Houses of the Holy

Certain Songs #910: Led Zeppelin – “Houses of The Holy”

June 17, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: Physical Graffiti
Year: 1975

While Houses of The Holy would probably been a better album with both “The Rover” and “Houses of The Holy” on it in the place of “The Crunge” and “Dy’er Ma’ker,” those songs ended up making Physical Graffiti as great as it was, so things worked out just fine.

And as a bonus, putting “Houses of The Holy” on Physical Graffiti put Led Zeppelin in that small group of artists that put the song that was supposed to be the title track of their previous album on a future album instead. Which is such a small group, I can’t even think of any others, even though I know that there are.

Certain Songs #906: Led Zeppelin – “The Ocean”

June 13, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: Houses of The Holy
Year: 1973

Led Zeppelin closed out Houses of The Holy with one of the most purely fun songs in their entire canon, the incredibly weird “The Ocean,” which somehow welds an impossible drumbeat, an acapella bridge and a 50’s pastiche closing into a seamless whole.

Let’s start with that drumbeat: in order to match the riff that Page & Jones are playing, John Bonham has to lay off on the snare beat every fourth measure, giving the whole song a stuttering feeling, like it’s drunk as fuck and is just about to fall over at any second.

Certain Songs #905: Led Zeppelin – “Dancing Days”

June 12, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: Houses of The Holy
Year: 1973

Houses of the Holy was a weird album.

Or at least to me, it’s always been a weird album. And so I’ve always kinda underrated it. Part of it was that it had the first two Led Zeppelin songs I ever really heard: “Over The Hills and Far Away” and “Dy’er Maker.” It also had couple of slow ones that took me forever to warm up to (and I’ve never quite got “The Rain Song”), as well as songs with weird rhythms, insanely high-pitched vocals and just about anything except for a straight-out pile-driving riff song like “Whole Lotta Love,” “Out on the Tiles” or “Black Dog.”

Certain Songs #904: Led Zeppelin – “Over The Hills and Far Away”

June 11, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: Houses of The Holy
Year: 1973

This is the first Led Zeppelin song I ever heard.

Or at least the first Led Zeppelin song I ever heard that I subsequently knew was by Led Zeppelin. Released as a single, “Over The Hills and Far Away” got a lot of airplay on KYNO-AM during the exact moment when I was becoming a pop music fanatic, so it’s one of those songs that I memorized by heart as a kid, only to fully discover as an adult that it had dozens of layers I’d completely missed.

And it’s probably a top 5 Led Zeppelin song for me now. Which doesn’t make me unique, as “Over The Hills and Far Away” is one of those Zep songs that is eternal and timeless, isn’t it? It grabs you from the very opening with Jimmy Page’s acoustic guitar doubling back upon itself, enjoying the lick that he’d come up with so much that he probably waved Robert Plant off in the studio, as if to say, “hang on, I’m really enjoying this.”