Jimmy Page, Robert Plant - Walking Into Clarksdale

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Music reviews of Walking Into Clarksdale

Music Review: Trying to scale the heights and ending up halfway
Rating: 3 Stars

In 1998, Page and Plant of Led Zeppelin fame released this album and commenced a tour, with their old bandmate John Paul Jones mysteriously missing. From the liner notes of Zeppelin's 1990 box set, it gave the impression these boys were like brothers, so why he wasn't invited to come along on this little musical jaunt into Page and Plant's musical past has puzzled many a listener. Page and Plant released a live album in 1994, largely comprised of old Zeppelin tracks with a heavy world-beat thrown in for good measure. They forgot to invite Jones that time too.

I actually got to see a show from that tour, which threw some revelation on this record. Page & Plant mostly played old Zeppelin tunes with the exception of a couple oftracks from CLARKSDALE. At the time they were pushing that they were into their new music and that the fan-base should give it a chance, though they neglected to include much of it in the setlists, which is rather revealing.

WALKING INTO CLARKSDALE is a rather hit and miss affair. One of the biggest problems this record faces as well is that the audience will have certain expectations which simply cannot be cut away. The album plays up to these expectations, and Plant and Page are honestly trying to musically progress and you can truly hear the effort. That's what makes this such a frustrating listen. You can here the potential, and you watch Page and Plant as they struggle to realise a successful collaboration. Ultimately they fail, resulting in a record which simply doesn't flow. In this regard, WALKING INTO CLARKSDALE is a fascinating listen, and an extremely frustrating one at that. You can tell where they're wanting to go, and perhaps had Page and Plant had Bonham and Jones around the record would have been fully realised. However, Bonham is dead and Page & Plant conveniently forgot Jones' phone number, and this is the result.

While there are some ultimately great tracks on here (the two singles "Shining in the Light" and "Most High"), ultimately the album gets bogged down in potentially Zeppelenesque tracks (not so much in the actual sound by the artistic progression that Zeppelin was on before Bonham's death) that ultimately end up going nowhere. At their musical peak, Led Zeppelin took a diverse array of influences (blues, mysticism, folk, and an over-the-top bombastic sound) and made them gel into a cohesive whole, culminating in what Plant calls the definitive Zeppelin song ("Kashmire"). Here, we get that restless sense of musical experimentation, and when it works it works very well. "Shining in the Light," "When the World Was Young," "Most High," parts of the title cut, "When I was a Child," and "Sons of Freedom" more or less are successful, but especially the firs three. The rest of the album never comes together in any sort of unity, and while we get the sense that Page and Plant are trying to rejuvenate their musical relationship, ultimately we have to write off half the album as just not top of the line, or even mostly good for that matter.

P. S. Clarksdale is one of the big spots where Blues really got its birth, and from the title some may expect this to be heavily drenched in that style of music. It's not. There's not a lot of blues on this one, and what there is has been strained through Page and Plant's unsuccessful attempts to be relevant again, so for the blues fans in the Zeppelin camp this record's a total write-off...

Description of Walking Into Clarksdale

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