“I was laying on everything”: the one song Jimmy Page never worked out how to play live

For every seasoned rock star, playing in the studio and playing onstage are two completely different animals. While many people can afford to play a bit looser whenever they are in front of a crowd, it can get to be a nightmare when working away in the studio trying to find the right guitar part to sprinkle into the mix. But whereas most people needed hours upon hours for any great riff to lock in correctly, Jimmy Page was the kind of one-man army that knew exactly where every Led Zeppelin song was going.

Page had already started the group in the late 1960s, and when he locked in with John Bonham on any riff, that was usually enough to fill out any decent track. While any great drummer’s job is to make sure he’s on the same page as the bassist, Bonzo knew that all the power was in Page’s right hand, as evidenced by the fact that he often changed up his style to mimic what the guitar riff was doing half the time.

And as the band entered Physical Graffiti, Page had reached the point where he could do no wrong. Not every track on the double album necessarily needs to be counted as the best thing that the band ever made, but everything from ‘Kashmir’ to ‘Ten Years Gone’ to even ‘Bron-Y-Aur’ saw Page at the peak of his powers, even if it meant taking the most basic riff and adding the right syncopation behind it.

It normally took a while for some of those songs to come to life onstage, but some tracks will forever be relegated to Zeppelin’s albums. The band may have played ‘Whole Lotta Love’ countless times live, and while hearing Page engage in a fierce battle with a theremin is fun for a brief period, it was never going to replace that ghostly vocal that they replicated on the album version right before the song kicks in one final time.

“I certainly didn’t think how I was going to do ‘Achilles Last Stand’ live. I was just doing it – I was laying on everything that I could think of.”-Jimmy Page

That was only a drop in the bucket of what Page could do as producer, though, and when they reached the making of Presence, he was like a kid in a candy store half the time. Much of the album relied on having a heavy guitar sound in the background, but ‘Achilles Last Stand’ was the first time that their music sounded like it was being made by gods, especially with the countless guitar overdubs going on in the background.

Despite the song sounding amazing when they eventually played it at Knebworth, Page admitted that he never felt completely comfortable when debuting pieces of the track onstage, saying, “I certainly didn’t think how I was going to do ‘Achilles Last Stand’ live. I was just doing it – I was laying on everything that I could think of that would work within the context of whatever the composition was.”

To the band’s credit, the song did have a great flow whenever they played it live. A lot of it may have been relying on John Paul Jones’s eight-string bass to anchor everything, but as long as they had that engine, Page could flip-flop between which guitar part he played in every respective section, depending on which would have the greatest impact on the audience whenever they played.

It was certainly a challenge trying to bring this kind of gargantuan song to the live stage, but the biggest problems of the recorded versions also became a strange strength for the group when they played it live. Not every band gets the opportunity to have multiple choices when playing their tunes, but whenever ‘Achilles Last Stand’ started up, it was always a mystery where Page would go.