Daytona Beach, Florida (1967)
Robert Plant - handwritten lyrics to “Kashmir,” 1975.
While [Jimmy] Page was developing an epic sonic experience, singer Robert Plant spent considerable time on the lyrics. He drew his inspiration from a suitably epic desert car journey through Morocco that he and Page undertook in 1973. “The whole inspiration came from the fact that the road went on and on and on. It was a single-track road which neatly cut through the desert. Two miles to the East and West were ridges of sandrock. It basically looked like you were driving down a channel, this dilapidated road, and there was seemingly no end to it. ‘Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dreams ….“
By the time Plant had heard a more finished version of the song, he recognized that it was in its own way as potentially powerful as any dust storm he and Page might have encountered.
“It was an amazing piece of music to write to, and an incredible challenge for me… Because of the time signature, the whole deal of the song is… not grandiose, but powerful: it required some kind of epithet, or abstract lyrical setting about the whole idea of life being an adventure and being a series of illuminated moments. But everything is not what you see. It was quite a task, ‘cause I couldn’t sing it. It was like the song was bigger than me. It’s true: I was petrified, it’s true. It was painful; I was virtually in tears.”
The differences to the present in comparison to the recorded track is evidence that Led Zeppelin were playing "working” versions to coincide with what would be their first album in two years. A journalist covering their concert in Houston on 27 February 1975 (three days after Physical Graffiti’s official release) told Robert Plant how impressed he was with this new song they were playing, particularly the lyrics. Plant responded by gifting him this manuscript.
Description via Southeby’s.
