The year was 1979 and both Led Zeppelin songs "Fool In The Rain and "All My Love" were being played at regular rotation on the radio. Music sounded great, but we all HAD to wonder about the LP the songs came from. The album was called "In Through the Out Door" and what made it stand out was the fact that the entire album was wrapped up in brown paper so you could not see what was on the cover!
Was it something offensive like profanity on the cover? Something ultra-violent and bloody, or -gasp- overtly SEXUAL? We didn't know, and the only way to find out was to purchase the thing!
BUY IT I did, and going home and unwrapping it, I didn't know WHAT to expect- but the last thing I could have foreseen was what I saw- a very plain (yet very noir-ish) black and white photo of a nattily dressed man in white outfit and hat at a bar, burning a letter with a lighter.
EH? THIS was the cover they didn't want anyone to see? Was this depicting some controversial political thing or something? I just didn't get it!
At my father's workplace, there was an older guy working there who was a musician and a great source of rock n roll information to my burgeoning early rock-n-roll dabbling, and I made sure to ask him about it the next time I saw him. "Say, why did Led Zeppelin wrap the In Through the Out Door album with brown paper?" He though about it and shrugged, saying "I think they did it just to be artistic." Well, that wasn't the answer I'd hoped for, but with little else to go on, left it at that!
Some weeks later and I was at my friend Jason's house and his sister has also bought the album. We pondered the many reasons why they might have covered up the LP ( sex, violence, profanity) but it wasn't until I sat back and looked at his sister's copy of In Through The Out Door...and realized something was off! It was the same depiction of the man in the bar burning the photo...but THEIR copy was shot in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT viewpoint from the picture on MY copy at home!
"HEY! I shouted, "My cover is different from yours! Say, I bet there must be a dozen different covers, and they covered it so you wouldn't know which one you got til you bought it and unwrapped it!" Turning the album around, I realized even the BACK cover was different from mine! This gimmick HAD to be the reason for the wrapping!
Running to that guy at my Dad's workplace the following week, I told him of my discovery, but he didn't quite believe me. "Why would they do that?" he countered, hinting I must be imagining things, but I insisted my copy and my friend's copy were different. "I know," I told him-"Next week, bring your copy and I'll bring mine and we'll compare and see if they're the same!"
Of course there was a chance that his copy and mine might be the exact SAME versions and I wouldn't have proven anything, however, when he brought his LP in, it TOO was drastically different from mine, showing once and for all that the variant covers (Such a new novelty at the time!) was really a thing!
In all there were 6 variations of the albums, each depicting the viewpoint of one character in the barroom, a fact I didn't discover til I saw the complete photos in the "In Through the Out Door" Guitar Songbook. What a cool concept from the geniuses at Hipgnosis!
And of COURSE, the MUSIC itself was a masterpiece, with not only the aforementioned tracks All My Love and Fool in the Rain, but the groovy "South Bound Saurez", the down-home contry kickin' "Hot Dog" and the epic synthesizer masterpiece "Carouselambra", the latter of which remains one of my BIG faves from the band.
As drummer John Bonham died after this release, In Through the Out Door became the band's last official album to be released, with only the odds-n-ends leftovers for "CODA" to follow. A strong album perfectly closing an awesome run!
