THE LED ZEPPELIN REVIEWS

THE LED ZEPPELIN REVIEWS

RECORDS

What follows are reprints of every Led Zeppelin album review CREEM has run. Because Led Zeppelin, the band's debut LP, was issued in January 1969, and the first CREEM came in March of that year, no review of that disc is included. Instead, the closest we’ve come was in CREEM Vol. 1, No. 1—Pam Brent's piece on Zep’s debut at Detroit's Grande Ballroom, which is reprinted in this Special Edition on page 7. Meanwhile, read what 10 years worth of CREEM writers had to say about Led Zeppelin...

LED ZEPPELIN Led Zeppelin II (Atlantic)

Led Zeppelin is the best living English sTiperfunk band. Cream is dead and Traffic’s gone left them here to sing that song. Champions by default. Yes and whatever happened to Jeff Beck anyway who I guess they started out to be and turned out better than. It isn’t apparent at the first few listenings but yes they’re taking all those predictabilities and often cliches to new levels. I do believe that Stones, Beatles aside they’re the best rock ’n’ roll band in the world.

After all rock ’n’ roll is meant to be drama and fire so why should Plant’s histrionics and Page’s pyrotechnics be considered excesses? “Whole Lotta Love” is rock ’n’ roll of the 70’s. No question about it. Taking it that far isn’t selfparody but logical progression. Instead of looking about for new forms they just take existing forms and carry them to their logical conclusion. And when they move on to the next generation of material I wonder what’ll come out. Because what they’re working with now are forms of the 50’s. That’s what I mean about this being Rock ’n’ Roll. Which Moody Blues/King Crimson post-rock isn’t. Within this particular system anyway.

They’re really good, too. Jimmy Page understands the nature of his instrument. He’s deep into his guitar as a guitar and the quality of the sounds it makes. And inventive. Although sometimes confusing. Bonham knows where all those beats are that you’d hit if you could and John Paul Jones is one of the great solid hesitation just the right bit behind bass players of the day. The thing about Plant is that he sees his voice as an instrument and the vocals don’t just fill up the part between the solos. But this isn’t essentially vocal music like the Beatles’ and I’m not just talking about his screams either.

The thing is they’re so good at extrapolating all those forms that you don’t have to compare them to anything to like them. For example “The Lemon Song” isn’t a Stylized “Killing Floor.” It’s the lemon song. Which they recognize. And pull off (no pun). When all these white blues bands do “Killing Floor” I can’t help but feel they’ve cut the balls off Wolfs original but in this case if s got balls of its own and is so far from the original but on a different plane altogether that none of these kind of comparisons spring to mind. Just doin’ their own thing, kids.

I’ll give it an 83 because it makes you want to shake your ass. In superrockstar frenzy, narcissistic glaze lust. You love it too, kids, admit it.

Deday La Rene/(Nov. 1969)

LED ZEPPELIN Led Zeppelin III _(Atlantic)_

I’d like to write a review that does in print what Led Zeppelin does on record. I’d like to wrote a revue that do in print what Lid Zapulon daes in rakard. Eyed lak two wring a rongvue thang done an purnt hot Lug Zipperlin dig em ekred.

For example, you could imitate Robert Plant being at the zoo and playing with the animals—ughoooeekkkkzzzzughughugh. Flour ecks sample who cowed imiganite Rudder Plunk bing adduh zeeund plodding wifde anizuls. uggauggauggabuggaugga. Flinkeks simple moocid immigrate Rubby Plaster bee adzuend plown thaniminimals. OOOOGGGGAAAAMMMMMMMUUUUUGGGGGGAAAAA.

Or Jimmy Page throwing up on his guitar while the crowd cheers and Yardbirds fans in legion descend to grasp his sweaty palm. (Except he only does it twice— reeeeeeeeskrofeeeeer) Oar Jammy Pig trang ape onis git tarwell dacrow chair and Yiddybid fangs inlegos refundu grapsis sweany pall. (Wwwwwwwwwhiigggggnnnnnnneeesssssssssstttttt)

There are myriads of wonderful bung-mung on this here record, there is a whole in the center and if they would only change their name to their reel nom de plumeata they could be filled in my record collection as the only bandie after Zappa, Rank. (Zep—rimes with hep.)

What is a Led Zeppily? I have oftimes asked of my own selfhead this questlung upon retiring to my bed patterns. Or sometimes, how is a Red Zipper not a Load Zoppinsky? Many times there is no answer and they refuse to do it for ya.

I really dung this requiem a lot.

Alexander Icenine/(Dec. 1970)

LED ZEPPELIN & (Atlantic)

This album has one of the more notable titles in pop history. Si Zentner or Ralph Marterie or somebody once released an album called “QX*%S$F!” or something approximate, and the Dead certainly scoreci with Aoxomoxoa. Why do these people think they have to pin such outlandish monickers on their product? Well, it’s just a trend, to cute, because nobody wants to be so unimaginative any more as to name their albums after songs on them and yet Sticky Fingers and Love It To Death are the only recent albums to effectively utilize the Sgf. Pepper—Blonde On Blonde era trick of tying up the whole bag of tunes in a single clever phrase that serves as comment or concept. For a while the big thing was to name, say, your fourth album after your group since your first album had some cosmically verbose title anyhoo. Santana just pulled this one on their new set. Then people started calling their records snappy things like I, II, III, etc., but most of them are getting away from that because not as many people are going to buy an album called Chicago LXXVI. But Led Zeppelin really scooped the whole field with this one. What are people gonna call it? I’ve studiously avoided mentioning it by name in this review, although Dave Marsh suggested “Atlantic SD 7208” might be a good handle. Sometimes I actually believe that these bands think up these titles just to confound reviewers, magazines, trade-journal charts and the editors of the Schwann catalog. By punking out and calling the album by the group’s name, we conceivably confuse it in the public mind with a first or other album by that name. The solution, in this case anyway, is that Atlantic has supplied the Icelandic runes of the title to all trade and public journals they’re sending it to. But will Billboard and Record World and Cash Box take the trouble to run it? Probably not; but CREEM will! And that’s the whole ball of wax.

And once you get past the runes to the tunes, what do you get? A Led Zeppelin album. It sounds pretty much like you’d expect it to, but there’s nothing wrong with that; most of the biggest and best stars of rock ’n’ roll history have found a relatively limited style and pursued it with minor changes. Led Zeppelin have taken the best aspects of the Yardbird’s style and the British flash blues tradition and inflated them into a mighty war machine that makes up in force and bigness of sound what it lacks in subtlety or variety. They’ve taken a lot of abuse from the rock press for this, being denigrated variously for “ripping off’ black blues and sounding to more imaginative ears like the tonal equivalent of a 1933 Nuremburg rally. If they weren’t so resolutely tasteless even in their attempts to be arty it might be different, but the Zep have stuck to their crass guns, and maintained their position as one of the most popular groups in the world and probably the secret kick of more than a few people with standards on their sleeves.

And it’s true that Led Zeppelin II is one of the great psychedelic production albums of all time, a pop classic precisely by its excesses of form and proportion. “Whole Lotta Love” was the ultimate jive-ass macho masterpiece and ultimate phased headphone tripout too even if largely lifted from a song on an old Small Faces album. The band’s unsung propensity for dealing with mutated folk forms led to some mighty interesting and distinctly British lyrics about the depths of Mordor and the like, and in their third album to the beginning of an acoustic experiment that many called the ultimate bastardization but was no less justified than anybody else’s version of “Gallows Pole.” Besides, “Immigrant Song” was the first rock ’n’ roll song ever about Vikings, and how much farther from the blues can you get?

Their new album, like the last, is nowhere near the skull-blitz that Led Zep II was, and doesn’t even have as many songs as III. Which means that the songs tend to be longer, which means that they tend to turn into jams that sometimes bog down. There’s more “pretty” folk-derived stuff too, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Nevertheless, if, er, ah, uh, Atlantic SD 7208 is far from the best Zeppelin album, it still has immediate impact—as contrived as his approach is, Jimmy Page still thinks largely in terms cataclysmic—and I’m playing it more and more an louder and louder as I become familiar enough with the contents to distinguish the songs with strong similarities from each other and make out most of the lyrics from Robert Plant’s singing, which is beginning to get as close to pure glottal-feedback garble as Iggy’s ever was. I’m still not sure exactly what he’s talking about in “Misty Mountain Hop,” and the sense of strain in his vocal style from the beginning is becoming more apparent, but whattaya expect from a contortionist anyway? That constrictolaryngeal shrillness is part of his charm. And the song itself moves in such an odd rush, sounding jumbled but never quite pushing the rhythm off its precarious ledge, that you’re always slightly disoriented enough not to look for parts to much as a sense of lunging, recoiling submergence. Same thing applies to “Black Dog,” which is an absolutely typical slab of Led Zep blood-and-iron boogie thunder, and even more to “Rock and Roll,” which is not nearly as brilliant but several thousand leukocytes thicker than Lou Reed’s song of the same name, and features the rather selfdeprecating lyrics: “It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled/Been a long time since I did the Stroll.” Nahh, if “Whole Lotta Love” wasn’t rock ’n’ roll this ain’t either, and it sure ain’t the Stroll, but it’s surely guitarro hysteria of a thick textured blast akin to the Stooges’ on Funhouse, and the surest single on this album.

Led Zeppelin are also getting deeper here into the folky stuff than ever before, and the results are unever. “Going To California” is a lapping moderato bit that’s as stereotypic in its intent “lyricism” and “beauty” as the other songs are in their frenzy, and bores the piss out of me, while “Stairway to Heaven” is a lapidary ballad with P*0*E*T*I*C lyrics (“And it’s whispered that soon if we all call the tune/ Then the piper will lead us to reason”) that’s as lush as a Kleenex forest. But in “Battle of Evermore” they apply acoustics in a brilliant way that’s as surface-skittery as the' power leads on “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Black Dog” and as internally unified. Plus Sandy Denny joining in with a beautifully arcing and swooping Grace Slickish vocal for one of the, yes, loneliest things (another is “That’s the Way” on Zep III) the band has ever recorded. And they finish things off with the best summary wowser since “How Many More Times” on their first album and get in some blues licks too which are not only proper but actually listenable, actually exciting: “When the Levee Breaks” is a great, groaning, oozing piece of sheer program music, one of the best things ever done by this group, with some growling harmonica that harkens straight back to the days of the Yardbirds, early Paul Butterfield and Manfred Mann’s version of “Smokestack Lightning.” Except that they had the sense not to drag theirs on for seven minutes; but then, the Zep seldom makes this mistake and when they do I’d much rather it’d be with a gorgon like “Levee” than a thicket of misbegotten mush like “Stairway to Heaven.”

Led Zeppelin are not nearly as pretentious in their actual music as in its exterior accoutrements. At this point they can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned, unless they should forsake their coagulated raveups to keep ascending them stairways to heaven until they’re lost in the stars. They’re stars already, but that’s not why I don’t expect any more from them than and am totally satisfied with the utterly predictable. It’s because things as familiar as my own heartbeat often-times are the quickest accelerators of heart’s pulse and stomping feet. So don’t pay any attention to the smartasses who tell you that this album’s just Zo-So.

Lester Bangs/(Feb. 1972)

I’m listening to Jimmy Page’s overdubbed guitar on “The Song Remains The Same.” It opens the album with a terrific surge of power, an intricate careen that speaks a little of both the Byrds and the Who at their best,and volumes of Jimmy Page’s continuing vitality. When Robert Plant’s vocal enters after Page’s extended attack it’s an abrupt change of mood and tempo, but the contrast works, Plant’s lazy drawl playing off Page’s insistence. “I had a dream—crazy dream... Sing out Hare Hare, dance the Hoochie Coo...”

Robert Plant, the original hippie, has been responsible for all of Led Zeppelin’s lyrics, and his peacelove doves and mushy stairways are all over Houses of the Holy. This is the first Zep set where they made the mistake of printing the lyrics; if they hadn’t, we might have missed gems like “I got my flower, 1 got my power,” or prime Rowan Brothers stuff like “Hare Hare” and “Singing in the sunshine, laughing in the rain...”

That kind of stuff may bug you the first few playings if you bother to notice it, but that’s not what pulls this album down from being a true mastepiece like their last one. Plant’s just the easiest member to pick on, and Houses is as erratic as Zeppelin have been for most of their career. At its peaks it’s amazing, but even though the peaks predominate the valleys are so

LED ZEPPELIN Houses of the Holy

(Atlantic) unambitious you get exasperated.

The perfect cuts are “Song,” “Dancing Days,” "No Quarter” and “Over the Hills and Far Away.” “Days” is built on another one of those angular, dissonant, truly disorienting Page riffs like the one employed in “Misty Mountain Hop.” It almost hurts, but you can’t get enough of it, and even if some of Plant’s lines are rather mawkish, the lyrics and the song’s blinding strut make it a crazed ’73 successor to “Dancing in the Streets”—a summer song!

“Over the Hills and Far Away” is simply fine, churning mainstay Zep expertise: a folky Page opening, a yearning vocal, a cinerama explosion. These boys breathe dynamics, and they’ve still got as fine and fierce a rhythm sense as any group on either side of the Atlantic. Just dig “The Crunge,” which may put you off at first because it sounds like Plant and the band indulging themselves in a little James Brown wank with tighten-up guitar. But Plant’s vocal has a genuine sense of humor, and when Page starts dragging those sproinging backwards riffs from underneath and counterposing them against all this mock-/ blackface (there is such a thing) it all gets a bit more, ah, intellectual, even if the blabbing at the end is a bunch of foolishness.

So is “D’yer Maker” (foolishness, that is). It sounds like a halfassed attempt at reggae mushed into another one of those cutesy 50s routines (Liner sez: “Whatever happened to Rosie and the Originals?” Well, if you must know, THEY HAD ONE HIT AND DIED THE MUNG FADE BECAUSE THEY WEREN’T SO HOT IN THE FIRST PLACE.) But it’s so fucking goofy you end up liking it in spite of (because of?) its very asininity. Which certainly can’t be said of “The Rain Song,” a truly undistinguished ballad that drags on for far too long. Page is impeccable as ever even when sounds like some “Laguna Sunrise” (Led Zeppelin influenced by Black Sabbath?) Plant is wimping all over himself, and the strings drift smoothshod over everybody til the whole song drowns in its own lymph.

So you can see why I’m tied up in knots and yodeling. Houses of the Holy is leagues from the perfect album Led Zeppelin are capable of making, and I hate to skip cuts. But fuck it! 1973’s gonna by a big year for rock ’n’ roll bands, what with Iggy’s Stooges and the Blue Oyster Cult and this one already hammering all over the place. Led Zeppelin are supreme masters of the studio, which means that you’re constantly amazed that four guys are putting out such a vast range and sheer awesome size of sound. You can see their songs even while you’re hearing them in the best o|dhat psychedelic sense. And since psychedelia is about due for a recycle anyway, even Plant’s love-in lyrics are okay by me. I expected a little more than this after waiting over a year, but I know that at least “Song” and “Dancing Days” are gonna be with me long after they finally get around to releasing their next one, and that’s enough.

Lester Bangs/fJune 1973)

LED ZEPPELIN Physical Graffiti

(Swan Song)

Rock’s biggest bruisers, Led Zeppelin, have got another album. In rock chronology this is an Event since the defending champions of the world’s biggest rock ’n’ roll draw have released only six albums in the past seven years. In fact we’ve spent 18 excruciating months between products pacifying ourselves with heavy rock’s second prizes—Deep Purple, Blue Oyster Cult and BTO. And these heavy metal hitmen couldn’t begin to plug up the leaks Led Zep left when they took on an extended, self-imposed exile to some musicians’ netherworld.

Physical Graffiti can stand on its own historically without the support of Zep’s five other million sellers, but inevitably the cuts on this album will be scrutinized with Nancy Drew-like precision in search of a successor to “Stairway” or an equal to “Rock and Roll.” Graffiti is, in fact, a better album than the other five offerings, the band being more confident, more arrogant in fact, and more consistent. The choice of material is varied, giving the audience a chance to see all sides of the bank. Equal time is given to the cosmic and the terrestrial, the subtle and the passionate.

The exotic and musky “Kashmir” is intriguing in its otherworldliness. Jimmy Page’s grinding, staccato guitar work sounds like a cosmic travelog to spritual regeneration, swelling around the lyrics, which are heavily laden with mystical allusions and Hessean imagery. Although “Kashmir” is certainly the best cut on the album, it could be trimmed without losing any of its mesmeric effect, because at some point the incense grows a little murky, and the slow burning guitar degenerates into opulent cliches, causing the-instrumenta! interludes to echo an Exodus soundtrack.

SINGLES

Released by Led Zeppelin

“Communication Breakdown”/“Good Timea, Bad Time*”

(Atlantic 2613)-March 1969

“Whole Lotta Love” / “Livin’ Lovin’ Maid (She’s Just A Woman)”

(Atlantic 2690)-Nov. 1969

“Immigrant Song”/“Hey Hey What Can 1 Do”'

(Atlantic 2777)—Nov. 1970

“Black Dog”/“Misty Mountain Hop”

(Atlantip 2849) -Dec. 1971

“Rock And Roll ”/“Four Sticks”

(Atlantic 2865) —March 1972

“Over The Hills And Far Away”/“Dancing Days”

(Atlantic 2970) -May 1973

“D'Yer Maker"/“The Crunge”

(Atlantic 2986)-Oct. 1973

“Trampled Underfoot”/“Black Country Woman”

(Swan Song SS 70102)—March 1975

“Candy Store Rock”/Royal Orleans”

(Swan Song SS 70110) —May 1976

“Fool In The Raln"/“Hot Dog”

(Swan Song SS 71003)-Dec. 1979

☆ ☆ ☆

'“Hey Hey What Can I Do” is also available on the U.K. album sampler The New Age Of Atlantic, released in 1972 and now deleted.

Not all of the cuts are exercises in advanced audial basketweaving, but trace a musical cycle running from Page’s grandiose productions to basic drunken boogie. “Trampled Underfoot” is seemingly effortless funk that is rescued from mediocrity by the elaborate punctuation of Page’s guitar. His fingers traverse the neck of his instrument with a velocity so violent that only a machine could improve upon it. Each batch of notes he pulls from his guitar is uniquely his own, personal as a thumbprint. Just as unique are Plant’s laments and his sexual heaves and sighs that turn the lyrics of a simplistic rocker like “Wanton Song” into an introspective, persona] statement. “Custard Pie” and “Boogie With Stu” are macho masterpieces in the tradition of the strutting, swaggering English flash blues formula pioneered on Zeppelin’s early albums. “Night Flight,” “Sick Again” and “Ten Years Gone” smack of pop picaresque, much in the manner of Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story”—vignettes and transient insights, slices of a popstar’s life.

Led Zeppelin moves in strange ways. Sure they’re gutsy, ballsy, and flamboyantly aggressive, always spiked with a lot of eroticism, but they’re also cerebral...by way of the glands. They have this unique ability to wind you up and prime you for a full-throttle tilt. You rocked, you rolled, and oh mama those juices flowed—but you also listened to the words.

Surprisingly, in an era where disposable bands and itinerant musicians constantly play a game of musical chairs, Led Zeppelin is a unit—the same four members for the past seven years. Their longevity is due to a kind of magnetism, magic if you will. That rare chemistry was evident even at their first

rehearsal, where they fit together like jigsaw pieces, transcending their common R&B backgrounds to achieve a gut-wrenching new synthesis. Lisa Robinson describes it as a case in which “the Beatles battled the Stones in a parking lot and Led Zeppelin won.” Zeppelin make more noise, has more guitar gimrhickry, more sexuality, more flash, and generates more violence than any of their competitors, so that they are more than mere musicians, simple superstars. They have become the longest-lasting model for those culturally bankrupt “trendies” to follow.

A Led Zeppelin album is like a select invitation to a key club of rock ’n’ roll, where the kohl-eyed gypsy Jimmy Page is finally accessible through his smoky guitar solos. Robert Plant preens and moans, lusts and longs for lost memories... and takes you along. Like a sonic cortex, Zeppelin draws you into their private caprice, spiraling, coaxing your willing psyche into a suprasensory haven where you can taste and savor this dream stuff that superstars thrive on. This is not pop music, but a harder stuff, more heady and potent, like a round of whiskeys and coke. Zeppelin are avatars in a cultural vacuum.

Jaan Uhelszki/(May 1975)

LED ZEPPELIN Presence

_(Swan Song)_

No “Black Dog” here, no “Kashmir” either. Yet though Presence doesn’t bombingly pockmark the landscape or scale snowy Himalayan heights—even if Jimmy Page’s guitar is becoming a riff Osterizer and Robert Plant’s voice is shredding at the edges and tearing in the middle—still, Zeppelin has such

command of heavy-metal weaponry that even their modest efforts have scorched-earth capability. When Zeppelin doesn’t launch search-and-destroy missions into your neocortex it’s because they don’t want to, not because they can’t. This album, a quickie recorded in 18 days, lacks the fleetness of Houses of the Holy and the architectural density of Physical Graffiti, but in its best moments still manages to rattle the windowpanes.

“Achilles’ Last Stand” for example is lengthy, too lengthy, and drivingly singleminded (a detour or two would have been nice), but is rescued by Plant’s parched-throat chanting which gives the track a raw thrilling lift. “For Your Life,” however, features Plant at his most dreary: he boringly moans coital groans as if his vocal cords were located in his testicles; such singing should be vasectomized. “Royal Orleans” has teasing guitar licks; “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” opens pretentiously but has a blasty harmonica break; “Candy Store Rock” is formula grindola, and “Tea For One” is the obligatory soul-draging, slow-bluesy number, a recycle of “Since I’ve Been Loving You” from album three. The high on Presence is “Hots On For Nowhere” which is dynamically sporadic, with Plant’s voice dancing across the interstices (and dancing adroitly: listen to the way he sings “shivers down my back bone”), guitars collide, meshing, then venturing out, and, refreshingly, drumming which isn’t so conscientiously stupid that you’d want to grab the drumsticks from Bonham’s hands and acupuncture his firstborn child.

Except to note that The Object which decorates the elpee’s gatefold looks like an Islamic paperweight or an intergalactic dildo (take your pick), there’s little else pertinent to say of Presence. Contrary to myth, critics have never really hated Led Zep the way they’re hated units like Chicago, ELO, or Emerson Lake & Palmer; Zeppelin was just resented, and resented simply because despite their numero uno popularity, they’re fundamentally so damned uninteresting to write about. Nearly all of the mavens (Christgau, Marcus, Landau) have written memorably about the Stones, but I’ve never read any analysis of Zeppelin which made them sound more provocative than the Doobie Brothers, BTO, Bad Company, or any of those other applause-machine bands that I assiduously avoid. Now I understand why: everything Led Zeppelin does is in the grooves, there’s no spillover, no sauce for us young dogs to lap up, and the fans they don’t care, they adore music which is so majestically selfcontained. Though I enjoy Zeppelin, it’s been a while since such hermeticstudio music could have an equally enthralling effect. In fact, it’s been a long time been a long time been a been a lonely-lonely-lonely-t/me.

James Wolcott/fJuly 1976)

LED ZEPPELIN The Song Remains The Same (Swan Song)

First, the bad news: this is a boring collection of heavy rock, listening to which arouses only the same fatigue that obviously went into its execution.

The good news? It’s also a really good Druid folk-rock album with solid performances climaxing in a 10:58 rendition of the Stonehenge Nation’s national anthem, “Stairway To Heaven.”

This compulsion of the Zeps to grind out the rockers, long after it’s become obvious that they no longer have any feel for them, is bewildering. C’mon lads, it’s no sin to prefer lute music to the blues, to be more taken with faeries, glade nymphs and questing knights than with the jet age concerns of heavy metal. Just unlock your chastity belts and do what comes naturally. The evidence of Led Zeppelin’s love for what you might call extremely nostalgic patriotic music is all over this long awaited effort.

•In the music. Jimmy Page’s most compelling guitar work here is on the 12-string, where he calls to mind a Jim McGuinn with a degree in music history—specialty, modal; emphasis, dulcimer; minor, sitar.

•In their own fantasies, as conveniently visualized in the movie for which all of this is but soundtrack. There, we see a lusty interest in maidens, misty moors, tombstones, swords-in-the-stone and all things mystical—magical.

•And, in the performance of the numbers here intended to rock hard in the mode moderne. Talk about songs remaining the same! I saw Page do precisely the same violin-bow-echo trick on “Dazed and Confused” back around ’69. It was class then and powerful in its drama, but even then it was just a trick, and how does a guy who’s been doing the same riffs for seven or eight years shave come the dawn? For guitar students only, and not for anybody else either. And “Whole Lotta Love” suffers by being much longer and even more pointless than the original. “Rock and Roll” is less disappointing but no more and “Celebration Day” is just nothing.

This leaves a little less than one single disc’s worth of extremely pleasing antiqued morbid mood music, all of it, with the exception of “Stairway,” from the Houses of The Holy LP (released) just before the ’73 concert which produced this package). With the addition of “White Summer,” “Hangman,” and maybe “Ramble On,” this could have been a great little record.

I have to think that the ultimate Led Zeppelin tour and live record have yet to be done. It will happen when and if Page and Plant develop the courage of their convictions and hit the road to perform the acoustic, or “soft” set they keep talking about. Now that would be a shot in the arm for pagan sensualism. And boys, don’t worry about being mistaken for elves. Jethro Tull’s got a lock on that schtick.

Kevin Doyle/(Feb. 1977)

LED ZEPPELIN In Through the Out Door _(Swan Song)_

Led Zeppelin has never made a bad album, and In Through the Out Door is no exception. You can call them cynical, you can call them whimpy, you can call them stupid, you can call them gimpy. Just don’t call them late for breakfast, because these guys bring home the bacon every time. And the nitrosamines with it. That’s the stuff in commercial bacon curing that’s supposed to give you cancer, and it’s also been recently discovered to be in beer by way of the latest fastbrewing processes. Schlitz beer is the #1 beer for nitrosamines and wouldn’t you know it, the cover of In Through the Out Door is plastered with Schlitz bottles like so many of those black obelisks on the cover of Presence. The scene is a diver bar that looks like the last watering hole before the river Styx and Schlitz bottles, Schlitz signs abound. Maybe they’re trying to say Led Zeppelin causes cancer, or maybe Page is trying to come up with some kind of reverse heroin cure for cancer via his studies in parapsychological phenomenon. In through the out door...

Although this record is a departure from Zeppelin’s standard orientation in favor of different musical styles and more emphasis on the keyboard sounds, the group’s basic formula remains the same. Bonham’s drumming is more complex and rhythmically varied here than it’s ever been but the technics of his sound are essentially unchanged—a crisp slog, an aural taffy pull, where every crack and crunch seems suspended for split seconds in mid-air. Naturally, the key to that powerful crunch is in Page’s astonishing production capacities—there’s no mixing board wizard who can top Page’s strange alchemic brew of sounds.

No time is wasted in setting the album’s tone. “In the Evening” opens with weird, droning Indian like backwards guitar effects blending back and forth across the channels until Plant invokes the title and the punch-out rhythms begin with 12-string electric guitar harmonies and synthesizer fills etching the spaces between Bonham’s four-on-the-floor slam. After Plant reaches high for the chorus, Page’s solo stumbles into the arrangement like an intruder and snaps an incredible sonority off the drone backing, then breaks to a guitar set piece: piercing, melodic lead lines over underwatery rhythms. On the last chorus the two harmony guitar parts burn Plant’s screeches, then in a brilliant last verse move Page quotes Clapton’s “Outside Woman Blues” line then extends it, bending single notes over four-bar passages in an exciting flourish. Some friends of mine listened to this cut and complained that Page wasn’t playing enough guitar, but it’s all right there and it’s not camouflaged either.

“South Bound Suarez” uses a honky tonk piano intro, doubletime walking bass line and an understated drumming pattern with guitar filling in the syncopation—a very uptempo dance step for these partners. Page is content to play a conventional rhythm guitarist’s role in the song until he rips into a screaming, cascading solo. His improvisational logic at suqh moments is so relentlessly twisted, constantly startling you with unexpected turns. Plant raves up at the end in a joyous vocal.

The structure of “Fool In the Rain” is one definite indication of change. It begins as a sprightly r&b tune with more-energetic drumming from Bonham and conventional harmony rhythms, then switches via a salsa piano pattern into an untempo Pureto Rican vamp replete with timbales before returning to the chorus for a weird synthe• sized guitar solo with bass playing a close harmony line behind. When the original verse is repeated at the end it sounds like old-style Zep by comparison with the rest of the song.

“Hot Dog” is the rubber band as it snaps, country guitar and a semiTexas r&b shuffle rhythm. Page’s accompaniment and solo here, in mock-country style, is a brilliant assimilation and demolition of stock pickers’ riffs.

“Carouselambra” is the album’s centerpiece, a long, hypnotic cut that begins with a synthesizer playing a souped up “Not Fade Away” pattern while dirty rhythm-guitars roar through like Flying Fortresses with Plant screaming away and Bonham’s dry-ice drumming smacking it along. After two verses this powerful joujouka rhythm chorus blasts in with synthesizers and guitars whirling in frenzied concert. There follows chorus upon chorus of sonic battle, synthesizers and guitars trading fours, staccato call and response 12-string and singleline guitar passages, three synthesizers blatting out spongy counterpoint only to be sliced by dualharmony guitars. After endless variations on this routine the song fades, leaving the listener gasping in trance.

Just for a breather, “All My Love” slots string synthesizers against subtle acoustic guitar rhythms at its opening before the sinewy electric guitar arabesques usher in a song very much reminiscent of “Stairway to Heaven” but without the bombast. “All My Love” is unambitious, a simple, pretty love song with beautifully interlaced guitar and bass lines and an instrumental section that contrasts hornlike synthesizer solos and stately guitar lines with huge slabs of strings/acoustic guitar orchestration.

The funniest part of In Through the Out Door is the finale, a good old slow blues with a full string section playing the intro and Plant show casing a gutsy performance worthy of the “squeeze me lemon” days (that was back when he wanted that lemon squeezed; now it’s an heroic posture). The slow blues guitar solo is Page’s most conventional moment on the record —after all, what can you add to that format by now—but he takes his role seriously and lays out a beautiful run that reaches for the sky and ends up out-crying Plant in the process. It’s fitting that Page should sign off in such a standard format after an album’s worth of production dazzle and stunt guitar work.

John Swenson/(Dec. 1979)

America's Only Rock n' Roll Magazine

NOVEMBER 1979

CREEM