I know, I know… more Led Zeppelin, you’re thinking. “Yeah, sure, but this is the Japanese pressing,” he said sheepishly, knowing it did not make the situation seem cooler, at least not to most people.
We spent a long weekend up in Bellingham, Washington, near the Canadian border, and while there I popped into the always-worthwhile Black Noise Records (which is also a label with 10 or so releases to date). Now, I’ve been looking for a reasonably-priced Japanese pressing of The Song Remains the Same for a while now, and the last place I expected to find a copy was in Bellingham, but there it was, on the wall, obi and all. The price was great, but then I saw the sticker – “Slight Warp”. Wah wah wah. So I figured I’d see how bad it was and… putting it on the listening station… there really wasn’t any kind of noticeable warp? I mean, 50-year-old records are often not perfectly flat, and this looked even better than average? Certainly nothing my Rega couldn’t handle. When I took it up front the person behind the counter wanted to make sure I’d seen the sticker. I said I thought it looked pretty good. “Yeah, someone returned it,” the said, mildly exasperated. “I played it though and it sounds great.”
The Song Remains the Same was kind of a big deal in the 80s, not so much because of the album but more the film. Led Zeppelin came to an end in 1980 and there weren’t any videos of the band, or most of their other 60s and 70s contemporaries, on MTV, so a film like The Song Remains the Same was the only way you could actually see an older artist perform. And of course it wasn’t a concert film, not entirely. It has some odd vignettes in it as well, including some swords, so it was kinda cool.
I had this on CD back in the day but rarely listened to it – live albums weren’t generally my jam when I was younger. But today I like hearing different versions of familiar songs, and The Song Remains the Same is chock full o’ the good stuff. And the sound quality? Slight warp or no, you can’t go wrong with Japanese pressings. It sounds way better than I remember, probably the cleanest live Zep album I have. And who can forget the extra refrain, “does anybody remember laughter?” in “Stairway to Heaven”? That slow, lugubrious bass in “Dazed and Confused” that seems to take forever, the song desperately wanting to break free of John Paul Jones’ shackles? And don’t even get me started on “No Quarter”. So good.
You certainly don’t need me to tell you how good this record is, but I will say that if you’re going to buy it on vinyl, try to track down a Japanese pressing. If you’re not so worried about it having the obi and/or insert, it probably won’t set you back much more than a US or UK copy, and as soon as stylus hits vinyl you’ll know what those extra few bucks were for.