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: PHYSICAL GRAFFITI

When Paul Simonon of the Clash said that he only had to look at the record covers of Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin to know he hated them I knew what he was talking about. If there was a symptom of what the seventies did to extend the corporatisation of rock music it was in the packaging of the albums. Of all the firms that put this sheen on the decade the UK outfit Hipgnosis led the game. Their tableaux de enigma rendered in bold pallets in high def were so heavily individual that they turned in a few years to into a kind of advertising awards blandness when taken altogether. Imagine a record shop where the only cover art is by Magritte and you'll get the idea. Whether clever or astoundingly irrelevant to the music they were supposed to represent, Hipgnosis covers and those of their copyists became a mark of a band's entrance into the international penthouse. So, Paul was saying a mouthful back there.

All of Zep's albums had Hipgnosis cover art. At first this was a mutual thing as both the firm and the band were starting out and grew mega within months. After that the increasingly remote connection between the music and the covers spoke only of the celestial fame the band had attained. By the milestone IV even the scapbook scaled mugshots of the band members had been replaced with high enigma. The band name only appears on the disc label which has no title beyond the four symbols that represent each band member. By the time we get to the sixth album here we get to somewhere even stranger than before.

The two discs are in card stock sleeves like album covers in their own right. The sleeves are mocked up like the side of a New York brownstone whose windows can be filled with anything from the band members in drag to the lantern jawed profile of Marcel Duchamp. The band had been grumpy over the teenybopper wheel that packaged songs like Since I've Been Loving You or That's the Way on the third album so here, almost in penance, the pictures are both more intimate and more distant; the very act of looking over them feels voyeuristic; the fan is both welcomed into the inner sanctum and barred from crossing into the room itself.

These two discs are folded into a large card which also has windows, some with letters spelling out the title but most with closed drapes. No song lyrics but the titles are collaged mix and match fonts. This might retrospectively remind us of punk cover art of only a year after but they strike me more as the kind of decontextualised retro look of the late sixties (Rock n Roll Circus, Mad Dogs and Englishmen etc); no one's sending a ransome note here, they know they already have your money. Along with the titles are song credits and occasional notes like "guitar lost courtesy of ...".

All of this is housed in an uber sleeve which looks like the building itself. The album title peers through the windows. The band name, absent from the previous two album covers, is worked into the building itself which suggests both the architectural strength and the opulence of a band that toured the US in an airliner emblazoned with its logo. Written in stone and not going anywhere, this band was both tradition and cheek; a Byzantine emperor with a bent for exploration.

As a thirteen year old I had no way of understanding any of this, it just looked mysterious. As I had done with the Beatles' White Album that same summer, I did a quick drop-needle tour of each of the four sides and out of those seconds per song samples I could not get a handle on what this album sounded like. If you think that's too skimpy a test try doing it with any of the Led Zeppelin albums before this one and see if you don't get a solid idea of the sound of it. It felt wrong. Whenever I heard Plant's voice it seemed different, changed, lower and more raucous rather than the Viking scream of Immigrant Song. Mixed low under guitar forces that felt too big. I chanced upon the end of Night Flight which featured a puzzling old style rock vamping on the 6th which stopped and started as Plant hurled nauseously. None of it made sense. None of it welcomed me. I replaced the discs in their ostentatious package and put the thing back in the pile.

Cut to a year later. I've started buying rock records for myself with pocket money at Ken Hurford's local import shop (yep, outer suburb of Townsville but we had an import shop) and I keep seeing the US pressing of this album and I keep passing it by as other records demand more attention. The tall Scot David Hunter, who can never make his mind up about whether he wants to be part of the herd or break free from its press, tells me in twilight mode that he heard a Led Zeppelin track on the radio last night that was slow and heavy. He turned it off before they announced it. He's making a point and it's a tiresome one. I know what he thinks of them and I care not. But he's also telling me because there's something pleasant about his memory of it. The only album I haven't heard is this one. The way he's describing it sounds a little like When the Levee Breaks but we both know that one. This, he says, is a recent track. Unless the great monoliths themselves have released a near unprecedented single or brought out a second album in the same year it has to be from Graffiti.

So it was on an afternoon with a sky as dark as lead I wagged it with Les Pedder and took one of the few bus rides I ever took in Townsville and got off at the shopping strip. As soon as Les saw I was only going to buy and listen to a record he went his own way. A massive $9.99 later I had this strange thing in my hand while walking the suddenly endless two hundred metres to home. Without a big song or hit to seek out first as a guide I put side one on and lowered the needle.

Cats! Big cats! Leopards and Jaguars! The snarling riff and territorial rasp of Plant's vocal tear the air. "Chewin' a piece of your custard pie." Like a lot of what follows this is some of Bonzo's heaviest and best recorded drumming. The song doesn't really do much but it's compelling. My severely limited sexual experience (still fourteen) didn't extend to informing me of why this is such a hard sexual song. It falls back on the knowledge of the listener rather than incites the neophyte. The big drum intro to The Rover starts, stops and sharply inhales before Page's power chords and sticky riffing kick in. Before you know it this odd rocker starts feeling epic like a waking monster rising and crushing the landscape. Phrases end with thunderous crunches rather than the smooth transitions they promise. The verse gives way to a kind of chorus figure about distance and joining hands. The guitar orchestration turns melancholy, if no less forceful. The solo is big but aching rather than aggressive. This strange song is both granite hard and saddening and it's an instant hit with me.

I get to the end of the opening slower verses of In My Time of Dying with its snaking slide figure and grim I-III-IV smash. Plant comes in with an agonising whining vocal that falls into crooning here and there. The jamming section starts and I lose interest. But then after the mess of the improv and pain comes the acapella giant's scream: O my Jesus! O my Jesus! O my Jesus! O my Jeeeeeeeesus! O my Jesus! and the band grinds back in. And on to the end. There's something about the harshness of the tone and the mix that gives it an informal feel, a rehearsal rather than a recording. That's what it, in fact, was with a few guitar overdubs here and there. The grimness of the opening is lost in improv that just sounds like a lot of banging about. It ends with Plant descending through the word dying which reminds me of the Icarus figure on the Swansong label. Someone coughs. Plant sings, "cough," through a smirk. Someone else (Bonham) yells, "that's gotta be the one." End of side one.

Side two kicks off with the cyberman sound of a Les Paul through a ring modulator. It's an impressive alienating effect and the song is pleasant enough but I forget it as soon as the funky clavinet of Trampled Underfoot sparks in. One iteration of the riff and then the band crashes in through a near relentless more rock than funk workout about cars n girls n canoodlin' maximus. There's a breakdown here and there but there's also always a comeback. I listen to it for the force but don't enjoy it much. After this is Kashmir.

Kashmir explodes to life with cavernous drums holding up a tough rising guitar riff that doesn't seem to be in any key and restarts halfway through a phrase, doubled by a string section. Over these giant steps Plant comes in with a bright vocal, edged with sandy experience, about being a traveller of both time and space, stars and sand. This is music I could listen to unchanging for a very long time. If the hard punching breakdown at its centre were not rendered aloft by Plant's sublime screaming improv I'd resent it. but I don't get the chance, anyway, as a brass fanfare and Bonzo snare bash and cymbal crash push us over the canyon edge to an Arabic middle 8 and I'm in full flight. The sheer beauty of this section is weightless and leaden at the same time. Plant's voice gravels up for the melancholic exit phrase which falls into a abyss of reverb and trills over the resumption of the main riff and last verse. More space in this one. Sometimes the fanfares returns only to wordless vocals. Then BASH! the middle eight's back and we're on the magic carpet again, high above the night oceans and mountains. Plant's voice soars and finds a bitterwseet motif as the string section finds a new ascending figure that goes from a minor chord to the major third of the one above it. Fade out. Get off the floor after minutes.

Kashmir is my favourite Led Zeppelin song. It combines pretty much everything I love about their more exotically influenced side, uncelebrated emotional subtlety and sheer bloody power. This is in an eight minute song that a band like Yes would have turned into a whole side with a lot of soloing. Here it's a dream travelogue needing only its own force to move and take us with it.

Side three begins with the dawn of time on what I only recently found out were bowed acoustic guitars but sound like the birth of an epic, a dark drone hums up to power as others around it also wake and rise. Then the sun comes up or a troubling imagining of the sun. John Paul Jones plays a reed voice on a synthesiser using the pitch wheel sliding up to the note. The scale is eastern and could be minor or major. The pace is slow, patient, waiting for a slow ceremony. It's possible that it's meant to be an evocation of the sun rising but to me it's more like light emerging in complete darkness. The bright, bending synth notes are like snakes of blinding light appearing from the dark and slithering in an increasing mass of writhing brilliance. This assumes a stillness.

Plant comes in with a choir made only of himself in strange middle European folk harmony. Grindly slow phrases about will sinking low and finding the road in the light. BAM! A riff the size of a planet descends through the space. This changes to another giant figure leaping in stretches which switches time signatures a few times per iteration and Plant, much closer, seems to be gives advice to someone off-song about keeping to the road and not straying. This gives way to a clavinet playing a sweet major key figure. Plant sreams that everybody needs the light before a brightly descending cascade of happiness. Back to opening drone. Repeat. Fade.

Bron-Yr-Aur fades in as a pretty and calm solo acoustic guitar piece, with some lovely reverse reverb, which fades out again leaving only the impression of a light in the dark of the vinyl. Actually ....

That's what this record makes me think: light and textures coming out of the black sheen of the vinyl of the disc. Every record was like a starless night, a black silence from which the sounds of others' imagination emerged to create light in varying shades, intensities and colours. Records were these dark slices covered in unreadable scripture broke or oozed into the air when the needle moved in their grooves.Whether as bright as a Queen megaballad or as murky as a Sabbath grinder, it came from the same oil-thick space. No, this wasn't a literal belief, it was fanciful but once thought it held. It carried to CD versions bought to replace old vinyl (99% given away) but didn't extend to anything I bought on CD for the first time, regardless of its vintage. A thumbnail of the cover art on a downloaded new album aids the impression but doesn't revive it. I don't miss the effect of this.

From that dark followed Down By the Seaside, a Neil Young/Rolling Stones vibe that could be lived with but not missed if omitted. After this the strange Ten Years Gone which begins as a lush chord-tuned guitar figure which turns into a spikey and strong riff before sliding down to a plaintive and low profile Plant vocal about a lost love. It's like the previous track which was a leftover from a previous album but without the force. A lazy solo ends in a compelling middle eight and then proceeds to more of the same. There is a real beauty to the guitar tone here and the riff has a powerful cinema to it but I wouldn't care if Led Zeppelin hadn't recorded it and if it had been left off the album and presented as one of the extras I would have listened a few times and let it go,

Night Flight delights from the first; a few high hat clicks lead into a cocky Plant vocal over a shimmering guitar wash (a borderline overdriven Les Paul in the combined pickup position! yum!) before a big chorus with leslied organ takes over. The big young Plant scream is there and the rock textures are tight. It's not surprising that this is a reject from the fourth album with its forward drive and stadium filling joy. The end bothered me as the band that didn't need any lift from the basic chord chord+6th boogie ends with a deliberate groove in just that under Plant sounding like he's vomiting. It did my head in.

The Wanton Song's combination of title, weird hard funk and Leslied guitar solo, desperate sounding lower voiced Plant scream and odd lyric made this song come across as a frightening admission that their power was not above that of the sexual swell attracted by their fame. It's all crawling away at dawn and hiding by the light of day stuff. The funk turned me off but I think there's more to it, now.

The pointless but enjoyable Boogie With Stu from the fourth album sessions and the rambling but enjoyable Black Country Woman (rejected from Houses of the Holy) are  different but feel like twins. It's easy to leave them on but you wouldn't miss them if they hadn't been chosen.

Sick Again comes across like a Stones or Slade cock rock celebration of the groupies with a hint of the exhaustion that would plague the next album's For Your Life. A boogie groove that shifts from a Stones-like strut mixed with a dirty minded diving riff ends in a bluesy guitar voice and harmonica riff that resolves in a strange upward bend. End of album.

So why is this my favourite Led Zeppelin album if so much of it feels like filler? Really, the songs I like best are all on sides 2 and 3 of the LP. It's just that putting it on at Custard Pie and letting it go to Sick Again works. You could mentally wander off and then rejoin the earth for the highlights. They might sound like filler to me but I don't dislike any of the songs on this album and the tension between the sound and style of the tracks taken from earlier years and those recorded for this album varies quite pleasantly. The Rover was from Houses of the Holy but sits perfectly between the 1974 Custard Pie and In My Time of Dying. Side four's mix and match of songs from three different years, even with dramatic changes in Plant's vocal range sits neatly. The heaving end of Night Flight doesn't have time to breathe or the listener to shift before The Wanton Song's aggressive funk kicks in. It's like the joke about Melbourne weather: if you don't like it wait a few minutes.

For me this album is all about the exposure and solution of a mystery. From the time I made my first baffled inspection of the packaging and did a needle dip test that revealed nothing but further questions to putting it on for the first time as an album I'd bought for real and began to move through like new territory. None of my Zep-savvy siblings commented on this one or had even heard it. Strange to say that the biggest rock act of the seventies did not engender the brand loyalty that others did. With my family and this band the affection stops short of the oft ridiculed Houses of the Holy and ventured no further. I felt I was flying solo over these dark coastlines and jungles that lay within the grooves. This feeling was more intense than with Houses (which I heard later) as it had no reputation at all among the opinions of my familial guides. Michael had his copy but never mentioned it nor played it. It was as though the band matured but their fans hadn't waited for them. And there I was a generation later hearing how well they'd grown up. It made us friends, that album and I, and we so remain.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME

I wonder if the seventies was the last decade in which the live album could become iconic. If they were from contractual obligation Hot August Night and Woodstock cast gigantic shadows o'er the record stacks o' living rooms of the greater first world. Frampton Comes Alive felt like a debut album; no one seemed to have heard of him until that moment and his first hit single in Australia was a live track. I hated The Who's Live at Leeds for wasting a whole side on covers of the campiest old early rock songs but it retains a legendary status. Enough bands played the Budokan in Tokyo and released an album whose title ended with "at the Budokan" for the avid collector to create a series of them. Cheap Trick scored a hit from theirs with I Want You to Want Me, screaming fans only heightening the neo bubblegum to infection.  And so on with big album chart bullets from Wings, The Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Bob Seeger, ACDC and many more. It seemed that a band's discography required a live album. Who better than the decade's no. 1 ticket (no rivals) but when it came out The Song Remains the Same didn't feel quite right.

First, it was sold as a soundtrack. The concert film would come out a year after the record and there were infuriating discrepancies in the set lists of the two media.

Second, because of the above, it came to us well past its time. The gigs were from 1973, in promotion of the then new Houses of the Holy album which, along with the rest of the set, sounded dated in the time of Physical Graffiti and Presence.

Third, the playing and singing are nowhere near as powerful as on the studio albums. Plant's voice has had its post IV drop and he can't scream things like Rock and Roll with that searing angle grinder force. But there isn't much in the way of post IV material here.

Dazed and Confused goes for a side of vinyl. It's infamous around the school. Even the girls know about it. It sounds like a mess. Decades later, hearing it on cd I realise why to a detail I didn't at the time I listened on my cassette. The edits in the mammoth track to get it down to fit on to an LP side are clunky and unignorable.

The big celebration that seventies live albums were didn't touch this record. It was old and sub standard. Nevertheless, we lapped it up and cried out "does anyone remember laughter?" as Plant ad libs in Stairway to Heaven at any opportunity. That was actually an interesting thing to try with teachers and it was telling to see which ones recognised it (disappointingly, three PE teachers and a maths teacher and not the hip Mr Symonds who took us for English).

I could doze to it very pleasantly afterschool. I'll admit to liking the extension to Whole Lotta Love with the rockabilly incursions and Plant's cheekiness. But I got closest to two songs I didn't know from albums because they (along with one other) were from Houses of the Holy. The title track is a barnstormer and features some forceful and thrilling rhythm guitar on the 12 string from Page who remains an unsung master of both. The Rain Song goes on but it really is moving and as with Song Remains the Same, Plant's vocal is very strong. The big section toward the end really thunders here. I'll go into more detail on this and its importance in the blog on Houses of the Holy but this was as close to having the thrill of new material as we could get until the last albums came out.

Also, it would have to do until the film came out. As a fourteen year old I loved the movie and, though I saw it a few times, didn't really notice how goofy the fantasy sequences were. Page's is the only one that feels like a real movie. It happens during the dark and psychedelic instrumental section of Dazed and Confused and, though it doesn't really seem to mean more than a very little, it does offer the non live footage moments a feel of the mystique surrounding the band. I'd add John Paul Jones's section as well but after an intriguing start of a sinister of horsemen in eighteenth century dress and warped masks riding through a foggy night it just goes nowhere.

This can be enjoyable still to leave on but the sense of compromise that is often audible and the strange and often embarrassing film that came of it cannot elevate it beyond this. It sits back there in the seventies along with my school uniform and the RAM magazine reprint of the 1977 US tour that lumbered with excess.

Page later went through the best of the live material he could find and put it together from as few shows in the same era that he could find and produced How the West Was Won. I bought that on DVD-Audio. It does feel like a live album and plays through everything the band was capable of and presented in high force. It's a masterpiece. Add to this the Led Zeppelin DV, which gathers some great rarities as well as some richly rendered concerts as completely as possible. The band's most celebrated incarnation (as a live act) has now been served perfectly. The Song Remains the Same received a more respectful treatment with the addition of some missing songs and a few that weren't on the LP or the film. It can't compete with the later releases but I'll still smile to think of this oddity that was both of and below its time.

One recollection from the time is of Wayne and I missing out on seeing Star Wars and deciding on what to do instead. We were being chaffeured by his sister Carol and her friend (name unremembered but female). When I suggested we all go and see Song Remains the Same at the Warrina. The two women showed instant disgust and eventually they drove us to my place and dropped us off there to pick Wayne up after they came back from wherever they went. I did eventually see Star Wars and the story of my galloping disappointment with it is known to all who know me. And as silly as Song Remains the Same gets I would still rather sit down in front of it than watch Star Wars again. But all of that was moot as that year saw me slowly closing the door on this side of music as lifestyle and going through another. And it wasn't the Out Door.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: LED ZEPPELIN

There is a pachyderm by the sideboard. Led Zeppelin (I) is often attacked as an act of plagiarism. There is some mud here and the case on both sides gets into a little special pleading and confirmation bias. I'm going to try to present a case that takes a little from both. Let's see what happens.

The facts are that a number of the songs on this record owe more or less direct debts to other songs. In some of these cases the song was attributed to the band when it should have gone to the original author. My copy from the mid seventies accredited two Willie Dixon songs correctly as well as another as traditional but arranged by Jimmy Page. One song, one of the monumental numbers from the band's canon, Dazed and Confused is a flat out appropriation of a song by Jake Holmes and yet the attribution is to Page alone. He'd brought it from his time in the Yardbirds. While the Zeppelin and Yardbirds versions took the song from a whining tale of a trip or love gone wrong and into rock greatness, the lack of attribution is disturbing.

Why the appropriation happened is not mysterious. The newly formed band recorded the album after a few live dates in Scandinavia and the set was made up of jammed versions of blues standards and anything else they could use to fill a set. The wrongdoing here is not the lifting but the claim. Holmes should at least received a co-credit (the changes made by Zeppelin were profound and not foreseeable from a listen to the original and they do involve a lot of new material). There are quotes in songs like How Many More Times but none of them constitues plagiarism any more than Beethoven quoting a folk tune in a symphony.

While it's clear that there was misappropriation the sadder fact in the case is that those who hear about it don't know where to stop and end up tunnelling into their own fundaments. I've seen Good Times Bad Times mentioned for its use of a Rolling Stones title. Care to knock on Justin Timberlake's door and ask him why he named Cry Me a River after a jazz standard he could never hope to equal? Elsewhere, there are many bone-pointings to lyrics taken from other sources but, boy, that's a barrel-bottom-scrape. If you listen to any live Zeppelin you will know that Plant was not an imaginative ad libber with lyrics. His strength was in his voice and its power. And when most of your lyrics are she done me wrong you're not setting them up for originality. If you keep the charges to substantial musical material wrongly claimed, you'll have a better case.

I begin that way as I can now no longer listen to this album without knowing any of this. The Zeppelin-stole-this industry has burgeoned and become as absurd as Ufology or 911 "truthism". Nevertheless, when I hear the great industrial BAM BAM power chord beginning of the opening track I'm flashed back to the mid seventies when I first fell into the great dark well of this music.

The punching chords are joined by a few percussive fills as though its more sober friend is pulling it away from a fight. Plant enters with a mighty vocal about the days of his youth and for the next few minutes of crunching, screaming, bubbling bass and big drums Led Zeppelin are announcing their arrival. The solo is particularly telling. After a big guitar crunch and a pause Page plays one of his million note solos which eventually gets taken over by the chorus and a return to the seductive opening theme as Plant ad libs over that and more lightning fingered Pageism. It's an incredible first statement that incorporates pretty much everything that early Zeppelin was: large scale, uncompromising, flashy and screamingly emotive.

Babe I'm Gonna Leave You follows with a gentle acoustic minor key finger pick with a descending bass and a near whispered melancholy vocal from Plant. This builds to a fuller voice, continuing the sorry confession of abandonment until Plant screams and the odd acoustic rock descent kicks in. It ends on a dramatic F-E-F block before returning to the plaintive textures with added Telecaster and electric bass. Repeat. A beautiful and affecting piece, this is directly taken from first Joan Baez's cover version and then to the original by Anne Bredon. Page repeated Baez's incorrect "traditional" attribution but it's Bredon's song.

The correctly attributed You Shook Me from Willie Dixon follows with an eerie curlew call of muted and distorted slide guitar playing a bluesy wail that could almost be an air raid siren or a lost soul wandering in the night sky. Drums, bass and blues harp kick in and the dark and grinding song begins. This is not like the purest blues of John Mayall or even Cream, it's from the lightless depths of a dangerous mood. Dixon's original has a darkness to it but the blues melody is significantly different enough for the band to have claimed it but for the lyrics. These are not particularly unique thoughts for an old R&B number but Plant's lack of invention when it came to the words had him sing Dixon's words over the top of the huge swampy groove and that was what drove the correct attribution on the record label. A strong organ solo is followed by blistering harmonica turn before the sky opens for Page's giant gliding solo which soars high and bright. One last verse and Plant circles around a wordless ad lib which Page starts matching and this turns into a brief shout out before Plant closes with a final iteration of the theme and Page finishes it off with a bright flourish.

Dazed and Confused starts without a gap after You Shook Me. A brooding bass descent is descanted with a psychedelic guitar harmonic. Plant's screamed opening verse is delivered with such force and control it stops time. At its conclusion the entire band plus overdubs replays the theme about ten times bigger than at first (extra guitar and harmonica but boy does it sound huge). The next verse ends with a bamming chord riff a tone above and then a section of Plant trading wordless phrases with Page playing his Telecaster with a violin bow through some big delay and amp tremolo. A sudden kick into double time brings a chromatic vocal and harmonica duet followed by a blistering guitar solo. Back into the bamming chord riff and we return to the big bad brood of the verse. Same as the first but it's a good same. The next bam chords start insisting on a single chord as the band lumbers on to the intense finish with Plant repeating a wordless vocal descant. The last chord lingers, an evil semitone above the key. End of side one.

Jake Holmes's original (youtube it) was lifted by the Yardbirds when Jimmy Page was on lead guitar in their home stretch period. The lyrics in this version are still very close to Holmes's original but the song now has the basic structure of the Zeppelin iteration. The Zeppelin version retains the basic scansion of the vocal and, unmistakably, the bass line. What's added are (for once) completely different lyrics and a treasure trove of new material which is substantially by Page. This is a different case to the flimsy one of Spirit's Taurus and Stairway to Heaven as all that's really similar is the scansion of the first few chords of the opening progression; Spirit most definitely didn't invent that descending figure. But the bass line in Dazed and Confused is the same and distinctive; that is where it came from. Yet Page took sole credit on the album label and only after a long legal case and decades does it now read Jimmy Page inspired by Jake Holmes. That's actually quite accurate but still...

Side two begins with a massive Bachian organ piece which ends in an oddly jaunty four chord arpeggio. The drums kick in with acoustic guitar and Plant comes in with a you-done-me-wrong lyric and the chorus is the title: Your Time is Gonna Come. Page adds a pedal steel which is off pitch but still quite lovely. The song is quite lovely. Then it ends in a fade which is interrupted by Page's acoustic tuned-to-a-chord instrumental Black Mountain Slide which borrows heavily from Bert Jansch's Black Water Slide without the vocals. It's a lift but of an arrangement rather than a composition and taken further into other territory by Page. Not a criminal act but annoying. Moot to me, in any case as I always skip it.

There is no gap from this to the equally skippable Communication Breakdown. It's a fast and crashing rock song with an intense screaming chorus and a blazing guitar solo and I've never heard the appeal in it. I will mention the attempt made by the car wreck voyeur style accusers of plagiarism who tried to claim this was an Eddie Cochran rip off because of the early rocker's song Nervous Breakdown. As fun as Eddie's song is (and it is) the sole link is the word Breakdown in the title. That's it. If you are serious about accusing anyone of ripping off other people's material you really should stick to the facts.

I Can't Quit You Baby is an avowed cover version of Willie Dixon's original. It's expert and not interesting to this blues-indifferent listener.

Finally comes How Many More Times which is what I'd skip to when I flipped sides. A big bass shuffle ends in a Bonzo roll and kicks into a delicious unison riff from Page's overdriven Tele. Pow-wer! Plant comes in with another done-me-wrong rants as the business surges below his scream. This breaks down to an even more sinister violin bowed guitar figure than the one in Dazed and Plant screams out a nightmarish resentment of his character's fall into fatherhood as though it's a terminal disease. This picks up with a lift from Albert King's The Hunter (uncredited but it isn't that long a quote) and then back in with a nod to Page's involvement in Jeff Beck's Beck's Bolero. And then it's BAM back into the verse at full speed with a more gradual but also more traditional blues rock finish. This track is a hell of a lot of fun.

At the beginning of 1977 when I first heard this the sound and mystique of it were thrilling. I associate it with the grey skies of early Autumn in the tropics which was the weather on the weekend I bought it and heard it god knows how many times. While I only knew about the lifting later I had already heard the dipping into improv and quoting in the live version of Whole Lotta Love and let that context forgive the band. Mostly, it felt like finally reading that book you heard about so long and having it come to the same life it had for all those other people.

Never my favourite Zep album but one with some of the seminal moments of inspiration that led the band to its best even if beginning from the nadir of plagiarism. But that is less about the music than the claim. Still wrong but also still misrepresented even now when the talented but uninspired bands of the last two decades lift whole phrases, guitar sounds or substantial chunks of other songs and get praised for it. Zeppelin made it to the world's top spot within a year of their formation and were seen as plunderers of the underdog. It's not surprising then to find forgiveness afforded the like of the Black Lips for Drive By Buddy (19th Nervous Breakdown) or the Flaming Lips' Fight Test (Cat Stevens' Father to Son). Such is life.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: HOUSES OF THE HOLY

 

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.

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.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: CODA

In 1982 Led Zeppelin were so remote from the culture I found them on a memory shelf between tuckshop pies and Benny Hill. I noted the idea of previously unreleased material from different times as a compilation rather than a best-of but taking the time and trouble to listen was beyond my interest. Oddly for a PostPunquePoseur, I had more interest in the top 40 than anything that had stood so resolutely outside of it. But they were still too close to consider this album for its archeological value. Greg had a copy and when I went home for the Uni holidays that year he told me about it with varying enthusiasm. He was more interested in the Robert Plant solo album which I'd heard only patchily and seemed like a treading of water.

The last time I was in Townsville (1984) I gave a lot of my records to Greg who tutted over the Zeppelin ones and said that I was rejecting the most important thing that any musician or listener could encounter: ideas. I hoped he would enjoy all that Zep and Queen and 10CC. In the late 80s I allowed some stylistic outcasts back in and bought second hand copies of everything up to Physical Graffiti. My flatmates thought along the same lines and we had nights of great guilty pleasure which rendered easily over a  very short time with the guilt vaporising with being noticed. It was a good household for a while (as most can be before that inevitably starts to fray) mixing a little Zep in with whatever passed for indy then felt like fun.

Cut to first job of my current career (librarian) and I completed the LZ collection on vinyl. This is because I had yet to upgrade my system from the cruddy three-in-one thing I bought in a furniture shop. (I call it cruddy but after a year and a bit of borrowing friends' ghetto blasters to have music in the house the cheap stereo sounded like audiophilia.) So I added Presence and In Through the Out Door. Both had good tunes. It never occurred to me to seek out Coda. That year I started buying anything new on CD and taping them at friends' places. I also got the CD of Physical Graffiti. Over the next year I added an amp, a more substantial cassette deck and hooked them up to my old 60s speakers and things got better.

Cut to my third contract job at the academic library which allowed me the first livable salary of my life. I bought a CD player at the local Cashies and put the first disc in which was, in fact, Led Zeppelin's remasters double disc. I skipped to Whole Lotta Love to test the remote control and couldn't believe how huge, powerful and clean it sounded. I went through every CD I'd stocked (about ten) with a sense of sheer luxury. And, yes, if something as raunchy as Zeppelin sounded great how would the more complex signal of a symphony orchestra with a piano soloist sound? Every Classical vinyl I ever had ended up hitting a distortion pedal whenever a alto singer or piano got high their range. The answer was a blissful perfect. Every  payday ended with a detour to the big cheap record shop and a bundle of CDs. It wasn't long before I started replacing my vinyl with optical and soon enough that included LZ. The first was Physical Graffiti as the 80s digitisation was from a tired and hissy old vinyl master. The 90s master which Page himself oversaw was filled with light and dark and detail and canyons of bass. So I completed the set again, including Coda.

I just read a bit about it and thought I might as well get a copy.

We're Gonna Groove is from the first burst of energy as the band toured America until America fell at its feet and they could fill stadia wither they went. It's a big booming rocker with a msucular first album scream. At about two and a half minutes it's a perfect dose of unheard Zep. You wouldn't know it was live but when you do your jaw might drop. Then if you wiki it you'll find out that it is rich with post overdubs. Still good tough rock, though.

Poor Tom comes across very third album with 12 string, slide and cantering drums. Reminds me a lot of the Stones' version of Prodigal Son. Great track sequencing as it plays lower to the ground but keeps up the pace and vibe.

I Can't Quit You Baby is a mixing desk recording of the Willie Dixon number from the first album. Live but clean. Very strong but not entirely different from the album.

Walter's Walk is a bass and Bonzo heavy strider with a guitar riff that Page would recycle for the enigmatic intro to Tea for One on Presence. Pretty good really.

Ozone Baby bounces with the mix of jolly major key riff and hard rock that the new wave bands had perfected. It's ok but sounds try hard.

Darlene sounds like the band trying the American equivalent of Ozone Baby with a piano part that Toto would have been proud of. Not for me.

Bonzo's Montreaux is a heavily advanced present to the samplers of the soon to be worldwide hip hop culture as it's nothing but Bonzo drumming. Beautifully recorded with a pleasantly even stereo field and come real character. Great tribute as it doesn't sound as tiresome as the solo in Moby Dick which a younger and more feisty Bonzo. I can actually listen to it all the way through.

Wearing and Tearing again plays with the retro chord structure that bands from The Damned to Blondie were making their own but as Led Zeppelin. It's pretty great, actually, a big rock classic. If this and Ozone Baby (and, hell, Darlene) had been on Out Door instead of South Bound Saurez, Fool in the Rain, Hot Dog and I'm Gonna Crawl they would have really gone out on a big one.

If I played it regularly I skipped. I can attest that if I'd heard this in 1982 when it was released and when I was stonily unforgiving I would never have bought a copy. Hearing this felt no different to me than finally hearing things like Pet Sounds, Who's Next or Dark Side of the Moon decades after their release dates; it was listening to the music of a former generation and great here and there but overall time capsule stuff. It was a contractual burden for the band and also served to combat bootlegging.

I was never a fan of bootlegging because of the multigenerational destruction on the audio quality of the music. This was a problem of the analogue era and could be eradicated if a digitisation was made as close as possible to the source. A school friend lent me a copy of a LZ live bootleg and I couldn't get through it one time. But there were collectors aplenty who got to hear toad call versions of these songs with a strong sense of privilege. The internet made a lot of it audible through ghastly media like real audio so you could hear Swansong or the early version of In The Light. Then comes the current crop of remasters. For the record (nyuck nyuck) I have bought these as they have been released as legit downloads with the bonus tracks as high resolution audio. This time the music sounds as I wanted it to; a full sound stage and landscapes of dark and light and colour performed with force. The intimacy has brought both welcome and provided further distance as I once again hail and farewell this monster of imposing will.

Shall I get the new remaster of this when it appears? Sure, why not? Not, can't wait. Just why not?



PS - If I seem to be posting these in a strange order you should know that the album notes will be sequenced in the order I heard them but posted in reverse so that when you, gentle reader, eventually see them all it will read that way from the top of the page to the last post. All listening done as prompts has been done with either the recent hi-res remasters or where those haven't yet been released, the very strong 90s CDs. Digital doesn't just mean mp3 and I don't do vinyl anymore.