1986 at 30: Ten Albums from the Decade that turned Fab into Drab

1986 and my first full year of living in Melbourne where I have now spent most of my life. If I heard of new music it was through the subscriber FM stations like 3PBS and 3RRR and the Age's Friday supplement the E.G. I might have bought a Juke or a RAM or NME but they'd long dropped from my list of habits. I was going to more live gigs in Melbourne than I had in my last two years of Brisbane and felt pretty well served by a culture that still harboured its own alternative. Going from one uninteresting casual job to the next I was mostly on the dole, trying to write the great Australian novel before officialdom or age caught up with me.

Once I'd finished the first draft of the book a started rewriting it and within weeks I was immersed in a thickening swamp of self-aware cleverness that the elements of the story became indistinguishable from the in-jokes. That was just the first chapter which I was still working on three years later. I attempted to read it a few years back and saw that I'd spent all that time refining some truly deluxe garbage. But at the time, strolling out on a sunny Fitzroy afternoon, bumping into someone good on Brunswick Street and going for a drink with them or just a coffee at Marios made all that go away ... until I sat down in front of the manuscript again.

While I still listened out for music I found it discouraging how formerly interesting bands went from Alternative Music to OzRock, absorbed by the syrup-dipping mainstream. Everyone moves on and should but the equation of The Models with Mondo Rock was horrible to watch. It was as though we'd just been told we'd won the change while the lardy lords of commercial FM radio polished up the world of Safeway Punk. I remember a little later seeing Ross Hannaford playing reggae with a three piece while his old band-mate Ross Wilson on tv blathered out some more dad rock with the word bop in the title.

I noticed two trends in the mid eighties that saddened me: a general blanding out of musical substance in bands that were highly celebrated and a return of the dominance of guitar rock. The encouraging signs in the early decade that music was moving free of the old templates with the adoption of electronics and dub were visible long enough to be smeared by power chords once again. Inevitable, I guess, but still a pity.

REM - Life's Rich Pageant
If you didn't know what was happening this album sounded like a streamlining of the band's approach. From the big guitar punch of Begin the Begin to the ultra pop of the cover version of Superman everything felt a little heightened and clearer than before. You could make out pretty much everything Michael Stipe sang and the song structures felt more classic. Peter Buck's guitar was set to stadium because that's where the band wanted to get to. The follow up, the also highly enjoyable Document, made it clear that this wasn't a progression but an abandonment. REM threw away its mysteries and roadside charm. They got rich and famous but also more predictable and less interesting. This one can be left on when it's put on but it always reminds me of when I wondered, in my early twenties, if I was getting too old to care about new bands. That would take over a decade to really kick in but this is where it started to really crack.

The Smiths - The Queen is Dead
I hated the Smiths for the irony in the pose and the pose anyway. I hated them for the blandness of their guitarist's muzak tones and Morrissey's over reliance on a few melodic tricks. I hated the cleverness of the lyrics and the screaming self-importance of all of it. But boy did I love the first three songs on this record. I softened to them after that, while never actually warming, and gave How Soon is Now a bow. They were one album away from disintegration and I didn't care. My flatmate Tracey loved them. Well, we at least shared REM records.

Sonic Youth - Evol
Flatmate Miriam was a drummer and came home from practice one night with a cassette of a unidentified band. She played it over and over in her room and to us. We took to it, too. The atmospherics, the soundscapes between songs, the cinematic textures and vocals that went from conspiratorial whispers to screams. I bought the LP and loved the endless groove at the end of each side. I also bought records previous and some to follow but loved none of those. I loved this one and still do.

Elvis Costello - Blood and Chocolate
I'd left Elvis C to himself after the ho hum of Trust, happily returning for the much better Imperial Bedroom but only temporarily, and it wasn't until a friend whose faith was stronger alerted me to some of the great gems in the C-ster's current bag. I can still leave this one on but I also still hang out for Tokyo Storm Warning and I Want You.

The Fall - Bend Sinister
A friend was heavily into the Fall and lent me a handful of cassettes. This was my favourite. It's still a put on and leave on.

Coil - Horse Rotorvator
The hardness of the commentary in the music and voice in this set is magnetic. My standout is Ostia for its beautiful vocal and sheer severe eerieness. Lists of demons, Marc Almond lashing his tongue around some gleeful debauchery. And somehow it's also mostly beautiful. Beyond its release date it's still fresh.

Go Betweens - Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express
As the GOBs sound got bigger they also got closer to the airy pop that they made in their final years. I still saw them when I could and they were always a breezy pleasure live. I liked Spring Rain and a few others but didn't get into this one. After this I enjoyed them almost as though they were another band. Aren't they allowed to develop? Yep, but they are also allowed to go beyond my interest. I probably wouldn't put this on today. Maybe I should, though, just to see.

Husker Du - Candy Apple Grey
I could hear the song craft but winced every time a song started with a wash of distortion pedal blah. A few songs have acoustic guitar and one has piano but this punk-a-decade-late sound wore me down. I still like Don't Want to Know. This could be a could candidate for a Nouvelle Vague style reinterpretation.

New Order - Brotherhood
The only band I liked who could get away with overproduction. Side one was like the earlier band, the slightly sunnier outgrowth from Joy Division. Side two was more like the band that did Blue Monday but lusher and more complex. Bizarre Love Triangle is still brilliant. The last song, Every Second Counts starts as a jokey take on Lou Reed but builds beautifully to a distorted mass which then gets stuck like an old LP. A friend of mine referred to this as "the Lou Reed album" because of the first half of this one track. He still characterises people that way to this day which makes him like a a character in a New Order song.

Hunters and Collectors - Human Frailty
Led by the glorious irony-free pop of Throw Your Arms Around Me, this album was the first step away from the giant clank and chant of the earlier incarnation of the band and toward the tv lights of OzRock. The choruses turned up within the first minute of each song put down as a potential single and, while there was still enough leisure in the observation and some luscious ensemble brass playing it would be the last Hunnas album I'd care about at all. Pity, as I had just moved to their homebase of Melbourne and no longer had to wait a year between their gigs. They were still good to see live but nothing can erase the earliest shows I saw where they turned the quite ritzy surrounds of the New York Hotel into a soundscape of jungle sweat and joyous chanting. I bought the 7 inch of Throw but that was it.

1966 at 50: The Byrds' 5d Fifth Dimension

It was so hard to get to hear the Byrds in the mid-70s that it was through luck and nothing else that the only way I got to hear the Turn Turn Turn album was a cassette dubbed by a school friend from his sister's copy. The copy was an original mono LP from 1965. Even the compilations were hard to come by. At a time when even The Beatles were only available in their late period. If you wanted Rubber Soul you had to know someone who had it.

I read about Eight Miles High before I heard a bar of it. It was shrouded in contraversy because of the word high in the title. Even back in the 70s that seemed weird to me. I had to imagine what it sounded like. I did finally hear it once on the radio during a special called Twang about the role that electric guitars played in rock music. For three or so minutes my world stopped. I didn't think to set it up to tape it. When it was over it was gone forever. I tried reconstructing it from that memory but knew I only had the first few chords and opening line.

The 80s were much kinder to the legacy of 60s bands and after a few reissued compilations the original albums began appearing in record shops. Apart from anything else, a great many post punk musicians were turning to the best of the 60s rather than the immediate past for a kindred style. Among the reissues was the Byrds back catalogue but such was the record-buying decision tree of the cashless uni student, I figured I already had the singles compilation and there seemed so many covers on the original albums that I couldn't justify anything instead of a new Teardrop Explodes or Siouxsie spinner.

Then, later, after a year working at a local theatre I left to pursue writing a novel (nyerk nyerk) and received a kind of thank you payment which allowed a few records and more. I got the first three Byrds albums. So I finally heard this one. I'd heard already heard six of the tracks on compilations. Nevertheless, context is everything and this was their entry into the all important 1966 albums ranks. So, what's it like and does it still work?

The cover art is all 60s zeitgeist. The band variously kneel, sit or stand on a Persian rug against a background so black that it looks like the outer reaches of the Zorgon Galaxy. Each band member is holding a white disposable plastic cup with red liquid that could be cherry cordial or something more suitable for creating the impression that they are flying on a rug in the outer reaches of the Zorgon Galaxy. Above them the CBS logo, stereo logo and set list form a kind of arch around the album title in a blocky white font which floats above Byrds in huge paisley pattern letters. If you'd been in any danger of mistaking this for one of the series of Sing Along With Mitch Miller and the Gang from the 50s that danger was erased. So how does it sound?

5D starts without a riff or a snare hit, just a sudden fall into the big floating jangle and warm vocal singing of the expanse of the universe. Falling through the quantum dark somewhere between a folk rock workout and a country waltz, this hymn to the wonders of science catches us from the start as Roger McGuinn's folk club vocal is soon joined by the cut glass harmony of David Crosby's tenor. At one point McGuinn sings a vowel as high as he can go and as the chord changes Crosby comes in even higher with a a falsetto note as the highly compressed Rickenbacker 12 string snakes around with tentacles of pure chiming light. If anything was going to gently but firmly tell Byrds fans that they had moved on from Dylan covers this is it.

Wild Mountain Thyme hearkens back to the folk of the first two albums with a mix of chiming guitar and solemn choir from the valley earth. This time there's a string section that blows in like a cool breeze. It's a beautiful piece and you'll never skip it and, while it reminds us of the joys of the peaks of the previous albums, we've already heard the future and want more of that.

Mr Spaceman like the previous two tracks opens without a 12 string riff which makes a hat trick of departures from the first two LPs. Bam and you're into it. McGuinn sings a country-flavoured jig about a close encounter of the third kind. The bouncy 2/4 time and bright stacked harmonies suggest a jokey throwaway but the song's science fiction elements would return repeatedly in the band's output.

I See You jumps up in 5/4 with the 12 string centre stage like bebop in a Beatle wig. The harmonies come straight in without a solo introduction and they, too, are jazz rather than folk or rock. The melody and vocals are sombre bringing light to lines of word association like notes from a therapy session: "I know you, met before, seventh floor, first world war..." A couple of time stopping droning middle eights in 3/4 pile on the abstraction and a frenetic 12 string solo that prefigures Eight Miles High. It might well be a kind of chocolate box of stream of consciousness but there's always been an eerie undercurrent in this song for me, as though it's a list of the last psychotic thoughts of a killer before his breakthrough action. There's something obsessive about all that detail that's being noted. Maybe it's the razor-crisp harmonies, their impersonal sound and the odd time signature but this one can still give me the creeps.

If that weren't strange enough What's Happening launches into a series of strange statements by the narrator (a solo vocal from writer David Crosby) who is bewildered by the person he is talking to and their surrounds. Could be a straight recollection of a trip. There is hesitation in the voice and a stammered laugh begins another line. Between each couplet McGuinn's 12 string takes a bending walk in a minor key, getting ever higher until it is soaring by the end. We end as we begin on a ground of pedestrian rock to the fade, walking inside a mind as its unschooled occupant. Crosby would take this mood to a far more focused and tingling extent in the big spooky Everybody's Been Burned on the following album and it points to his later work with Stills and Nash but here in the context of a rock group it feels more like a word to the knowing.

If the cute 12 string riffs of Turn Turn Turn or the Bells of Rhymney have been absent from this far more serious platter and the lyrics are getting stranger and darker they still form slight preparation for the Side 1 closer I Come and Stand at Every Door. This is the one I had to replay when I got that copy back in the 80s. I heard it through three times straight and it sent a shiver each time. It still does. A modal wash of jangling guitar and crashing cymbals waltzes slowly beneath Gene Clark's unsmiling account by the ghost of a child incinerated in Hiroshima, condemned for eternity to knock on doors and plea for peace. "My hair was scorched by swirling flame, my eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind. Death came and turned by bones to dust and that was scattered by the wind" I'm welling up a little just typing those words. This is a cover of a song that emerged in the US folk scene in the late 50s. The lyrics are an adaptation of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet piece The Girl Child and the song under the new title can be found covered by many including a nerve draining version in the 80s by This Mortal Coil. The Byrds version keeps its rock basis in the background, washing back and forth like the tide as Clarke's funereal drone persists against the force. The full band harmonies at the end offer some relief with the words about peace but it's too little too late as the wash falls quickly into its fade. End of side one.

The CD version observes a second or two of silence before resuming. Side 2 begins with one of the most sublime songs of its decade. A thick electric bass arpeggio thuds around the tonic and fifth of E over swishing ride cymbals. A stuttering six string electric clangs on a low E and then the huge golden notes of the introductory riff of Eight Miles High sing loud as a fanfare. Lift off. The figure playing G major against the relative minor that the rest of the band are grinding through tells us we're in for a strange ride. Immediately we are in for some turbulence as the 12 string lunges into a strange modal scale as influence by John Coltrane's sax as the then fashionable Indian classical music. This is not the sweet and cute jangling riff of Mr Tambourine Man but an engine turbining up and taking off. It scraggles around the scale, moving upward until it hits the ceiling with a rapid alternation of a high E and F. Before you can take any of that in the vocals enter, leaving us somewhere between Ravi Shankar and Cologne Cathedral's greatest hits.

The unworldly harmonies through the minor third slow and strong as a take off, lingering on the tension of ascent until the release with the ringing open D on the 12 string which feels like you're in the open air. Eight miles high and when you touch down you'll find that it's stranger than known ... Signs in the street that say where you're going are somewhere just being their own. What does that mean? To me it means perfectly chosen vowels and consonants sung like a monastic choir rising to the clouds. I don't care what it means because I'm up there with them, suspended. The second verse is the same steady controlled climb and cruise. Then the next instrumental break begins with the gleaming fanfare on the 12 string, courses through some turbulence in the stratosphere and darkly builds until again the choir emerges again for the last verse: Round the squares, huddled in storms.
Some laughing some just shapeless forms. Sidewalk scenes and black limousines. Some living, some standing alone. A brief moment of indecision in the playing, not stumbling or stuttering, more like hanging in the air wondering whether to land or keep coursing through the light. It's a landing, turbulent, jangling and assured rolling to a massive four engine stop that ends in the sigh of a ride cymbal.

I remember the phrase "huddled in storms" and thought, whether or not this was correct, that they had borrowed the word storms as a kind of collective noun, a group of huddles. It gave me pictures of vague fogbound shapes, flashes of  light sparkling around them. I will never get sick of this song.

Almost as a sublime to ridiculous transition next up is David Crosby's take on the year's go to cover, Hey Joe. The Leaves made it a garage epic and Hendrix just made it epic. The Byrds give it a speedy panic with a scraggly lead guitar (6 string) skittling in the background and Crosby's nervous high voice on full psycho setting. I like this version and I think I'm the only one who does. Maybe it's because the others stand by themselves and this needs an album to make it work. It sounds like something Crosby insisted on for coolness' sake.This was the Byrds' first album to contain no Dylan covers. The covers they chose (not counting to two trad numbers), this and Every Door, were decidedly un-Dylan and more a grab at the wider zeitgeist, anti-war and outlaw. Things were on the change.

Captain Soul sound like filler and is but it's filler composed of a kind of taunt. Having built a brief but fast career on folk modernisation and rocking up Dylan. A soul based groove would have seemed a freshener as much as Hey Joe was. The trouble is that, while it's endurable, it goes nowhere and has as much soulfulness as any of the white boy garage acts that Lenny Kaye stuffed the Nuggets album with: intention doesn't equal effectiveness.

John Riley is one for the old fans, a solemn choral jangle reading of an old folk tune about a returning lover. The same paint by numbers string section that appeared in Wild Mountain Thyme turns up again, and again as needlessly. It's pleasant and easily lived through but sounds like yesteryear.

Finally we hear the rising scream of a jet engine which gives way to a far more convincing groove than Captain Soul as between grabs of control tower radio talk we get a fun closer telling us to ride the Lear jet, baby. Before you think of this being an innovative anti-consumption broadside, taking aim at the really big wheels, be informed that the Byrds were young cool Californians with a lot of money who knew the people who designed the aircraft and probably a few people who owned one. This is a celebration of one of the ultimate consumables of the era. They might have turned into hippies but for now they wanted in.

As closers go, this was a step up from the first album's goofy We'll Meet Again or the previous one's embarrassingly self-consciously cute Oh Susanna. It rounds off the album without a cringe. Things were looking up.

Fifth Dimension is how it sounds, a band that had lost their chief original songwriter (Gene Clarke, who is on the album as a writer and singer) but who knew they needed to keep moving. Like so much of the rock LPs released in 1966 this was in response to Rubber Soul, the Beatles game changing set that, from cover art to the run out groove declared that real albums now had to have some cohesion and weren't allowed to be just lists of songs. While this is less a cohesive whole than a group of songs with filler dressed up as primary material it kind of gets away with it. It's not a bad parlour trick but the quality gap between Eight Miles High and Captain Soul cannot fully convince. The best they've done is to make the contemporary formula of covers supporting hit singles digestible across time. It's not the Byrds LP to begin with (I'd go with either Notorious Byrd Brothers or Mr Tambourine Man) but it feels like its time without sounding dated


Listening Notes:
Version used for this article was the 1996 remastered CD with bonus tracks. If you wanted to hear it on vinyl you'd need to try and find an original pressing from the 60s as the reissues from the 80s are from horribly worn masters. But even if you did access a copy from 1966 it still wouldn't have the bass response that the mid-90s CDs have so, really, listen to the CDs for best results until someone budgets enough time and money to have them remastered in hi resolution digital when they will finally sound like they did at the mixing board. The original mono mix of Mr Tambourine Man appeared on SACD and it is stellar. There's one of Notorious Byrd Brothers but I can never find a copy. Other Byrds albums remain at CD level resolution but, happily, this round of remasters was a fine one.

PS - I know he still called himself Jim McGuinn on this album and Roger came later but that's how he's been known ever since so ....

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: PRESENCE

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.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: IN THROUGH THE OUT DOOR

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.