All the Led Zeppelin experts in my family hated this one and considered it a sell out. As my fandom urged completion I had delayed this one until I could delay no longer. In the Easter of 1977, after a year of using my inherited disdain in the record shop, I finally shelled out for it and bore it home as a forbidden object, a secretive smile on my face. I would break the line and advance on my own orders.
Actually, I'd already done that in one sense as the double soundtrack album for the concert movie The Song Remains the Same contained three long versions of Houses songs (including the sturm und drang title track). The concerts which became the film and album were from just after the release of Houses of the Holy and were played with extra vigour. They are still superb versions. Also, the guitar book I'd got for Christmas of the then complete Led Zeppelin had a section for Houses that it identified only as V. I hadn't heard any of these songs and could only strum around the chords and pretend I knew what they sounded like. Hearing The Rain Song and Same at the movies and on the cassette that Wayne made for me I thrilled to imagine what this illicit disc might offer.
It was Good and Bad. The multitracked guitars and vocals for Song Remains the Same and hugeness of the Rain Song as it went from gentle to thundering felt like they were made of light. But the lead vocals sounded sped up. Wayne described them as childish. They are, in fact, altered by pitch control as Plant between the fourth album and this one lost most of his upper range. This is evident in the concert film where he can barely make the notes of Rock and Roll and Black Dog. This weedy mew of a vocal keens through most of the bigger moments of the album. But it doesn't detract as much as it might.
Getting and then getting into this LP was a kind of rebellion against all that experience and wisdom the older siblings imparted that had led me to it. I overplay how scorched was the earth after punk but Led Zeppelin were a current band and, perhaps past their best, still one of the world's best love hard rock acts. While saurian as the punks characterised them they yet offered some compelling warps in the expected sound of a rock band without ever quite buying into the big mess of prog. Hearing the band that needed only sound like their fourth album again and again taking strange left turns here and diving into pools of strange there felt far more refreshing in early 1977 than anything the Eagles were capable of.
The cover. Always the cover. It was meant to be a more naturalistic rendition of the same scene but at either dawn or sunset but weather proved prohibitive. Instead black and white shots were taken and the colour process went south, resulting in this strange harsh dreamscape of bloodlessly white blonde children climbing a weird rock formation that looks like it's on another planet. The sky is orange. No faces or frontal but you can tell one is male and the other female. Unfold the gate and it's extended with even more figures. If you don't know that these are the same two over and again the image immediately looks weird and offputting. Not from any sexual dodgeyness (no one would be allowed to shoot the cover let alone complete it for retail distribution today) but because it resolutely offers no reference points at all. Some of the poses have the kids look like human iguanas while others are more amphibian. The strange pot-like rocks appear to be near the sea and the children seem to have come from the water and are climbing like the first of their species to the apex. One on the back cover lifts her arms high and wide as though in worship. Is it pagan. Is it extra terrestrial? Flip the gate fold around and it gets uglier. A naked bald adult is holding one of the children aloft in the line of a beam of light that is streaming over the edge of a ruined castle. The sky is a weird shade of blue at its height but lemon at the horizon. It looks like a sacrifice. As on the fourth album there is neither band name nor album title anywhere on the sleeve.
Putting the record on and lying on the floor of the rumpus room to listen my first impression is two pronged. As aforesaid, Plant's vocals sound like the Chipmunks whenever he has to go into what would have been a mighty Black Dog scream. All the big zep vocal moments like the end of Rain Song or The Ocean have been sped up. At first listen it's offputting; the effect is usually used in cartoons but here it is soaring above fierce rock songs. It's quite distinct from Paul McCartney having his vocal sped up for things like When I'm 64 which is only just noticeable. It sounds like it was done to cover the change in Plant's vocal range. Eventually, you get used to it but then if you listen to any of the albums after this one and hear how much lower his screaming voice is the affected one on Houses just sounds weird.
The second immediate impression is that of brightnesss. The guitars are mostly played at a very hot clean, just here and there breaking into overdrive but mostly operating at a rich chiming tone. The guitar orchestration is stunning and there is a lot more variation in arrangement on display, testifying to further maturity on the part of all players. There is nothing on this fifth album that sounds in any way jaded. In fact, if anything, the clear invention in evidence seems to be at the wheel and we get a Led Zeppelin album that's both happy and distinctly part of the canon.
The Song Remains the Same starts side one with a tintinabulating D on a 12 string electric. The other forces come in almost immediately and Page's guitar orchestra takes us on a glittering flight to the stately vocal section where Plant sings about having a dream. Then it takes off again and when Plant returns he's in chipmunk mode trumpeting above the shining helium landscape. The song does not fade as expected but with a Plant choir intoning an ahhhhhhhhh a disturbing semitone over the main chord wash. It puts the joy of the song on a strange plain as it could sound like awe or evil.
The Rain Song mixes acoustic and twelve string electric with mellotron strings and muzaky piano. Bonham shows he can bring out the dynamics in excelsis. Plant gives the tenderest vocal he's delivered since Thank You. The words are a kind of flowerpot of cod philosophy and love letter but everything blends and the result is beautiful. The big verse with the giant strings and Plant's scream that had so thrilled me on the live album version. I notice two things about this: the strings are bigger on the album version but the vocal is the chipmunk scream whereas it had been a perfect thundery bellow on the live cut which carried the song with such righteous force. I remember thinking it was a pity they couldn't have mixed the live vocal for that part over the studio speed up.
Over the Hills and Far Away is one of those Jimmy Page guitar figures that every kid who picked up a guitar in the 70s worked out how to play. It's just a means of getting from G to D and back to D but it's done with such a joyful ease that you want to play it for yourself straight away. After a brief Plant croon the song kicks into medium paced but energetic rock with a kind of Cajun jaunt. Plant screams the lyrics of most of the song. This time his voice sounds natural rather than sped. We end on what sounds like the reverb without the source of the acoustic opening quietly moving to a warm and delicious G major that feels like a sunrise.
Then there's The Crunge. It's a funk workout begun on bass and drums, carried into James Brown territory by first Page and then Plant. A jaunty synth figure comes in wearing blackface here and there and it ends with Plant's very white man sounding joke about finding that confounded bridge. This fun piece contains everything I hate about funk, black or white, and is this album's Hats Off to Roy Harper.
Side Two crashes into light with another James Page Electric Orchestra. Page is playing a number of Strats here which contribute a lot to the brightness of tone but also allow for a whammy bar emulation of middle eastern reeds. He adds a slide and a more rhythmic scaffolding to this song about Dancing Days, good times and fun. It's textured heavy but it persists in shining. I can never get sick of this track.
D'yer Mak'er is a weird mix of fifties doowop and reggae with Bonham doing a Keith Moon in Kingston thump while Page scratches out a little arpeggio in the background, Jones plays a blocky chocky bass very high in the mix and plays a white man piano vamp on the chords. Over this Plant stutters a fifties teen love song: Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh baby don't you go oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.... There's a crashing heavy rock chorus and a lot of playing around on the 50s C-A minor-F-G progression and then it ends with Plant in high range (again unaided) and a chorus of probably himself whispering "fire!" Fade. Actually it's really enjoyable and I'll always turn it up if it's on. The title? An old joke: My wife went to the West Indies. Jamaica? No, she went of her own accord. Boom Boom.
No Quarter is meant to be highly atmospheric with brooding minor chords broken up on a Fender Rhodes piano over a low synth growl and Robert Plant singing about vikings or some people on a mission who carry steel that's bright and true. There's a torturously long intstrumental section that snoozes down into a kind of cocktail jazz that reverses all that spookiness and returns to the main theme as though someone's tapped it on the shoulder and tapped their watch. Page comes in with a welcome Zeppish fuzz guitar riff for the chorus and Plant makes a lot of some improv over the long fade. Zep fans are meant to love this one but I usually skip it.
The Ocean starts with a piratical chant which sounds like Bonzo before kicking the door down with one of Page's classic riffs. It has a funk feel but this is not constipated like The Crunge but rocky and forward moving. Plant's chipmunk voice comes in with some stuff about singing to the ocean and hearing the ocean's roar over the hot bright 9th and 11th chords Page is serving up. A breakdown in the middle surprises us with some la-la-ed harmonies before bashing into the final verse which ends with the riff that itself gets broken into by the big happy guitar orchestra and doobydoobydowop ending. A big bright descending figure on the massed guitars of Stargroves brings everything to a huge shining happy close, Plant getting a clearly smiling "so good" just before the last few notes.
There it is, a Led Zeppelin album that leaves you grinning. Repeat!
So this will always sound like Easter to me. I rushed out of the last class on Thursday, ta-ta-ed everyone and hurried to Mum's school to get a lift into town to get this album. It was planned for awhile. We weren't going away for Easter that year. Mum had to go to town for something and I ran to the record shop in the basement of Chandlers and, after mentally umming and ahing with the record in my hands I went to the counter and shelled out for it. Getting back to Mum's car, I pored over the cover art, noting its strange dreamlike colour saturation. Then I noticed the inner sleeve was a lyric sheet.
The odd mix of typeface was only intriguing. Some of the lyrics were set in zigzags and others with strange indentations, almost as though the band were ashamed to be making them so accessible, like someone who smiles a lot when you haven't liked something they've shared with you. Led Zeppelin were not a lyrics band and I never cared much about trying to decipher the words to their songs or mine them for meaning. Most of them seemed to have a straightforward motive and most of that was hedonistic or cod mystical. There is, however, a mystery at the centre of the words to The Ocean. The inner sleeve has the line as "I got a date, I can't be late for the high hopes haila ball." What Plant says sounds nothing like this. A lot of people hear some words about hell, hell fire or hell hounds. The latter would fit the Plant's somewhat generous plundering of old blues lyrics such as Robert Johnson's Hellhound on My Tail. (It was the lyrics, by the way, rather than the music that led to so many of the lawsuits, a reason I find incredible as LZ's lyrics were largely tarted up ad libs from Plant's limited literary imagination.) The idea that the lyric sheet had been tampered with (especially by the US side of the band's global business empire) was almost an urban myth at the time. But then any song that plays the same goofy sleight of hand dad joke about the girl who won his heart (i.e. his toddler daughter) that The Brotherhood of Man did with Save all You Kisses For Me isn't really going to be big on goat sacrifices.
For the next four days I met the cooler autumn mornings with fresh coffee and muesli, did no schoolwork and got out of yard work and listened to this album. I listened to it loudly in the rumpus room (to clarify that, the Jetnikoff rumpus room was a separate building between the house, pool and garage and was the size of a small holiday cottage) and blasted myself with it in the headphones while drawing as the rest of the clan watched the Jeffery Hunter Life of Jesus or whatever. And I turned to the unthumbed section of my Led Zeppelin songbook called V and started getting a feel for some of the guitar parts.
My brother Greg, chief among the album's detractors borrowed it to tape it and even came around over the next few weeks to ask how to play the Ocean riff. His warning against buying the album had to do with his vocal rendition of D'yer Mak'er and made it sound fifties and daggy. He said nothing of Song Remains the Same or Dancing Days. In fact, he got into it. I felt vindicated. I had discovered an artefact of the elders from the throne room and presented it in its self-illuminating splendour.
It wasn't too long before I was disowning Led Zeppelin and their saurian ilk and pursuing the delights of everything that stood against them, particularly from the UK. I loved the fact that I could get the Clash and Damned debut albums at the local Woolies and waited all winter and spring long for the release of Never Mind the Bollocks. Greg took delighted delivery of this and my other Zep LPs along with other discs by the likes of Queen, Kansas and 10CC when I finally transported all my records down to Brisbane in 1984. But then when I rebought the LZ albums in the late 80s when anyone could like anything without comment I looked forward to getting another copy of this bright but tough rock album whose guitar hero mover and shaker made it through two sides with a paucity of solos. I still listen to it and these days I'll even leave The Crunge on. And while I tend to dismiss nostalgia when it assails me I happily give in to the flashbacks of this anaethemised object bursting to flashing brilliance before me against all the warnings of my elders.
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