Presence (Led Zeppelin, 1976)

Presence is the "jump the shark" moment for Led Zeppelin, the point at which the fair-weather fans cleaved away from the devoted ones. While I think most of their contemporaries still would have relished the kind of success the album ultimately attained, it was way below par for a band of Zeppelin's caliber. In general, every band trips up at some point: Deep Purple with Who Do We Think We Are!, Black Sabbath with Technical Ecstasy. It would be strange for a band, particularly in the 1970's when corporate handling was a tad lax, not to have a slip-up at some point.

As a product of a time of great personal hardship for the group, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant are shamelessly defensive about how much they like this album. However, they are in a serious minority, with far more willing to call this the worst Zeppelin album (Coda, a collection of leftovers, doesn't count). In fact, the criticism made me nervous album picking it up at all, making it the last Zeppelin album I acquired (again, not counting Coda). All in all, it's an OK album. The first track, "Achilles Last Stand" is highly unrepresentative of the rest of the album. It's a ten minute slab of awesome proto-metal that kind of falls somewhere between Rush and Iron Maiden. Unfortunately, it's a tough act to follow, with most of the rest of the songs being lightweight shuffles with little thought. They are pleasant enough to listen to, but totally overshadowed by even the weaker parts of the previous year's Physical Graffiti. By the time the band gets back to channeling the slow blues, done so successfully on albums past, "Tea for One" just seems to be too little too late. Overall in tone, this was Page's album on which to shine. John Paul Jones, who would sometimes share the leads on keyboards, largely takes a back seat on these performances.

The band would rebound somewhat from Presence three years later with In Through the Out Door. Jones would reassert himself heavily on that album, which also included a number of latter-day fan favorites. It's different in tone that the rest of the Zeppelin catalog, and may have been a sign of things to come in the 1980's, with Plant and Jones more in control, but with the sudden death of John Bonham in 1980, the band elected not to continue (in stark contrast to the similarly-challenged Who).