Synthgirl

I gotcha, no problem, haha. And I adore Stevie's use of it as well. Especially those lovely lush orchestral strings on "Village Ghetto Land" which I believe are all GX-1.

SGR

That's a great description of its strengths. There's something very hypnotic about the album - probably due to the excellence of the rhythm section as you said. It just keeps chugging along. If I ever got a steelworking job, and had to bring one album to accompany me throughout my day, Presence might be it.

That said, In Through The Out Door is quite underrated too. Wouldn't say I like it better than Presence, the synths are sometimes enjoyable and other times feel aimless. But every time I listen to it, it does make me curious what their next album would've sounded like, especially had they continued in the direction of ITTOD.

Chula Vista

Presence: The band had planned a huge world tour for 1976 since Physical Graffiti was still selling like crazy. Then during a vacation prior to the tour Plant & family were in a bad car accident so the tour was cancelled.

Page came up with the idea to record an album. The band convened (with Plant in wheelchair) to record but they had no new material. Page took over coming up with riffs and ideas like crazy. More than any other, Presence is Page's album.

Notice there's no ballads, no acoustic guitars, and no keys - just one tasty Page riff after the other.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Chula Vista

Pray do tell!

In Through the Out Door: Planned album that Page & Bonham were mostly AWOL during the writing process, as both were bogged down with addictions by that point. As noted, JPJ had gotten the new synth and he and Plant got bored sitting around waiting on the other two so they did the brunt of the writing. Page even gave Plant/Jones primary credit in the liner notes of the album.

If Presence is a Page album then ITTOD belongs to JPJ and Plant.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Queen Boo

Honestly that's one of the reasons it feels lacking for me, some of my favorite Zeppelin tracks are the ballads and acoustic songs, that B side is what makes III the best Zeppelin album IMO.

Also The Rain Song is probably my favorite Zeppelin song, I like a little schmaltz mixed in with my hard rock I guess.

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SGR

Well that explains why you like In Through The The Out Door

Hopefully not carrot cake

Chula Vista

Did ya know that George Harrison 'inspired' that song? At a party he complained to Page that Zeppelin didn't do enough ballads.

Page took the challenge and wrote The Rain Song, and in a wink to Harrison, used the same opening chords as George's Beatles song Something.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Trollheart

Jesus Christ! You're even older than I am! Was this forum here in the 11th century???
Isn't "Tea for One" a ballad? Slow blues tune anyway.

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Chula Vista

You answered your own question. It's a blues number.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Mucha na Dziko

tbh it's not that hard to invent that progression. At least the beginning. It's just C, then Cmaj7, then C7. My guess is any guitarist ever thought of that, like during practice.

I don't mean to put this Harrisong down or anything, but the "inspiration" bit seems a bit stretchy for me. Me and my band made a song that starts with A, Amaj7 (then he goes into G something) and it sounds at first like "Something". Our guitarist came up with that, and he only noticed it after I told him it kinda sounds like "Something" at the beginning.
https://soundcloud.com/user-44099143...social_sharing

I usually dislike Zeppelin, while I'm a Beatle fanatic, but this piece of trivia is one of the most not-believable thing I've ever read (you're not the first person I see talking about this).

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