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Why In Through The Out Door is a GREAT album


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12 hours ago, Canadianzepper said:

No judgement on my part, just a point I always remember, that of all the quotes I have heard probably describes Zeppelin the most accurately, it was by Prince of all people and he suggested to the effect, I paraphrase, "look at Led Zeppelin, every song of theirs made you feel different."  That's not just good music, that great musicianship and it's keenly true of the band and a song like Tea For One.

So, back to my roundabout defense of Tea For One, a song I didn't particularly like either (or that entire album truth be told); it's a song you have to almost feel depressed to listen to.  Maybe not that far gone, but, you have to almost act out the lyrics, lie on the bed looking at a clock in the hotel room and wish you were 1000 miles away back with the ones you love.  Pages work on the song is great too, a top 5 solo in my opinion.

Anyways, maybe that does something for how you see it, maybe not.  Many people like Hot Dog for instance, and I've never liked the song, though I might sing it if drunk and wanted to present a parody of some hillbilly ho-down somewhere. :) I'm sure many don't view it that way, but I always have. As you said, to each their own.

Per the thread, when I first listened to LZ I actually enjoyed this album a great deal, liked their "newer" stuff, as time went on I realized I was wrong about the guitar.

I like Hot Dog quite a bit; it's fun, it's different, and like Prince said - every Zep song makes you feel different. I agree with you about Tea For One being a bit of a downer. One of the reasons why I like Zep so much is that very, very few of their songs are wistful, or sad. I remember being a kid in the '70's and hearing Stairway for the first time and not liking it because I thought it was kind of sad. I've gotten over that, of course, but in general, I'm not a fan of "slow jams", sad music or too much wistfulness. I have enough of that in my own life!

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6 hours ago, EaglesOfOneNest said:

I like Hot Dog quite a bit; it's fun, it's different, and like Prince said - every Zep song makes you feel different. I agree with you about Tea For One being a bit of a downer. One of the reasons why I like Zep so much is that very, very few of their songs are wistful, or sad. I remember being a kid in the '70's and hearing Stairway for the first time and not liking it because I thought it was kind of sad. I've gotten over that, of course, but in general, I'm not a fan of "slow jams", sad music or too much wistfulness. I have enough of that in my own life!

For sure. A lot of their songs are happy and irreverent. Black Country Woman - one of my favourites for it simply being just a cheeky little grin of a song. A great joy. And even reflective more beautiful songs like Ten Years Gone or The Rain Song have such a beautiful emotive sound. Not what I would say is akin to happiness, but so beautiful and deep. They are some of the best listening. None sad. Tea for One is a little wistful, not one I go back to a lot I must admit.

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On 10/6/2017 at 8:03 PM, rm2551 said:

For sure. A lot of their songs are happy and irreverent. Black Country Woman - one of my favourites for it simply being just a cheeky little grin of a song. A great joy. And even reflective more beautiful songs like Ten Years Gone or The Rain Song have such a beautiful emotive sound. Not what I would say is akin to happiness, but so beautiful and deep. They are some of the best listening. None sad. Tea for One is a little wistful, not one I go back to a lot I must admit.

Black Country Woman - another great one. "That's allright, I know your sisters, too".. hahaha!!! Love the cheek! Ten Years Gone and Rain Song are two of my favorites... emotive without being depressing. 

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11 hours ago, EaglesOfOneNest said:

Black Country Woman - another great one. "That's allright, I know your sisters, too".. hahaha!!! Love the cheek! Ten Years Gone and Rain Song are two of my favorites... emotive without being depressing. 

The closest to "sad" is SIBLY from TSRTS. Hard to imagine a more emotive song when your in the right frame of mind and pump it into your ears. The intro has such angry, defiant angst that drops so beautifully into that almost sad, melancholic opening. By the time Robert chimes in, I feel like I am at least 4 major turns and drops into a fantastic rollercoaster. It's just unreal. The angst reminds me of the start of the second solo break in Comfortably Numb. It always hits hard with how clear the emotion is. Just such good writing and playing.

Edited by rm2551
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Yes, agreed, Led Zeppelin has a way of really appealing to a lot of different emotions! Different in a way from Pink Floyd, which I think is also emotive / emotional music, but with a more down / depressing element. I did see Roger Waters live in July and it was a fantastic show though!

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Well, back to ITTOD. The album is slicker than any other Zep release. But much of that IMO is that many of the songs

have multiple layers of guitars, keys and so on and the songs with few exceptions are milder Zep, so the complexity

replaces to some extent raw emotion. For me only HOTH is as diverse as this album, and the band really stretches.

I don't understand critics who say Jimmy had run out of ideas; he is not repeating anything he did before, and there are

some excellent solos here. I was in a band and we used to play Hot Dog, everybody loved it, seriously. And my favorite

Zep mood changer is OTHAFA, apart from the "dramatic" live solo, this song to me is a song of happiness, that life is good,

everything will turn out good. "You really ought to know"......total life affirmation.

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Many new ideas and approaches, a renewed vitality and spirit, great material.  The one thing that really strikes me is the amazing return of Plant's voice.  On PG he sounds damaged although it works with the material.  Presence vocals work well with the songs but are not his best singing.  Robert's singing on Out Door is a joy to behold.  I wish the vocals were stronger in the mix in In the Evening - on the outtakes you can hear him more clearly.  Fool in the Rain, Hot Dog, and All My Love are simply magnificent vocals.

One other note - I think South Bound Saurez is fantastic - it is simple and silly, but that piano, guitar and drums sound magnificent.  And that blistering Page rave up solo - short and SWEET.   

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3 hours ago, John M said:

Many new ideas and approaches, a renewed vitality and spirit, great material.  The one thing that really strikes me is the amazing return of Plant's voice.  On PG he sounds damaged although it works with the material.  Presence vocals work well with the songs but are not his best singing.  Robert's singing on Out Door is a joy to behold.  I wish the vocals were stronger in the mix in In the Evening - on the outtakes you can hear him more clearly.  Fool in the Rain, Hot Dog, and All My Love are simply magnificent vocals.

One other note - I think South Bound Saurez is fantastic - it is simple and silly, but that piano, guitar and drums sound magnificent.  And that blistering Page rave up solo - short and SWEET.   

Really-REALLY-love this album.  Page's solos are incendiary. The crunch of his solos in INE, the one in SBS you mentioned, and IGC... which is simply beautiful.

And yeah, SBS... no matter how many times I try to keep time with Bonzo I manage to F it up.  I just can't figure it out.  His drumming on that entire album is fantastic.

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1 hour ago, LedElvis75 said:

Really-REALLY-love this album.  Page's solos are incendiary. The crunch of his solos in INE, the one in SBS you mentioned, and IGC... which is simply beautiful.

Page may have been fucked up during this time, but he wasn't fucking around while laying down those solo's, or any of his tracks for that matter. It all sounds really good and done with purpose, nothing on this record was mailed in. The thing that I've noticed is that while the production value on most songs are excellent,  ITE & Carouselambra don't have that crispness the others have, they're a bit muddy. As far as the songwriting goes, I think its impressive they could pull off an album as good as this without Jimmy's usual input. I've always felt that he kind of approached this record with a session player mentality in a way. 

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3 minutes ago, blindwillie127 said:

Page may have been fucked up during this time, but he wasn't fucking around while laying down those solo's, or any of his tracks for that matter. It all sounds really good and done with purpose, nothing on this record was mailed in. The thing that I've noticed is that while the production value on most songs are excellent,  ITE & Carouselambra don't have that crispness the others have, they're a bit muddy. As far as the songwriting goes, I think its impressive they could pull off an album as good as this without Jimmy's usual input. I've always felt that he kind of approached this record with a session player mentality in a way. 

Well said.

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Yeah, ITE and Carouselambra are a bit muddy. But one wonders, did Jimmy muck up Carousel a bit because he

realized some of the lyrics are about him, despite the drug haze ?? Presence has Robert saying things as well, but they

are much more indirect. And the contradiction at hand, that Jimmy was already a polydrug/alcohol abuser, yet he plays

like a master on ITTOD, is stunning. Certainly in the studio even back then you could slice and dice, but to my ears

some of the solos at least sound like a whole take, not 8 pieces of tape painstakingly spliced together. A very creative

album,  but I remember at the time although many Zep fans still liked it, I and others grumbled a bit about the lack of

hard rock. But Presence was much more hard rock, so looking backwards ITTOD seems much more logical now.

Jimmy and Bonzo themselves thought ITTOD was a bit fey, and the next album would be much more hard hitting.

But despite Jimmy's masterful playing on ITTOD, I am not convinced that Jimmy had some storehouse of monster

riffs or sledgehammer material ready to go later. Jimmy's story was Presence was my "guitar" album, and ITTOD

was JPJ's "keys" album. Ha Ha Ha. And drugs played no part in this., of course. Jimmy is one funny man.

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On October 10, 2017 at 1:52 PM, Mithril46 said:

Yeah, ITE and Carouselambra are a bit muddy. But one wonders, did Jimmy muck up Carousel a bit because he realized some of the lyrics are about him, despite the drug haze ?? Presence has Robert saying things as well, but they are much more indirect.  

Carouselambra is about as "indirect" and vague as anything Plant has ever written. To even entertain the thought that Page purposefully  created a shitty mix in order to bury Plants lyrics cause' it was about him is far fetched and fanciful at best. The difference between Plant on Presence and ITTOD is that #1) Plants son had died and #2) Plant stopped doing blow. Before that, he was happily rolling down the tracks on the party train despite all of his many colds/flu's/laryngitis "episodes" that marred many of his vocal performances and tours. To think that Plant would be now be admonishing Page in his lyrics for his continued 'proclivities' is laughable really, not to mention hypocritical. Maybe Plant was still butt hurt over being forced to record Presence with a fucked up leg, we know he wasn't happy with his vocal performance. I never understood why a fucked up leg would prevent a singer from doing vocal tracks in a studio, what, your on painkillers? That aint nothing new, your already on 'em all the time, might as well make good use of time and make a fucking record. If the drummer has a fucked up throat I would still expect him to lay down drum tracks. Never quite got that one. You got guys now (Axl/Grohl) that go out on 'tour' with a broken fucking leg, sitting in a fucking chair for christ's sake! Sorry for straying off topic, but I find the Robert good/Jimmy bad narrative a little hard to swallow. Either that, or its correct, and it was one of the ingredient's that made them as great as they were. Either way...it was one a hell of a ride.

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17 hours ago, blindwillie127 said:

Carouselambra is about as "indirect" and vague as anything Plant has ever written. To even entertain the thought that Page purposefully  created a shitty mix in order to bury Plants lyrics cause' it was about him is far fetched and fanciful at best. The difference between Plant on Presence and ITTOD is that #1) Plants son had died and #2) Plant stopped doing blow. Before that, he was happily rolling down the tracks on the party train despite all of his many colds/flu's/laryngitis "episodes" that marred many of his vocal performances and tours. To think that Plant would be now be admonishing Page in his lyrics for his continued 'proclivities' is laughable really, not to mention hypocritical. Maybe Plant was still butt hurt over being forced to record Presence with a fucked up leg, we know he wasn't happy with his vocal performance. I never understood why a fucked up leg would prevent a singer from doing vocal tracks in a studio, what, your on painkillers? That aint nothing new, your already on 'em all the time, might as well make good use of time and make a fucking record. If the drummer has a fucked up throat I would still expect him to lay down drum tracks. Never quite got that one. You got guys now (Axl/Grohl) that go out on 'tour' with a broken fucking leg, sitting in a fucking chair for christ's sake! Sorry for straying off topic, but I find the Robert good/Jimmy bad narrative a little hard to swallow. Either that, or its correct, and it was one of the ingredient's that made them as great as they were. Either way...it was one a hell of a ride.

Doing heroin is a bit different to doing coke plus I think that a rock singer would much prefer to stand up when singing in the studio, you can't really put your back into it when you're sitting down.

Having said that, I love Plant's vocals on Presence.

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I think that ITTOD was just to pushy. The I and II albums were focused on that hard blues rock that Zeppelin was known for. In the III and IV albums, they started to be more creative and it was beautiful. Houses of the Holy showed stunning ideas and amazing feels. Physical Graffiti was just an explosion of new and fantastic sounds nobody expected to happen. But Precence was a bit iffy on its sound and mixing. Then comes the mad man named In Through the out Door.

 

Not only was it the end of 70’s, but it was the spiral of Rock and Roll. Zeppelin was starting to be out of the public eye and Bonham and Page were dealing with addictions. So with all these problems and the new sound of the 80’s, the very pushy and misunderstood album ITTOD came out. It could have been a better album but it just wasn’t. 

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Carouselambra is brilliant. Production could have been better on that but a raw live version that they could have performed in 1980 and beyond would have solved that, It could have been the new Achilles Last Stand showpiece in concert.

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2 hours ago, zeplz71 said:

Carouselambra is brilliant. Production could have been better on that but a raw live version that they could have performed in 1980 and beyond would have solved that, It could have been the new Achilles Last Stand showpiece in concert.

Completely agree with you, and it gets slagged off so much by so many 

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2 hours ago, zeplz71 said:

Carouselambra is brilliant. Production could have been better on that but a raw live version that they could have performed in 1980 and beyond would have solved that, It could have been the new Achilles Last Stand showpiece in concert.

Agree. But I must admit, the original vs. "The Epic" - the original mix was a bit shit. Too blurred. Can't hear a word Robert says. And he deserves to be equal or even a bit more up front that the drums and wall of keys. The Epic is so much better to listen to for this reason.

Live it could have well been a MONSTER.

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I've always really liked Carouselambra, despite the shit mix. It was obviously a bit of an experiment, which can be risky, buts that a good thing. The song seems to take you on a journey with all the changes in moods and tempo's, very fucking creative for sure. One of the things that bugs me about it though is all the goddamn "Ahh Ahhh's" it just seems to go on and on. And then, they shift into the dreaded "Trucker's Gear Change" and Plant continues with the fucking "Ahh Ahh's". The song does get a bit monotonous but it has amazing movements, urgency and intent throughout, so overall, for me...its a winner. 

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On ‎10‎/‎15‎/‎2017 at 6:31 AM, Xolo1974 said:

Completely agree with you, and it gets slagged off so much by so many 

The last 2 minutes or so of Carouselambra are great (starting at Bonzo's fills at 8:08, but I especially love the last minute).  Bonham is just going crazy and the tension is just fantastic.  Has always been one of my favorite parts of any Zep tune.

Evidence that Zep could still bring (a bit of) the Hammer of The Gods when it wanted to.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 10/5/2017 at 5:53 PM, LedElvis75 said:

Boy... I've never thought of it THAT way.  The greatest last album a band, ANY BAND, ever released.  Wow.  How true is that??????

Abbey road is the greatest last album by A major band . And I am a led zeppelin fan . If zeppelin had broken up after physical graffiti perhaps the statement would hold good 

 

On 10/6/2017 at 2:29 PM, Mook said:

Yeah, I'll give it a whirl again, sometimes it helps to have someone point out a couple of things I may have missed.

 

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10 hours ago, zosokm said:

Abbey road is the greatest last album by A major band . And I am a led zeppelin fan . If zeppelin had broken up after physical graffiti perhaps the statement would hold good

Er... Let It Be was released after Abbey Road.
Or doesn't it count because they'd split by the time it was released?

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21 hours ago, woz70 said:

Er... Let It Be was released after Abbey Road.
Or doesn't it count because they'd split by the time it was released?

OK, I was JUST thinking about this the other day. I recently discovered a renewed appreciation for CODA. Wouldn't call it Zep's greatest, or the greatest "last" album, but it's pretty damn good, especially the re-mastered 1994 release

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1 hour ago, the chase said:

Let It Be was released after Abbey Road, but it was recorded before..   

True.

But from the perspective of the buying public Let It Be was the final album of newly recorded music.

I think Phil Spector's production set it aside from the rest of The Beatles' canon anyway.... but it was still the last album.

Much as, like or loathe it, CODA was Zep's last album.

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