Led Zeppelin-Physical Graffiti (1975)

The endless creativity of the Physical Graffiti album starts from the cover. The two records came in inner envelopes inside a slim box that featured a New York building. The windows of the building were openwork, to show images that depended on how one arranged the internal envelopes; each of them had different and small photographs, including one of the singer Robert Plant dressed as a woman. One of the envelopes had the letters that formed the title of the album, which could be seen through the small windows. The cover designer, Peter Corriston, scoured the entire city looking for a suitable building, until he found two, five stories each, located on St. Mark's Place 96 and 98. They made several adjustments to the original photo: they cut the fifth floor so that it enters well in the square format; the buildings on the left and right were tweaked to match the style of the main buildings; they added details to the architecture; They removed part of a balcony so that a window can be seen better. The front of the cover is a daytime photo, the back is the same photo taken at night. The result is an unforgettable cover, so much so that it was nominated for a Grammy. Incredibly, he did not win, but his designer, Mike Doud, did in 1980 with the cover of “Breakfast in America”, the album by Supertramp. A few years later, in the video for the Stones song “Waiting on a Friend,” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards appeared on the doorstep of these same buildings.
Those 80 minutes of "Physical Graffiti" have everything. It is as if Led Zeppelin had decided to show everyone what they were capable of. It happens that the popularity of the group was so gigantic but the critics used to despise their music, describing it on many occasions as "basic" and too inspired by other artists. In this case, moreover, the band was releasing their own record label, Swan Song, in partnership with their manager. Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham, therefore, were not deprived of anything: there is heavy rock, progressive rock, funk, acoustic rock, ballads and even an instrumental. So rich and varied is the album that includes both the longest song by Zeppelin (“In My Time of Dying”, eleven minutes, if we ignore the live versions of Dazed and Confused) and the shortest (“Bron-Yr- Aur ”, from 2:06). Among the songs that would later become classics, the main one is the progressively monumental "Kashmir", but there are also "Trampled Under Foot", "Ten Years Gone" and the essential "The Rover".
Kashmir is, in the words of Robert Plant himself, the definitive song of the group (something that is perhaps exaggerated if we compare it with classic songs like Stairway to Heaven, Dazed and Confused, Whole lotta love or Since I've Been Loving You for just naming four of the band's dozens of mythical themes), Kashmir is an epic progressive rock theme in which orchestral rock is mixed with oriental influences, supported by John Paul Jones' mellotron. Although the song is based in Kashmir, a region between India and Pakistan, Robert Plant wrote the lyrics during a long journey through the Moroccan desert.