March 31st marks the 45th anniversary of the release of Led Zeppelin’s seventh and penultimate studio album, Presence, issued on this day in 1976. It was the product of yet another tragedy, one of several, which would haunt the band’s career up until it was felled completely by the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980. In this instance it was a tragic car crash that set the stage for the creation of this album.
In August of 1975, Robert Plant was taking a break after their spring tour to promote Physical Graffiti, traveling around the Greek island of Rhodes. It was here that he suffered major injuries in a car crash that left him wheelchair bound for much of the next year. The band had planned to tour the US during the latter half of 1975, but the accident meant that plan had to be scrapped. Plant returned to his tax-exile home in Malibu, California to recuperate and ruminate on his and the band’s future. While there, he began to put some thoughts down into lyric form and, after being joined by Jimmy Page, the duo began to work out the basic sketches for what would become the Presence album.
Eventually, Page & Plant arranged to book some time in Musicland Studios in Munich, Germany. Page favored this studio due to its state of the art facilities, but they were up against a time crunch because they had to be done within a couple of weeks so the Rolling Stones could take over the studio and begin work on their Black & Blue LP. With Bonham and John Paul Jones joining them in Munich, rehearsals began and the band fleshed out the arrangements for the songs to be included. Because Page and Plant had already worked out most of the songs in Malibu, the writing credits for the album would feature only one track written by the entire band with the rest credited to Page and Plant.
Stylistically, the urgency of the time-crunch and the sense of intensity created by the tight schedule helped to solidify the band’s, and particularly Page’s, desire to make this album more hard rock focused. There are no keyboards used on the album at all and only one track which uses some minimal acoustic guitar. The emphasis was squarely on heavy riffs. With Robert being physically limited in what he could do, the bulk of the work on the album ended up falling into the lap of Page and co-producer, Keith Harwood. Page and Harwood would often tag-team in the studio to maximize their time, with one grabbing a couple of hours shuteye while the other kept the fires burning in the studio. With a total production time of two and a half weeks, it wasn’t uncommon for them to pull 18-20 hour days. That production schedule would have the album in the can faster than anything they’d done since the group’s debut LP. The result of that sort of schedule was an album high in energy and sharp with edge and with no room for the more pastoral, acoustic side-roads common on previous albums.
While it received massive advance orders and landed on the top of the charts in the UK and US upon its initial release, due to Plant’s ongoing recovery, the lack of a support tour to help sustain sales meant that it ended up being one of their lowest selling albums to date. The release later that same year of their concert film and its accompanying soundtrack, The Song Remains the Same, didn’t help with sales either. The critical reception of the album was similarly weak. Many critics found it lacking in terms of adding anything fresh or relevant to the Zeppelin catalog, though some of those harsh criticisms have been reevaluated as the record has aged. The fans were also somewhat ambivalent as it was not as varied as previous albums.
Though the music may not stand as Zeppelin at their “best”, according to some, the album cover certainly managed to make a mark and even won them a Grammy for best LP design. Created by the legendary Hipgnosis design house, who dominated the LP cover market in the 1970s, the cover is an ingenious bit of subversion, utilizing the seemingly simple device of an enigmatic “object” which is inserted into a variety of mundane domestic settings, rendering them somehow extraordinary merely by its “presence”. It was intended as a metaphor for the group’s power and influence at the time. The obelisk like “object” was designed and built by Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle. Peter had been a design partner in Hipgnosis for a couple of years at this time while he was just starting out in TG. I recall seeing this in the shops and being constantly drawn to it. I'd stare at the photos and try to imagine what could be going on. Why was this thing in all these pictures? What was it? What did it do? Its blackness and confounding shape implied something mysterious and possibly sinister!
Personally, it’s not my favorite LP by the group, but I find it a solid listen nonetheless. This was the second Zeppelin LP I ever purchased, which I picked up sometime in 1977. Led Zeppelin III was my first and is still my favorite. Once punk and new wave came around in 1978, I kinda tuned away from the band, though their last album, In Through the Out Door (1979), had a few tracks I liked. It wouldn’t be until a couple of decades later that I’d start to be drawn back to them again after a friend blasted their first album at a party one night and I remembered how brilliantly they could rock out. Once I did take that second look, I’d spend time to explore albums I’d never given any attention to previously. Within that process, I found myself coming back to Presence with much more enthusiasm than I was expecting. I like its focus and clarity and sense of purpose. There’s an immediacy and urgency to it that is, in retrospect, more distinctive in their catalog than people gave it credit for when it was released. Indeed, its stripped down simplification is quite sympathetic to the zeitgeist of the “Punk” scene, which was just starting to take root in the world at the time.
