To cover for not being able to tour in 1976 the band released the concert film “The Song Remains the Same” along with the live album to accompany it, but the reception was lukewarm at best. A 1977 tour of the US saw big crowds in attendance, but it was then cut short by the news of the death of Plant's five-year-old son due to a stomach virus. It put the band on an indefinite hiatus.
It wasn’t until another 15 months had passed that the band reconvened and began to write and record their next album, and even that was made difficult through events. The album was named to describe its struggles after the death of Plant's son and the taxation exile the band took from the UK which resulted in the band being unable to tour on British soil for more than two years, and trying to get back into the public mind was therefore like "trying to get in through the 'out' door." And thus became the start of Led Zeppelin’s determined course to lift its profile once again, one that ultimately came to signal the end of more things than was expected.
The songs composed for this album again show a different style to what the band had produced early in their career. This could be attributed to the fact that both Page and Bonham were still very much in the throes of their own addictions, and this resulted in them being less involved in the process from the rehearsing and writing stage. Both often failed to show up on time at the recording studio, which left bass guitarist and keyboardist John Paul Jones and Robert Plant to their own devices, and as a result the music written for the album saw their greater influence. This skewed the direction eventually taken, with Page for the first time not being credited on every song on a Led Zeppelin album. It also got to the point that Jones and Plant would arrange the songs during the day, and Page and Bonham would come in at night to put down their parts. It seemed like something that would not be sustainable down the track, but that was a problem for another day. There is also in increase in the front and centre position of the keyboards being utilised by Jones on this album. In the past the keys have been there, but act as a secondary styled instrument behind Page’s guitar and Jones’s bass. In a lot of ways the music on the album acts as a transition from what the band had achieved in its early years... to what could have been for the future. The rise of the synth and keys with the rise of new wave in the early 1980’s does tend to cultivate this thought.
Of the seven tracks created and recorded for the album, there is more atmosphere from the keys than the stomp of the guitar and drums. And the changing face of the songs does make for some rearranging when it comes to fans of the band. The opening track “In the Evening” tends to process this, with the quiet opening and then serene melodic guitar in the middle bookended by a harder beat and Plant’s vocals that come across in a very un-Plant way. “South Bound Saurez” follows with a very southern blues rock piano dominating the song, and the low mixing of everything else. This is one of two songs on the album credited to Plant and Jones without Page, and the music of the song does play this out. Then comes “Fool in the Rain”, which combines differing rhythms in a basic rock sound, and ends up coming across as a repeatable tempo plod through the first half of the track, and then a faster beat into the second half. It almost has a reggae feel at different times which was not unusual for music at the time but surely was unusual for a band such as Led Zeppelin. “Hot Dog” then goes in a different direction once again, incorporating rockabilly ragtime piano again with almost Elvis-like vocals throughout. It’s short and sweet, and draws on very US country themes as well. It’s a strange song, one that takes some time to get used to.
“Carouselambra” is a 10 minute monster, dominated throughout by Jones’s keyboards. And this is something that I mentioned earlier, that the keyboards and synth sounds on this album, and in this song in particular, showcase the way that new wave was impacting the music work at the time, and how it then began to be so prominent especially in the UK music scene. So while this may not be what many would classify as a typical Led Zeppelin track, it did come across as a glimpse of the future. Even if Led Zeppelin was not to be a part of that. And it is interesting to ponder whether the band would have explored that further after this, or if they were to return to their hard rock roots as the members suggested in interviews after this album’s release. “All My Love” is the second Plant/Jones composition, which is about Plant’s son. Jones plays a keys and synth solo throughout the middle section of the song inspired and flavoured by classical music, offset by Page’s quietly sombre guitar leading out the song. The album the concludes with “I’m Gonna Crawl”, a blues/soul track with the extra addition of Jones’s synth again proving a dominating factor. Once you have listened to the whole album, it is amazing that that instrument has had such a heavy influence on the album, but by this point it is the easily held conclusion.
As I have probably mentioned somewhere here before, I have never been the biggest Led Zeppelin fan. My appreciation of their work has only really come as I have gotten older, but when I was growing up it was a little like ‘old people’s music’. I had acquaintances at school who kept telling me I HAD to listen to albums like “Houses of the Holy” and” Led Zeppelin III” because they are the BUILDING BLOCKS of rock music!... but I generally didn’t find that to be the case. The only Led Zeppelin I owned for a very long time was the Remasters double CD released in 1990, which I really enjoyed, as the songs chosen by Jimmy Page to remaster on that album were terrific. But for a long time that was enough for me.
Eventually I found a time where I began to go back in time and try and collect albums and bands that I knew I should probably listen to but had never done so, and Led Zeppelin was one of those bands. And through that, I eventually got around to “In Through the Out Door”.
When it came to doing this episode however, I had no recollection of what I thought of it at the time. I had to delve back to my old reviews that I had done over 20 years ago, and find the couple of paragraphs I had written when I was first listening to this album. And what I had written is this. “Compared to the ground breaking efforts that Led Zeppelin made early in their recording career, this is just average. Not a bad album by any stretch of the imagination, but just a run-of-the-mill one that suffers more for the name of the band that recorded it than the material it contains. Certainly, listening to the album again today, none of the songs jumped out at me as memorable in any fashion. Probably its most damning critique”.
Listening to it over the past couple of weeks, and it is quite probable that I have listened to it more in that time than for the rest of my life combined, I again fall back on that old word to describe my feelings for it. “Appreciation”. Because I appreciate the music here, but I don’t love it. It is an interesting listen but now that the episode is completed, I don’t know how often it is going to come off the shelves again.
This proved to be the band’s final offering, with drummer John Bonham’s passing just over a year after its release, and the band’s unwillingness to continue without him. This was the only album that did not have a song credited to him, the reason behind that the same as for his eventual demise. This album therefore concludes the career of one of the most influential bands of their age.
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