“What are we doing?”: The album that divided Led Zeppelin ?

No rock band can claim to see eye-to-eye on everything. Even though they seem like a band of brothers every time they take the stage, there are always those few minutes where you want to wring each other’s throats because one person dared to have their instrument louder than everyone else’s. And while Led Zeppelin couldn’t really find that much to complain about by the late 1970s, Robert Plant admitted that in Through the Out Door was the moment where the group started to fracture right down the middle.

Because, really, where could Zeppelin go after Physical Graffiti? There had already been many great records made before then, but their double album experience stuck a line in the sand of what all of their classics were supposed to sound like, especially when going into epic territory on tunes like ‘Kashmir’.

Presence was certainly a decent record to follow it up, but outside of having to live in the record’s shadow, some of the greatest tunes were anchored by the fact that Plant was out of commission working on some of it after treating injuries during a car accident. ‘Achilles Last Stand’ still sounded good, but it wasn’t like they were breaking new ground on ‘Candy Store Rock’.

But maybe that’s because they didn’t want to. They had done all of their grandiose rock and roll, so In Through the Out Door may have been their way of cutting loose and having fun between records. There is still a lot of great music to be found on the record like ‘All My Love’, but one of the biggest points of contention was John Paul Jones’s brand new toy: the synthesiser known as The Dream Machine.

The hallowed instrument was already becoming one of the most present voices in modern music, but it’s not like there wouldn’t be a few shakeups. No matter how many times someone might like to twist their sound around, not hearing some of Jimmy Page’s licks across the record left much to be desired when making tracks like ‘Fool in the Rain’.

When talking about that period, Jonesy remembered things getting a little bit testy between everyone trying to figure out which direction they should go, saying, “Robert and I were getting a bit closer–and probably splitting from the other two, in a way. We were always to be found over a pint somewhere, think, ‘What are we doing?’ And that went into In Through the Out Door. Basically, we wrote the album, just the two of us.”

It does feel like a bit of a pivot point looking back on it as well. As much as Page’s guitars can be a bit muted in some places, tracks like ‘All My Love’ are still great tunes that were bound to become anthems should they have had the chance to play them live before John Bonham’s passing.

If anything, the fact that In Through the Out Door was so divided meant that Zeppelin never got to end things on their own terms. People have tried their best to put their best foot forward on each album, but their swan song feels like a transitionary record to a sound that never fully came.