The only Led Zeppelin album that I had no interest in. Same hype campaign as Presence. The cover was the most ambitious Hipgnosis had attempted. The sound would be bigger than ever. This was 1979 and In Through the Out Door promised to be the most irrelevant monolith of its time. I actually felt sad for the band. All those years of innovation, legendary excess and excessive legend and a few whinging kids in torn jeans and hacked haircuts make them obsolete in a heartbeat. They'd take three years to get this one out and no one had told them that bigger and better were boring.
Let's start with the cover as that's what everybody knew about months before they'd heard a note. The LP would have a brown paper bag around the sleeve with the title and band name stamped on. Inside that was a normal cardboard sleeve depicting any one of six different viewpoints of the same film noir type scene of a guy burning a rejection letter in a divey bar. The six viewpoints were of the main figure as seen by six different characters around him in the bar. The pictures were sepia toned but the scene on the front cover had what looked like a brushstroke at the centre which revealed a glimpse of colour. Inside this was a paper sleeve which, though you had to discover it yourself, produce pastel tints when wet. Inside that was the record in a plastic sheath.
Jimmy Page made a lot of the title saying that it was about something that was hard to do. The packaging suggested a joke about a band whose fame and position at the top of the mountain made them inaccessible to their fans. But really it had more to do with the band feeling excluded from playing at home in the UK because of tax exile. The only difficulty getting in through that out door was created by choice. If the late sixties onward had taught the punter on the carpet anything it was about the inverse relationship between the richness of packing and the value of the base product. There are exceptions to everything and there are some to this but In Through the Out Door proves the rule through hard compliance.
As I said, I didn't really care about this one when it came out but happily borrowed it from Stephen Priest when he bought his copy. I took it to my brother Greg to listen to it on his massive system. he had introduced me to a lot of music and was a Zep fan up to but short of Houses of the Holy (which he ridiculed until he heard my copy and changed his mind about a few of the tracks). He lowered the needle and I sipped my sars, waiting.
The fade is slow but rises warmly to produce a mirage of the middle east with a shimmering keyboard desertscape. Something like a cello or bowed guitar (but is actually tonal synth drums) provides some menace. Plant comes in through a wailing through a chorus effect with the title "in the eeeeeeev'ning." BAM! the riff crashes in top gear, drums, bass guitar and the newer whine of a synth all at once as Plant screams in lower register about .... something which supposedly culminates in the chorus about him needing "your love". A guitar solo bashes the door down in a use of guitar jack noise so ingenious it was discovered by Johnny Greenwood only one and a half decades later for Creep. A quiet spell ensues and it's quite beautiful with what sounds like Robert Fripp on guitar (it's an ebow) before Plant takes to the home stretch with the word "whatever." Fade. Wow, not a classic but what a great way to kick it all off.
That smile is shortlived. South Bound Saurez has some nice big sounds but it goes nowhere beyond its own musical constipation. Fool in the Rain is nice and Latin influenced, even degenerating into the kind of cabasa and shaker led samba that made bachelor pad muzak famous. It returns to its plunky beginnings with a fiddly guitar through a harmoniser solo and ends somewhere. Hot Dog starts promisingly with a pleasant bluegrass riff on a fuzzy Tele that falters in the second iteration disarmingly. Then the rest of the band comes in with a jiggly rockabilly number the like of which has been preceded by a decade of heavy and prog rockers showing they have senses of humour by playing something their fans would joke about. In every case of this, from Emerson Lake and Palmer having the most studiously correct time with crap like Are You Ready Eddie? to Bad Company's cringing The Letter with its 50s talky bit and do wop backing, proves embarassing to its perps. This one's no different. D'yer Maker on Houses of the Holy got away with its two pronged 50s plus reggae schmozzle because no one had thought of that before, they still sounded like Led Zeppelin and the track is good. This one sounds like filler, it comes across like a fun jam that has been worked out down to the faltered riff at the beginning to the clicketty click gap fillers after the chorus. Side one ends up being one for good and three for crap. Not middling. Crap. The thing most audible through the entire side is keyboards. John Paul Jones, terrific bassist whose keyboards had always enhanced the band's ethic of pushing recognised forms forward without giving in to prog campyness here lies back and thinks of Greek statues wearing clown noses.
Then again, side two begins with the album's best track and it is dominated by Jones. A few synth shots across the bow and the band crashes in. Page is buried under the keyboards, his Les Paul growling. Plant shrieking something that may as well be deep n mystical for all I care. His own backing vocals sigh in brief bends downward as the big synth rush bubbles on. Jones takes frequent Keith Emerson like million note breaks. A third of the way through this stops and Page enters centre stage with a huge multi-amped twelve string playing a tragic balanced figure as Plant moans mournfully. A brief bright guitar led break and we go back to the sadness. The bright break now sounds more melancholic before a third visit to the big sad landscape brings Plant an octave higher in range. And then abruptly everything changes into a frenetic staccato spike and bubble in a contrasting major key mood dominated by synthesiser. Plant gets a few more lines in about whatever it is and we stay here for a while. It's less prog than the kind of bouncy keyboard driven pop that is beginning to fill the top 40 of the late 70s and would dominate the early 80s. We end on a fade of crashing guitar tides and more synth ploodling than even Genesis were doing at the time. Well, if nothing else it's been interesting. It sounds like nothing else on a Led Zeppelin album but bursts with ideas and moves with real force.
After its fade comes the most famous track on the album, All My Love. A gentle wave of synthesised strings rises like switched on Corelli. Drums kick in and they're big but they work. Page enters with a mewling Telecaster whose B bender makes it sound like a pedal steel. And Plant sings one of the most sincere love songs of his career. It's in honour of his son who had died two years before. The chorus ends in a strange bombastic chordal figure on the keyboards that only reinforces the solemnity. A synth trumpet solo after that verges on silliness but the delicate synth strings figure following prevents the crossing. Pages responsive guitar lines are his best since the third album. The chorus after the second verse extends for Page's tasteful soloing and Plants improv. Fade.
I'm Gonna Crawl closes the album with the kind of mock 50s ballad that Angelo Badamenti made arresting in his work with David Lynch. Here it outstays its welcome for most of its length and is impossible to recall. Some surprisingly powerful screaming from Plant echoes the early days. The song and the band's recording career end on a brief synthesised whimper and that's it.
Three ok songs and four bullshit ones. Both Greg and I turned away from each other's eyes at times. If I'd been indifferent to it before the listen I was now angry. At least, at the very least they could have done more of the same and been flamboyantly out of step. The best of this was only promising and the worst sounded mistakes without lessons.
Compare and contrast another dinosaur outfit who released a major album that year. Pink Floyd's the Wall was liked across the board. It had all the anger of Suspect Device but no attempt was made to get down n dirty with the kids. It sounded like Floyd. It cast a sincerely critical eye on the isolation of the rock star, suggesting he (usually a he) was a would be fascist clamouring for control of his public, their minds as well as their money. You didn't have to be a Pink Floyd fan to like it (I wasn't and I did) and respect the gigantic band for being relevant while keeping to what they were. And people who say they didn't like Comfortably Numb are the same as anyone who says they don't like More Than a Feeling: liars!
In Through the Out Door tried to take just that route and failed and deserved to fail. I was sad when Bonzo died the following year but didn't mourn the passing of the band. The cultural force of punk rock which anathemised all big fat flared excess left no place for them. Two years before, Queen had released the loopy but wonderful track Sheer Heart Attack on their News of the World album. That was almost the last time I liked anything by them (I had a real weakness for Crazy Little Thing) but as accurate a study of punk aesthetic as it sounded, it didn't sound like they were trying to rival Pretty Vacant. Jimmy Page famously backed the wrong horse in the first wave of punk by championing The Damned. Credited with the opening salvo of the punk wars, The Damned were always more look than feel and it only went to show how remote Page and co were from what was happening in clubs around them.
Page has said more than once that Door was a transition and wouldn't have sounded like it did if he'd been more on top of things (heroin) and that if they'd been able to make a follow up it would have been more like them. But, I wonder if that doesn't just mean they would have kicked themselves even further away from the shore the way that all of the old hard and prog rockers did in the eighties, making them sink into the murk. I remember a friend at uni revealing his ongoing support of one of those old things (Yes or something) and it felt like he was showing me his Airfix models.
Stephen Davis, in his here wonderful there cringey Hammer of the Gods, claims that In Through the Out Door saved the record industry from the ruin it might have met because it was bought by the pallet load in outer suburbia after the big labels had lost so much money investing in new wave acts which sold pitifully. Maybe, but maybe we might have been forced into the healthier niche-ing of the 90s and 00s which bypassed the big labels altogether. No internet, of course, but the indy scene might well have taken some opportunity.
Who am I gammin'? Punk and anything that wasn't done in support of the industry failed and kept failing throughout the early 80s until the mainstream filtered it down to a look and a sound. That was always going to happen, even if that time allowed a little more critique in than the last time. So, what if Out Door was the worst Zeppelin album, it was the fastest seller on release? As such it probably outsold all of the punk and independent label fare from 76 to 80 combined. It was like one of those movies where the bad guy gets away without apology, redemption or punishment, a very uncomfortable lesson.
Greg taped the album and gave it back to me and I gave it back to Stephen Priest un-taped. I told him I was glad I wasn't a fan of the band anymore and he jibed me about the rag tag loser punk stuff I was into and both of us parted feeling we were the victor. I would have gone to a uni party that weekend and got merrily drunk to the sounds of Devo or Stiff Little Fingers while trashing the second clash album or having a good laugh about In Through the Out Door to someone older enough than I who gave my youth undeserved points and opinions undeserved credence. Led Zeppelin were dead to me. I had not needed the certificate but had no pangs on seeing it.
I bought a copy much later, in the early 90s when anyone could be into anything. I replaced all the Zeppelin I'd given away to Greg when I took most of my records from Townsville to Brisbane and then Melbourne. I was kinder to it than that first time and put on one of the three standouts now and then. Later I bought a copy of the remastered 90s CD with the same result that, apart from the big songs I didn't listen to it. I didn't leave it on. Even when I listened to it while writing this I did so track by track rather than let it flow.
Page had smack on his plate and Bonzo was seriously boozing and we got this thing. Not that Presence was any masterpiece but at least it sounds like a whole work. As a 17 year old I blamed Zeppelin for not reaching out to me and respecting me as a consumer, regardless of how much I rejected the label. A lot of my attitude has to do with the naivete of the young consumer, though, who plugs into their culture like an appliance and expects the current to keep flowing without ever questioning why it started flowing, never considering a time before the current. Later we all go through to the other side of the swing and dismiss all culture as disposable but if we are honest we will admit to those moments when this piece of plastic, that projected shadow or that perfectly fashioned line made us feel in touch with inspiration and take more seriously the objects of those creators' exhaustion. Almost none of us get close to making such things and it is always important to register the fall so we can remember the heights. Meanwhile, I had the end of high school to terrify me and there was nothing in the rock celestium that provided for that and plenty on the indie labels that addressed me. End of school. End of pre-adulthood. End of seventies. Bye bye Zeppelin. It really was good to know you.
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