Houses of the Holy at 50

I couldn't wait to get my hands on some new tunes, and my thirteenth birthday couldn't come fast enough. Thanks to the $20 bill that had come in my grandmother’s card, I had the perfect excuse to escape my tiny hometown and take a 40-minute trip to Brunswick, ME, the nearest record store in the Cooks Corner Mall.

That’s right: cassette. Because I’m old…

As I browsed through the aisles, Black Sabbath's Mob Rules caught my eye. But, as fate would have it, Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy ultimately snatched my undivided attention. I’d spent the past two months obsessing over Led Zeppelin IV (more on that obsession — complete with embarrassing pics — may be found here), and I was ready to take the next step into that world. The alliterative title on the spine made me curious, even if the young, naked girls on the cover weirded me out a bit (even at 13, I couldn’t help but think “um, that’s a little too young, don’t you think?”).

Eager to listen to my new tapes, I decided to start with Sabbath, but it didn't hook me at first listen. I didn't know it yet, but I was missing the magic of Ozzy Osbourne's vocals, and it would take me a while to appreciate the Ronnie James Dio era.

And then, I played Houses of the Holy. From the first seconds of The Song Remains the Same, I was immediately entranced. Here was a lighter, brighter sound than Led Zeppelin IV, but still equally epic. I was blown away by Jimmy Page's masterful layering of all these different guitar sounds: shimmering appregios and soaring melody lines which he seemed to be able to produce simultaneously.

The album continued to stun me with its lush Rain Song, majestic Over the Hills and Far Away, idiosyncratic The Crunge (more like “the cringe”, amiright?), slinky Dancing Days, reggae foray D’yer Mak’er (which is now as it was then a “meh” song for me), wondrously strange No Quarter, and killer album closer, The Ocean.

I couldn't stop listening. I played it over and over again, flipping it back to the beginning once I reached the end. The songs lingered in my head, haunting me even as I went hiking along the Atlantic shore with a friend the next day. I couldn’t wait for my mom to pick me up so that I could get back home and listen to them anew.

As much as Led Zeppelin IV implanted a love of music within me, Houses of the Holy took it to the next level: I needed to learn how to MAKE music.

When I finally picked up the guitar later that year, I discovered that my playing style was contrapuntal, based largely on Page's work on The Song Remains the Same. It took me over a year to realize that he had overdubbed three or four guitar parts on top of one another. But even after I found out, I held on to my pick-plus-fingers approach, which I still use to this day.

The Song Remains the Same is ground zero for my guitar playing, a testament to its grandiose virtuosity that serves the song without ever stepping in its way. It's right up there with Jimi Hendrix's version of Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower.

So here's to you, Houses of the Holy. Thank you for making me a musician, and happy 50th anniversary.