Led Zeppelin
Presence

Swan Song    SS 8416-2  (1976)

Rock/Pop
CD, 7   Tracks, 44:19  Length
01 Achilles Last Stand Jimmy Page; Robert Plant 10:27
02 For Your Life Jimmy Page; Robert Plant 06:24
03 Royal Orleans John Bonham; John Paul Jones; Jimmy Page; Robert Plant 02:59
04 Nobody's Fault But Mine Jimmy Page; Robert Plant 06:13
05 Candy Store Rock Jimmy Page; Robert Plant 04:11
06 Hots On For Nowhere Jimmy Page; Robert Plant 04:42
07 Tea For One Jimmy Page; Robert Plant 09:23
Music Details
Product Details
Packaging Jewel Case
Spars DDD
Sound Stereo
Musicians  &  Credits
Vocals Robert Plant
Guitar Jimmy Page
Drums John Bonham
Bass John Paul Jones
Musician Led Zeppelin
Producer Jimmy Page
Engineer Keith Harwood
Cover by Hipgnosis
Personal Details
Index # 1961
Owner Dave
Tags Hard Rock
User Defined
Purchased New
Notes
Led Zeppelin's seventh album, Presence, is a straight-ahead rocker, that has much more of a "live" feel than some of their previous recordings. Gone are most of the big production flourishes, and in their place the big power trio + vocals sound that made Led Zeppelin such a popular concert band.

The opening "Achilles Last Stand" is a driving, up-tempo rocker, while the closing "Tea For One" is a slow, Chicago-style blues, featuring Plant's moaning vocals and Page's alternatingly sweet, and frenetic solos. Elsewhere, "Royal Orleans" mixes delta blues with Indian music, "Hots On For Nowhere" is a stop-time boogie, and "Candy Store Rock" is heavy metal rockabilly.

---------------------

Presence is the seventh studio album by Led Zeppelin, released by Swan Song Records on 31 March 1976. The cover, inside sleeve and back of the album feature various images of people with a black obelisk-shaped object. Inside the album sleeve the item is referred to simply as "The Object" aka "The Obelisk". It was intended to represent the "force and presence" of Led Zeppelin.

Jimmy Page explained: "There was no working title for the album. The record-jacket designer said 'When I think of the group, I always think of power and force. There's a definite presence there.' That was it. He wanted to call it 'Obelisk'. To me, it was more important what was behind the obelisk. The cover is very tongue-in-cheek, to be quite honest. Sort of a joke on [the film] 2001 A Space Odyessy. I think it's quite amusing."

Jimmy Page made the decision to record the album after Robert Plant sustained serious injuries from a car accident on the Greek island of Rhodes on 5 August 1975, which forced the band to cancel a proposed world tour that was due to commence on 23 August. At this point, Led Zeppelin were arguably at the height of their popularity. When he was taken to a Greek hospital after the accident, Plant recalled:

"I was lying there in some pain trying to get cockroaches off the bed and the guy next to me, this drunken soldier, started singing "The Ocean" from Houses of the Holy."

The background used in the cover photograph is of an artificial marina that was installed inside London's Earl's Court Arena for the annual Earl's Court Boat Show that was held in the winter of 1974–75. This was the same venue where the band played a series of concerts a few months after the boat show, in May 1975.

In 1977 Hipgnosis and George Hardie were nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of best album package.

---------------------

Created at a time of intense turmoil for Led Zeppelin -- they scrapped a planned international tour in the wake of Robert Plant's car accident in Greece in August 1975 -- Presence is a strange, misshapen beast of a record that pulls upon its own tension. With Plant somewhat on the sidelines -- he recorded many of the vocals while in a wheelchair -- Jimmy Page reasserted himself as the primary creative force in the band, helping steer Presence toward a guitar-heavy complexity, perched halfway between a return to roots and unfettered prog. This dichotomy means it feels like Presence sprawls as wildly as Physical Graffiti even though it's half its length: the four epics tend to overshadow the trio of lean rockers that really do hark back to the Chess boogie and rockabilly that informed Zeppelin's earliest work. Each of these three -- "Royal Orleans," "Candy Store Rock," "Hots on for Nowhere" -- plays as snappily as the throwaways on the second half of Physical Graffiti, containing a sexy insouciance; the band almost seems to shrug off how catchy Page's riffs and how thick the grooves of John Bonham and John Paul Jones actually are. No matter how much fun this triptych is, they're lost underneath the shadow of "Achilles Last Stand," a ten-minute exercise in self-styled moody majesty and the turgid blues crawl of closer "Tea for One." In between, there are two unalloyed masterpieces that channel all of the pain of the period into cinematic drama: a molten blues called "Nobody's Fault But Mine" and "For Your Life," as sharp, cinematic, and pained as Zeppelin ever were. Added together, Presence winds up as something less than the sum of its parts but its imbalance also means that it's a record worth revisiting; it seems different upon each revisit and is always compelling.