From the Vault: Led Zeppelin's In Through The Out Door

Aha! You forgot about In Through The Out Door, didn't you?

This often overlooked Led Zeppelin album is one of my absolute favorites. One summer it was the only tape (yes...I said tape) that I had in my jeep, and so I listened to it no less than five dozen times. When you listen to an album that many times, it becomes part of your brain waves forever. You memorize the changes between the songs so well that, forever after, when you hear one of the individual songs on the radio you expect to hear the next song from the album and it seems almost PREPOSTEROUS that anything else could come next. That's the relationship I have to In Through The Out Door.

This album has some sublime songs on it, like the opener "In the evening," which has that classic, Zeppelin heaviness about it, to the oddball jump-blues sound of "Hot Dog," to the eerie, wending darkness of "Carouselambra." And let's not forget the bittersweet "All of my love," and the fun, kitschiness of "Fool in the rain."

After dismissing this album from my mind (but not my heart) for a few years, I took a step further back in the technological timeline and bought a copy of the LP, which comes in this cool brown paper bag cover-slip. And yes...the album still holds up even after all this time. It wasn't just a summertime fling. I still feel a chill go up my spine during "Carouselambra" when the song breaks into those weird, heavily distorted guitar riffs as Robert Plant wails incomprehensibly. Buy the album, you just might feel that chill as well...