“Once we started playing ‘Kashmir’… I didn’t want to stop” Jimmy Page remembers the first time he played an iconic Led Zeppelin track with John Bonham
Led Zeppelin guitarist and founder Jimmy Page has been reminiscing over the first time he played the iconic Kashmir with late drummer John Bonham.
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In an interview with Uncut, Page recalls the “adrenalin music” he had been working on at home, and how he “hope[d] he likes it all” before showing it to Bonham. Starting with tracks such as Sick Again, Wanton Song, and “a little bit” of In My Time of Dying, Page remembers having another riff that he wasn’t quite ready to share.
“Finally, I thought, ‘Right, this is the opportunity…’ Once we started playing Kashmir, I don’t know how long we played it for but he didn’t want to stop and I didn’t want to stop.” It was Bonham’s untimely death aged just 32 that led to the disbanding of Zeppelin only five years later.
“There’s a bootleg where we’re just playing the riff repeatedly, it just locks in,” Page continues. “We know that we’re on to something, nobody’s ever gone anywhere near this. It was new music, no-one had ever heard anything like it.”
In the same interview, Robert Plant elaborates on the track’s evolution. “It grew and grew until everything made sense. All of it, the weave of the whole thing was something.” He continues, “Kashmir, it is what it is. It’s just such an achievement – and it is an achievement even now, all these years later.” Even now, Plant finds moments where he hears the track and “just sit[s] down and listen[s].”
The only ingredient missing was Led Zep bassist John Paul Jones, who was missing from the Headley Grange session right up until the vital moment…
“We’re playing Kashmir and, as if by divine intervention, John Paul Jones walks into Headley Grange,” Page continues. “It couldn’t have been at a better time. He plugged in his bass and joined in.”
Kashmir, which was released on Led Zeppelin’s sixth album Physical Graffiti in 1975, would go on to become one of the band’s most recognised and celebrated tracks, being performed live in excess of 3,500 times.
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