In Through the Out Door

On getting into a classic artist via a less-than-classic album

None of us are born cool.

If we’re lucky, we find mentors who can point us in the right direction and introduce us to the cool things in life. If we’re not, we have to find ways to figure it all out for ourselves.

When it came to music, I was a bit of both — lucky enough to have an aunt who loved The Beatles, Beach Boys, sixties Motown and pre-British Invasion oldies (and who was generous about sharing her knowledge), but completely on my own when it came to deciphering the musical landscape of the 1970s.

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Led Zeppelin, for one example, was a complete question mark to me until the late summer of ‘79, when In Through the Out Door was released. It was clear from the local radio stations — which started playing “All My Love” like crazy, even though it hadn’t actually been released as a single — and the coverage in the L.A. Times that a new Zeppelin album was an event, but it meant little to me. Which, in retrospect, makes perfect sense; I had no older siblings or relatives who grew up at the height of Led Zeppelin mania to hip me to the band’s catalog, and the last Zep record before this one had been released in 1976, when I was 10 years old and completely obsessed with baseball; popular music hadn’t been on my radar at all at that point.

By the time In Through the Out Door came out, I could have only accurately identified “Stairway to Heaven” and “Black Dog” as Led Zeppelin songs. The former bored me and the latter kind of scared me, but I found “All My Love” (and “Fool in the Rain,” the album’s lone single, which dropped later in the year) charming and evocative enough that I felt like I could qualify as a Zeppelin fan. Buying the new album was out of the question, though; my eighth grade budget was strictly singles-only, and there were other albums that I was far more interested in saving up for, like the new Commodores LP.

It’s just as well that I didn’t blow my allowance on In Through the Out Door; once we moved to Chicago at the end of ‘79, WLUP’s constant rotation of career-spanning Zeppelin tracks clued me in to the fact that there was much, much better stuff out there by the band than “All My Love” or “Fool in the Rain,” and that some of the other cuts on In Through the Out Door were actually pretty awful — an impression that was further confirmed once I finally listened to the whole thing at a friend’s house in the summer of 1980.

I’ve gone back to the album many times over subsequent decades, hoping to find new things to dig about it, but to no avail. Just the same, I still have a fondness for “All My Love” and “Fool in the Rain” — even though they probably wouldn’t make the Top 10 of too many Led Zeppelin fans, they always bring me a pleasing flutter of nostalgia, and I acknowledge that I have them to thank for piquing my curiosity about a brilliant band that I now know and deeply love.

I started thinking about this concept — being introduced to classic artists via one of their less-than-classic albums — recently, when my friend and colleague Joe Bonomo posted a pic of The Cry of Love by Jimi Hendrix on Facebook. “My first Hendrix album!” I responded enthusiastically, which took him by surprise; Smash Hits had been his Hendrix gateway, as I’m sure was the case for so many others. It would have been for me, as well, had my then-stepfather owned a copy of that particular greatest hits collection; in those days when I was still figuring out who was who and what was what in the music world, greatest hits comps (or live albums featuring all of their best-known songs) were what I instinctively reached for.

I’d heard a few Hendrix songs on WLUP, knew he was considered one of the greatest guitarists of all time, and wanted to learn much more. “Purple Haze” and “Foxy Lady” were the songs of his that had really caught my attention, but I couldn’t find them on any of the four Hendrix records — Axis: Bold as Love, Electric Ladyland, Band of Gypsys and The Cry of Love — on my stepfather’s shelves. For reasons I cannot recall now (maybe I was just enchanted by Nancy Reiner’s fro-tastic cover illustration), The Cry of Love was the one that I pulled out and placed on the turntable during one fateful afternoon in February 1980.

I certainly didn’t recognize any of the song titles from The Cry of Love’s track listing, and I had no idea at the time that the 1971 album was the first Hendrix LP to have been released after his death — or that it had been posthumously cobbled together from completed tracks for his planned fourth studio album and unfinished tracks that hadn’t yet been fully fleshed out by the maestro. All I knew was that I immediately connected with the album’s loose-limbed mixture of funk, blues and hard rock, which was enough to motivate me to further explore the other Hendrix albums that my stepfather owned.

But while I dug the raw energy of Band of Gypsys, its lengthy jams didn’t click with me, and my 13 year-old brain was simply not ready for the psychedelic expanses of Axis and (especially) Electric Ladyland. So for the next several years — basically, until I started regularly smoking weed and/or until I bought the first Jimi Hendrix Experience LP (I can’t remember which came first) — The Cry of Love would be my go-to Hendrix album.

Some folks claim The Cry of Love isn’t a real Hendrix LP, and that it was just the first in the long line of tawdry, archive-trawling cash-ins that followed his untimely death; others think of it as the last legit Hendrix album, albeit with the caveat that it was still unfinished at the time of his demise, and therefore must be ranked below his first three studio albums. But I still dearly love its songs like “Freedom,” “EZY Rider” and “Straight Ahead,” and the skeletal, unadorned, down-to-earth feel of many of its tracks remains a big part of the album’s appeal for me. The Cry of Love was good enough to make me a Hendrix fan, and isn’t that what ultimately counts?

So how ‘bout you? What’s a decidedly less-than-classic album that turned you on to a truly classic artist or band?

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