IN THROUGH THE OUT DOOR

Though many Zeppelin fans thought "Prescence" showed the band were past their peak, many felt "In Through the Out Door" seemed to show a lack of cohesion within the Zeppelin camp, dogged by personal misfortune, and signified the beginning of the end. As the titled suggests, the rise of Punk and the aforesaid personal difficulties, the group were finding it worrying that their crown seemed to be slipping. Personally I think there are some great songs on this album which history has been unkind to, the albums still contains the classic mysterious Zeppelin signatures though it is dominated by John Paul Jones' synthesisers and appears largely experimental though underrated - there is some fine work by JPJ here.

Having taken up Abba's invitation to use their Polar recording studios in Stockholm the end result, though not apparent on the primitive setup I was using in 1979, was poor sound quality in comparison to their earlier albums, and though Jimmy Page's expert remastering did little to improve the veiled sound I wish they'd recorded the album back at Olympic Studios in London where their meteoric rise to fame first began.

The cover was an interesting though largely ignored concept by Hipgnosis, a bemused buyer would find the sleeve was contained in a brown paper "jacket" with the band and album title "rubber stamped" in the top corner, with the main sleeve "hidden" within. The main cover showed a man sitting at a bar burning a "dear John" letter, surrounded by five other characters: the barman, a rather tipsy floosie, a "detective" in the corner, another rather tired-looking bar-room girl and a piano player. The six different sleeves, labelled on each spine as "A,B,C,D,E and F" showed a different pair of photos with a different point of view seen from the six characters within the scene. If that wasn't enough, the inner sleeve showed two sketches of some bar debris which could actually be coloured in using a wet brush like in a child's book!

The quiet mysterious eastern-style intro to "In The Evening" belies the straight rock song that follows, with a typical Bonham beat swathed in synthesisers, though the next song "Southbound Suarez" is a more upbeat rock'n'roll "sha-la-la" piano boogie style shuffle. "Fool in the Rain" is a rather simple song but features some fine shuffling drum work from John Bonham and keyboards from JPJ, and breaks into a Santana style latin groove containing a growling Page solo, a good track which I still find hard to keep still to! Some fast fingering by JP is featured on the hill-billy style "Hot Dog" about a girl who "took the Greyhound at the general store", and "she took my heart, she took my keys from in my old blue dungarees", a fun song (try and keep still to this one!) which nicely rounds off side 1.

If JPJ's influence was merely evident on the preceding music, on side 2 it literally dominates - the heavy synthesiser-driven "Carouselambra" is widely considered the best most Proggish track on this album, and features strong drumming from JB though Plant's vocals are so drowned within the mix they are barely decipherable. Some amazing passages from JPJ's synthesiser intertwined with Page's dramatic power chord guitar statements make this a tingling listen, with Plant's vocals reminiscent of the old dragon-and-sorcery lyrics of earlier material, "Faceless legions stood in readiness to weep, just turn a coin, bring order to the fray..", the song then breaks into a different more dramatic direction with "Held now within the knowing, rest now within the beat, take of the fruit, but guard the seed.." followed by some spine-tingling power chords from Jimmy - very dramatic stuff! "All My Love" is much more sedate, and contains some beautiful and catchy almost Vivaldian keyboard passages from JPJ and singing from Plant, leading up to a similar mood in "I'm Gonna Crawl", about unconditional love and devotion, something an old fool like me would know about but scoff at occasionally (!) - though I'm not going to scoff at "In Through the Out Door" as I still think it's a great album, one which I still love hearing, and deserves more recognition , it was better than many other albums released in 1979, Led Zeppelin had already set the bar very very high!

MUSIC RATING 4.5/5 PROG RATING 3/5

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