure the record company sort of cursed the whole idea… It was a bit sort of mischievous saying, ‘Right, let’s try the same idea, but we’re going to make it a bit more user-friendly so you can actually see everything that’s on the inside.’”

Perhaps the most emotional part of the session came when a fan revealed to Page that the song “In the Light” helped him a decade ago when he was in the hospital after suffering a stroke. Page, visibly moved, said, “Thank you… it’s such an inspirational song. I have to give credit to Robert on that. The lyrics are just phenomenal.”

The deluxe edition of Physical Graffiti, due Feb. 24, is just the latest installment in the continuing Led Zeppelin reissue campaign. Still to come are Presence, In Through the Out Door, and Coda, which like the previous six releases will feature previously unreleased bonus tracks.

Of course, Alexander had to ask what sort of surprises we should expect on forthcoming releases, but Page wasn’t biting. “I sort of know what’s coming,” he said with a sly grin, “but I can’t tell you, because that’s the surprise.”

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Still a whole lotta love for legendary Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin guitarist and producer Jimmy Page has assembled a 40th-anniversary tribute to the band's masterwork, Physical Graffiti. He tells Pierre Perrone why the album is so special So many myths have grown around Led Zeppelin, the British rock band that ruled the Seventies and continues to cast a long shadow over popular music, that their guitarist, producer and curator extraordinaire Jimmy Page has to see the funny side.

The 71-year-old's hair may be snow-white, but his black-clad frame is as pencil-thin as it was in his prime. The years roll back while we converse in a plush Kensington hotel, a stone's throw from the Royal Albert Hall, where Led Zeppelin triumphed in 1969 and 1970.

He is talking up the 40th-anniversary edition of Physical Graffiti, the third tranche of a reissue campaign. The addition of extra discs with out-takes, alternative and rough mixes has returned the group's first five mega-selling albums to the charts.

Page is debunking a story about what happened before the recording of Physical Graffiti started. "On this one, we're really bouncing. We've been touring and we're going in there and John Paul Jones has left his choir," he quips, alluding to the rumour that, at the end of 1973, his multi-instrumentalist bandmate considered quitting the world's biggest group to become a choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral.

The truth is more prosaic. "John had a big family and he wasn't there on the first few days. His holidays over-ran," he says. Back in 1973, since vocalist Robert Plant was also late arriving, Page and drummer John Bonham began rehearsing the epic Kashmir, the unstoppable, Panzer-like track which typified the ambition of Physical Graffiti.

"I had that riff on an acoustic piece I was working on and I also had those staccato parts that became the brass parts. The idea of using the orchestra over that riff goes back to classical music, things like Benjamin Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. I knew it was pretty radical.

"John Bonham understood what it was about. The whole band took to it. "Robert said, 'Oh, I've got some lyrics that I wrote before, in Morocco'. He tried them out and they worked really well," says Page.

As he admits, there was no guarantee the Eastern-flavoured majesty of 'Kashmir' was going to translate across to the general public. Yet it became another gem in the superlative Led Zeppelin catalogue, and a milestone at the crossroads of world music and rap, recycled by Puff Daddy for Come With Me on the soundtrack to the Godzilla blockbuster in 1998. "People went, 'Oh, he shouldn't have done that', but you might as well say, 'Oh, he shouldn't have dabbled in world music'. Of course, I should have. I was doing that as a teenager, so why in heaven's name not? It's all part of the big picture," says Page.

Page has remained fiercely protective of their catalogue and amassed his own collection of bootlegs, which proved handy when he began considering the definitive, state-of-the-art, expanded reissues.

And how does he feel about their legacy? "Some bands have done terrible things, some bands have done really good things, playing in the spirit of Led Zeppelin. You're only passing on the baton really. What does matter is that we've managed to make a difference and quite clearly Led Zeppelin's music did."

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/still-a-whole-lotta-love-for-legendary-led-zeppelin-31006327.html

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Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page: 'We enjoyed pushing the boundaries over the horizon' AS Led Zeppelin’s much-lauded album Physical Graffi ti is re-released, Martin Townsend meets the band’s guitar legend
Published: 00:01, Sun, February 22, 2015

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Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page opens up about his career, recording albums and success

In a chic café bar above the Olympic Studios in Barnes, South West London, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin is holding forth on the band’s extraordinary success.So many strange myths and legends swirl around Led Zeppelin, partly fuelled by their staunch refusal to release videos or singles and partly by tales of excess on their 1970s tours in particular, that Page’s straight-ahead demeanour comes as something of a surprise.

An affable, chatty, youthful-looking 71 year old, still rock star slim in expensive-looking leather jacket, he pinpoints their loathing of singles in particular as key to their longevity.

“Every time we went into the studio, whether it be the first, second or whatever album, we weren’t shackled,” he says.

“We didn’t have that great ball and chain of the ‘singles market’ dragging behind us...You could see with other bands that it was the Achilles heel for them. They’d spend days and weeks coming up with a single. In the same period we could make an album. We made our Presence LP in three weeks but you’d never know it because there’s so much going on.

“We could just enjoy what we were doing, making the music and really pushing the boundaries over the horizon. And that’s what, by rights, we had to do, because we were such fine musicians and we were also able to play and connect together so well as a band.”

Such pride in the band’s achievements would sound like arrogance from most, but in Page’s case it seems entirely justified: not only has he co-written some of the greatest rock songs ever recorded – Whole Lotta Love, Stairway To Heaven et al – but, in recent years, re-mastered them with a painstaking care that seems to come more from love of the material than any desire to cash in.

“You hear other people say they’ve re-mastered their catalogue,” explains Page, “but with this it was a far more adventurous project, far more ambitious, because it was about approaching every aspect of the way things were heard. You can hear the depth, the quality, the height and the width of it all.”

The latest recipient of his care is the band’s sixth – and for many fans, best LP, Physical Graffiti. From the piano-driven Boogie With Stu through the swelling majesty of Kashmir and crunching Trampled Underfoot, this double-album, released 40 years go this week and re-released tomorrow, was, arguably, their masterpiece.

The new edition includes an extra disc of additional material, including a cracking early version of In My Time Of Dying, All eleven and a half minutes of it..

“That’s a really good point of reference of this album because it wasn’t done in sections, as it would be now, it was just ‘1-2-3, start the guitar’, and that’s it... Everyone would remember the whole musical map of it, in one take,

“And then we hadn’t actually rehearsed the ending so what you hear is Robert (Plant) and I jamming between us. It’s such a wonderful illustration of what we were and no other band could do that.”

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'I’m not looking to recreate another Led Zeppelin'

Page’s own rock background was extensive even before he formed Led Zeppelin. He played alongside Alexis Korner during the British blues boom and then on countless hits during the 1960s, including Petula Clark’s Downtown, Tom Jones’ It’s Not Unusual and Marianne Faithfull’s As Tears Go By.

At one point he was involved in three different recording sessions a day. In 1966 he joined The Yardbirds as rhythm guitarist and when they fell apart set about forming The New Yardbirds with John Paul Jones, vocalist Robert Plant and drummer John Bonham from a Birmingham band called Band Of Joy.

The band changed their name to Led Zeppelin on the advice of Keith Moon, no less, who thought they’d go down like a lead balloon...

“From the first album Led Zeppelin was always going to be a totally new approach from what had gone before – whether it was approaching the blues or folk music like Babe I’m Gonna Leave You: nothing existed like that.

Nobody had thought of tracks where you had the acoustic but and then the whole group coming in and,’ he punches his palm, ‘hitting hard. But everything we did was always the result of everybody’s roots. Everybody had substantial roots and that reallyhelped.”

Despite Page and Plant’s various solo and group projects since, it is arguable that Led Zeppelin would still be playing together today had not tragedy struck in 1980. After a marathon 24 hour drinking session, involving 40 shots of vodka, drummer John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham died in his sleep aged 32 . Led Zeppelin as an ongoing project, without Bonzo, seemed unthinkable.

“I don’t think drums had ever sounded so big until Led Zeppelin’s first album,” says Page. “He changed drumming overnight. The bass drum technique, the sound of the drums was incredible...groundbreaking. It’s a science tuning the drums because it’s an acoustic instrument but he knew how to tune them for optimum effect, to make them project. It sounds like he’s really hitting it with fore-arm smashes but it’s all coming from the wrist.”

He shakes his head at the memory. “He was marvellous. A really good player.”

Just before Christmas 2007 Led Zeppelin reformed, with John Bonham’s son Jason on drums, for a concert at the 02 in London in memory of legendary record company executive Ahmet Ertegun, the man who had brought them to Atlantic Records on the strength of their earliest demos.

Does Jimmy miss the band not being an ongoing project ?

“No,” he says, “because I think that ten or eleven period is what it is and to have been part of that is really cool. You get a chance like that maybe once in your lifetime and you are lucky to sustain it over that period of time. It doesn’t mean to say that whatever I do in the future has no substance to it – I may present some new material I’ve got and there are definitely new angles of doing it - but I’m not looking to recreate another Led Zeppelin.”

In the meantime the band seem to have attracted new generations of teenage fans. “It’s not a band that comes to the surface then disappears again; it’s extremely consistent all the way through because of the quality, because it’s infectious and because it captures performances of four people playing and singing. We worked really well together,” he says. “We didn’t waste time...”

* The remastered Physical Graffiti is out tomorrow, in all formats on Warner Brothers Records.

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Jimmy Page on the 'Swagger' of Led Zeppelin's 'Physical Graffiti'
Forty years after the double-album's release, the guitarist and producer explains how the band made an epic masterpiece
By Kory Grow | February 23, 2015

By the time Led Zeppelin released Physical Graffiti in 1975, they no longer needed to prove anything. "All of us knew that it was a monumental piece of work, just because of the various paths that we'd trodden along to get to this," says the group's guitarist and producer Jimmy Page, in one of the music rooms at London's Olympic Studios where the double-LP was originally mixed. "It was like a voyage of discovery, a topographical adventure."

After refining the band's blend of heavy-hitting blues-rock and introspective English folk on their five previous records, Led Zeppelin made Physical Graffiti their victory lap. They were now successful enough to operate their own record label, Swan Song, and the album — their first offering on the imprint — was their lengthy battle cry. Clocking in at a little over 80 minutes, Physical Graffiti contained some of their hardest-rocking tunes ("The Wanton Song," "Custard Pie," "Houses of the Holy"), trippiest epics ("Kashmir," "In the Light," "Ten Years Gone") and sweetest rock & roll diversions ("Black Country Girl," "Boogie With Stu"). The record showed Led Zeppelin at both their most excessive and most impressive.

Now, along with the rest of Led Zeppelin's canon, Page has given Physical Graffiti an overhaul — remastering the original LP and compiling an album-length bonus disc of alternate mixes and early sketches of the songs on the record. Some are subtle, like the understated rough mix of "Houses of the Holy" and overdub-free version of "Trampled Under Foot" (titled "Brandy and Coke"), and others are drastic, such as "Everybody Makes It Through," a psychedelic draft of what would become the LP's portal to other worlds, "In the Light."

When Page recalls the first rumblings of the album, he remembers the excitement he felt about returning to Headley Grange, the 18th century English estate where the group had recorded its landmark fourth LP. "I knew what we could do at Headley Grange after having had such a rewarding and productive experience there before," he says. "I knew the secrets of what could be done there."

What was it about returning to Headley Grange that excited you?
I knew how we did the drums in the main hall for [the fourth album's] "When the Levee Breaks." And some numbers would come out of thin air, like for example the way "Rock & Roll" did on the fourth album and then on Physical Graffiti, "Trampled Under Foot," which came out of thin air like that, just starting out of a riff. I was basically musically salivating on the way there. I was just looking forward to the whole process of everybody being there and just having a whole run at basically working out whatever material I had had or anyone else might've had.

You had written music at home prior to the sessions. Were you living in Aleister Crowley's former estate at that point?
No, I wasn't at Crowley's house. I lived in the countryside in Sussex, and it was a really interesting house. At the top of the house, I had a multitrack studio put in, and it gave me a chance to work on textures. I had the whole of "Ten Years Gone," all of the guitar orchestration, prepared in that house. I came up with "The Wanton Song" and "Sick Again," and I had the whole concept of the "Kashmir" basically there.

How did the sessions at Headley Grange begin?
It sort of kicked off with myself and John Bonham there. I had a good half-dozen things at least. And one of them — the first one that I couldn't wait to get the drums in the hall, to get this big drum sound and then play the riff of — was "Kashmir." I wanted to try out these ideas that I had for the cascading brass part and figure out the guitar's pace on it. I always thought of that guitar part as being something that was augmented by the orchestra. Basically, it was just really good to start kicking it off with him, 'cause he and I worked so well together.

"This was meant to be something pretty epic and substantial."

What were the roots of "Kashmir"?
Well, I had the ideas for the riff and the cascading part, which is actually electric 12-string and it's brass on the record, from something that I had been working on before we even went to Headley. It was another piece of music entirely, and right at the very end of it, while I was playing along, I played the acoustic guitar part in reverse, and there was a sort of fanfare, or the cascades, followed by the riff, and I thought, "Whoa." It just occurs right at the end. I said, "Oh, boy, I can visualize this. It's going to be built around the drum kit, and I'm going to get in there with John Bonham." It's the first thing that I ran through with him, because I just know that he is gonna love it, and he loves it, and we just play the riff over and over and over, because it's like a child's riff. Musically, it's a round, like "Frère Jacques," where you can lay things on top of it. That was the idea of having this riff that was gonna be really intense, and probably pretty majestic as well, but quite intriguing. But the fact was, it was going to be built around the sound of Headley, and the drums in the hall. That's how I heard it, and that's how I saw it, but I also heard it with orchestra in mind.

It was the first track where we actually heard the complement of a full orchestra on top of the brass, and the strings. We'd used strings on "Friends," on the third album, just a small string session, but this was really something that was meant to be pretty epic and substantial.

Robert Plant has attributed the lyrics to "Kashmir" to a trip you two took in Morocco. Was the riff similarly inspired?
No. It had already been taking on a really magnificent and substantial shape, and Robert said, "You know, I've got some lyrics that I wrote when we were in Morocco I'd like to try on this," and that's what he did. But that was way after the event of actually having the whole of the structure of the song.

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Jimmy Page speaking in Los Angeles on November 12th, 2014. Kevin Winter/Getty

You included a "rough orchestra mix" of the song on the new companion disc. What stands out to you about it?
The phasing of the drums isn't apparent on this one. It's a different mix all together, but the placement of it is really good, as far as the position on the mixing. There's a sort of 3-D perspective, like the old 3-D films where you could actually touch things when they were coming past you. It's more like that in a sonic picture. Everything, including the background, is in focus.

The most surprising track on the companion disc is "Everybody Makes It Through," which became "In the Light." How did that transformation take place?
That version is a combination of riff ideas, and the structure is made up of it. At that point in time, on "Everybody Makes It Through," Robert is singing a guide vocal as a point of reference. It also doesn't have the [intro] drone. It was always gonna have a drone to it, which is a bowed guitar, and you hear those sort of bowed switching on and switching in on the final version, but John Paul Jones comes in and lands this absolutely miraculous synthesizer part that opens up "In the Light." It's just phenomenal, and then Robert comes in and does those block vocals, which to me always sounded like some choral music that I had heard from the Music of Bulgaria. So you can hear the work that was individually put into those things.

I must say that as far as all of these extra things, the studio album versions are better, but all these other versions are really of great, significant interest, I believe.

It seems like that one developed more than some of the other songs on the album.
It just depends on whether you caught it with the first take, like "Custard Pie" or "Trampled Under Foot" even. "Trampled Under Foot" is "Brandy and Coke" on the companion disc and that's really interesting for its energy but you can also see all the extra sort of work that goes into it as far as the overdubs. Same deal with "In My Time of Dying." That one is, like, the full 11 minutes. There were no edits or drop-ins or overdubs to the version you hear. This is Led Zeppelin just going for it for an 11-minute song with all the changes in it and everything and the musical map that you have to remember when it goes 1-2-3-4, tapes rolling.

Why were you interested in drones at the time anyway?
Well, the drone we used at the opening of the concerts that actually came out as How the West Was Won, the ones in Long Beach and L.A. Forum, and it was just an acoustic guitar that was tracked. I used the bow going way back into the days of the Yardbirds, and a little bit before that. But it was something I took very seriously but that was on electric guitar; I wanted to get the density, if you like, of an acoustic guitar tuned into a chord and just sort of bowing and just building it up like you'd have over an orchestral thing almost or [modern classical composer] Krzysztof Penderecki. He would have liked that [laughs]. The idea of using the drone even preceded that album, but it really comes into effect there, that's for sure. It was the early days of ambient music, if you like.

I've read that John Paul Jones said you never played "In the Light" live because it would be too hard to replicate.
We could have done it. At that point in time, I think he's still in the position that the synthesizers were monophonic maybe. But further on down the road, maybe on the '77 tour, we could have done it. Maybe we should have played it at the O2, because I know that the keyboards of today are more complete. But the song didn't come into the equation; we never even took it on.

Going back to the final album, another song you had held onto from previous sessions was "The Rover." Did that take a lot to develop?
It was something that was started when we were at Stargroves [estate] for Houses of the Holy, but it got worked on when we actually got to Headley on the second visit where we did guitar overdubs and it was mixed at Olympic. The whole thing about "The Rover" is the whole swagger of it, the whole guitar attitude swagger. I'm afraid I've got to say it, but it's the sort of thing that is so apparent when you hear "Rumble" by Link Wray — it's just total attitude, isn't it? So that sort of thing, which is sort of probably in my DNA to be honest with you.

Why was Physical Graffiti ultimately a double-album?
It gave us the chance to put in the material that was left over from the first visit to Headley. There were three tracks that were left off of the fourth album, and that was "Boogie With Stu," "Night Flight" and "Down by the Seaside." If you think about it, you couldn't have substituted anything off the fourth album with any of those tracks, quite rightly so. Each of them had their own individual charm and character.

So with those, plus the fact that "Houses of the Holy" was a track that wasn't included on the album Houses of the Holy, that was four things straight away [to include]. And, you know, given the chance of having a good run at this writing and recording process, I didn't want it to be a double-album with any padding on it. It would be a double-album with all character pieces, the way that Led Zeppelin did their music with the sort of ethos of it, if you like, that everything sounded different to everything else.

You also had your label to think about at the time.
It was the first [Led Zeppelin] album that was going to be on the Swan Song record label that Peter Grant had helped put together for the band with Atlantic. Having a record label was a really cool idea, because it gave us a chance to showcase people that we really liked and respected, so, as an example, Paul Rodgers' band, Bad Company, which was one of the first releases and also, the Pretty Things, we all did highly of, and I thought what they did on Swan Song was good.

You were working on the soundtrack for Kenneth Anger's film Lucifer Rising, which you're reissuing soon, around that time you made Physical Graffiti, too.
Yeah, having the facility to have this multitrack at home, I could try experiments with sort of all of the instruments, giving them different treatments so they didn't actually sound, necessarily, like the instrument itself. So the tabla drums, they don't sound like tabla drums and there's a big tambura that sounds pretty radically different. The version that's coming out has got the guitar guide to it. So there was an acoustic guitar to it that I took out in many other versions. But it's pretty interesting.

Was there any crossover between what you did with Lucifer Rising and Physical Graffiti?
I knew that that sort of stuff wasn't necessarily the way that Led Zeppelin was going to go, although it's still there in all. It was like my own sketchpad and I tried things out that are pretty radical. I was pushing myself, that's what it was, in every degree in every angle.

You came up with the title "Physical Graffiti." What was the concept behind it?
Graffiti had started to appear on buildings at the time, and usually it was quotes from William Blake, and it wasn't in the graffiti which we know think of, which was more from the hip-hop times. Nevertheless, graffiti was appearing, and I imagined something, which was like a physical reaction to it. Since we were in a recording studio, if you're doing a recording, and it's going on the tape, even though its magnetic tape, that's like a graffiti in itself. The music was a physical manifestation.

Lastly, you've said you're now working on a new "guitar project," and also that it began with playing acoustic guitar. What will it be?
I intend to be doing something which obviously will surface as a sort of album somewhere. It'll surface further on down the line; I'm looking forward to doing whatever the project is. But if you think about all the areas that I've attempted, guitar, whether it's acoustic or electric or whatever, all the different approaches that I've done, it's just gonna be an extension of all of that, and that's it. So it's not just acoustic, it's not just electric, it's everything I can muster up.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/jimmy-page-on-the-swagger-of-led-zeppelins-physical-graffiti-20150223

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"In The Studio" : Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti 40th Anniversary

[Hear part one]

In the delightful 2008 electric guitar documentary film It Might Get Loud starring Led Zeppelin founder Jimmy Page along with The Edge from U2 and Jack White, we finally get a glimpse inside the English country manor house known as Headley Grange, immortalized as the site of recording Led Zeppelin‘s record-breaking fourth album. Clearly, in the film Page cannot contain his pleasure with returning to the scene of creating that iconic recording, as well as what would become the inspired double album Physical Graffiti three years later. By the time of its late February 1975 release, Led Zeppelin’s sixth signaled a fundamental change in the popular music and media equation that began with IV . With “Stairway to Heaven” Led Zeppelin had proven that the album format had matured to the point that a hit single for Top 40 radio was no longer a necessity for huge album sales. By the time of recording the wide variety of styles for Physical Graffiti‘s four sides, a hit single wasn’t even a consideration for Page, lead singer/ lyricist Robert Plant, bass playing multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones, and legendary drummer John Bonham.

To mark the fortieth anniversary of this 16X platinum ( ! ) magnum opus, producer/ co-writer Jimmy Page has meticulously remastered the bounty of songs on the original and combined them with unheard demos, roughs, and working versions from the PG sessions for a truly deluxe edition worthy of the description. In this interview for part one, Jimbo lifts the curtain on the rapier “Custard Pie”, the funky romp”Trampled Underfoot“, the thunderous grind of “The Rover“, the acoustic toe-tapper “Black Country Woman“, and the whisper-to-a-scream dynamic eleven minute ecstasy of “In My Time of Dying“.

Jimmy Page joins me as very special guest for the first of our two-part exploration of the album Rolling Stone magazine ranks at #70 on their” Top 500 Albums of All Time”. -Redbeard

http://www.inthestudio.net/redbeards-blog/led-zeppelin-physical-graffiti-40th-anniversary-pt-1-jimmy-page/

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Posted on the NPR (National Public Radio) site:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2015/02/25/388521663/jimmy-page-reflects-on-40-years-of-led-zeppelins-physical-graffiti

Forty years ago this week, Led Zeppelin released the band's monumental sixth album, the double LP Physical Graffiti. It was, as guitarist Jimmy Page himself tells us in this interview, "the mother of all double albums," with some of the band's most memorable songs, including "Kashmir," "Houses Of The Holy" and "Custard Pie."

For this interview with All Songs Considered hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton, Page shares his memories of making Physical Graffiti, why he decided to lift the veil on Led Zeppelin's creative process, and some of his favorite stories behind the pictures in his new book. He also talks about some of the artists who have most changed his life, including skiffle legend Lonnie Donegan and guitarist Les Paul.

Edited excerpts from our conversation with Page are below. You can hear the entire 45 minute interview with the audio link at the top of the web page.

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Well, I learned something new there, that besides "Kashmir", that, "Custard Pie" and "Houses of the Holy" are some of the band's most memorable songs!!!

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Posted on the NPR (National Public Radio) site:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2015/02/25/388521663/jimmy-page-reflects-on-40-years-of-led-zeppelins-physical-graffiti

Forty years ago this week, Led Zeppelin released the band's monumental sixth album, the double LP Physical Graffiti. It was, as guitarist Jimmy Page himself tells us in this interview, "the mother of all double albums," with some of the band's most memorable songs, including "Kashmir," "Houses Of The Holy" and "Custard Pie."

For this interview with All Songs Considered hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton, Page shares his memories of making Physical Graffiti, why he decided to lift the veil on Led Zeppelin's creative process, and some of his favorite stories behind the pictures in his new book. He also talks about some of the artists who have most changed his life, including skiffle legend Lonnie Donegan and guitarist Les Paul.

Edited excerpts from our conversation with Page are below. You can hear the entire 45 minute interview with the audio link at the top of the web page.

-----------------------------------------------

Well, I learned something new there, that besides "Kashmir", that, "Custard Pie" and "Houses of the Holy" are some of the band's most memorable songs!!!

-----------------------------------------------

I'd agree with Kashmir, not so much the other two.

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The Zeppelin mastermind talks us through the making of one of the band’s greatest tracks, from their newly reissued album Physical Graffiti.

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Jimmy Page … ‘I know this thing is really majestic’ Photograph: Ross Halfin/PR

Michael Hann

Saturday 28 February 2015 02.33 AEDT

“No, no, no, no!” Jimmy Page insists, reacting with a certain irritation to something that had been presented a compliment. It’s not that he’s modestly rejecting the praise, more, I suspect, that he feels there might be an implicit criticism of Led Zeppelin’s musical borrowings.

The compliment was the observation that it was a testament to Zeppelin’s adaptability that Page could take an Eastern-style guitar tuning brought to attention by Davy Graham, and take it from the English folk scene to form the bedrock of Zeppelin’s most globe-crushingly colossal moment, Kashmir.

“The thing about that tuning is it has absolutely nothing to do with anybody,” Page continues. “It’s like the blues tunings of open D or open E or open G – those tunings were there and everybody would use them. Keith [Richards] did lots of things – and why not? That’s what you do. What I’m saying is that tuning was around – Bert Jansch had used it – it was just a tuning that was being used. I came up with my own original tunings as well.”

We’re talking about Kashmir a few days ahead of the 40th anniversary of Physical Graffiti, which was No 1 in the midweek charts the day Page appeared at the Brit awards to give Royal Blood, for whom he’s been effusive in his praise, their prize for Britsh group. But the Sussex duo have a got a long way to go before they reach Kashmir.

The genesis of the song was a riff Page had before he went to Headley Grange in Hampshire in November 1973 for the first Physical Graffiti sessions. “What I had in my mind was the riff and the cascades, which is electric 12-string overdubs, but also brass on the final thing,” he says. “I had thought of the riff in orchestral terms, with cellos doing it, and this cascading brass, for the different colours of the orchestra. I didn’t know it would work, but I knew it ought to theoretically.”

The earliest version of Kashmir was just Page and drummer John Bonham. John Paul Jones was not present at those first sessions, and singer Robert Plant was yet to make his contribution to the song. “We do some rockabilly stuff, and then Robert went off somewhere and it’s just John Bonham and myself and I start going through all the ideas that I’ve got. I’ve got half a dozen things, but I want to try this thing out. And John Bonham absolutely loves it. He loves the fact that he’s back in the hall with this great drum sound and this hypnotic riff. We’re just playing it over and over over again. And then it gets to the point where we do literally a take of it, and I start counting it out as far as the verses are going to be, and then I try the electric trails for the overdubs and it’s exactly what I think it’s going to be. And I know this thing is really majestic. Even with just the two of us and these simple overdubs.”

The famous riff, Page explains, is a round – like Frère Jacques, it “catches up with itself” and can be played on top of itself. It created the challenge of making sure that every other element of the song was up to snuff. “The riff was so good that you had to make sure whatever you did as the first change really holds up.” The riff is so great, in fact, that you can listen to

and not get bored, even without the orchestral colour and Plant’s vocal.
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One of the peculiarities of Kashmir is its positioning on the vinyl edition of Physical Graffiti – at the end of side two, rather than at the end of side four, as you might expect. “Each side of vinyl was sequenced to showcase whatever was on there, so it wasn’t square pegs in round holes. Any of the four sides could be your favourite side. All of them have an intensity to them, but some have got more rock roots maybe than others. A double album was so right for Zeppelin.”

On CD, though, the sequencing becomes more of an issue. On a two-disc set, though Kashmir remains at the end of a side, the equally monumental In My Time of Dying moves from the end of a vinyl side one to a mid-disc position, completely unbalancing the set. “Absolutely,” Page says. “I can see that. But I didn’t want to start reshuffling, but you’re right – it wasn’t intended to be like that. Those songs – In My Time of Dying, Kashmir – are supposed to be: That’s it. Nothing follows that. You need time to catch your breath after.”

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/feb/27/jimmy-page-on-led-zeppelin-kashmir

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We focussed better while writing and recording in one place, says John Paul Jones

John Paul Jones is known for his role as bassist and keyboardist for Led Zeppelin.

He helped give the band a more melodic side. But he recently spoke about the first attempts at recording tracks for Physical Graffiti at Headley Grange in East Hampshire, England with Ronnie Lane's Mobile Studio.

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Listen to the songs of Led Zeppelin on Gaana.com

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/english/music/news/We-focussed-better-while-writing-and-recording-in-one-place-says-John-Paul-Jones/articleshow/46409915.cms

Physical Graffiti is Led Zeppelin's crowning achievement

The double-set Physical Graffiti is undoubtedly Led Zeppelin's crowning achievement as an album. It now seems laughable that critics at the time didn't think highly about their previous albums, even though the fans loved it and Zeppelin met stardom with their very first album.

The music press soon acknowledged that the band definitely weren't like any of their contemporaries. In fact, they were the best band of the 70s. Here, the group's guitarist Jimmy Page [Rolling Stone magazine has described Page as "the pontiff of power riffing" and ranked him number 3 in their list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". In 2010, he was ranked number two in Gibson's list of "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time" and, in 2007, number four on Classic Rock's "100 Wildest Guitar Heroes"] talks about the genesis of the album.

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Watched that interview on our local morning show and me and my mate fell about laughing when Page said"I don't think about One Direction".Good to see someone standing up against 'manufactured music 'and not pandering to the media.

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