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?

Mind you, ALS alone makes me feel like I'm listening to the greatest music ever recorded when it's playing.

i thought the same thing.

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

So I tried to listen to Houses Of The Holy and Physical Graffiti again, and both left me cold. Yeah, there's some great songs on them, but they aren't aging so well. IV is a different story. Pretty perfect, that one.

OK, you guys convinced me to listen to this and hear it a little differently. I could sort of see the math rock thing and this helped me to notice the interesting ways that all the repeated riffs interlock. Like some kind of weird math rock/James Brown hybrid or something. And, yeah, there's a lot happening in all the layered guitar sounds if you listen for it. Are those wild crashing-out-of-tune drops (e.g. in "For Your Life") just done purely with whammy bar? Particularly "Tea for One" has a staggering amount of detail in all the different guitar tones that are layered and drop in and out - it's the "guitar orchestration" thing that really blows me away about Page. And the soloing on that track is pretty great too. I still don't think it's their best album but there is a lot there.

the whole rekkid is great…

TBH I picked on "Hots On for Nowhere" upthread just because it was the one track I couldn't remember by looking at the track list. It's actually a good track, I realized when listening.

I'm not sure I understood anything in that discussion of liking Zeppelin "from birth," but the part that struck me as especially interesting, counterintuitive, and inexplicable, was the notion that Presence is appealing to those coming at Zeppelin from a punk background. Really? To me this is Zep at their most proggy and dinosaurian - I mean, there are, what, two ten-minute songs on this thing? Oof.

Anyone else really wish they'd built a song out of that really great tense intro to "Tea For One?" I always get all excited before I realize that it's just going to lead into yet another plodding blooze thing where Page fiddles around and Plant moans some pointless crap...

The highlight for me has to be "Royal Orleans," a song I never even knew by name until this more attentive, ILM-geared listen...

There's an acoustic guitar in Candy Store Rock, but it barely registers without headphones.

I think this might nail it (with the exception of ALS of course). But maybe I'll change my mind if I listen more.

Yeah, people I know who come to LZ from punk or indie usually take to II or stuff like "Immigrant Song" in my experience. The only people I've known (and most are from this board) who really love Presence have been obsessive longtime fans.

No, it's not the "best" Zeppelin record but I'll stack "Royal Orleans" and "Hots On For Nowhere" against anything, pretty much.

"Presence conveyed the sense of a band up against bad odds, fighting back. The opening two tracks, "Achilles Last Stand" (about the car accident) and "For Your Life" (about hell and drugs and terror, and about how life inside the band may have been developing), featured the best solos Page would ever play -- abstract, desperate, raging. "Presence was pure anxiety and emotion," Page said later. "We didn't know if we'd ever be able to play in the same way again. It might have been a very dramatic change, if the worst had happened to Robert. Presence is our best in terms of uninterrupted emotion."

Over the years, Presence hasn't sold as well as most of the band's catalog. It's more or less the forgotten album, its feelings are too hard, too intense and probably too insular to stay close to or very long. In effect, Led Zeppelin accomplished something akin to Eric Clapton's achievement on Derek and the Dominos' Layla: They forged the spirit and purpose of blues into a new form, without relying on blues scales and structures. Presence is clearly singular in Led Zeppelin's body of work, and it's likely the best album the band ever made.

"It was really like a cry of survival," Plant said. "There won't be another album like it, put it like that. It was a cry from the depths, the only thing that we could do."

---------

When I read that, I figured Gilmore was on crack and was just playing up the melodrama. Guess you had to be there to feel the intensity, because I don't remember any of the songs. I don't remember them being horrible, but just didn't leave an impression. But there are at least a couple people here who might agree with Gilmore to an extent.

I think with the exception of II, all the Zeppelin albums are inconsistent. I never understood what anyone saw in Physical Graffiti aside from "Kashmir" and "Houses of the Holy." So I'm open to hearing Presence again and entertaining the possibility that it's, like, their, um, fifth best. I'll pick up a used copy tomorrow.

"Achilles Last Stand" is absolutely incredible...my friends and i used to listen to that song for hours. "Tea For One," in my opinion, seems like a b-side to "Since I've Been Loving You," but a b-side that is just as enjoyable as the a-side.

Presence in its entirety would not be a good introductory album, but it is one of my top 5 Zep albums.

Think i'll give it a listen. It's been long enough.

If anyone here is old enough to actually remember this record when it came out in 1976 and can comment on the overall musical milieu it was born into, I'd love to hear about it.

i like their later period albums. prefer the vocals to plant in his supposed peak. he sounds like hes not trying so hard on presence. just relaxed. more like himself. and the riffs are still great. theres just an easier going charm about this era of led zep, you know theyre not trying so hard, have less to prove etc, but rather than = lazy, theres something appealing about them just doing what they do.

Surprised Bonham doesn't get more mention here. To me his drumming is on fire on this rek. That said, it's pretty much the case on everything. I love the guy to death.

When I did my Zep POX, I started from the premise of Presence + 3, then looked at the rest of the catalogue for songs strong enough to knock any of Presence's songs out. (My POX was 3 out of 10 Presence... before I managed to whittle it down, it was 5 out of 15 Presence.)

― truck-patch pixel farmer (my crop froze in the field) (Rock Hardy),

Took me a minute to decipher my own post there. But yeah, this is the absolute biznis, always will be to me.

My thoughts on Presence.

bringing this back up to the top for Sunday morning readers...

it's brilliant stuff, Marcello. Thank you for that. Still a huge fan of this, probably 3rd fave Zep record.. Bonham is so phenomenal on this, the whole thing does have that "room sound" that puts me in mind of what Albini strives for

also, as massive a Zep geek I am, did not know that bit about the Stones coming in for 'Black and Blue'!

seriously fantastic piece, Marcello

This isn't even LZ's best album but it's good enough for me.

Great post -- thanks! Very evocative -- I was instantly listening along in my head as you described sections.

As i said on twitter, an amazing piece of writing Marcello. kudos.

dude, marcello, A+. for real. and i hate everything and everybody! makes me want to work harder.

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

the "Tea For One" riff is a tweaked and slowed down version of "Walter's Walk" which is a HOTH outtake...he also used to fold it into Dazed and Confused live

"The Ocean" seems to me a predecessor of Presence.

I want to add something about the influence of the abstraction of James Brown on Presence, thinking that his funk was an abstraction from soul, but I don't know enough to say for sure. We all know about "The Crunge", but the latter seems to me such a misstep (chiefly for JPJ's anemic keys) that it can't be a definitive statement of JB's influence. And I'd like to know how the different members of the band appreciated JB: was it mostly one member, like Bonham, or was it Page, etc?

I know they used top play Sex Machine and Licking Stick live....I would imagine the whole band were big fans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd0b42chX5A

I want to add something about the influence of the abstraction of James Brown on Presence, thinking that his funk was an abstraction from soul, but I don't know enough to say for sure.

Funny I was listening to Achilles this very morning and really focusing on the drums & something that people gloss over when they talk abt Bonham's drumming it is so deft, so fleet-of-foot and fonky, everyone just talks about how hard he hits.

W/r/t to Brown, I believe they were all fans but specifically Bonham and JPJ were to the r&b/funk fanatics

jpj tells a story about Clyde Stubblefield and the other JB drummer at the time (Melvin Parker?) at Newport, standing behing Bonham during the Zep soundcheck and gawking at him playing both their parts

John Jabo Starks, I would guess

I know they used to play Sex Machine and Licking Stick live

wait what

They would do this live in 1975, folded into Whole Lotta Love or Dazed and Confused, just sections—"Ain't It Funky Now" too

Is that on any live recordings? I've never heard them play either I don't think.

apparently it's on this one: https://longliveledzeppelin.blogspot.com/2015/09/19750312-led-zeppelin-long-beach-great.html

a Vancouver show too, a handful of '75 boots

I hadn't really read anything about the connection before, but The Crunge always made me assume they were James Brown fans.

it's been made many times -- Page and Plant mentioned it?

(not trying to dis you)

i fuckin love this album and this thread

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

― 29 facepalms, Friday, May 10, 2019 2:18 PM (ten months ago) bookmarkflaglink

guess what also came out in 1976, that's right aerosmith's rocks

which "hots on for nowhere" kinda exists in the same universe of

The persistent avoidance of For Your Life, the dark center of this album and my favorite song from this release by some distance, renders this otherwise classic ILM thread less potent than it ought to be. Bonham is playing lead here and Plant is singing off him, his vocals are like fills, as the drums start, stop, rush, and swing. Structurally, the song is sneakily complex with five distinct parts—ABABCDCEAB—with the whole descending riff in the “Do it when you wanna” section a master class in tension and release as Bonham unveils a straight 4/4 beat while a chorus of Plants tease and coo over the top about the darkest cocaine hell I could imagine. Run-on sentences do not capture how much I admire this song.

Yes
And the off beat on the Do you Wanna section
Magic

still the greatest ilm thread

this album kinda terrifies me, putting me into a very weird mood right now

always