All of Zep's albums had Hipgnosis cover art. At first this was a mutual thing as both the firm and the band were starting out and grew mega within months. After that the increasingly remote connection between the music and the covers spoke only of the celestial fame the band had attained. By the milestone IV even the scapbook scaled mugshots of the band members had been replaced with high enigma. The band name only appears on the disc label which has no title beyond the four symbols that represent each band member. By the time we get to the sixth album here we get to somewhere even stranger than before.
The two discs are in card stock sleeves like album covers in their own right. The sleeves are mocked up like the side of a New York brownstone whose windows can be filled with anything from the band members in drag to the lantern jawed profile of Marcel Duchamp. The band had been grumpy over the teenybopper wheel that packaged songs like Since I've Been Loving You or That's the Way on the third album so here, almost in penance, the pictures are both more intimate and more distant; the very act of looking over them feels voyeuristic; the fan is both welcomed into the inner sanctum and barred from crossing into the room itself.
These two discs are folded into a large card which also has windows, some with letters spelling out the title but most with closed drapes. No song lyrics but the titles are collaged mix and match fonts. This might retrospectively remind us of punk cover art of only a year after but they strike me more as the kind of decontextualised retro look of the late sixties (Rock n Roll Circus, Mad Dogs and Englishmen etc); no one's sending a ransome note here, they know they already have your money. Along with the titles are song credits and occasional notes like "guitar lost courtesy of ...".
All of this is housed in an uber sleeve which looks like the building itself. The album title peers through the windows. The band name, absent from the previous two album covers, is worked into the building itself which suggests both the architectural strength and the opulence of a band that toured the US in an airliner emblazoned with its logo. Written in stone and not going anywhere, this band was both tradition and cheek; a Byzantine emperor with a bent for exploration.
As a thirteen year old I had no way of understanding any of this, it just looked mysterious. As I had done with the Beatles' White Album that same summer, I did a quick drop-needle tour of each of the four sides and out of those seconds per song samples I could not get a handle on what this album sounded like. If you think that's too skimpy a test try doing it with any of the Led Zeppelin albums before this one and see if you don't get a solid idea of the sound of it. It felt wrong. Whenever I heard Plant's voice it seemed different, changed, lower and more raucous rather than the Viking scream of Immigrant Song. Mixed low under guitar forces that felt too big. I chanced upon the end of Night Flight which featured a puzzling old style rock vamping on the 6th which stopped and started as Plant hurled nauseously. None of it made sense. None of it welcomed me. I replaced the discs in their ostentatious package and put the thing back in the pile.
Cut to a year later. I've started buying rock records for myself with pocket money at Ken Hurford's local import shop (yep, outer suburb of Townsville but we had an import shop) and I keep seeing the US pressing of this album and I keep passing it by as other records demand more attention. The tall Scot David Hunter, who can never make his mind up about whether he wants to be part of the herd or break free from its press, tells me in twilight mode that he heard a Led Zeppelin track on the radio last night that was slow and heavy. He turned it off before they announced it. He's making a point and it's a tiresome one. I know what he thinks of them and I care not. But he's also telling me because there's something pleasant about his memory of it. The only album I haven't heard is this one. The way he's describing it sounds a little like When the Levee Breaks but we both know that one. This, he says, is a recent track. Unless the great monoliths themselves have released a near unprecedented single or brought out a second album in the same year it has to be from Graffiti.
So it was on an afternoon with a sky as dark as lead I wagged it with Les Pedder and took one of the few bus rides I ever took in Townsville and got off at the shopping strip. As soon as Les saw I was only going to buy and listen to a record he went his own way. A massive $9.99 later I had this strange thing in my hand while walking the suddenly endless two hundred metres to home. Without a big song or hit to seek out first as a guide I put side one on and lowered the needle.
Cats! Big cats! Leopards and Jaguars! The snarling riff and territorial rasp of Plant's vocal tear the air. "Chewin' a piece of your custard pie." Like a lot of what follows this is some of Bonzo's heaviest and best recorded drumming. The song doesn't really do much but it's compelling. My severely limited sexual experience (still fourteen) didn't extend to informing me of why this is such a hard sexual song. It falls back on the knowledge of the listener rather than incites the neophyte. The big drum intro to The Rover starts, stops and sharply inhales before Page's power chords and sticky riffing kick in. Before you know it this odd rocker starts feeling epic like a waking monster rising and crushing the landscape. Phrases end with thunderous crunches rather than the smooth transitions they promise. The verse gives way to a kind of chorus figure about distance and joining hands. The guitar orchestration turns melancholy, if no less forceful. The solo is big but aching rather than aggressive. This strange song is both granite hard and saddening and it's an instant hit with me.
I get to the end of the opening slower verses of In My Time of Dying with its snaking slide figure and grim I-III-IV smash. Plant comes in with an agonising whining vocal that falls into crooning here and there. The jamming section starts and I lose interest. But then after the mess of the improv and pain comes the acapella giant's scream: O my Jesus! O my Jesus! O my Jesus! O my Jeeeeeeeesus! O my Jesus! and the band grinds back in. And on to the end. There's something about the harshness of the tone and the mix that gives it an informal feel, a rehearsal rather than a recording. That's what it, in fact, was with a few guitar overdubs here and there. The grimness of the opening is lost in improv that just sounds like a lot of banging about. It ends with Plant descending through the word dying which reminds me of the Icarus figure on the Swansong label. Someone coughs. Plant sings, "cough," through a smirk. Someone else (Bonham) yells, "that's gotta be the one." End of side one.
Side two kicks off with the cyberman sound of a Les Paul through a ring modulator. It's an impressive alienating effect and the song is pleasant enough but I forget it as soon as the funky clavinet of Trampled Underfoot sparks in. One iteration of the riff and then the band crashes in through a near relentless more rock than funk workout about cars n girls n canoodlin' maximus. There's a breakdown here and there but there's also always a comeback. I listen to it for the force but don't enjoy it much. After this is Kashmir.
Kashmir explodes to life with cavernous drums holding up a tough rising guitar riff that doesn't seem to be in any key and restarts halfway through a phrase, doubled by a string section. Over these giant steps Plant comes in with a bright vocal, edged with sandy experience, about being a traveller of both time and space, stars and sand. This is music I could listen to unchanging for a very long time. If the hard punching breakdown at its centre were not rendered aloft by Plant's sublime screaming improv I'd resent it. but I don't get the chance, anyway, as a brass fanfare and Bonzo snare bash and cymbal crash push us over the canyon edge to an Arabic middle 8 and I'm in full flight. The sheer beauty of this section is weightless and leaden at the same time. Plant's voice gravels up for the melancholic exit phrase which falls into a abyss of reverb and trills over the resumption of the main riff and last verse. More space in this one. Sometimes the fanfares returns only to wordless vocals. Then BASH! the middle eight's back and we're on the magic carpet again, high above the night oceans and mountains. Plant's voice soars and finds a bitterwseet motif as the string section finds a new ascending figure that goes from a minor chord to the major third of the one above it. Fade out. Get off the floor after minutes.
Kashmir is my favourite Led Zeppelin song. It combines pretty much everything I love about their more exotically influenced side, uncelebrated emotional subtlety and sheer bloody power. This is in an eight minute song that a band like Yes would have turned into a whole side with a lot of soloing. Here it's a dream travelogue needing only its own force to move and take us with it.
Side three begins with the dawn of time on what I only recently found out were bowed acoustic guitars but sound like the birth of an epic, a dark drone hums up to power as others around it also wake and rise. Then the sun comes up or a troubling imagining of the sun. John Paul Jones plays a reed voice on a synthesiser using the pitch wheel sliding up to the note. The scale is eastern and could be minor or major. The pace is slow, patient, waiting for a slow ceremony. It's possible that it's meant to be an evocation of the sun rising but to me it's more like light emerging in complete darkness. The bright, bending synth notes are like snakes of blinding light appearing from the dark and slithering in an increasing mass of writhing brilliance. This assumes a stillness.
Plant comes in with a choir made only of himself in strange middle European folk harmony. Grindly slow phrases about will sinking low and finding the road in the light. BAM! A riff the size of a planet descends through the space. This changes to another giant figure leaping in stretches which switches time signatures a few times per iteration and Plant, much closer, seems to be gives advice to someone off-song about keeping to the road and not straying. This gives way to a clavinet playing a sweet major key figure. Plant sreams that everybody needs the light before a brightly descending cascade of happiness. Back to opening drone. Repeat. Fade.
Bron-Yr-Aur fades in as a pretty and calm solo acoustic guitar piece, with some lovely reverse reverb, which fades out again leaving only the impression of a light in the dark of the vinyl. Actually ....
That's what this record makes me think: light and textures coming out of the black sheen of the vinyl of the disc. Every record was like a starless night, a black silence from which the sounds of others' imagination emerged to create light in varying shades, intensities and colours. Records were these dark slices covered in unreadable scripture broke or oozed into the air when the needle moved in their grooves.Whether as bright as a Queen megaballad or as murky as a Sabbath grinder, it came from the same oil-thick space. No, this wasn't a literal belief, it was fanciful but once thought it held. It carried to CD versions bought to replace old vinyl (99% given away) but didn't extend to anything I bought on CD for the first time, regardless of its vintage. A thumbnail of the cover art on a downloaded new album aids the impression but doesn't revive it. I don't miss the effect of this.
From that dark followed Down By the Seaside, a Neil Young/Rolling Stones vibe that could be lived with but not missed if omitted. After this the strange Ten Years Gone which begins as a lush chord-tuned guitar figure which turns into a spikey and strong riff before sliding down to a plaintive and low profile Plant vocal about a lost love. It's like the previous track which was a leftover from a previous album but without the force. A lazy solo ends in a compelling middle eight and then proceeds to more of the same. There is a real beauty to the guitar tone here and the riff has a powerful cinema to it but I wouldn't care if Led Zeppelin hadn't recorded it and if it had been left off the album and presented as one of the extras I would have listened a few times and let it go,
Night Flight delights from the first; a few high hat clicks lead into a cocky Plant vocal over a shimmering guitar wash (a borderline overdriven Les Paul in the combined pickup position! yum!) before a big chorus with leslied organ takes over. The big young Plant scream is there and the rock textures are tight. It's not surprising that this is a reject from the fourth album with its forward drive and stadium filling joy. The end bothered me as the band that didn't need any lift from the basic chord chord+6th boogie ends with a deliberate groove in just that under Plant sounding like he's vomiting. It did my head in.
The Wanton Song's combination of title, weird hard funk and Leslied guitar solo, desperate sounding lower voiced Plant scream and odd lyric made this song come across as a frightening admission that their power was not above that of the sexual swell attracted by their fame. It's all crawling away at dawn and hiding by the light of day stuff. The funk turned me off but I think there's more to it, now.
The pointless but enjoyable Boogie With Stu from the fourth album sessions and the rambling but enjoyable Black Country Woman (rejected from Houses of the Holy) are different but feel like twins. It's easy to leave them on but you wouldn't miss them if they hadn't been chosen.
Sick Again comes across like a Stones or Slade cock rock celebration of the groupies with a hint of the exhaustion that would plague the next album's For Your Life. A boogie groove that shifts from a Stones-like strut mixed with a dirty minded diving riff ends in a bluesy guitar voice and harmonica riff that resolves in a strange upward bend. End of album.
So why is this my favourite Led Zeppelin album if so much of it feels like filler? Really, the songs I like best are all on sides 2 and 3 of the LP. It's just that putting it on at Custard Pie and letting it go to Sick Again works. You could mentally wander off and then rejoin the earth for the highlights. They might sound like filler to me but I don't dislike any of the songs on this album and the tension between the sound and style of the tracks taken from earlier years and those recorded for this album varies quite pleasantly. The Rover was from Houses of the Holy but sits perfectly between the 1974 Custard Pie and In My Time of Dying. Side four's mix and match of songs from three different years, even with dramatic changes in Plant's vocal range sits neatly. The heaving end of Night Flight doesn't have time to breathe or the listener to shift before The Wanton Song's aggressive funk kicks in. It's like the joke about Melbourne weather: if you don't like it wait a few minutes.
For me this album is all about the exposure and solution of a mystery. From the time I made my first baffled inspection of the packaging and did a needle dip test that revealed nothing but further questions to putting it on for the first time as an album I'd bought for real and began to move through like new territory. None of my Zep-savvy siblings commented on this one or had even heard it. Strange to say that the biggest rock act of the seventies did not engender the brand loyalty that others did. With my family and this band the affection stops short of the oft ridiculed Houses of the Holy and ventured no further. I felt I was flying solo over these dark coastlines and jungles that lay within the grooves. This feeling was more intense than with Houses (which I heard later) as it had no reputation at all among the opinions of my familial guides. Michael had his copy but never mentioned it nor played it. It was as though the band matured but their fans hadn't waited for them. And there I was a generation later hearing how well they'd grown up. It made us friends, that album and I, and we so remain.
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