It wasn't just that it lacked heaviness. Most of the songs just felt like they were going through the motions without any real love or idea of what they were doing. This first became apparent with a lot of what was on Presence, but ITTOD didn't even have tunes like Achillies Last Stand and Nobody's Fault But Mine to save it.
Would have been interesting to hear what they put out next.
I was in Free Cloud records yesterday and Richard had 10 copies of IV, all sealed brand new. I don't think they are reissues by WEA, but perhaps are the Mexican pressings I've seen before.
I didn't buy one, if I don't know the label/company then I won't throw good money away no matter what record it is.
Reminds me I'll finally get to my vinyl copies of II and IV this week, we'll see if they are good after I clean them and check them out.
I was in Free Cloud records yesterday and Richard had 10 copies of IV, all sealed brand new. I don't think they are reissues by WEA, but perhaps are the Mexican pressings I've seen before.
I didn't buy one, if I don't know the label/company then I won't throw good money away no matter what record it is.
Reminds me I'll finally get to my vinyl copies of II and IV this week, we'll see if they are good after I clean them and check them out.
Achilles Last Stand is up with Black Dog and a couple on the first album with my disliked tunes of the band.
In Through The Outdoor may have been not near as heavy as other albums but being heavy to me does not automatically mean better. It was really a hit or miss album for some people understandably but for me it was a hit because it was a bit different. Can't expect a band to want to do the same thing all the time.
Achilles Last Stand is up with Black Dog and a couple on the first album with my disliked tunes of the band. In Through The Outdoor may have been not near as heavy as other albums but being heavy to me does not automatically mean better. It was really a hit or miss album for some people understandably but for me it was a hit because it was a bit different. Can't expect a band to want to do the same thing all the time.
The essence of a great band is it's ability to evolve and not rooted in the same musical structures. Not all of their albums sound alike which is to me what drew them to me in the first place. Their last two albums really showed a disconnect among the members. Plant's reticense over the bad luck that shadowed them from late 1975, Page's addictions, Bonham's erratic behavior and Jones' independence which irked Page and the rest of the group.
It took me awhile to latch on to "In Through The Out Door" but it did grew on me eventually.
How does a rock legend keep himself busy and engaged after he’s already seen and done it all? In the case of Led Zeppelin‘s John Paul Jones, the answer appears to be “write an opera.”
Jones recently discussed the project, which is based on August Strindberg’s ‘The Ghost Sonata,’ with Red Carpet TV News, saying he was drawn to opera because “It’s unlike anything else. It’s the emotion, the passion.”
It also sounds like it’s relatively slow going for Jones, who said that while he’s “halfway through the first act,” writing a piece of music for this medium presents some unique challenges. Asked to name the biggest one, he responded, “The sheer scale of it, I think. I don’t know. I’m probably about to find out what the challenges are.”
Talk soon turned, of course, to the possibility of a Led Zeppelin reunion, and although Jones refused to rule out the possibility, he did point out that he’s got other things going on at the moment. Saying he only has time to “do little gigs that I don’t have to prepare too much for,” he discouraged rumors of a 2014 tour by saying, “2014′s full of opera for me at the moment.”
25 Years Ago: Jimmy Page’s ‘Outrider’ Album Released
by Jeff Giles June 19, 2013 6:00 AM
Jimmy Page was a band player before he started Led Zeppelin, and he returned to the group ranks after Zeppelin’s breakup in 1980, starting the Firm with former Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers. But by the late ’80s, he was ready to step out on his own.
The result was Page’s first proper solo release, 1988′s ‘Outrider,’ which found one of rock’s most respected guitarists working with a cast of characters that included former Firm bassist Tony Franklin, Zeppelin drummer John Bonham‘s son Jason, and vocalists John Miles and Chris Farlowe — as well as Led Zep singer Robert Plant, who contributed vocals to one song, ‘The Only One.’
If that description makes ‘Outrider’ sound like a bit of a hodgepodge, there’s good reason. Although Page was initially rumored to be recording an ambitious double-album set whose songs would be grouped according to genre, those plans had to be scaled back after he was forced to start from scratch partway through the demoing process.
“I remember looking around for some demos and sort of wondering where all my tapes were,” he later explained to Brad Tolinski, author of ‘Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page.’ “There was so much going on around my house and in my life at that time, I just figured they’d turn up somewhere. Well, they did turn up — as bootlegs! Someone who was pretending to be a friend stole the tapes.”
That setback put a completely different spin on the ‘Outrider’ recording process — although as Page went on to admit to Tolinski, he might not have made it a double LP anyway. “Because I was shaping ‘Outrider’ as I went along, I put more work into it than any other album I’ve ever worked on,” he claimed. “Consequently, I didn’t fancy doing a double — it would have been a masochistic task.”
Fortunately, Page had the luxury of working within a fairly sophisticated home studio system, which allowed him to build the tracks as he went along without racking up astronomical bills. “There weren’t any demos…Everything was basically made up in the studio, you see,” he explained during an interview with Guitar World. “I just play the guitar, don’t I? That is my characteristic and it’s my identity as you hear it. I suppose as far as this album goes, in a way it’s almost like a back-to-basics album.”
He ended up with a nine-song set comprised of eight originals and a cover of Leon Russell’s ‘Hummingbird,’ with three instrumentals mixed in among the six vocal numbers. Focused on the arrangements, which included a ton of guitar overdubs, Page left responsibility for the lyrics to his singers. As he put it to Guitar World, “I don’t sing, so I think if a guy’s doing the lyrics, he’s gonna sing them with more conviction than if he’s doing yours, so to speak. That was the concept there, anyway.”
Although ‘Outrider’ cracked the Top 30 on both sides of the Atlantic, it wasn’t the sort of critical or commercial success he’d enjoyed with Led Zeppelin — and his former band’s legacy shadowed the new album in more ways than one. As Page later admitted to Tolinski, “When I went to the U.S. to do publicity for the ‘Outrider’ album, all I heard was ‘Robert said this’ and ‘Robert said that.’ It was really bothersome. I continually had to say, ‘Aren’t we supposed to be talking about ‘Outrider’?”
On the other hand, as he told Guitar World, “I started a solo career prob’ly pretty late in the day, possibly.” At the time, he expressed hope that ‘Outrider’ was just “the first projected element” of an ongoing series of solo records, saying, “And then, each album that I do is gonna be different, hopefully. So this was just like … it gave a taste of the different guitar styles that I do.”
As fans know, things didn’t exactly turn out that way; in fact, Page wouldn’t resurface with a new album until 1993, when he returned with the short-lived David Coverdale duo project Coverdale/Page before reuniting with Plant for a pair of recordings in the ’90s. These days, Page’s musical ambitions have taken a back seat to his duties as the Zeppelin archivist, but once the band’s next round of reissues is out of the way, who knows? One of these days, maybe we’ll get to hear a proper follow-up to ‘Outrider.’
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