Led Zeppelin's third album was loaded from the off. After getting a lot of guff in the more popular press for being too monolithic and heavy the chief songwriters, Plant and Page holed themselves up in a Welsh cottage to absorb the dew and leafy goodness of the rustic life and breathe it out as a new album. This was it: not a tight loaded cartridge of road-tested goodies but a planned pregnancy.
But people like to simplify. LZ III is supposedly their first acoustic record or side one is rock and side two is folk or ... But, really it's a mix from the get go. The barnstorming Immigrant Song gives way to Friends which is heavy but acoustic (with Bonzo on the tablas!). Already the record is both the lofty Zeppelin and the lead in the band name. But if anything this album's mix of styles is less eclectic than confident. If the first was the campaign broadside and the second another first than this is what happens when they draw breath and see what they might want to do next.
What that was turned out to be a mix of folk with mandolins and 12 string guitars like Gallows Pole, plumbing pipe stompers like Out on the Tiles or weird blue freakouts like Hats Off to (Roy) Harper. It feels like comfort more than bravado. They would hone it to perfection in the next album before closing the door and starting freshly with the next one. If that's true why bother, why not just take a whole year off and make the fourth album?
Well, because it was 1970 and rock music for its most successful practitioners became something that could be developed through trial and error, a forgivable misstep here or a bold failure there. The era of Tommy and the White Album was one of disregarding limits and getting it out for a public, not some notion of an ocean of teenyboppers but a public. LZ III's energy rises and falls eccentrically: the hoedown of Gallows Pole fades before the gentle strum (after a false beginning) of Tangerine; the juddering monster Out on the Tiles explodes from the silence after the emotional wrenching of Since I've Been Loving You (which would have been a perfect side closer). The record dozes and wakes up violently again and again but even that has no pattern. After all the formalism leading to a Sergeant Pepper there needed to be more of an artist's choice about an album, a song after song rather than a solid core going from an imagined audience and tuning orchestra to the great coffin lid closing of A Day in the Life. Not a reaction against, just a restart.
That's what this is. Instead of a more satisfying three album climb it's just the first of two. As the first two showed a refinement of their own. After Houses of the Holy everything changes from that again as circumstances demand pragmatism and triage. But at that point when the band that made this record were preparing for tours and more musical adventures to come they offered this. If it weren't so substantial I'd call it a sketchbook but take almost any of its tracks and play them outside of the sequence and they still work.
This is worth noting at this stage as it's not so easy to define what a pop music album is or should be. That has been the case since the early '00s when genres variously merged or splintered into ever finer fragments and the public became all of what they only partially had been before, the consumer base. That's not a rant from an old man as much as it is a recognition that moments like this album are more the norm and offering a concept (like Flaming Lips or Arcade Fire were still attempting in the late '00s) has not yet reached its quaint retro charm status.
But this wasn't itself offered as a concept, just two sides of songs. The big cohesive statement with its levees of doom and stairways to the misty mountains was yet to happen. I know, the gimmicky cover with its planters wheel made a meaningless fan-service picture show is at odds with that but that was not in the band's control. Even if it had been it would still make a kind of cheeky kind of bait and switch. And the joke in that would have been that this was the sweetest and most sincere sounding Led Zeppelin records to date. So, I guess I still like it.
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