Happy 50th Anniversary to Led Zeppelin’s fifth studio album Houses of the Holy, originally released March 28, 1973.
As I contemplated this retrospective, I mentally referred to it as “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ‘The Crunge.’” I thought that spending substantial time with Houses of the Holy (1973) would uncover something redemptive in part of the record I didn’t love. This has worked before. But, my friends, I regret to say that I have not learned to stop worrying. I have not learned to love “The Crunge.”
The stretch of “The Crunge,” “Dancing Days,” and “D’yer Mak’er” are the first false starts in Led Zeppelin’s discography; until this point, they had put together four records that ranged from damn good (the first) to visionary (the fourth). Those albums—and the other five songs on Houses of the Holy—get their esteemed status by full-throatedly embracing old forms (like the blues) or by shamelessly combining folk, psychedelia, and the growing progressive and hard rock elements of the British Invasion into something that is uniquely Zep.
On Houses of the Holy, “Over the Hills and Far Away” is probably the best example of the latter form. The acoustic intro is a full thought in and of itself; it feels perfect and complete. But then Robert Plant’s vocals add a new dimension to it, and it feels perfect and complete again. But then the rest of the band kicks in with the kind of head-banging rock that only they are capable of. Zeppelin trades a repertoire of grooves and interludes into one spectacular, cohesive piece. It feels uniquely theirs, but also not quite the same as anything that had come before it.
In a few cases, Houses of the Holy outpaces the band’s previous formulas. The stereotypical Led Zeppelin strong structure—a chunky riff that repeats two or four times and persists throughout the tune, usually asserting itself at the end of vocal phrases—litters the catalogue (see: “The Wanton Song,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Heartbreaker,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” “Immigrant Song,” “Custard Pie,” “Celebration Day”). But “The Song Remains the Same” is another animal entirely, stringing together not one, but two, incredible full-band riffs before launching into a remarkable Jimmy Page solo—and then the whole thing drops to almost nothing for Plant’s big moment. Ecstatic, cohesive, maudlin, heartbreaking: the core Led Zeppelin elements, somehow rolled into one.
In fact, Led Zeppelin did some of this work so well that they burned bridges behind them; some of their more ambitious experiments, like “No Quarter” and “The Rain Song,” stand essentially alone in rock music. While prog opuses are strewn across the rock music canon, a group trying to write their own “No Quarter” will inevitably fail, because that precious corner of the earth has already been explored.
Listen to the Album:
“The Rain Song,” in spite of its gloomy title, sounds like a late afternoon where the clouds have already parted and the wet pavement glows. By the time the second verse emerges, more than four minutes in, I usually forget that there had been vocals in the song at all; the instrumental is so immersive with its glacial changes and cul-de-sacs (my favorite is the bass lick at 3:25) that it constructs its own world. Then there’s the incredible, unexpected kick into the finale, the kind of thing you wish you could hear for the first time again.
Meanwhile, “No Quarter,” (preposterously following up D’yer Mak’er) is a noxious lagoon, heavy from the first moment but never in a hurry. It’s almost frightening how steady John Bonham is in the first instrumental section; this isn’t one of the rock and roll freakouts we’ve heard elsewhere on this record—this is serious stuff and we’d all better listen. All of the goodwill that defines “The Rain Song” is swept away. The incredible thing is more than the band’s instrumental versatility in creating these two very different sounds—it’s the flexibility of their vision. It’s incredible they created both of these things that see the world in such different ways and embrace them with the same conviction.
Which means that when Led Zeppelin were at their best, they made the world bigger. They took you to magical or forgotten places and asked questions of you and demanded answers. They strung together parts of songs that were unexpected—but never counterintuitive—to pull you just a little bit further from the place you thought was home. It certainly helps that they were masters of their instruments, but they carved new dimensions into the face of rock music in terms of worldview.
This, I think, is why the middle section of Houses of the Holy bums me out so much. Considering the precious Led Zeppelin album run-time, we don’t need a James Brown parody or, especially, a fake reggae tune. To me, it’s one of the most conflicting records out there—huge, sweeping artistic gestures paired with…I don’t even know what. But even though I’m still going to keep skipping those three songs, I’m going to keep spinning Houses of the Holy for a long time. I know nothing like it is coming around anytime soon.
LISTEN: