I have no idea why, but I am such a sucker for a 12 bar blues. I’m currently traversing approximately 12,000 songs on my iPod and rating them. Buried in there are a fair old number of blues tunes. Some of these I like and some of them I don’t, but I absolutely love any 12 bar blues.
From my dim and distant youth, I can also remember shipping over to a smoky nightclub every week for the blues night and loving everything, but especially loving 12 bar blues. From the simple, insistent, driving bass, the simple drumming, the discipline of the rhythm guitarist, the wailing inventiveness of the lead to the drawn-out climax of the song, I couldn’t get enough. And the 12 bar songs were always the jewels of the show for me, the other stuff was nice, but really it was just fluff, covering old standards like Route 66 were just to keep the some semi-commercial appeal in place.
So, the 12 bar blues: anyone know why it gives me such a thrill?
The night I moved into my first flat also happened to be the night I decided to open a CD I had bought several weeks earlier: Led Zeppelin’s Presence. What with writing term papers and studying for final exams, I hadn’t found the time to listen to it; but my exams were finished at last, and I had loaded all of my possessions into my hatchback to carry them from the dormitory room to the new flat.
The first thing I unpacked was the stereo. I rigged it up on the floor of the empty sitting room, put the album on, and proceeded to open my bin bags stuffed with clothes and vodka boxes stuffed with books.
It was a queer night. I was alone, for perhaps the first time in months: no roommate, no flatmates yet, no internet connection. Everything was very quiet, as the flat was off the beaten path and I had grown used to all of the background noise associated with living in close proximity to hundreds of people.
The first track on Presence, ‘Achilles’ Last Stand,’ begins with a lone, repetitive arpeggio that fades in and grows to a crescendo before breaking into the pounding drums and screaming guitar that are Zeppelin’s trademark. But it sounds nothing like their other work; this song is dark and frightening. Alone in the empty flat at night, I was already disposed to be jumpy, but my first reaction to ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ was such paranoid dread that I could hardly bear to carry on listening.
Presence is one of Zeppelin’s later albums, released in 1976. Some critics say that, although very atmospheric hard-rock, it has none of the energy and excitement that infused their earlier work. Possibly it is their most drug-fuelled album; I’ve even heard it said that, by the time it was recorded, Robert Plant’s voice was done for. Certainly it’s not as enjoyable an album as, say, Led Zeppelin II.
But ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ saves it. Plant can no longer carry off the crazy wailing of days of yore, but as a result his voice on this track has the kind of purity of pitch one associates with standing chimes. John Bonham keeps up the gruelling, relentless pace of the drums for ten minutes straight, displaying his famous endurance. John Paul Jones lays down a scalar bass line in unexpectedly perfect counterpoint to the melody.
But the real master is Jimmy Page, whose fingerprints are all over the track, from its ominous darkness and dramatic dynamics to its guitar solo of almost unparalleled genius. One account of the recording process states that when Page played the solo unaccompanied in the studio, Jones, who was listening to it for the first time, didn’t believe it could possibly work over the rhythm parts Page had proposed for that section of the tune. And it’s true that the solo is vaguely disconnected to its musical surroundings, although that hardly diminishes its power. The frantic build to the end is vaguely reminiscent of his famous solo in ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ but ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ takes that solo and raises it to the power of fifty, like a Caravaggio compared to a child’s drawing in crayon.
(Solo 3:41-5:14.)
An article I read many years ago claimed that ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ was one of the greatest pieces of blues ever written; I wish I could remember where I read that, because at the time I scoffed at this analysis. Whatever the qualities of the track, it doesn’t sound like any blues you’ve ever heard – until you realise that, like the blues, it’s built around the pentatonic scale; and then you can hear what the author of that article meant. For what is technically a blues tune, the track is heavily layered and complex; even after years of listening to it, I still don’t know it inside and out. It’s one of the few songs I never grow weary of, and it’s definitely the only one that’s ever inspired any visceral anxiety in me. I could love it for that reason alone.
I am not a lyrics person; I tend not to hear the words to songs, or to ascribe to them much meaning if I do. Music comes to me in colours (‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ is black and bronze) and most of the time the words just get in the way. But eventually, if you listen to a song often enough, some of the lyrics sink in, and that’s the last impression of ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ I’ll leave with you. Sometimes the lyrics Robert Plant writes are a little too pastoral for my taste, and there’s an element of that in this tune, but here he manages to find words that accord perfectly with the unceasing drive and terrible weight that are the dominant musical characteristics of the track:
Wandering and wondering what place to rest the search
For the mighty arms of Atlas hold the heavens from the earth
Posted by bellagerens 
