Welcome to Defector Music Club, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album. Today, Israel Daramola, Dave McKenna, Ray Ratto, David Roth, and Lauren Theisen discuss Led Zeppelin's penultimate studio album Presence on what is very nearly its 49th birthday.
Israel Daramola: OK, I want to start this off by clearing out for Dave and Ray here a little bit. So guys, please tell us why we’re talking Led Zeppelin today.
Dave McKenna: Thanks for letting this record be the record of record! Means the world to me, because this band and this record meant the world to me.
I was already a Zeppelin fan because you pretty much had to be in my world. I’d already played “Stairway” backward and hell if I didn’t hear “My sweet Satan!” (I still haven’t figured that one out yet.) But Presence was the first Zeppelin record that came out after I became a rock record-buying guy, using my own paper route money, and that is a massive step in fandom and life. I bought it the day it came out at Giant Music in Falls Church, Va., and I swear I remember the moment I put the needle on my dad’s record player down and “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” kicked off. (I only learned in prepping for this exercise that I started out on Side 2. But by god it worked out fine!)
Relistening took me right back. What a great time to be alive and young and dumb and drunk. I pitied all mofos who weren’t around more with every verse. No fooling. I had Led Zeppelin! I was laughing at how many stops and starts there are on this record. I’d forgotten that pretty much every song has a mid-tune break then rocks right back into things. I was air drumming all over again on “Nobody’s Fault But Mine.” And pretty much everything else. Greatest air drumming album ever?
Ray Ratto: We’re talking Led Zeppelin because Lauren said we were. As far as being special to me, well, I never had the magical force plow through me like Dave, though I support AYDD as a way to go through one’s formative years. I had done the earlier six records, and though I thought “Achilles Last Stand” was Bonham at his best/most unhinged, I thought the rest of the album was a bit uneven, and “Tea For One” kind of struck me as a “We’re running out of studio time so let’s bang this out and go” song. Then again, I always thought "South Bound Saurez" was grossly underrated, so maybe the problem is mine.
Lauren Theisen: I’ll give some context for why I picked Presence. I’m very conscious of the five Zeppelin songs I knew around the time that their catalogue made it to iTunes in 2007: “Immigrant Song,” which was in School Of Rock; “Black Dog,” which sounds like a song you never heard for the first time; “Rock And Roll,” also a standard; “Stairway To Heaven,” which was scripture for the guitar-playing boys at school; and “Kashmir,” which blew my mind when I heard it on the radio for the first time—both because I couldn’t place the instruments and for the way it just stretched on, and on, and on.
None of these songs are on Presence, which was Zeppelin’s penultimate record and the one that really started to signal their downfall. It was made quickly, during a time of struggle for the band. It did not carry particularly lasting pop hits. And just in general it feels to me like the least-discussed of all the main Zeppelin records. Even In Through The Out Door usually sparks vociferous debate, and holds the honor of being their last.
But Presence maintains a significant place in my head because of the first time I heard “Achilles Last Stand,” also on the radio. It’s a song that would probably annoy some people if they didn’t know what to expect, because it also goes on forever, without the same sonic innovation of “Kashmir.” But it kind of knocked me over as a kid—this epic, endless, charging rock song delivered to me by the familiar voice of Robert Plant. Anyway, I just want Presence to get a little bit of love.
Israel: I am going to sound like a child here a little bit but my own history of Led Zeppelin started in high school, mostly by knowing very specific types of guys starting bands who were really into classic hard rock. But revisiting the band this past week for this, I’m struck by how many of their songs I know mostly because of That ’70s Show. At any rate, I thought Presence was interesting but maybe doesn’t have any of the more pronounced or … let's call it virile magic of their more “classic” songs except in moments. It feels like an album for the purists, which I respect but definitely feel unqualified to properly talk about.
Ray: There’s no such thing as unqualified, especially with a band that had fewer “purists” than “deep devotees.” Especially Jimmy Page, who had a very “If you don’t like Clapton or Betts or Robertson or Kirwan, there’s also this” kind of vibe. Stand tall, Iz. Your chops are not to be disputed.
David Roth: I also came to Zeppelin in high school, if in a way that more befits my age than Israel’s. They hadn’t invented That ’70s Show at the time; the culture, as a whole, was not conceptually prepared even for the concept of names like “Topher Grace” or “Ashton Kutcher,” let alone the stark reality of their on-camera presence. I knew Led Zeppelin because they were on rock radio every day and I listened to rock radio every day, and because I knew that the reason they were on the radio every day, two decades after they ceased to be a band, was because the consensus at the time was that they were The Greatest.
This was not something I remember anyone ever exactly telling me, and it wasn’t what I thought myself—just among their radio peers, I thought The Rolling Stones were cooler/scarier and personally enjoyed Creedence Clearwater Revival much more—but it was an opinion that I understood to be settled and correct and so worthy of respect; somehow I was an institutionalist at age 14. So when I was able to buy CDs, eight at a time through the mail from Columbia House or BMG, I figured Zeppelin was a good place to start, like learning phonics before you learn how to read. Looking back at that, I feel less aggrieved—Zeppelin is cool by me, I don’t listen to them much now but enjoyed listening to this record for what was more or less the first time—than confused at how passively I accepted all that. In this case, I at least know it wasn’t a New Jersey thing. Our radio stations didn’t invent Getting The Led Out at 3 p.m. or whatever. I think everyone was doing that.
Dave: Israel, I wanna party hard with the guy who feels unqualified to properly talk about rock and roll! Never met such a man! Back to me: I saw Led Zeppelin in May 1977, they had no other studio albums between Presence and that tour. The week after I saw ‘em, the New York Times put them as perhaps “the biggest‐drawing concert attraction in the history of live entertainment.”
Bigger than Mozart? Wow! But they were as mysterious as they were big. This is pre-MTV, pre-cable, pre-internet. There were no Led Zeppelin interviews. They barely even had singles—only 16 non-promotional singles ever released by my count. (And no, “Stairway to Heaven” was never a single!) You only got Led Zeppelin through the radio and their albums, and you had no idea what they even looked like unless you saw ‘em. The mystique surely is why even the cover of Presence rocked my world. Taught me what an “obelisk” was and I’m pretty sure I’ve only used “obelisk” ever since in relation to the Presence cover!
So getting to see them after this record was a massive deal for me. I got the Led Zep full monty that night: Jimmy Page playing with a theremin and a bow while wearing a white satin suit with snakes stitched all over is so very mockable. But I’ll not have your mockery! I’ve gotten so much mileage outta actually seeing a Zeppelin show, as you guys know too well. Oh wow, what’s this?
Lauren: Something that strikes me about Zeppelin, and I realized this while listening this week, is that they come off more like business partners than old buddies. Compared to the boyish camaraderie of, say, The Beatles, who were mythologized by their movies, Zeppelin feels like four very talented musicians collaborating in a very professional way. And Presence is kind of a weird one in part because it’s almost a Plant/Page side project. The singer and guitarist wrote most of it together in California while Plant was recovering from a car crash, while John Paul Jones and John Bonham were absent. Page then went on to take charge in the studio, and you can really hear this as a guitar-first effort where he’s following what sounds best to him. (Contrast it with the next release, where he was all messed up on heroin and Jones’s keyboards took more of a role.) Plant, too, sounds a little weakened and distant, unable to give a full oomph to his voice, and so it all just sounds like someone messed with the levers on the Led Zeppelin machine.
Israel: Now, I’m just imagining a small town high school rocked into madness by the mere name of “Wilmer Valderrama.”
David: I think in a lot of ways suburbia has never recovered from that knowledge.
Ray: My rule of thumb has always been what I call the Rule Of Thirds. Give me a band’s third album and the third song on any album and I’ll tell you if they have legs (my only exception to this was Stage Fright by The Band, which is not their best). LZ definitely had legs, but Presence struck and still strikes me as the start of their descent as a band that liked working together. I think it may be because I tend to distrust overdubs, and Presence seemed to have more of those than the standard Led Zeppelin album. In other words, Lauren seems to have this pretty well sussed. As for Wilmer Valderrama, he kind of lost me at NCIS.
David: I’d understood this record to be an afterthought, and not even a relative oddity in the way In Through The Out Door is, and had not really listened to it much before this, which is part of why I was glad we picked it. I could talk about Led Zeppelin IV for an hour without ever actively engaging my brain, I know basically the whole record by heart without (again) ever affirmatively choosing any of that, but the kind of flawed, polarizing, downside-of-the-career catalog was just not on my radar at all. Of the songs on Presence, I think “Achilles Last Stand” was maybe the only one I’d ever really heard more than once or twice. They still sounded like Led Zeppelin songs, which is to say I mostly noticed how loud and heavy and cool the drums sounded, and experienced some mild cringe symptoms at the most British men ever to put their shit on wax trying to play the blues. But I enjoyed it as something that was dated but not stuffy or dull.
Israel: One thing I did really appreciate about this band, even in high school, was that they had a real mystique to them. Not just because we were too young to have seen them at their peak but there was just such a legend to their expertise as musicians, as evidenced by how many people had to learn “Stairway to Heaven.” That’s a kind of thing that no artist can really have anymore. I think any musician making Lord Of The Rings references in their songs would be dismissed as nerd music, but mostly because they’d probably be playing World of Warcraft on a Twitch stream in 2025.
I really enjoyed “Tea for One,” a great album closer, another lost art form. What were the records that stood out for everyone else?
Lauren: So “Achilles Last Stand” and “Nobody’s Fault” are rightfully the standouts. “For Your Life” and “Candy Store Rock” are both pretty droppable. But I thought “Royal Orleans” was a very fun, kind of dancey track, and then it closes on a real high note with “Hots On For Nowhere” and “Tea For One.” The penultimate song is just really assured, old-school Zeppelin rock, and then the final track very much sounds to me like zoning out on downers. It just sort of hangs around in your ear, disorienting you and calming you at the same time. That was the diamond in the rough I feel like I “discovered’ by digging into this record.
Ray: I think my bias against “Tea For One” is my bias against 10-minute riffs in general. This was the era of long and (for me) self-indulgent meanderings—listen to the Allman Brothers’ Live At Fillmore East if you want the full 23-minute “Whipping Post” experience—and I sort of sit now at the “unless you have something to say that needs 10 minutes, say it in five” school of thought. Not because artists need stifling, but because they need to know not every note was French-kissed by God.
David: I don’t feel that way about long songs, although I think 1) Ray is right that there’s a limit and 2) it’s funny the extent to which our respective opinions on this matter are reflected in how we write. I am a sucker for long and digressive guitar-driven music, and there’s a lot of that going on here, but I was surprised at how much “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” hit for me. That’s one of the more overt blues-quoting bits on the record, and has some of the most obvious Zeppelin Moves in it, but it had been long enough since I heard any of those sonic moves that I was like nodding and saying “hell yeah” to myself every time they did that thing they do.
Dave: Roth that makes me feel better about how hard that song hit me all over again! The harmonica break could be played by anybody with big lungs, but by god it’s thrilling! (Israel, your “Stairway” reference reminds me I really have to make a disclosure here. Not for journalistic and/or ethical purposes. Just cuz it’s boss: I was on the witnesses list for the Stairway to Heaven trial. Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, Dave McKenna ... It’s a long story. As you were.)
Ray: You are, as has been noted previously, a god.
David: Yeah, the harmonica heroics in there were also a bit that reminded me of what I liked about them in the first place, that signature delirious overstatement. I was trying to think, while listening to this, how they prepared me for other bands that I’d like more later in life; I feel like they were formative in a way, but more in approach than in sound. They’re just kind of galloping through shit full tilt for as long as seems necessary. I would come to like other bands that did that sort of thing with a very different gait and approach—Arbouretum, Wooden Shjips, Endless Boogie, Dead Meadow, your more psychedelic/differently narcotized long-song artists—but this was the aspect of Zeppelin’s approach that woke something up in me and put me on a different trajectory as a listener. To what extent would you say that Zeppelin is influential, or just to what extent did they influence you? I don’t think of them as A Big One For Me in general, but I think maybe I was underestimating that. I’m talking myself into it.
Dave: The influence question is a heavy one, Roth! I mean, they stole half their riffs; Washington Post pop-music critic Carl Bernstein (yeah, that guy!) labeled Plant’s singing “latter-day blackface” after a 1969 show outside D.C. And the band got sued a lot and occasionally admitted thievery. Yet the total package made ‘em as unique a band as could be.
Lauren: I do think they at least evolved out of their early cosplay. I don’t like their early records as much because Plant will sing something like “Now I've got ten children of my own/I got another child on the way that makes eleven” and I’m like, “No you don’t, Robert Plant. You’re about to reread The Fellowship Of The Ring.” But eventually I think they figured out a way to add their own sound and style to the blues and make it a distinctly ‘70s hard-rock thing.
Ray: Co-sign that. Their lifts from actual blues artists seem more egregious because they ended up as a bigger band than, say, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, but the ‘70s were a time of excessive everything. They did morph out of that in part later on, but they could cringe it up in the early days.
David: Disagree with Lauren, I really believed and still believe that Robert Plant is constantly going down to the mean old levee to weep and moan. And I think that lived experience really shows up in the work.
But I think Ray’s bit about the ‘70s as this period of total berserk liberation unencumbered by much in the way of insight—you could just kind of steal or do or claim whatever, because it was important that you be the most you that you could be or whatever—made for some thrilling but also retrospectively hilarious experiments. Like for instance a mincing British dude singing blues songs about Gollum.
Israel: Honestly we might be back to an age of outright theft and reckless style siphoning, so maybe that influence is right back with us.
Dave: I can’t separate geezer me from teen dirtball me when I hear “Achilles Last Stand.” I mean, to me it holds up so great. So much going on! The thin line between excess and ecstasy! The bass and drums are just heavier than anything before or since! But all I know is me. I can also see how this record by the biggest band in the world led (!) to the punk boom. I really would like to know what a headbanger of today would think about that tune. Is that Greta band still around?
Ray: We need Punk 2.0, and this is just the government to experiment on.
David: No more fitting tribute to the lasting power of Zep than this: 50 years later their stuff both still sounds pretty good, and is still inspiring your more contrary listeners to be like “we really need to make shorter songs.”
Ray: Why, I oughta...
Defector's Favorite Jams Right Now
Car Seat Headrest - "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales"
YouTube's algorithm delivered this song from 2016 to me a couple weeks ago. New to me and I can't get enough of it. Starts off sounding kinda like stoner Kinks for several verses as singer/bandleader Will Toledo debates the morality of driving drunk for convenience sake, and it's interesting as heck lyrically and pleasant enough musically. But stick around and you'll get rewarded with a chorus from the gods. I didn't want the song to end the first time I heard it. And I still don't! I've learned Toledo and the band are from the D.C. area and I can't believe I hadn't heard something so in my wheelhouse and from my neighborhood before now. From a search of my email, I learned that a friend had sent me a link to the song back in 2016. My last decade would have been better had I clicked it at the time. I love this shit.
-Dave McKenna
Early Fleetwood Mac
Lately I've been listening to Fleetwood Mac pre Buckingham/Nicks (because they're never not tedious), mostly Bare Trees and Future Games. Danny Kirwan and Bob Welch solos can mellow a badger.
-Ray Ratto
Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee
We ran an excellent blog on this record in May of last year, and the album itself first surfaced online around a year ago. "Surfaced" is the word for it, although "appeared" would also work—the album, which is around two hours long and plays like a long dreamy scan through the radio dial on a late-night car ride, arrived on various online platforms and left them, off and on, before finally getting released on vinyl and compact disc last month. I'd listened to it where it could be found for months before then, and was never anything less than in awe of it; I believe that it is, in its way, one of the most astonishing and transporting albums I've ever heard. But I am very happy to be able to listen to it in the way that I like to listen to music, which is by putting an actual object onto a record player or into a CD deck and letting it play through a stereo system. Some of that is me being stubborn and old—I will be one of the last thousand people in this country buying CDs, if I am not already—but I have enjoyed bringing that extra little bit of intention to it, and removing the occasional interstitial ad from the listening experience adds greatly to the overall effect. I am listening to this record to get lost, and it feels like an important part of the experience to exercise that little bit of agency before doing so—to choose it, and then to go where it takes me.
-David Roth
Wilson Phillips - "Hold On"
As the country gets swallowed by cruelty and bigotry, I've found a little more value in the simple affirmations of "nice" art that I would otherwise dismiss as trite or cringe. Yes, Wilson Phillips, I think to myself while listening, I WILL hold on for one more day.
-Lauren Theisen
