I Couldn’t tolerate it longer Jimmy Page confesses after slapping Robert Plant on stage over…

I honestly don’t think we give Jimmy Page and Robert Plant nearly enough credit for making such a bold, brave move with 1994’s No Quarter – Jimmy Page & Robert Plant  Robert Plant to do an episode of Unplugged (do kids these days have any idea how cool Unplugged was?), and he decided to invite his old frenemy Jimmy along for the ride, the easiest thing in the world would have been to do acoustic Zeppelin by the numbers.  An acoustic take on “Rock and Roll” for example, could have really cooked, or say, an acoustic “Heartbreaker”, with the same guitar parts, only played on acoustic guitars instead of electric guitars.  That’s what most artists on Unplugged did, they just unplugged and played the same stuff for the most part.  Not that it wasn’t fun – I usually liked it – but it didn’t really take a lot of artistic vision most of the time.  Eric Clapton decided he’d make an exception to his usual bland approach to music-making and created one of the more exciting episodes in the series, but most of the time it was bands doing their big songs on acoustic rather than electric guitars, sounding pretty much how you’d expect them to sound sans distortion.  Cool, but hardly revolutionary.

Messrs. Page and Plant did a little of that – but they did a lot more of recasting Zeppelin songs into brand new creations, tracks that were qualitatively distinct and different from their original forms. They didn’t play it safe, they didn’t go for easy – they seem to have taken a step back and said “What can we do differently with “Kashmir”?  Hey, maybe we slow part of it down so that hypnotic riff packs a little more punch when it comes crashing in.  I wonder what “No Quarter” would sound like if we replaced that iconic keyboard part with a new guitar part?  What if we add Middle Eastern textures to a boatload of our songs, they overlay them with a traditional Western orchestra for good measure?”

And to some extent, it was a risk.  Sure, anything that reunited Page and Plant was going to ship a lot of copies no matter what, but there was also a good chance your typical metalheads and headbangers were going to say “what the hell are all of these Egyptian violinists doing on my favorite Led Zeppelin song??!?”.  It could be that’s what happened – No Quarter was big, but not nearly as big as some might have expected.   It topped out at #4 on Billboard in the U.S., and #7 on the U.K. albums chart – and nowhere in the world did it hit #1, as might be expected when two of the architects of Led Zeppelin came back together for a much ballyhooed reunion.  I think they could have shipped a lot more units if they’d chosen the path of least resistance.

And I, for one, respect that they didn’t.  Perhaps No Quarter doesn’t always fully succeed, but where it does it is breathtaking, and where it doesn’t, it’s still better than a tired by-the-numbers Zeppelin retread without Jonesy and Bonzo would have been.  We didn’t need Page and Plant to try and recreate the magic of Zeppelin – I think they were far wiser artistically to create a little new magic of their own.