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The band had worked hard to cultivate an aloof image, believing that it helped sales. But it was the Rolling Stones, not Led Zeppelin, who were bagging magazine front covers and having society author and social butterfly Truman Capote trailing them around America on tour. One of these, No Quarter, the album’s only downbeat track, had been attempted during sessions for the fourth LP. Between them, Jones’s grand piano, bass and synthesiser, Page’s eerie-sounding guitar, Plant’s treated vocals and a restrained John Bonham, conjured up a mysterious song about an unspecified snowbound rendezvous. Few songs in the Led Zeppelin canon are as divisive – even within the band itself – as this reggae-esque romp.
Lyrics
Bonham and Page played as if they were reading each other’s minds, and Plant ad-libbed the vocal to which he added a James Brown pastiche (‘Has anybody seen the bridge?’). After further sessions at London’s Island and Olympic studios, with engineers Keith Harwood, Andy Johns and George Chkiantz, Zeppelin went back on the road in America in June. In between dates, they checked into New York’s Electric Lady studios with Kramer to mix the Strargroves tracks. Plant’s lyrics referenced Zeppelin’s globetrotting adventures, with ‘sweet Calcutta rain’ a nod to a trip to India the singer and Page had made before starting the album.
How did the song resonate with audiences upon its release?
Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin IV/Houses of the Holy/Physical Graffiti - Pitchfork
Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin IV/Houses of the Holy/Physical Graffiti.
Posted: Tue, 24 Feb 2015 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Houses Of The Holy has the distinction of being one of only two Zeppelin albums (the other is 1979’s In Through The Out Door) on which Plant doesn’t slip into caveman mode even once and sound like’s he’s coming to drag your daughter/mother/grandma back to his lair. The Song Remains The Same also had a cinematic, larger-than-life feel that Zeppelin would go back to on Achilles’ Last Stand, the dominant track on 1976’s Presence. But while the latter track sounded like the end of the world, The Song Remains The Same sounded like a band having the time of their lives. While progressive and glam rock were thriving in the outside world, Zeppelin created music in a bubble. Nothing ever seemed to make its way in, apart from the blues, soul and 50s jukebox records they’d grown up with. Page had come to the sessions loaded with song ideas worked up beforehand at his home studio.
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From thereon in, however, Led Zeppelin turned The Rain Song into a courtly, contemplative ballad with an enigmatic quality that stands apart among the best Led Zeppelin songs. Drawing upon the changing of the seasons and the elusive qualities of love, Plant’s poetic lyric (“This is the mystery of the quotient/Upon us all, a little rain must fall”) proved the ideal foil for the band’s sweeping performance, enhanced to near-perfection by Jones’ Mellotron-derived strings. To assist them in their quest, Page and co rehired Eddie Kramer, the highly respected studio engineer renowned for his work with Jimi Hendrix and also on Led Zeppelin II.
Composition and recording
Showcasing one of Houses Of The Holy’s most assured performances, Dancing Days reputedly pleased the band so much that studio engineer Eddie Kramer recalled them dancing around the garden at Stargroves while they listened to a playback of the final mix. Despite experiencing stratospheric levels of stardom, Led Zeppelin were still hungry to create new music, so while they embarked on a lengthy world tour following the release of “Led Zeppelin IV”, they began informal rehearsals shortly after returning to the UK in 1972. Initial get-togethers took place in Puddletown, in Dorset, before the band discovered a suitable out-of-studio location for more intensive work. This residential approach had worked wonders when they decamped to Hampshire’s Headley Grange to lay down much of “Led Zeppelin IV”, but this time Zeppelin settled on Stargroves, a country mansion in Hampshire owned by Mick Jagger.
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Page composed most of Led Zeppelin's music, particularly early in their career, while Plant wrote most of the lyrics. Jones's keyboard-based compositions later became central to their music, which featured increasing experimentation. The latter half of their career saw a series of record-breaking tours that earned the group a reputation for excess and debauchery. Although they remained commercially and critically successful, their touring and output, which included Presence (1976) and In Through the Out Door (1979), grew limited, and the group disbanded following Bonham's death in 1980, feeling that they would not be "Led Zeppelin" without him. Since then, the surviving former members have sporadically collaborated and participated in one-off concerts.
One interpretation of the meaning behind “Houses of the Holy” suggests that the song explores the idea of transcendence and the search for higher truths. The lyrics paint vivid imagery, evoking a sense of otherworldliness and awe. The “houses” referred to in the song are often seen as symbolic manifestations of various spiritual realms or dimensions.
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Several songs subsequently became fixtures in the group's live set, including "The Song Remains the Same", "The Rain Song" and "No Quarter". Other material recorded at the sessions, including the title track, was shelved and released on the later albums Physical Graffiti (1975) and Coda (1982). All instruments and vocals were provided by the band members Robert Plant (vocals), Jimmy Page (guitar), John Paul Jones (bass, keyboards), and John Bonham (drums). The cover was the first for the band to be designed by Hipgnosis and was based on a photograph taken at Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland. They were so happy with it that engineer Kramer spoke about watching the ebullient four members dancing in line on the lawn at Stargroves as the track played from the Rolling Stones Mobile recording unit. Among the joys is hearing Page lace slide guitar over the main riff, which created a degree of challenge in recreating the song live.
Led Zeppelin encourages listeners to open their minds to the exploration of these metaphysical realms, urging them to embark on a quest for enlightenment and knowledge beyond the confines of their physical existence. Classic Album Sundays tells the stories behind the albums that have shaped our culture and in some cases, our lives. On May 5, Zeppelin broke US box office records playing to 56,800 at Florida’s Tampa Stadium. They toured with a private jet, groupies at their beck and call, and enough booze and drugs to make them think their heads had exploded – or, at least, been jammed between the buffers of two railway carriages. Which just leaves the two tracks that have been polarising opinion for 40 years. Side One of Houses Of The Holy ended with a circular funk rock jam called The Crunge.
They’d scoop ’em up after the encore and whisk them away to the airport while the crowd were still at the stadium cheering for more.” Never the most enthusiastic flyers, Zeppelin found their first craft, a Falcon 20 business jet, cramped and uncomfortable. When a bad bout of turbulence threatened to knock the plane out of the sky following the penultimate show of the tour’s first leg, they decided to jettison the Falcon for good. Peter Grant tasked tour manager Richard Cole with finding a new plane, demanding he spare no expense for opulence and safety – in that order. A North American tour, the band's first since 1977, was scheduled to commence on 17 October 1980. On 24 September, Bonham was picked up by Led Zeppelin assistant Rex King to attend rehearsals at Bray Studios.[89] During the journey, Bonham asked to stop for breakfast, where he downed four quadruple vodkas (from 16 to 24 US fl oz (470 to 710 ml)), with a ham roll.
He said there was something sinister about the image, though his sister disagreed. The programme ended with Gates returning to Giant's Causeway and listening to the album on a portable player, after which he said that a great weight had been lifted from him.[23] Samantha also appeared on the back cover of the band's 1976 album Presence. The song simply roars out of the traps, with Page’s power chords urged on by John Bonham and John Paul Jones’ surging rhythm section, and it makes for one of rock’s most explosive curtain raisers.
“Houses of the Holy” stands as a pivotal track in Led Zeppelin’s discography. It showcases the band’s continued evolution and exploration of new musical territories. With its intricate melodies and thought-provoking lyrics, the song represents a defining moment in Led Zeppelin’s artistic journey. Even though Led Zeppelin traveled around the world in a swanky, custom-painted jumbo jet, the trek (and no doubt, the cumulative effect of their previous several years) left the band exhausted. It would be 18 months before they toured again, and nearly two years before they released their next record, 1975's double-album masterpiece Physical Graffiti.
No Quarter swept Houses Of The Holy out of the daylight and into the Arctic gloom. “I knew instantly [No Quarter] was a very durable piece and something we could take on the road and expand,” Jones told Zeppelin historian Dave Lewis. Houses Of The Holy, one of LZ’s most epic albums, is a showcase of folk and softcore classic metal mastery. The album, although met with mixed reviews, was confirmed triple platinum in 1989. As Procol Harum's lyricist, Keith wrote the words to "A Whiter Shade Of Pale." We delve into that song and find out how you can form a band when you don't sing or play an instrument.
“Houses of the Holy” is distinguished by its humour and willingness to play with other forms of music such as the James Brown tribute “The Crunge” and the reggae and 50’s pop influenced “D’yer Mak’er”. They were unabashed in showing their admiration for other music forms, Robert Plant telling the NME that he wished he could write something as superb as Mendelssohn’s “Fingal’s Cave”. And as one of the 60’s most eminent session players, Jimmy Page was well-versed in many forms of music including folk, Indian, flamenco, classical and more.
Never one for self-aggrandisement, it’s difficult to overstate his role on the whole album. He’s there throughout, sometimes in the foreground but more often than not multi-tasking at the back. But Led Zeppelin and its follow-up Led Zeppelin II both cracked the Top 10 in Britain and America. Those who dismissed the group as stone-age grunters were further disarmed by 1970’s Led Zeppelin III, which included a clutch of almost tender folk songs.
Rather like that record’s Gallows Pole, Over The Hills And Far Away was instilled with a quiet-loud dynamic, albeit one stemming from one of Page’s more languid acoustic guitar figures. Plant’s vivid lyrics speak of a rambling minstrel with a wandering eye (“Many times I’ve loved and many times been bitten/Many times I’ve gazed along the open road”) while the band get the balance bang on, doling out light and shade in equal measure. After the release of their illustrious untitled fourth album (usually referred to as “Led Zeppelin IV”), Led Zeppelin became bona fide superstars. As they were now ‘The Biggest Band in the World’, the band members were now fairly confident in their musical abilities, and with this confidence came the freedom to pursue their own musical interests. Their first two albums were heavy-duty rock n’ roll fuelled by turbo-charged blues but as the band matured, so did their music.
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