Can we talk about why Presence by Led Zeppelin is the best album ever made when you're actually listening to it, but it's easy to forget about when you aren't listening to it?

I love "Rising" by Rainbow. I also love "Presence" by Led Zep. I've never really considered these two records all that similar. Other than Page & Dio both had penchant for wizard-y appliques on their jeans

They're both hard rock records that were released in 1976.

Single word titles

Not to mention that the Rising era line-up of Rainbow were as musically potent as the members of Zeppelin, both individually and collectively.

Great headphone album. Insane.

I love "Tea for One" and "Hots On for Nowhere," especially the drums on the latter.

Booming revive by Euler

― flappy bird, Friday, May 10, 2019 12:48 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

listening to "presence" this morning i decided to listen differently than i normally do, which is to say i listened closely and carefully. like so many records that are important to me, this was a car record all the way, i.e. it was a cassette. and every few years, for weeks at a time, the album would begin when the car turned on and end when the trip was over. on longer drives it would repeat itself multiple times, but even then i never got a strong feeling that the record had a firm beginning or end. i stepped into the river, bathed in the river, knew the river by heart, but didn't have much of an idea where it came from or where it went. i definitely couldn't talk about the song titles, i could barely understand what robert plant was saying (still can't), and i knew that the cover art was white with some people on it but that's about it. so in that sense the thread title definitely made sense to me.

anyway, i put on my headphones this morning and was struck by a number of things that i'd like to share here.

achilles last stand is a song that for some reason i want to speak about in spatial terms: it is, among other things, immense. furthermore, it has a coldness, an austere quality, and a kind of classicist symmetry; despite its many flourishes the song doesn't meander, really. in fact, its focus over such a great length is part of its intensity, its power. in a sense the song, like the record, is a bit like, say, the parthenon: something to marvel at but not a place i want to live inside. lz ii is a record i can live inside, a world i can wonder around in. presence is a marble temple that inspires awe but does not exude warmth. intricate, alien, and inhuman indeed, Euler otm.

And there is no need for "Nobody's Fault But Mine" to have TWO guitar solos.

― Mr. Snrub (Mr. Snrub), Saturday, February 4, 2006 3:01 PM (thirteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry person from thirteen years ago, but it's actually a harmonica solo and then later a guitar solo, and they both fucking rule. the harmonica is played with a kind of mannered primitivity, and yet the way in which it incessantly churns the same simple blues figures again and again, barely more than a few notes, but so incessant and propulsive, it becomes almost manic: circular breathing turned hyperventilation. the guitar solo serves as exposition and recapitulation, through stilted, jittery echoes of a blues that has been deconstructed, flipped upside down, and reverse engineered through a thousand coke come-downs, resulting in what sounds like sputtering, buffering: a robot's failed attempt at b.b. king, and yet still so crisp.

the only thing i can understand robert plant say are "nobody's fault but mine" and "ding dong ding dong" so i dunno what's going on thematically here, but did read the thread and the blog link and found the stories interesting.

the congas that suddenly start in royal orleans in the verse begninning "down on bourbon street" are just so sick; the fact that they come in for barely 15 seconds and then disappear makes me crave them even more every time the song comes on.

candy store rock is a genre exercise, sure, but it's much more than that. here robert plant must be admired for his remarkable sense of harmony: listen to the chord implied by his melismatic "oo" on the word "before" (and i think "jaw" ? and "head") !! just this small moment that implies a completely different harmonic direction for the piece, or that's how i hear it anyway. and then that creepy coda really seals the deal.

hots on for nowhere: what the fuck is going on here ? is this the best song ever or is it just filler bullshit ? so it's enigmatic at the very least, a bit like a face that can alternately appear, according to lighting or circumstance, ugly or beautiful, although in the end my revulsion is sublimated into a kind of polyrhythmic desire; it's the focus and intensity of the drums, fills especially, that ultimately make me want to stick with this track.

speaking of desire: there is music that, in my experience, will and will not love you back. i don't know if i love presence (although i admire and, sometimes, desire it) but i do know that presence does not love me. presence is too involved in its own hang ups, its own brilliant and intricate inner-workings, it is too desperately focused on holding its fragile and deeply beautiful appendages together, to really allow space for the listener to be present in any way except as spectator.

when it ends i feel stunned and a bit lonely tbh.

Hell yes to this post, agreed on many points

"Hots On For Nowhere" is a weird fucking song

This, Station to Station and Animals form some kind triptych of 70s anomie/awesomeness.

"Hots On For Nowhere" is a weird fucking song

― chr1sb3singer, Friday, May 10, 2019

Glorious.

I remember an interview w/Plat from around the time of the reunion where he brought up playing the album for his current girlfriend, after which she told him "[she] didn't want to be left alone with...this music."

Plat=Plant, obvs.

I love "Tea for One" and "Hots On for Nowhere," especially the drums on the latter.

― recriminations from the nitpicking woke (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, May 10, 2019 12:18 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

“tea for one” sometimes my favorite zep song

thank you budo jeru for your post, rich with insight.

when I called the album inhuman & alien & algebraic earlier, I meant that the music is rushing with expression, saying many things, and yet it’s inscrutable until “Tea For One”, whose perfect polycarbonate blues reveals profound human longing. Is that what the rest is expressing? Longing has plasticity, filtered through the drugs, the exhaustion, eight years gone. Or instead simply reaching through that, to try to express something new.

budo jeru and euler can see into the center of this record, great posts

Wow at Budo jeru's post. Couldn't be more OTM

yeah that is a peak ILM post, thanks b.j. gonna be queueing this one up.

https://e.snmc.io/i/600/w/9be20ee140b63144a9643fc5581398a4/6869895

Bloomington shout out.

This, Station to Station and Animals form some kind triptych of 70s anomie/awesomeness.

presence > station to station > just reached the climax of 'dogs'

i feel comprehensively nothing

in a sense the song, like the record, is a bit like, say, the parthenon: something to marvel at but not a place i want to live inside. lz ii is a record i can live inside, a world i can wonder around in. presence is a marble temple that inspires awe but does not exude warmth. intricate, alien, and inhuman indeed

Yeah, this really gets at something about the album.

I've got to be honest, I wonder if it's partly because "Presence" is sort of a "lesser" LZ album, at least in terms of popularity; it maybe the LZ album with the fewest tracks played (if ever) on classic rock radio, at least in my experience. "Station to Station" and the Berlin albums hold a similar place in the Prime Bowie pantheon. They're weird because ... well, because they're weird. But because most of the songs don't get played on the radio much, they've remained weird and mysterious for decades.

> Bloomington shout out.

― earlnash, Saturday, May 11, 2019

Whoa, throwback. I worked for their record label at the time and remember when they came up with the idea. The cover ended up getting more publicity than the music. Bummer b/c it's got so many great songs on it!

John and Josh, have you guys hung out?

Ha...we haven't but I think we realized we lived pretty close to one another at some point.

Always thought Harvey Milk’s “Lay My Head Down” was trying to mine the same vein as “Tea for One”

https://youtu.be/FjucU_X-zTU

I've got to be honest, I wonder if it's partly because "Presence" is sort of a "lesser" LZ album, at least in terms of popularity; it maybe the LZ album with the fewest tracks played (if ever) on classic rock radio, at least in my experience. "Station to Station" and the Berlin albums hold a similar place in the Prime Bowie pantheon. They're weird because ... well, because they're weird. But because most of the songs don't get played on the radio much, they've remained weird and mysterious for decades.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, 11 May 2019 02:39 (two days ago) Permalink

For real, in Mpls back in the late 80s/early 90s when the playlist was "slightly" more adventurous the local classic rock monolith KQ92 would sometimes play "Nobody's Fault But Mine" but even that infrequently.

W/r/t Rainbow "Rising", the mention in this thread did lead me to track down "Live Munich 1977" which is fucking awesome

I've listened to little besides Presence since last week, and am now listening backwards through their oeuvre from there. I used to think that "Four Sticks" was the worst song on IV, now I think it's the best. Am I a latent prog fan?

How come 24 hour

listening to Zep III right now, it seems to be a mirror image of Presence: it's a sentimental album, from the simultaneous joy & horror of the conquering horde, to the mellow jams of side 2. Whereas Presence detaches from all this, leaving only unit structures

what lovely sentences!

Wilhelm Worringer, "Abstraction and Empathy", 1908. Abstraction is "to wrest the object of the external world out of its natural context, out of the unending flux of being, to purify it of all its dependence upon life, i.e. of everything about it that was arbitrary, to render it necessary and irrefragable, to approximate it to its absolute value.’’

this is how I hear Presence

otm

when I called the album inhuman & alien & algebraic earlier, I meant that the music is rushing with expression, saying many things, and yet it’s inscrutable until “Tea For One”, whose perfect polycarbonate blues reveals profound human longing. Is that what the rest is expressing? Longing has plasticity, filtered through the drugs, the exhaustion, eight years gone. Or instead simply reaching through that, to try to express something new.

still processing this / trying to respond

but do want to thank you for the initial revive which inspired my re-listening to "presence" and then "station to station" which was a big breakthrough for me because i worship bowie but never really "got" that record until just a few days ago

listening to HOTH now, both "the song remains the same" and "no quarter" seem to anticipate "presence"

you guys this is such a great revive

Regarding this quality of remoteness or abstraction, I think it gets after something essential about Zeppelin which is anticipated not just on HOTH but from the very beginning. There's a prevailing misapprehension among their detractors (but a lot of fans too) that because they trafficked in traditions that are predominantly "expressive" (blues) or more broadly "communicative" (folk) that these qualities are what they, too, wanted to forward. But the mission from the outset was sonic. This is what sets them so far apart from everybody else. On record, anyway, their heaviest, most experimental, most inventive contemporaries—Hendrix or Cream or whatever—are still prioritizing some compact with the listener that has to do with the given trope, whereas with Zeppelin even the most brazen dilletante blues or cod-folk is *not* Freedom Rock. It is rather sculptural, framed, finished. It's sound-qua-sound, art rock.

And while it's true that there were smart business reasons not to release singles, or edit for radio, or put the band's name on the sleeves, or tour with opening acts, I believe this was Page's real motivator in all those choices: it wasn't a statement that they were better than anyone else (although they knew they were) but a category factor. You couldn't just *have* them—any more than you can "have" something screwed onto on pedestal or mounted on a gallery wall.

that's a good point; that Zep's accomplishments stem from their being blues posers.

Accomplishments stem from high quality music from the very first album on...

It is rather sculptural, framed, finished. It's sound-qua-sound, art rock.

this is really getting to something that i've felt for a long time about lz; they really have much less in common with mayall, clapton, et al. than they do with george martin and the beatles. page's studio wizardy has been remarked upon at length, but rarely is it acknowledged as more or less the core of the project -- instead it's more along the lines of, hey, how fortunate they had this dude to bulk up / amplify their sick chops and killer riffs. i don't really buy that.

i think, at its core, what this musical project does is necessitate that performance and sonics are inextricably linked. the arc of the riff and the tone of the guitar that plays it are the same sonic unit, as it were. in that way the organizing principle of a led zeppelin song is not its lyric, or its melody, and rarely is the quality of the songwriting (in the traditional sense) a major concern for me as a listener. rather, what i hear is the effect, the sound, created by the constitute units of riff-tone, drum pattern-sound, etc. -- all of which in turn are essentially the products of a studio process that selects and then isolates specific idioms or gestures them from the earlier, deeply rich socio-cultural contexts of various folk and black popular musics (page, whatever he might say to the contrary, is basically anti-historicist), and it's precisely this process of separation, fetishization, and distillation that is the core of the musical endeavor. since worringer has been quoted, allow me to make the analogy that picasso's cubist paintings are not exactly "in dialogue" with west african folk art objects. i think that in much the same way, led zeppelin deliberately failed to work "in the tradition" -- in fact, if my observations are correct, they were inherently incapable of doing so since their project relied on a specific kind of presentation -- which is what i think hadrian is otm about.

i want to relate this back to "presence" but i don't have time right now !

I have nothing quite as sophisticated as any of the last several posts to say, although they are quite good posts, but whenever I revisit Achilles and really a lot of Zeppelin's work I'm struck by the fact that they are thought of as pure "cock rock" and yet the lyrics (to one of the heaviest songs ever recorded) are actually fairly sweet and not very macho:

Oh, the fun to have
To live the dreams we always had
Oh, the songs to sing
When we at last return again

^ i do like the tenderness of those lyrics

"Hots on for Nowhere" is easily one of Zep's best 10 songs.

― darin (darin), Monday, February 6, 2006 3:55 PM (thirteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally agree.

I'm trying to imagine the people whose first introduction to Zeppelin was this album, and how they'd view the remainder of their catalogue. Would they have preferred the most "Presence"-esque tracks like "The Wanton Song", "Wearing and Tearing", and "Out on the Tiles" as if they were on the record ("Wow - more songs dominated by tight bass-kick-guitar interplay!"), or found them to be far too ornamented, preferring the "real thing" instead? What about the more straight-ahead rockers like "Communication Breakdown", "Hot Dog", or "Rock and Roll" (which are surprisingly scarce in their catalogue - it's wild how many of their "traditional" blues-rock tunes have at least one major time change, key change, or instrumental-based bridge that can almost be its own song - see "Black Dog", "Heartbreaker", "Whole Lotta Love")? I'm guessing they'd be all about the epics like "Kashmir" and "In My Time of Dying", yet find the slower bluesy stuff found on the early records to be a bit boring (except for "Since I've Been Loving You", which stands out from that group with its musical complexity), but who knows?

I'd especially love to hear their perceptions of the more bucolic Fairport Convention-style tracks ("Going to California", "Battle of Evermore", "Bron-yr-Aur") that are about as far from "Presence" tracks as possible, or their more eccentric regular-length songs like "The Ocean", "The Song Remains the Same", or "Down By The Seaside"?

The big question, of course, is how would they have responded to "In Through the Out Door", especially if they didn't hear it until after consuming the rest of their oeuvre?

(Or better yet, what if "ITtOD" was their first Zep!?)

LZ's riff that they use as the intro for "Tea for One" had been around for a while. They used it to open a few different songs live.

I’ve been thinking about that intro riff a lot lately! It’s such a damn shame they couldn’t get an entire song out of it.

I think every garage band has one riff that they think is pretty cool that they never figure out where else to go.

“Soft Enfolding Spreads,” by the Howling Hex, is sort of a song-length mutant offshoot of the “Tea for One” riff.

(Or better yet, what if "ITtOD" was their first Zep!?)

I'd heard the first two albums, but the first Zep thing I bought was Coda because it was in the cassette rack at the local drug store ca. 1984. So I was well-acquainted with the ITTOD outtakes on side two long before I heard Presence which might explain why it never seemed that bizarre to me. It is a less-immediate record than most of their catalogue, certainly - less obvious hooks - but I don't think it's that surprising from the band who previous released stuff like "Four Sticks" and some of the tracks on Physical Graffiti (Sick Again, The Rover, even Trampled Under Foot and Kashmir).

i think, at its core, what this musical project does is necessitate that performance and sonics are inextricably linked. the arc of the riff and the tone of the guitar that plays it are the same sonic unit, as it were. in that way the organizing principle of a led zeppelin song is not its lyric, or its melody, and rarely is the quality of the songwriting (in the traditional sense) a major concern for me as a listener. rather, what i hear is the effect, the sound, created by the constitute units of riff-tone, drum pattern-sound, etc. -- all of which in turn are essentially the products of a studio process

yes yes yes