Houses of the Holy by Led Zeppelin: The Complete Story

The basic tracks for Houses of the Holy were laid down in the gardens and reception rooms of Mick Jagger's Victorian Gothic country house in Hampshire, in May 1972, with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio parked in the drive and Eddie Kramer running cables through the front door. The band that turned up was a hard rock band that had just decided it was no longer interested in being only a hard rock band. Two of its members had built recording studios in their own homes over the previous winter and arrived at Stargroves with completed arrangements of ballads, twelve-string instrumentals, James Brown parodies, reggae experiments and a seven-minute keyboard showcase. The album they made is the one on which Led Zeppelin stop being the heaviest band on earth and become the most musically curious.

It is also the first Led Zeppelin album to do something its predecessors had not done. The fourth album had refused a title, refused a band name on the sleeve, refused even credits on the cover. Houses of the Holy refused a band name and a title on the front (Atlantic stuck a wrap-around paper band around US copies so distributors could tell what they were looking at) but it gave the songs printed lyrics for the first and only time in the catalogue, and it gave the world a sleeve so polarising it ended up nominated for a Grammy. The contradictions on the front of the album are the contradictions inside it. By the time the record was released on 28 March 1973, Led Zeppelin were already on tour playing songs that had been finished almost a year earlier, and the music press was already calling the result the moment the band lost its way. Critics were wrong. The record went diamond, the songs became live cornerstones, and nearly every Zeppelin album that followed quietly inherited the eclectic licence Houses of the Holy demanded.

Album Facts

Field	Detail
Artist	Led Zeppelin
Album	Houses of the Holy
Release Date	28 March 1973 (US); 30 March 1973 (UK)
Label	Atlantic Records (K50014 in the UK; SD 7255 in the US)
Producer	Jimmy Page
Studios	Stargroves (Hampshire) and Headley Grange (East Hampshire) with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio; Island Studios (London); Olympic Studios (London); Electric Lady Studios (New York)
Genre	Hard rock, art rock, progressive rock
Track Count	8
Total Runtime	40 min 57 sec
Billboard 200 Peak	No. 1 (two weeks)
UK Albums Chart Peak	No. 1
Other Notable Chart Peaks	No. 1 Australia, Canada and Cash Box; No. 3 Austria, Netherlands and Japan; No. 4 Italy and Norway; No. 8 Germany
Certifications	Diamond (11x Platinum, RIAA, United States); Platinum (BPI, United Kingdom); 2x Platinum (ARIA, Australia); 2x Gold (SNEP, France); Gold (BVMI, Germany; Promusicae, Spain; FIMI, Italy)
Estimated Sales	Over eleven million in the US alone; widely placed above twenty million globally
Key Singles	Over the Hills and Far Away (US only); D'yer Mak'er

Cultural Context

By March 1973 Led Zeppelin were touring the largest venues in the world, but rock music as a category was diversifying around them. Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, released on the same Atlantic-owned distribution channels three weeks before Houses of the Holy, would end up living on the US chart for an unbroken fifteen years. David Bowie was about to release Aladdin Sane. Steely Dan had just released Countdown to Ecstasy. The Rolling Stones, who had already vacated Stargroves for the south of France to make Exile on Main St., were tracking Goats Head Soup at Dynamic Sound in Kingston, Jamaica, fully twenty months before Houses of the Holy's reggae pastiche D'yer Mak'er became a US single.

The records Houses of the Holy was charting alongside in spring 1973 included:

• Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon (March 1973)
• Alice Cooper, Billion Dollar Babies (February 1973)
• Elton John, Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player (January 1973)
• Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure (March 1973)
• Deep Purple, Who Do We Think We Are (January 1973)
• Wings, Red Rose Speedway (April 1973)
• The Allman Brothers, Brothers and Sisters (recording, released August 1973)

Punk was four years away. Disco was nibbling at the edges of the R&B chart but had not yet crossed over. Glam was peaking in the UK. Progressive rock was the dominant critical force in album-oriented radio. The contemporary lens through which Houses of the Holy was therefore reviewed by the Rolling Stone-led American rock press was the one tuned to Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd and the increasingly baroque side of the Stones. Zeppelin's refusal to do straightforward heavy blues on the record was read by that critical establishment, with extraordinary inaccuracy, as a failure of nerve. It was the reverse. Houses of the Holy is the album on which Zeppelin claim the same artistic territory their progressive contemporaries had been claiming for three years already.

The Band's Story Up to This Point

Led Zeppelin had formed in London in late 1968 out of the wreckage of The Yardbirds, with Page recruiting John Paul Jones (a fellow session veteran), John Bonham (a Midlands powerhouse drummer he had been advised to listen to by Plant) and Robert Plant (an unknown Black Country singer playing with the band Hobbstweedle). They had released four studio albums in three and a half years (Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, Led Zeppelin III and the symbol-titled fourth album of 1971), toured America repeatedly, broken box-office records previously held by The Beatles in several US cities, and become the biggest single touring rock act on the planet.

The fourth album, in particular, had locked the band's commercial position. Stairway to Heaven was already, without ever having been released as a single, the most-requested track on US album-oriented FM radio. Zeppelin had walked off the Australian and Asian leg of their February 1972 world tour with the knowledge that they could play any venue, sell any seat, and that the only person who could now slow their momentum was Jimmy Page himself.

Page's response was to invest the money the touring had earned into a personal recording studio at Plumpton Place, his Sussex country house. John Paul Jones did the same at his home. The two of them turned up at Stargroves in spring 1972 with finished pieces of music they could play to the other two members. This was new. The previous Zeppelin albums had been recorded in rooms full of musicians arguing about arrangements in real time. Houses of the Holy was the first record where the songs had been demoed at home before tape rolled at the session.

The band's internal dynamic was, by Zeppelin standards, calm. There were no drug-fuelled rows. Bonham was the most volatile member but had not yet started the slide that would dominate the latter half of the decade. Plant was still recovering, lyrically, from the country and Tolkien-inflected mode of the third and fourth albums and was looking for something less serious. The band were in the gap between megastardom and burnout that, for most rock bands of their era, lasts only a single album. Houses of the Holy is that album.

Pre-production & Demos

The earliest material that ended up on Houses of the Holy is No Quarter, which was first attempted at Island Studios in central London in December 1971 during the late stages of the fourth album sessions. The original take was a faster, less keyboard-led blues-rock arrangement that John Paul Jones disliked. It was shelved.

Over the following winter Page built his Plumpton Place home studio using equipment he had bought from the Pye Mobile Studio truck (best known for capturing the Who's Live at Leeds in 1970). Jones did the same at his own home. Both arrived at the band's first session of 1972, at Headley Grange in East Hampshire in early April, with finished compositional drafts. Page brought The Rain Song (complete with unusual guitar tunings and the long Mellotron pads it would end up needing), Over the Hills and Far Away (with its quiet-to-loud architecture already mapped out), and The Song Remains the Same (initially an instrumental he called The Overture, later renamed The Campaign once Plant added lyrics). Jones brought a completely reworked, keyboard-dominated arrangement of No Quarter.

The Headley Grange session in April produced a working version of The Crunge (which grew out of a Bonham jam) and the early sketches of what would become Walter's Walk (eventually released on Coda in 1982). The band then moved with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio to Stargroves for the main sessions in May. From that point onward, almost every song was tracked together in a single house over the space of a fortnight.

Creating the Album

Stargroves is a mid-nineteenth-century manor house at East Woodhay in Hampshire, designed in a slightly mad Victorian Gothic / French Château hybrid with castellations, corner turrets and Tudor Revival windows. Mick Jagger had bought the property in 1970 for £55,000 and was renting it out to other artists, including the Stones themselves (who had cut parts of Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. there), the Who (Won't Get Fooled Again was tracked at Stargroves) and now Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones Mobile Studio (a custom-built control room on wheels, parked in the drive and fed by long microphone cables run through windows and doorways) handled the recording, with Eddie Kramer (returning from Led Zeppelin II, III and the fourth album) at the desk.

Kramer had a clear technical approach. Where most studios of the period worked with relatively tight, dead spaces and added artificial reverb in post, the Stargroves rooms were live, wooden, sympathetic. He used the stone-flagged entrance hall, the high-ceilinged drawing room and even the gardens to capture natural ambience. Dancing Days was tracked with the band literally dancing on the terrace between takes; the playback was set up on outdoor speakers, and Kramer later recalled the four of them larking in the grass with the song booming out over the Hampshire countryside.

The signature sonic choices were:

• The Stones Mobile's Helios console for tracking, with Kramer's preferred valve microphones brought in from his personal kit
• Bonham's drum kit positioned in the wood-panelled main hall, where the rebound off the wooden floor and the high ceiling gave him a thicker natural reverb than any contemporary purpose-built studio could provide
• Page playing electric twelve-string and electric six-string on The Song Remains the Same to produce the multi-tracked guitar overture that opens the record
• Jones's Mellotron carrying the string parts on The Rain Song (the same instrument the Beatles had used on Strawberry Fields Forever six years earlier), supplemented by ARP synthesisers that he had bought specifically for the No Quarter rework
• Vocals and overdubs taken later to Olympic Studios in London, where the band could mix on a fixed desk
• Final overdubs and Plant's vocal on The Ocean recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York during the band's 1972 North American tour, with Kramer (who had co-built Electric Lady with Jimi Hendrix) again behind the desk

The mixing was largely done by Page and Kramer at Olympic. Several songs went through multiple passes. Plant's lead vocal on The Song Remains the Same was, in the final mix, sped up slightly, giving the song its distinctive high, urgent quality. Page later admitted that this was a happy accident: the wrong tape speed during a playback session produced a reading of the vocal he preferred to the original.

An overlooked sequence of sessions took place at Electric Lady during the same New York stint and produced a series of Elvis Presley covers, taken from Elvis' Golden Records, that Plant in particular wanted to attempt as a side experiment. None of them was ever finished to release standard and they remain unreleased.

"We had the Stones truck in the driveway and the band in the house, and Eddie had mics everywhere. We weren't trying to be in a studio. We were trying to record a band in a house. That's why the album sounds the way it does."

Jimmy Page, in conversation with Brad Tolinski, Guitar World, January 1998

Personnel & Credits

Role	Player	Notes
Core band
Lead vocals	Robert Plant	Lead vocal speeded up on The Song Remains the Same; backing vocal accidentally an octave above his own lead on parts of The Ocean
Guitars, production	Jimmy Page	Six-string and twelve-string electric, acoustic, Danelectro electric; pedal steel; production credit alone
Bass, keyboards, Mellotron, synthesisers, backing vocals	John Paul Jones	Bass on every track except No Quarter (synth bass); piano on D'yer Mak'er and No Quarter; Mellotron on The Rain Song; organ on Dancing Days; ARP synthesisers on The Crunge and No Quarter; backing vocal on The Ocean
Drums, backing vocals	John Bonham	Drums on every track; backing vocal on The Ocean's a cappella interlude; count-off on The Ocean (the "we've done four already" line)
Production
Producer	Jimmy Page	Sole credit, as on every Zeppelin album
Engineering and mixing	Eddie Kramer	Engineered Stargroves and Electric Lady sessions; mixed at Olympic with Page
Engineering	George Chkiantz	Engineered the Olympic Studios sessions
Engineering	Keith Harwood	Additional engineering, particularly the Island sessions
Mastering	George Marino	Mastered the 1994 and 2014 remasters
Artwork
Sleeve design	Hipgnosis	Storm Thorgerson submitted a rejected first design featuring a tennis court and a racket as a visual pun on the band's "racket"; he was fired from the project
Cover photography	Aubrey Powell	Shot at the Giant's Causeway and Dunluce Castle in Northern Ireland over ten days of constant rain
Child models	Stefan and Samantha Gates	Siblings, aged five and seven; multi-printed in black and white and tinted in post-production to create the impression of eleven figures

The Songs

#	Title	Writer(s)	Length	Single?	Notes
Side One
1	The Song Remains the Same	Page, Plant	5:32		Started life as a Page instrumental called The Overture; Plant's vocal speeded up slightly in the final mix
2	The Rain Song	Page, Plant	7:39		Page's response to George Harrison saying Zeppelin "never did any ballads"; opening chords directly quote Harrison's Something
3	Over the Hills and Far Away	Page, Plant	4:50	A-side (US)	The album's first US single, 24 May 1973, b/w Dancing Days; peaked at No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100
4	The Crunge	Bonham, Jones, Page, Plant	3:17		James Brown parody; band considered printing actual dance steps on the album sleeve
Side Two
5	Dancing Days	Page, Plant	3:43	B-side (US)	Band danced to playback on the Stargroves lawn; Atlantic promoted a single edit to US radio in March 1973
6	D'yer Mak'er	Bonham, Jones, Page, Plant	4:23	A-side (US)	Reggae-and-doo-wop hybrid; second US single, 17 September 1973; reached No. 20 on the Hot 100
7	No Quarter	Jones, Page, Plant	7:00		First attempted at Island in December 1971; reworked entirely by Jones into a keyboard showcase
8	The Ocean	Bonham, Jones, Page, Plant	4:31	B-side (US)	Dedicated to the band's audience; Bonham counts in with "we've done four already but now we're steady"

The Song Remains the Same

The album's opening track was born as a Page instrumental called The Overture, intended as a curtain-raiser for the album proper. Plant added lyrics that reflected on the band's life on tour, and the song was provisionally retitled The Campaign before being given its final name. The arrangement layers Page's electric six-string Telecaster with an electric twelve-string and at least one acoustic part; the multi-tracking is so dense the song needed the band's Gibson EDS-1275 doubleneck (the same guitar Page used to play Stairway live) to be reproduced on stage. Plant's lead vocal in the final mix runs slightly above the take he recorded, the result of a happy tape-speed accident during playback that Page chose to keep. The track functions as a stylistic mission statement: it tells the listener immediately that this is not Black Dog.

The Rain Song

The album's emotional centrepiece, a seven-and-a-half-minute ballad in three movements that Page composed entirely at his Plumpton Place home studio. The story Page has told repeatedly is that George Harrison, at a backstage meeting with Bonham, complained that Led Zeppelin "never did any ballads". The Rain Song was Page's direct response, and the opening four chords (G major, then a descending pattern) are a deliberate quotation of the first four chords of Harrison's Something. The backing track was tracked at Olympic under the working title Slush, with Plant adding pastoral lyrics about the seasons of a relationship. Jones's Mellotron string part replaces what would otherwise have been a hired orchestra, and Page plays acoustic and Danelectro electric guitars in non-standard tunings, layered so densely that there are at least seven distinct guitar parts in the final mix. The song became a permanent live fixture and was revived by Page and Plant on their 1994 to 1995 reunion tour.

Over the Hills and Far Away

An open-road, hippie-lifestyle lyric set to one of Page's most-imitated quiet-to-loud architectures: a slow acoustic opening, fingerpicked on Page's Martin twelve-string, that takes a hundred seconds to reveal that there is a hard rock band waiting on the other side of it. The song was one of the first from the Houses of the Holy sessions to enter the live set, appearing in setlists by mid-1972, nearly a year before the album came out. It was the first US single from the album, released on 24 May 1973 in a 3:14 edit backed with Dancing Days, and reached number 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 (a modest result, but Zeppelin's commercial business was always in album sales).

The Crunge

Houses of the Holy's most divisive track and probably the funniest. Bonham, jamming at Stargroves, set up a deliberately off-the-beat funk groove that he wanted to make impossible to dance to. Jones picked it up on bass and ARP synthesiser, Page added an Albert King-styled rhythm guitar, and Plant improvised a lyric in the manner of James Brown, eventually parodying Brown's famous "take it to the bridge" call-and-response toward the song's coda. The band considered printing dance steps for The Crunge on the back of the album sleeve as a tongue-in-cheek inversion of the impossibility of dancing to it. Critics in 1973 took the track at face value and called it filler. Almost every retrospective review since has corrected the record.

Dancing Days

Page later said Dancing Days was the most natural song on the record: a single afternoon's writing at Stargroves over a Jones electric-piano riff, finished and tracked the same day. Kramer's anecdote about the band dancing on the Stargroves lawn to a playback at sundown belongs to this song specifically. Atlantic was so confident in it as a single that a promotional radio-only edit was sent out to US AOR stations in March 1973 as a teaser for the album.

D'yer Mak'er

The hit nobody in the band except Plant wanted. Bonham started with a brief to fuse reggae with 1950s doo-wop, by leaving a short off-beat in the snare pattern and ghosting alternate sixteenths on the kick. Jones disliked the result and has said publicly, more than once, that the song was not properly thought through. Plant heard it as Zeppelin's chance to have a singles-chart hit, and pushed for a single release. The band's standing policy was never to release UK singles, but Atlantic put it out in the US on 17 September 1973 backed with The Crunge, and it climbed to number 20 on the Hot 100, becoming Zeppelin's first top-twenty single since Whole Lotta Love four years earlier. The title is an old British music-hall joke: "My wife's gone to the West Indies." "Jamaica?" "No, she went of her own accord."

No Quarter

The album's keyboard showcase. The song had originally been attempted at Island Studios in December 1971 in the late stages of the fourth album sessions, in a faster, less atmospheric arrangement that did not survive the cut. Over the winter of 1971-72 Jones rebuilt it entirely around electric piano, acoustic piano, ARP synthesiser bass and a long jazz-influenced solo section that he developed at his home studio. The final track on Houses of the Holy is slowed down by half a semitone (which gives Plant's vocal its uncharacteristic underwater quality), runs seven minutes flat, and became a permanent Zeppelin live feature from the 1973 US tour through to the final 1979 shows. Jones used it as an extended solo showcase in concert, sometimes stretching the song to twenty minutes. Plant revived it on his 1990 solo tour, Page and Plant played it on the No Quarter sessions tour in 1994, Jones performed it as an instrumental on his solo dates in 1999, and it formed part of the set at the Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert at the O2 in 2007.

The Ocean

The album closer is dedicated, in Plant's lyric, to the audience that had carried Zeppelin to where they were. It opens with one of rock's best-known studio asides: Bonham, counting in the band by saying "we've done four already but now we're steady and then they went, one, two, three, four", referring to the four takes the song had already required before the released version. The middle of the track features an a cappella vocal break sung by Plant, Bonham and Jones in an arrangement Plant had been working out on the tour bus, and the song ends in a doo-wop pastiche coda that complements D'yer Mak'er's reggae one. The Ocean opened almost every Led Zeppelin concert from 1973 onward and was the band's regular set opener through 1977.

B-sides, Outtakes & Lost Songs

The Stargroves sessions produced more songs than Houses of the Holy could hold. The most significant casualty was the track called Houses of the Holy itself, a Page-Plant song recorded at Olympic, mixed at Electric Lady, and ultimately left off the album when the eight-song running order proved to need nothing else. It eventually surfaced on the band's next album, Physical Graffiti, in 1975, where it retained the name even though the album it had been written for already had it. Two other Stargroves songs, The Rover and Black Country Woman, also held over for Physical Graffiti. Black Country Woman is the one that famously opens with the sound of an airplane overhead because it was recorded outdoors in the Stargroves garden and Kramer left in the BOAC fly-over that interrupted the take.

Walter's Walk, an unreleased Stargroves track, was finally issued on Coda in 1982 alongside other outtakes from across the band's career. A series of Elvis Presley covers attempted at Electric Lady during the New York stint, with Plant as the lead vocalist, were never finished or mixed and have never circulated even on bootleg.

The 2014 super-deluxe reissue added a bonus disc of seven alternative versions and rough mixes: a guitar overdub reference mix of The Song Remains the Same, a mix-minus-piano take of The Rain Song, a guitar mix backing track of Over the Hills and Far Away, a keys-up rough of The Crunge, a vocal rough of Dancing Days, a no-vocal rough of No Quarter with Jones's keyboard overdubs, and a working mix of The Ocean. Pitchfork's reviewer noted that they were less revelatory than the corresponding bonus material on the IV and Physical Graffiti reissues, but they at least confirm how complete the arrangements had been before the band even arrived at Stargroves.

Album Artwork & Packaging

The cover is one of the most reproduced images in rock photography. It was the work of Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis, the British design partnership Powell ran with Storm Thorgerson. The first sleeve concept Thorgerson submitted was an electric green tennis court with a discarded tennis racket lying on it: a visual pun on the idea that the band's music sounded like a "racket". Page hated it. According to Page's own later account, Thorgerson was fired from the project on the spot. Powell took over.

The replacement concept was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 science fiction novel Childhood's End, in which children climb toward a transformation that takes them away from the human race. Powell chose two locations to shoot: the basalt steps of the Giant's Causeway on the County Antrim coast of Northern Ireland, and Dunluce Castle, a ruined medieval stronghold a few miles further along the same coast. The shoot involved two child models, siblings Stefan and Samantha Gates, aged five and seven respectively. The brief required them to be photographed naked, climbing the rocks, at dawn and at dusk for ten consecutive days. It rained almost continuously.

The first results, in colour, were unusable. Powell switched to black and white. The children were multi-printed into eleven separate climbing figures and the final image was hand-tinted to produce the orange and violet sky that gives the sleeve its alien quality. The accidental tinting effects, achieved entirely in post-production, are the cover's signature element. The inner gatefold photograph of Dunluce Castle was taken at the same time. Stefan Gates, interviewed by BBC Radio 4 on the cover's history in February 2010, said he had found the image somewhat sinister growing up, and admitted he had never actually heard the album. He listened to it on a portable player at the Causeway for the documentary, and said afterwards that a great weight had been lifted from him. His sister Samantha later appeared on the back cover of Zeppelin's 1976 album Presence.

The packaging caused Atlantic two distinct problems. The first was that neither the band's name nor the album title appeared anywhere on the sleeve, which made the album physically hard to merchandise in record shops. Manager Peter Grant agreed to a single concession: a wrap-around paper title band, printed with both, that had to be broken or slid off to open the gatefold. The second problem was that several countries refused to display the cover in shop windows because of the children. In Spain, censors required the original sleeve to be replaced with an alternative.

The cover was nominated for the 1974 Grammy Award for Best Recording Package (it lost). VH1 ranked it the sixth-greatest album cover of all time in 2003. It has appeared in every credible list of the greatest sleeve designs of the seventies since.

Release & Reception

Atlantic had hoped for a January 1973 release. The delay was almost entirely down to the artwork: the printing process for the tinted cover took longer than anticipated, the wraparound title band needed a second pass after the first proofs came back wrong, and Page was insisting on a quality of finish nobody at the label had budgeted for. The album finally went out on 28 March in the United States and 30 March in the United Kingdom. By the time it hit the shops, the band were already three weeks into their 1973 European tour playing material from it.

The reviews were ferociously polarising in real time. Gordon Fletcher in Rolling Stone, writing on 7 June 1973, called the album "one of the dullest and most confusing albums I've heard this year" and accused Zeppelin of being "a watered-down heavy metal" act. Other critics found the eclecticism baffling rather than offensive. Robert Christgau, writing in The Village Voice and subsequently in his Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies, gave it an A− and was complimentary about side one's "sprung rhythm", the James Brown parody on The Crunge, and what he called the two "amazing, well, dance tracks" on side two: the transmogrified shuffle of Dancing Days and the reggae of D'yer Mak'er. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine, in the retrospective review, gave the album five stars.

"The epic scale suited Zeppelin: They had the largest crowds, the loudest rock songs, the most groupies, the fullest manes of hair. Eventually excess would turn into bombast, but on Houses, it still provided inspiration."

Gavin Edwards, Rolling Stone, July 2003 retrospective review

"Houses of the Holy might be Zeppelin's most impressive album on a purely sonic level. This particular remaster reinforces that notion."

Mark Richardson, Pitchfork, on the 2014 reissue (9.3/10)

The chart story made the critics largely irrelevant. The album debuted at the top of the UK Albums Chart in early April 1973 and held the number one position. In the United States it went to number one on the Billboard 200 and held for two non-consecutive weeks, the band's longest stint at the top since Led Zeppelin III. It spent 39 weeks on the chart and finished 1973 as Billboard's number four album of the year. It went to number one in Australia (Kent Music Report), Canada (RPM) and the Cash Box top 100. It eventually went diamond, with the RIAA certifying eleven million US copies. Outside the US it added an additional several million across the territories where the band's appeal was strongest. The Grammy nomination for the artwork was confirmed in early 1974. The album has appeared on every Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums list (149 in 2003, 148 in 2012, 278 in 2020) and on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Definitive 200.

Singles & Music Videos

Led Zeppelin's commercial philosophy was to refuse the UK singles market entirely. Houses of the Holy was true to that policy: no UK seven-inches were released. In the United States, where Atlantic insisted, two singles were issued.

Single	Released	B-side	US Hot 100	Other
Over the Hills and Far Away	24 May 1973 (Atlantic 45-2970)	Dancing Days	51	Modest AOR radio favourite
D'yer Mak'er	17 September 1973 (Atlantic 45-2986)	The Crunge	20	Canada Top 40; the band's first Top 20 US hit since Whole Lotta Love (1969)

Music videos in the modern sense did not exist as a category in 1973, and Zeppelin in any case refused most television. There was no promotional film made for either single. The closest the album came to a visual document of itself is The Song Remains the Same, the concert film of the band's 1973 Madison Square Garden shows, released as a feature film in October 1976 (with a soundtrack double album the same month). The film opens with full-throat live versions of Black Dog and Rock and Roll, the title track from Houses of the Holy follows it as the third song, and No Quarter and The Rain Song appear in expanded live arrangements. The film's hour and forty-eight minutes of concert footage is, in effect, the visual companion piece to the album.

Touring & Live

The album launched onto two of the largest tours in rock history. The 1973 European tour ran through March and April, with Zeppelin headlining football grounds and large arenas across the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden and Denmark. It segued directly into the 1973 North American Tour, which ran from 4 May through 29 July across two legs and set a number of all-time attendance records.

Production highlights from the 1973 dates included:

• A 56,800-strong crowd at Tampa Stadium on 5 May 1973, which at the time was the largest single-artist concert audience in US history, breaking the record the Beatles had set at Shea Stadium in 1965
• Three sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden in July 1973, filmed for what would become The Song Remains the Same
• The introduction of laser lighting and mirror-ball effects on a scale most other touring acts could not afford
• Bonham's drum solo (Moby Dick) extended to twenty minutes on some nights
• Jones's No Quarter solo expanded into a piano-and-synth showcase that could push the song past fifteen minutes
• Plant's use of a hand-held microphone (most other singers of his stature were still standing at a fixed stand)

The robbery of $200,000 in cash from the band's Drake Hotel safe-deposit box in New York on the final night of the 1973 US tour became a footnote to the Houses of the Holy era. The album's songs continued to dominate Zeppelin's setlist through 1975 (when Physical Graffiti added new material), 1977 (the last major US tour) and 1979 (Knebworth). The Song Remains the Same, The Rain Song, Over the Hills and Far Away, No Quarter, The Ocean and Dancing Days all featured permanently. Only The Crunge, performed live a handful of times as an in-joke interlude (sometimes inside Dazed and Confused), and D'yer Mak'er, played only on the 1977 tour, stayed marginal in concert.

In TV, Film & Media

The album's deepest cultural footprint lies in soundtrack and sync placements rather than in television performance, because Zeppelin in 1973 simply refused TV. The Song Remains the Same and No Quarter dominate the soundtrack to the eponymous concert film of 1976. Over the Hills and Far Away appears on the soundtracks of Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium (2007) and Almost Famous (2000), the latter being one of the most-circulated Houses of the Holy moments in modern cinema. D'yer Mak'er appeared in Just Married (2003) and in the third episode of the second season of HBO's Westworld (2018), where its reggae groove was used to score a deeply incongruous narrative beat. The Crunge has been used in episodes of The Sopranos and Rick and Morty. No Quarter has appeared in the trailer for the film Doctor Sleep (2019) and in episodes of Mr Robot. The Rain Song was used in the Cameron Crowe film Vanilla Sky (2001) and as the score to the final scene of the BBC drama Top Boy.

Stargroves itself has had a separate cultural afterlife. After Jagger sold it in 1979, it passed through Boxford businessman John Varley, Swedish businessman Claes Bourghardt, Boston Celtics owner Paul Dupee Jr (who installed a basketball court), and Formula One team boss Frank Williams. Rod Stewart bought it in 1998 for £2.5 million from Williams but separated from his wife Rachel Hunter before moving in and sold it again. In 2012 it was sold for more than its £15 million listing price to a member of the Sackler family. The house also doubled as a Doctor Who filming location for the Tom Baker-era serials Pyramids of Mars (1975) and Image of the Fendahl (1977), which means a generation of British children grew up watching the rooms where The Rain Song was tracked being used as the lair of an alien mummy.

Controversy, Censorship & Lawsuits

The album cover became the single biggest source of difficulty. Several countries either refused to display the sleeve in shops or insisted on alternative artwork. In Spain, censors required Atlantic to replace the original cover with a substitute (a photograph of the band at the Stargroves estate); this Spanish-only sleeve is now an extremely scarce collectors' item. The naked children depicted on the front of the standard cover have, periodically since the 1990s, prompted retrospective public discussion about the image. Both Stefan and Samantha Gates have spoken publicly and have consistently said the shoot itself was professionally and properly managed, and that they do not consider the image exploitative. Internet hosting platforms have nonetheless occasionally blocked or pixelated the sleeve.

The Rain Song's quotation of the opening chords of George Harrison's Something has been the subject of light musicological discussion but never a lawsuit. Page has openly acknowledged the borrowing as deliberate, and Harrison made no public complaint (he is widely believed to have been amused by the joke). D'yer Mak'er has been the subject of more debate, particularly from reggae musicians who object to its arrangement as parody, but no legal action has resulted from those debates either. No songwriting credits on the album have ever been changed or disputed in court, an unusual position for a Led Zeppelin record given the band's later history of being sued over Stairway to Heaven, Whole Lotta Love and others.

Covers, Samples & Tributes

The album has had a long second life through covers, samples and homages, particularly the slower songs. Highlights include:

• The Rain Song has been covered by Eddie Vedder (acoustic, solo) on Pearl Jam's 2002-03 tour, by Yes, by Joe Bonamassa, and by ambient act Eluvium for the 2014 Rain Songs tribute compilation
• Over the Hills and Far Away has been recorded by Eric Johnson, by Vitamin String Quartet for their Led Zeppelin tribute album, and by Aussie band Wolfmother on radio sessions
• No Quarter has been covered by Tool (a recurring live staple on the 10,000 Days tour), by Dream Theater on the Made in Japan 30th-anniversary live record, and by Jeff Buckley in a famously slow piano arrangement that survives on bootleg recordings only
• The Crunge has been sampled by Beck on his 1996 album Odelay and by The Beastie Boys on multiple tracks
• D'yer Mak'er has been covered by Sheryl Crow for the Encomium tribute album in 1995 and by Sublime live
• The Ocean has been sampled by The Beastie Boys on "She's Crafty" from Licensed to Ill (1986), one of the most famous Zeppelin samples of all time

The album itself sampled and quoted in the opposite direction too. The Rain Song's opening chords quote George Harrison's Something. The Crunge directly parodies James Brown's vocal mannerisms, particularly the "take it to the bridge" interjection that Brown made famous on a series of late-sixties Funk Brothers singles. D'yer Mak'er borrows its title from a music-hall joke and its musical grammar from the 1950s doo-wop singles Bonham loved (specifically the rhythm of Rosie and the Originals' Angel Baby, which is name-checked obliquely on the sleeve).

Reissues, Remasters & Anniversaries

Houses of the Holy has been reissued repeatedly. The 1990 remaster (George Marino at Sterling Sound, supervised by Page) marked the album's first widely available CD edition with the sound corrected to Page's preferences. The 1994 Boxed Set Volume Two compilation pulled tracks from the album onto a fresh selection. The 2007 Mothership compilation included The Song Remains the Same, The Rain Song, No Quarter and Over the Hills and Far Away.

The definitive reissue is the 2014 super-deluxe edition, paired with the parallel reissue of Led Zeppelin IV and released on 27 October 2014. Six formats appeared: a single CD, a deluxe two-CD, a single LP, a deluxe two-LP, a super-deluxe two-CD plus two-LP set with a hardback book, and high-resolution 24-bit / 96kHz digital downloads. The bonus disc featured seven alternate mixes and rough takes (listed in the B-sides section above). The reissue received nine professional reviews and a Metacritic aggregate of 98 out of 100, indicating universal acclaim. Pitchfork (9.3), Classic Rock (9/10), Q (five stars), Mojo (four stars) and Rolling Stone (four-and-a-half stars) all praised the remaster as the cleanest version of the album in print.

The 50th anniversary in March 2023 came and went without a fresh box set, an absence that has frustrated collectors. The album's 50-year status remains the obvious window for an even larger archival treatment featuring the unreleased Stargroves Elvis covers, the original December 1971 No Quarter take, and the unreleased Walter's Walk session. Rumours that Page has these tapes intact and is preparing a future release have persisted since the 2014 box.

Legacy & Influence

Within Led Zeppelin's catalogue, Houses of the Holy sits in a deliberately liminal position: too eclectic to be a true hard rock album, too riff-based to be a true progressive one, and too direct to be either folk or art rock. That mid-position is exactly why every subsequent Zeppelin album draws on the licence Houses of the Holy established. Physical Graffiti's range, from In My Time of Dying to Trampled Under Foot to Kashmir, depends on the same eclectic charter. Presence and In Through the Out Door were both born of the same idea: that a rock band of Zeppelin's standing was entitled to play in any genre it chose. Without Houses of the Holy, there is no D'yer Mak'er, no In the Light, no Royal Orleans, no Fool in the Rain. The album is the corner the band turns to become the band of the second half of the decade.

Outside Zeppelin's own catalogue, the album's influence is in the licence it gave subsequent hard-rock acts to genre-hop. Queen's appetite for pastiche on A Night at the Opera, Aerosmith's R&B and reggae detours on Toys in the Attic and Rocks, Van Halen's pop forays on 5150, the Foo Fighters' acoustic-electric tracking on In Your Honor and Concrete and Gold, all run on the precedent that a fundamentally heavy band can take a left turn into another genre on its own album and not lose face. The Black Keys, Wolfmother, Greta Van Fleet and Royal Blood have all paid Houses of the Holy explicit homage in interviews and live covers.

"Houses of the Holy is the album where Zeppelin remembered they were a band of musicians, not just a riff machine. The Rain Song alone proves it. There are guitar parts on that track I'm still trying to figure out forty years later."

Jimmy Page, interviewed for Mojo, November 2014

"Throughout the record, the band's playing is excellent, making the eclecticism of Page and Robert Plant's songwriting sound coherent and natural."

Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AllMusic, retrospective review

The Rain Song's status as a critical landmark in extended ballad writing within hard rock is also worth noting. Heart's Magic Man, Boston's More Than a Feeling, Aerosmith's Dream On, Queen's Save Me, and a small army of later power-ballad acts all run on the quiet-loud-quiet template Page perfected on The Rain Song. Page himself has said in multiple interviews that he considers The Rain Song one of his three or four most accomplished compositions in the Zeppelin catalogue.

Things You Might Not Know

Fact	Detail
The Harrison comment	Page wrote The Rain Song after George Harrison complained backstage to Bonham that Led Zeppelin "never did any ballads"; the song's opening four chords are a deliberate quotation of Harrison's Something.
The original title track	A song called Houses of the Holy was recorded at Olympic and mixed at Electric Lady but did not make the album; it eventually appeared on Physical Graffiti in 1975 under the name the previous album had already used.
The fired designer	Hipgnosis's Storm Thorgerson submitted a first cover featuring a tennis racket on a green court as a visual pun on the band's "racket"; Page hated it and fired Thorgerson; Aubrey Powell shot the replacement.
Ten days of rain	The Giant's Causeway photoshoot took ten days in 1972; it rained almost continuously, the colour shots were unusable, and the entire cover ended up as a hand-tinted black-and-white composite created in post-production.
The accidental tape speed	Plant's lead vocal on The Song Remains the Same is slightly faster than the take he actually sang; the wrong-speed playback was a happy accident Page kept in the final mix.
The Doctor Who house	Stargroves, the Hampshire manor house where most of the album was tracked, doubled as a Doctor Who filming location during Tom Baker's run (Pyramids of Mars in 1975 and Image of the Fendahl in 1977).
The Beastie Boys sample	The Ocean is sampled on "She's Crafty" from the Beastie Boys' 1986 debut Licensed to Ill, one of the most famous Zeppelin samples ever cleared.
The hotel safe robbery	$200,000 in cash from the band's Drake Hotel safe-deposit box in New York was stolen on the final night of the 1973 US Houses of the Holy tour; the case was never solved.
The Tampa attendance record	The 5 May 1973 concert at Tampa Stadium drew 56,800 fans, breaking the Beatles' 1965 Shea Stadium record for the largest single-artist audience in US history.
The music-hall joke title	D'yer Mak'er is the phonetic rendering of an old British music-hall joke: "My wife's gone to the West Indies" / "Jamaica?" / "No, she went of her own accord."
The dance steps that didn't appear	The band seriously considered printing actual dance steps for The Crunge on the back of the album sleeve as a tongue-in-cheek hint that the off-beat funk groove was deliberately impossible to dance to.
The Spanish censored sleeve	Spanish censors refused the original cover and Atlantic Spain produced a unique alternative sleeve featuring a photograph of the band; that pressing is now an extremely scarce collectors' item.
The first ever printed Zeppelin lyrics	Houses of the Holy is the only Led Zeppelin studio album to ship with complete printed lyrics for every song; every other album in the catalogue, before or after, left fans to transcribe Plant's vocal themselves.
The only album with no Bonham writing credit on side one	Houses of the Holy is the first Zeppelin record on which John Bonham has writing credits on multiple songs (The Crunge, D'yer Mak'er, The Ocean), all of them on side two; side one is entirely a Page-Plant composition zone.
The home-studio breakthrough	It was the first Zeppelin album whose songs were largely demoed at home before tape rolled at sessions, because both Page (at Plumpton Place) and Jones (at his own home) had built personal studios over the winter of 1971-72.

Podcast

Houses of the Holy sits in the middle of the Led Zeppelin run that the Riffology podcast covers in detail across the back catalogue, from the debut through to In Through the Out Door. Subscribe wherever you listen, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and Pocket Casts, leave a rating, and let us know which Zeppelin record you would like us to cover next.