Continuing my look at the albums of 1975…

Last week I named Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here as one of my favorite 1975 albums and noted that the band was a staple of my high school days. Well, the other band my friends and I obsessed over was, of course, Led Zeppelin. Forgive me for being a walking cliché.

Something about Floyd and Zeppelin, different as they are, made them catnip for teenage boys, at least in the late 80s.

For some reason, my Led Zeppelin fandom spanned only the band’s first five albums (the four numbered releases plus Houses of the Holy). I knew a few songs from their final three records but I didn’t know the full tracklists.

I knew 1975’s Physical Graffiti because of one standout song, the epic ‘Kashmir,’ considered one of the band’s finest recordings. That opening riff is certainly one of the greatest in rock history.

Physical Graffiti started as a collection of eight new songs that ran too long to fit on a traditional record. So the band decided to expand the lineup and release it as a double album, increasing the runtime by adding seven outtakes from previous albums.

Those tracks include ‘Houses of the Holy,’ a great song that was somehow left off of the album that bears its name, and two lighthearted songs (‘Down by the Seaside’ and ‘Boogie with Stu’) that would have felt wildly out of place had they been slotted into Led Zeppelin IV.

This is a 15-track album that runs 83 minutes, testing the listener’s patience on some of the extended songs. But it’s much more varied, in terms of sound and style, than I expected. There’s a lot of buried treasure here.

Of course, I shouldn’t write about Physical Graffiti as if it’s some little-appreciated collection. I might have missed it in my high school days, but it was a smash hit, one of four Diamond-selling albums in the Zeppelin discography, and second only to Led Zeppelin IV in total sales.