Led Zeppelin- Houses of the Holy 50th- Jimmy Page 3-27

The release of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy in Spring 1973 is very vivid in my memory on the eve of its golden anniversary, no doubt for a number of reasons. Even before you opened it, the cover art was dazzling, the photography color-saturated and other-worldly. The American blues influences, which had informed so much of Led Zeppelin’s first three albums, had by Houses of the Holy either evolved or evaporated, depending on your point of view. The songs “Over the Hills and Far Away”, the sublime “The Rain Song”, the Jimmy Page ear candy “Dancing Days”, the whimsical “D’Yer Mak’er”, and the John Paul Jones’ smoldering “No Quarter” may not have been deemed ready for American Top 40 radio, but with over 11,000,000 copies sold just in the U.S., Led Zeppelin was rapidly changing how the pop music industry would do business for the remainder of the 20th Century.

Jimmy Page is my guest the week of March 27 here In the Studio on the fiftieth anniversary of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, ranked by Rolling Stone magazine at #278 on their latest Top 500 Albums of All Time. –Redbeard