‘Kashmir’ isn’t all that complex, relatively speaking, but it does have what Sherlock Holmes would call ‘some points of interest’.The song was originally built off Bonham’s drum part:Bonzo came in with this really nice driving tempo, really laid-back sort of shoom shoom. […] And having been travelling a little bit to get the feel of foreign lands, the song developed from that shoom shoom…and with a touch of the east, a little bit of cholera on the arm…what we had left was ‘Kashmir’.(Robert Plant, quoted in Barney Hoskyns’ oral history of Led Zeppelin, Trampled Under Foot)What exactly Plant meant by ‘a touch of the east’ is not clear, but the striking thing about ‘Kashmir’ is its polymetric quality.Put simply, the guitar part in the verse is in one metre and the rest of the song is in another. The song can be written out in 4/4 time, which is what Bonham is playing, but Page’s guitar part, consisting of two groups of three eighth-notes followed by a tonic, ascending each time by a semitone towards the octave and then jumping a tone to get to it before cycling around again, is in (unless I’m mistaken) 6/8 time. Or maybe it's 3/4, I've always been crap at telling compound metres from simple ones. In any case, the guitar is in triple time and the rest of the band is in quadruple time.To test this for yourself, consider the riff, which could be vocalised as 'dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-daah / dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-daah / dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-daah' (etc.)Now, you're going to have to do this out loud, because if you are a layperson and you try to do it in your head, you will probably not be able to audiate it.I want you to count to yourself "One-two-three, two-two-three, one-two-three, two-two-three" a few times, till you get that waltz feel. Sway from side to side if it helps.Got it? Good. Now, keeping that rhythm in your body, hum the riff. I'm marking off each measure with a slash /, so you can see how this works. What makes this riff in triple time is that the stresses fall on the first beat of each bar if it's in 3/4, or the first and fourth if it's in 6/8.Still swaying? Still waltzing?Go riff.So, it comes out as 'dah-dah-dah, dah-dah dah daah / dah-dah-dah, dah-dah dah daah / dah-dah-dah, dah-dah dah daah / dah-dah-dah, dah-dah dah daah'.Notice something? The stresses always fall in the same place in each measure.But it doesn't feel like that in the song.In the song, the whole mood is swirling with the mood of the mystic Orient, amirite? Let's see how that is done, by playing our triple-time riff against our foursquare rhythm.Now count the rhythm for the song, based on Bonham's drum part: "One two three four / one two three four / one two three four / one two three four". Shoom shoom. Shoom shoom. Shoom shoom. Shoom shoom.In the song, it feels like:'Dah-dah-dah. Dah-dah dah daah dah-dah-dah. / Dah-dah Dah daah dah-dah-dah. Dah dah / dah daah dah-dah-dah. Dah dah dah daah / dah-dah-dah'. (Etc.)Notice what's different? The stresses within the riff shift oddly against the underlying pattern of 4/4 upbeat and downbeat.Because 4 and 6 are both factors of twelve, this means that the guitar part falls on successively different beats of each bar of 4/4 until three bars (12 beats) of 4/4 have gone by, whereupon they sync up again. This is, in my view, one of the things that gives the song its ‘mysterious’ quality; the feeling that the guitar part is obeying slightly different laws than the rest of the song.In other parts of the song, everything is in the same metre so it's not nearly so irregular and subtly weird.And that, I submit, is why 'Kashmir' feels so complex.
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