(Credits: Far Out / Led Zeppelin)
Tue 9 September 2025 18:30, UK
No matter how much you practice or drill a song into your repertoire, it can’t always come out sounding exactly how you want it to, and Led Zeppelin, for all their brilliance, struggled significantly with this.
When performing live, there were certain tracks that the band were known for in particular for how massive they managed to make them sound, or how much they absolutely nailed the execution. The fact that they were blessed with four of the finest musicians on their respective instruments was always going to give them strength both in the studio and on the stage, but that brilliance doesn’t come without putting in the hard graft to get there.
‘Dazed and Confused’ springs to mind immediately as an example of a song that always managed to sound like some sort of beast, as do other tracks from early releases like ‘Immigrant Song’ and ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’. These songs have certain aspects that keep things simple, but they’ve also got elements where they take things a step further, and this rings true for most of the first half of their catalogue. However, when it came to performing new tracks for the tour in support of Physical Graffiti, they hit a few stumbling blocks.
Physical Graffiti is perhaps their most ambitious record, and the most grandiose that Led Zeppelin had ever managed to make themselves sound, so as a result, you’d think that some of the structures of songs were what had them faltering. However, when it came to playing tracks like ‘Kashmir’ or ‘Trampled Under Foot’ live, there were hardly any issues that they found, always managing to nail the gargantuan sound of the most elaborate tracks, even sometimes without the backing of the additional instrumentation that they had access to in the studio.
It was, however, the lyrics that Robert Plant found himself struggling with, and when talking to Melody Maker in 1975, he said that despite constant rehearsals, certain songs just weren’t feeling right to be translated into a live capacity, purely because of his choice of words.
While bemoaning the fact that the band had to rehearse intensely to get things sounding perfect and stage-ready, he acknowledged that it was important to do this despite how they regularly used to rely on spontaneity to drive their shows. “Obviously we had to rehearse the stuff from the new album to get it into some viable shape,” he explained. “We played all the new songs at the rehearsal, but some of them take such a direction that it would be difficult to employ them live after being off the road for 18 months.”
The song in question that ended up taking a completely different shape was ‘Sick Again’, and despite it becoming a live favourite and regular inclusion in the setlist from this period, Plant was always worried about how the autobiographical lyrics about their experiences of Los Angeles would translate live. “It’s a pity you can’t hear the lyrics properly live,” Plant added. “The lyrics say: ‘From the window of a rented limousine, I saw your pretty blue eyes. One day soon, you’re gonna reach sixteen, painted lady in the city of lies.’ As much as it’s pretty, it’s sour really. That’s exactly what LA stands for. Joni Mitchell summed it up best when she called it ‘City of the Fallen Angels.’
With the song ostensibly being both a love letter and a critique of Los Angeles, performing the track in LA may well have been hard for audiences to stomach, but the fact that they’re some of Plant’s most societally-conscious lyrics on record also makes the song stand out, and that’s perhaps why it ended up working out in their favour.
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