“Achilles Last Stand” by Led Zeppelin

"Achilles Last Stand" throws open Led Zeppelin's seventh album, Presence, from 1976, and at around ten and a half minutes it's one of the longest and most tangled things they ever cut in a studio. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant started writing it in the summer of 1975, their heads full of Eastern music, mythology and the places they'd been, and Page, producing, layers guitar on guitar until the interlocking sections gallop like a cavalry charge that never runs out of horses.

Critics mostly liked it, and some put it alongside "Kashmir". The band kept it in the set from 1977 to 1980, and a 1979 performance ended up on the Led Zeppelin DVD in 2003. Page has called it his favorite Zeppelin song more than once, and he rates its solo right up with the one on "Stairway to Heaven".

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