The Tragic Led Zeppelin Song, Written by Robert Plant, That Jimmy Page Felt Uncomfortable Playing
For a band that helped kick-start hard rock and heavy metal, Led Zeppelin’s most famous song is the power ballad “Stairway to Heave
Still, Jimmy Page’s guitar riffs, John Bonham’s thundering drums, John Paul Jones’ deep bass grooves, and Robert Plant’s bluesy howls define the legendary group. If you need one song to distill the power of Led Zeppelin, “Immigrant Song” offers their explosiveness in less than three minutes.
Of course, they were much more than this, but Led Zeppelin I opens with “Good Times Bad Times,” not the acoustic guitars and organ swells of “Your Time Is Gonna Come.”
Page was the group’s architect. He produced the records, and his experience as a session guitarist and member of The Yardbirds helped guide Led Zeppelin’s extraordinary rise. Though he was in charge, there’s one song he disliked. But due to the emotional impact behind it, the guitarist let it pass.
A Devastating Loss
In 1977, Plant lost his 5-year-old son Karac, who died from a stomach virus. He wrote “All My Love” as a tribute to his child and told Dan Rather the song expresses “the joy that he gave us as a family.”
But Page wasn’t so enthused about the song. Though he understood the sentiment behind Plant’s lyrics, the guitarist told SFGate in 2000 he didn’t think it fit the band’s sound.
“The only one I never felt comfortable playing was ‘All My Love.’ That was not my sort of deal. It sort of felt like the Rod Stewart songs of the time with the scarf-waving chorus. That wasn’t really my thing,” he said.
He recoiled at the idea of the audience waving hands to its chorus, potentially becoming a new direction for the band. In Brad Tolinski’s book Light and Shade, Page said, “In its place it was fine, but I would not have wanted to pursue that direction in the future.”
Behind the Song
“All My Love” does sound like a departure for the band. A synthesizer drives the mid-tempo ballad. It has more in common with ELO than Willie Dixon. But it split the band creatively. Jones and Plant wrote the song, while Page and Bonham were uncomfortable with the track’s soft rock direction.
You can hear Bonham pushing against the delicate recording, almost trying to will some power into it. Meanwhile, Page plays a Fender Telecaster equipped with a B-Bender, which mimics the sound of a pedal steel guitar. It doesn’t give the tune a Nashville sound but does add a wobbliness to Plant’s heartbreak.
Should I fall out of love, my fire in the light
To chase a feather in the wind
Within the glow that weaves a cloak of delight
There moves a thread that has no end
Plant endured an unspeakable tragedy under the lights of rock star hysteria. And Led Zeppelin’s success didn’t leave space for grieving parents. But Plant and his wife Maureen Wilson lived outside London then, giving them something like a normal existence. He said Bonham and his wife Pat Phillips helped them through the tragedy.
“All My Love” appeared on Led Zeppelin’s eighth studio album, In Through the Out Door (1979). It was the band’s final release before Bonham’s death. Both the wistful song and the album title’s emphasis on an exit reflect the looming end of one of the world’s greatest rock bands.
