Search - Jimmy Page, Robert Plant :: Walking Into Clarksdale

Could have had more energy to it

Dragonwheel | Montreal PQ Canada | 05/30/2010

(3 out of 5 stars)

"If you followed some of the solo work by Jimmy Page you would remember that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page did a track on Jimmy Pages solo album Outrider called The Only One, back in 1989. It was a strange track. If Walking to C had been more like that track on Outrider, which in and of itself was a kind of weird album since it featured a bunch of singers and a bunch of drummers, etc, Clarkesdale could have been much better. The better Zeppelin recordings always had some humor, and Clarkesdale is kind of a serious guy album. We are serious it says, and we are walking to Clarkesdale. Well, I doubt that either of them have ever walked anywhere since the Zeppelin took off back in 1968, never mind hoofin' it from one town to another in the State of Mississippi. I notice that many people really liked Clarkesdale. Nobody seemed to say it was sloppy, or that the songs were nowhere near as good as Led Zeppelin's stuff, or as good as a whole bunch of solo material from ex-Zeppelin members either. I listened to it about half a dozen times over the time span of a month and then pretty much just put it away. The promo shots for the album show two guys, Page and Plant, who looked like they wanted to be somewhere else, looking kind of forlorn and alone, not the same situation as previous times for either of them I think. 'Most High' was the best track, but I always thought it sounded kind of odd, like someone trying to be Arabic whilst not being that thing in reality. Egad. I did notice Clarkesdale was the last time that pairing ever happened for original song writing purposes. Well, rock and roll never dies, it just changes labels, over, and over, and..."