Released
on August 22nd, 1979, the eighth and final studio album from legendary
hard rockers, Led Zeppelin, In Through the Out Door, turns 45 years old
today. While being one of their biggest selling albums ever, it divided
both critics and fans as it sought to redefine the group's sound after a
family tragedy left them on hiatus for the better part of three years.
With
the group not having released a new LP since Presence in 1976, the
pressure was on to prove that they were still relevant. The interim
between albums had seen a C-change in the music culture, with the
arrival of punk and new wave music. Led Zeppelin were looking like the
proverbial "dinosaurs" that the kids were accusing them of being. The
group had been sidelined after the tragic death of Robert Plant's young
son while they were on tour in 1977. That unbearable personal loss took
the wind out of the band's sails, ending their tour and putting off
future plans indefinitely.
By
late 1978, the emotional wounds Plant was dealing with had healed enough
that he was ready to head back into the studio, but the group knew it
would be an uphill battle to reassert themselves in a pop music scene
that had radically changed in the years they'd been sidelined. That
apprehension was what inspired the title of the album, as the group felt
their task was pitting them against the flow. This was all compounded
by the process of grieving, for Plant, and the practical difficulties of
the band being in tax exile from the UK. With their revenue stream
hobbled by their inactivity, their solvency was a serious consideration.
This record would need to be a success in order to right their ship
again.
Rehearsals for recording
began in September of 1978, lasting six weeks before the group decamped
to ABBA's Polar Studios in Stockholm, Sweden, where they spent three
weeks recording in November and December. In addition to the above
mentioned challenge of making a come-back after a long absence from the
public eye, the group were also wrestling with internal personal demons
that would directly impact the sound of the album.
Half
the band were trying to work through substance abuse issues, with
drummer John Bonham battling the bottle, a war that he would ultimately
lose, while Jimmy Page was distracted by a heroine addiction. These
circumstance meant that Robert Plant and bassist/keyboardist John Paul
Jones were often left to lay down the foundations for the album's
sessions. The pair would frequently work together on their own during
the day, while Bonham and Page would come in late at night to add their
contributions.
The results are
clear from the writing credits for the album, with Bonham completely
absent and Page, uncharacteristically, missing on two of the album's
seven tracks, which were credited only to Plant and Jones. The effect
on the sound of the record is immediately apparent by the dominance of
the keyboards from Jones, who was left to fill in the gaps created by
Page's distractions. Jones was inspired by the Yamaha GX-1 synthesizer
he had recently purchased, along with the opportunity to work closely
with Plant, a situation that had never happened in the studio before.
Only the album's opener, In The Evening, fully features Page's guitar
histrionics in all their blustery glory, while the 50's inspired Hot Dog
is merely a perfunctory indulgence of tired vintage rock 'n' roll
cliches that evolved out of the group's warm-up jam sessions. The rest
of the album is mostly about Jones's keyboards, with the sprawling
Carouselambra being the centrepiece of his contributions.
When
it came to the album's packaging, Hipgnosis' Storm Thorgerson pulled
out all the stops in order to create one of the most elaborate and
complex cover concepts his design house ever produced. The concept was
to recreate the Old Absinthe House in New Orleans, Louisiana, in a
London photo studio. The staging was meticulously detailed and
populated by a half dozen ragtag denizens one might find in such a
venue. The central character, a despondent man in a white Panama hat
and suit, burning a "dear John" letter, sits at the bar with the
bartender looking on and the other characters dispersed throughout the
space. The first "gimmick" for the packaging was that the record would
be released in six different variants, with the photos in each taken
from the vantage point of each of the different patrons, who were all
looking over at the man at the bar. The next element was the inner
sleeve, which featured a hidden colour dye that was activated by water,
intended to be applied gently with a sponge by the purchaser of the
record. This would activate the dye and colour the inner sleeve. The
final element in the design was that the whole thing would be enclosed
in a plain brown paper slip cover with the band name and album title
stamped on the outside. Once shrink-wrapped, buyers would not be able
to tell which version of the album cover they'd got, though one might be
able to peek at the inner spine of the cover to see a letter "A" to "F"
as the only indication of the edition.
The
album's release was initially planned to be before the group's two
night live stint at Knebworth in 1979, but production delays held it off
until after the shows. When it finally did hit the shelves, it was met
with a strongly divided response from both fans and critics, many of
whom were put off by the dramatic change in tone from their previous
record. While some fans felt betrayed by the change, critics batted
about their opinions in the press like a tennis match.
Reviewing
the album in Rolling Stone, Charles M. Young said Page's diminishing
creativity resulted in little good material to work with for Plant,
whose lyrics Young found inane, and Bonham, whose drumming was viewed as
heavy handed. This brought to the forefront the keyboard playing of
Jones, who Young said "functions best behind Page, not in front of him".
Chris Bohn from Melody Maker said "the impressionable first play" of
the record "had everyone in the office rolling around laughing", while
accusing the band of being "totally out of touch" and "displaying the
first intimations of mortality". By contrast, NME journalist Nick Kent
argued that the album was "no epitaph", believing its "potential points
of departure" deserved further listening. Robert Christgau also wrote
positively of the record in The Village Voice, observing the usual "lax
in the lyrics department", but regarding the album as the group's best
since Houses of the Holy (1973). He said "the tuneful synthesizer pomp
on side two confirms my long-held belief that this is a real good
art-rock band", while "the lollapalooza hooks on the first side confirms
the world's long-held belief that this is a real good hard rock band".
Yet despite the mixed responses, the album soared up the charts to
crack the number 1 slot in multiple markets, including both the US and
UK, making it one of the groups biggest sellers of all time.
Personally, I was well down the road towards much more experimental
music, so my response was muted, though I found the opener one of
Zeppelin's best tracks, but the rest came across as mediocre or just
dumb (I'm looking at you, Hot Dog).
Even
the band themselves were a little ambivalent about it, both immediately
after its release and in later years, considering it something of a
transitional record on the way to something else, though that
destination would never be reached. After the Knebworth shows in August
of 1979, the band didn't hit the stage again until embarking on a
limited European tour in June and July of 1980, with a majority of the
shows booked in West Germany. The tour was a way for the band to warm
up in smaller venues so that Robert Plant could regain his confidence
before attempting a US leg. Before they could head to the US, in
September of 1980, the tragic news of John Bonham's death knocked the
pins from under them, putting an end to their plans and their career,
since none of the surviving members were prepared to continue without
Bonham's presence.
I'm sure
that tragedy is partially responsible for pushing sales of the album, as
it soon became apparent it would be the group's last. The Coda album,
released in 1982, contained only studio leftovers from across their
career, though somewhat weighted with outtakes from In Through the Out
Door. There would be no real Led Zeppelin reunion, save a few rare live
shows well dispersed over the coming decades, the last in 2007
featuring Jason Bonham on drums. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant would
reunite in the 1990s for a time, first to reinterpret songs from the
Zeppelin catalogue and then to record an album of new material with
grunge producer, Steve Albini. John Paul Jones was conspicuously
excluded from those projects, however.
As
a last statement from one of the most important bands in rock history,
In Through The Out Door offers some highlights, but mostly indicates
that there was much more to be done to get back where they wanted to be.
It is only through speculation that we can consider what that
destination might have been.
