Jimmy Page, courtesy of the imagery he so painstakingly drew around him, could guarantee deference and respect whenever he showed his face in public.
Presence (1976) has been perceived as a weak album, but it nevertheless served up great songs, and In Through the Out Door — well, the less said about that one, the better. Houses of the Holy, though — well, it just sits there, doesn’t it, the one Led Zeppelin album whose ambition and sense of humor does not seem to have been forgiven by history.
We all own it, of course, and we know it’s on the shelf waiting. But when Zeppelin are on the menu, it’s rarely anyone’s first choice to play; and when you’re thinking behemothic earth-crunchers, even “No Quarter” — the album’s one epic — falls some way down the list. Be honest. Even when you’re listening to The Song Remains the Same, the in-concert leviathan recorded on the Houses of the Holy tour, how many of us skip over the first half of side three in order to get to “Stairway to Heaven”?
And yet… pound for pound, song for song, what Houses of the Holy lacked in skull-crushing riffs and brain-melting lyricism, it readily compensated in other ways. And the truth is, it was one of the smartest moves the band ever made.
There was, in the aftermath of, and particularly in the wake of “Stairway to Heaven,” a very real sense that Led Zeppelin’s next album would follow that same train of thought, continue into the realms of grand symphonics and over-arching verbosity.
