When I told two acquaintances at school assembly that I had bought Presence they weren't unimpressed but uncomprehending. They thought I'd said presents. There had been a high profile campaign about the album which included a competition for a very limited number of sculptures of The Object used on the cover art. Local radio 4TO ran a special on it with a track by track DJ commentary and a history through interview snippets. Everybody heard that. Ok, no, they didn't.
The intense learning program I worked through in the previous year was equivalent to a few months Googling. Every book or retrospective in rock rags I could find I read. Everything. Four of my many siblings had first hand fan experience and happily plugged into this opportunity of sudden importance. I learned a lot. I was what would be called in the following decade a nerd (the word came to popular breath from Happy Days but no one on earth was owning it in the seventies). When those two misheard me, however innocently, I physically backed away and went to speak to someone else.
Oddly though, the packaging and sell-job on this album and the idea that I would get to buy a Zeppelin album while it was still living ran so high in my imagination that I could be nothing but disappointed when the needle hit the groove. And so I was. Just not all at once.
Achilles Last Stand opens with an otherworldly twelve-string grind, phased to sound like it was revolving in light. Once it has reached us from the horizon and stands shining in our eyes everything kicks in. Then it explodes into a constantly flashing gallop with frenetic drums, chugging bass and guitar and huge clashing power chords tied together by strange staccato figures on the guitar. Page used six guitar tracks, mostly doing different parts (but occasionally reinforced each other). Plant narrates a tale of something that sounds serious and epic, here with a conspiratorial schauspiel and there with a clean full throated caterwaul that describes size rather berserker frenzy. Page takes a solo and it's not a milllion-note parlour trick but grave and beautiful, witness to big events. The song drives to the end with a double tracked Plant in unison with himself singing a tidal rise through a minor mode. Then suddenly everything stops and the flaming golden twelve-string figure swirls in front of us again and flies back to the horizon.
For Your Life is a grinding funk piece with a low key bellow from Plant. The gloom is broken by a sudden chiming twelve string descending arpeggio and then resumes. The mood is huge but it meant exactly nothing to me. Funk still fails to inspire me I think of it as musical constipation and that's all I can hear from this song. Royal Orleans (miscalled on the radio special as New Orleans Street) is a little funk piece that is over before it begins and I still struggle to recall it.
Side two starts with a nasty variant of the swirling golden flame of the guitar figure from Achilles Last Stand. It's minor and played on slide and sounds like, and yep - BAM - there it is, turns into a big blues number. This belts along like an older Zeppelin shouter with a ripping guitar and then thrilling harmonica solo. There is a mature worldliness to this one that stops short of cock rock and almost assumes a cautionary tone. But everything goes on for too long and the point lies sunken somewhere back in the second verse, unsalvageable and easily forgotten.
Candy Store Rock tries a joke which was tried back then of a heavy band playing a fifties number. It works for the first few lines and then bogs down in repetition and mess. It's like your drunk uncle at Christmas spoiling his own jokes but insisting on getting to the punchline anyway. Hots on for Nowhere feels like fun. It's happy and bright with a joyful burst of twelve-string heaven a couple of times. The lyric seems a kind of easy come easy go thing which fits. Tea for One is a rewrite of Since I've Been Loving You that has its charms but too few to really move to. And then it's over.
I didn't have to like any album in full. I remember judging albums as songs rather than albums and didn't really care about the duds. But Achilles, Nobody's Fault and Hots On were the only songs I'd revisit with this one. I liked feeling disturbed by the cover art with its clean cut cold war Americans seemingly under the spell of this black horrible looking object and this could momentarily influence my listening to the album but more so it aided my daydreams of a kind of sci fi horror world that felt good to walk through.
Later I learned that this album had been made under great pressure in very little time. Robert Plant was recovering from a car accident and sang his vocals from a wheelchair. He wanted to be with his family but felt pressured to be there in a claustrophobic basement studio. His voice betrays this. There is no cock of the walk screaming or strutting here, just regret and personal desolation. Achilles is a retelling of the accident. For Your Life is a testimony of exhaustion on the other side of Babylon where the sex and the drugs are calling for their due (one nervous system in full, please). There is more to it and it's interesting listening with the history in mind. But when I read one commentator talking about its "neon guitars" everything I felt about the album fell into place.
While I shall never love this album as a whole I do owe it something important. No one outside of a very few people at school had even heard of it. None of my brothers, sisters or their friends who had been among the first fans of the band had heard it and when they did had little to say. I had an import copy. The pressing was deep and the packaging was that notch noticeably superior to the local ones I saw in the other shops. I knew and treasured its gems and was easy with the rest of it. Dig? I felt like its keeper, that I alone knew its value and made no effort to sell that to anyone. If the rest of the crowd were uncaring I bore the flame. It felt legendary, epic and important.
This was 1976 and my world was about to change when I found myself to be the only one in the room not ridiculing a Weekend Magazine story about punk rock in London. All of rock music past present and future changed in those few minutes but the sense that it no longer had to be a thing of mass involvement but was just as strong as a secret was a familiar feeling. Respecting Presence made it easy to accept punk which felt like home. Any ridicule just looked like hicksville, all the kids who never questioned their parents' values and the parents themselves who mistook punk's vigour and cultural violence for something alien and new rather than just the new version. It wasn't the mediocrity of Presence that made punk familiar but the compelling might of its exceptions and I didn't care who knew that because I did.
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