Through The Door Of Inspiration
Thanks to my daughter, I finally have my favorite Led Zeppelin album. And on vinyl, too.
Whenever I walk through my local grocery store, I see racks of celebrity magazines at every checkout stand. This is not uncommon. For decades, magazines such at People, Us Weekly, In Style, Life and Style have been on display where people unload their shopping carts. And there’s no secret why: Things like gum, candy bars and especially magazines are impulse buys. If you can get someone to drop another 6 bucks, or more, on top of whatever is in their shopping cart, then that’s an extra 6 bucks in the day’s sales total.
One of the standard ploys of these rags is to put a celebrity on the cover along with his or her kids looking exceedingly happy. This is to lure us in to read about just how awesome, sweet and great the star’s kids are. And, usually, the cover includes a quote from the star along the lines of “How my kids inspire me.” My wife has a “People” from a few months back that has Mr. Chrissy Teigen, aka, singer John Legend, on the cover saying just that. Based on the numbers of “Peoples” my wife had had over the years, I think every star in Hollywood who has had kids has told the magazine that thier children have inspired them.
Now, anyone who has had kids knows that most of the time, this kind of statement is a bald-faced lie.
Kids are confounding. They are exasperating. They often have no concept of time, or why it is important to not be late for school four out of every five days. They do their homework on your truck’s dashboard on the way to school and they have no compunction about asking you to order food from Doordash when there are plenty of chicken wings still in the fridge from the last Doordash order not even 48 hours prior. They drive you crazy. They rarely “inspire” you do anything except question many, if not all of your lfe choices.
Except for those times that they do, legitimately inspire you. Like how my 16-year-old daughter, Madeline, recently inspired me to buy my first Led Zeppelin album.
On the surface, this might sound utterly insane. Maddie was born in 2008, and she has gone through phases of worshipping Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams and, most recently, a guy who goes by the stage name Role Model. I, however was born in 1968, the year Jimmy Page pulled together the parts that would become the Mighty Zep and the band recorded its debut album, “Led Zeppelin”. I grew up on what we call “Classic Rock”. I know about a million Led Zeppelin songs: “Kashmir”, “Whole Lotta Love”, “Good Times, Bad Times”, “Achilies Last Stand”, “Over The Hills And Far Away”, “Rock and Roll”, and, of course, “Stairway To Heaven”. I know that the song “Houses of the Holy” isn’t on the album “Houses of the Holy” (It’s on “Physical Grafitti”). I know that one of Led Zeppelin’s last big concerts in the U.S. was at the Kingdome, in Seattle. I know that the B-side to the “Immigrant Song” single was “Hey, Hey What Can I Do?”, a non-album track not on “Led Zeppelin III”. I know my Zep music.
Yet, for whatever reason, I had never owned an actual Led Zeppelin album myself.
Growing up, my younger brother had a vinyl copy of “Led Zeppelin IV”, and, I’m pretty sure, cassettes of “Led Zeppelin II” and “Physical Grafitti”, so, it wasn’t like there was no Led Zeppelin in my presence. But…I guess I was too busy using my allowance money on “Kenny Rogers Greatest Hits” and “Sgt. Pepper” to care about picking up a copy of LZ’s seventh studio album, “Presence”.
This past Christmas, Maddie got a record player for one of her gifts. It’s nothing fancy. The brand is Victrola. It looks like a small briefcase when it’s closed. And, she got herself some actual vinyl albums to play on the thing. There are a couple of Taylor Swift records, some jazz thing, and Smokey Robinson’s 1980 album “Warm Thoughts”, which has him looking like the looks like the smoothest pimp in the Wyoming wilderness.
With Maddie re-introducing vinyl into our home, I became inspired to do something that I hadn’t done in more than 30 years: Buy a real, legit record album.
And, after seeing “Becoming Led Zeppelin”, the new documentary about the early years of the band that is actually authorized by the band members, I decided it was time to fix that dent in my musical armor and I ordered a copy my favorite Led Zeppelin album—“In Through The Out Door”.
Yes, you read that right. My favorite record by the biggest band of the 70s, a band known for its mammoth (and mammoth-selling) classics like “Physical Grafitti” and “Led Zeppelin II” is the last complete album the band would ever issue, and the record that many hardcore Zep fans would call the band’s worst. “In Through The Out Door” gets maligned for a few reasons, mostly because LZ fans like to lament “…Out Door” for being the last album that drummer John Bonham made before he drank himself to death in 1980. Another is that Led Zeppelin devotees always thought the band should just pump out more versions of “Black Dog” and “What Is And What Should Never Be” for eternity, and that wasn’t going to happen with John Paul Jones—the band’s bassist, keyboardist, arranger, songwriter and all-around musical secret weapon—taking charge of the recording because Jimmy Page was (reportedly) strung out and not up to his typical level of awesomeness.
“In Through The Out Door” was the first Led Zeppelin album that I really became aware of, and that is probably why it’s my favorite of the band’s catalog. It’s also almost completely different from anything else Led Zeppelin ever did. As creative as Jimmy Page was as a guitarist and producer, and as great/ridiculous Robert Plant was as a singer and lyricist, neither of them had the chops, or guts of John Paul Jones to layer on the late-70s synthesizers like Jones did on “Carouselambra”, texturalize “All My Love” into a lament for Plant’s late son, or push my all-time favorite Zeppelin song, “Fool In The Rain” from a simple bounce into a Brazilian Carnaval breakdown, complete with a whistle blowing to signal the shift in the song’s musical tone. It really is a case of a something different being so different that its differences make it unique.
Or, something like that.
But, as much as I love “In Through The Out Door”, I also can’t say that I had ever had a burning desire to own the record. That was until I saw Maddie spinning her own albums, and became inspired to do something new. Like going In Through The Out Door.