JUST NOW: Led Zeppelin is in very big touble…
Chris Cornell, frontman of the Seattle grunge band Soundgarden, was always a big fan of Led Zeppelin. He forged a friendship with their guitarist Jimmy Page, and there was even (misjudged) speculation at one stage that Cornell might take the place of singer Robert Plant in a reconstituted Zeppelin. Certainly, Cornell took his admiration for the heavy metal behemoths to the grave.
On May 18 2017, Soundgarden rounded off a gig at the Fox Theatre, Detroit, with the track “Slaves and Bulldozers”, into which Cornell inserted lines from Zeppelin’s darkest, heaviest slab of blues: “In my time of dying, I want nobody to mourn / All I want for you to do is take my body home.” Hours later, he hanged himself in his hotel room. He was 52.
“In My Time of Dying”, from Zeppelin’s sixth studio album Physical Graffiti (1975), is a juggernaut of droning guitars and groaning vocals underpinned by a relentless rhythm track. At more than 11 minutes, it is the band’s longest studio track, but bizarrely, after all that Sturm und Drang, it ends not with a bang but a whimper as drummer John Bonham coughs theatrically and, clearly pleased with the take, cheerily declares, “That’s gotta be the one, hasn’t it?”
Zeppelin claimed authorship of “In My Time of Dying”, but it wasn’t really theirs. Credited to “Plant/Page/JP Jones/Bonham” on the record label, it is, in fact, an old gospel blues number, recorded in 1927 by singer and evangelist Blind Willie Johnson. Inspired by a verse from the Book of Psalms (“The Lord will strengthen him on his bed of illness; / You will sustain him on his sickbed”), the song was sometimes called “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed”. A version with called “Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed” was released in 1933 by Josh White, a prominent civil rights activist as well as performer, and what Zeppelin did with the song four decades later bears a much stronger resemblance to his take than Johnson’s.
