Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (12 page)

The Battle of Evermore
Stairway to Heaven

Barely two seconds pass between the final beer-bottle smash of “Rock and Roll” and the first chiming hints of “The Battle of Evermore.” For the listener, the effect is somewhat like stumbling out of rockabilly night at a biker bar and finding yourself in a sylvan glade with Frodo and Sam, hushed and reverent as a troop of high elves pass by on their way to the western lands. We have grown used to such juxtapositions in the sampledelic daze of postmodern media, where mash-ups signify irony or geeky bravado or just the way things work in an era of dataglut. But the bridge Zeppelin builds across
these two seconds suggests none of these. Here the sharp contrast between genres attests, not only to Zeppelin’s range of styles and moods, but to the amount of space that
creates—space enough for two tunes as different as milkshakes and mead to flow together rather than clash, to follow organically, to make sense.

The smoothness of this transition also suggests something of the role of acoustic music in Led Zeppelin, perhaps the least analyzed dimension of the band’s sound, and one that is both profound and charming. Page and Plant both loved acoustic music; before meeting the singer, Page wasn’t sure whether he wanted to form a hard rock group or an Anglo-folk combo along the lines of the Pentangle. Given that every album until
Presence
included acoustic tunes, Page in some ways got to have his cake and eat it too. Though Zeppelin will be studied by our cyborg progeny for the power of their electric rock, some of the band’s most perfect moments are essentially acoustic: “Gallow’s Pole,” “Hey Hey What Can I Do,” “Black Mountain Side,” “Friends,” the beginning of “Stairway.” Though Page is not quite a maestro of the steel string—he once described his finger-picking as a cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and “total incompetence”—he possesses a witchy command of acoustic mood. I have listened to tons of mopey fingerpicking records over the years, but I remain, to this day, inexplicably moved by the 122
seconds of
Physical Graffiti
’s “Bron-Yr-Aur,” a limpid pool of sad serenity named for the isolated Welsh mountain cabin where Page and Plant first sketched many of their acoustic gems.

Zeppelin enjoyed acoustic music for its own sake, but the primary function it served on their records was to deepen the elemental contrast of light and shade. Instead of the modern Promethean buzz of electrical
djinn
, acoustic guitars announce the more ancient powers of wood and bronze—descriptions of Bron-Yr-Aur, for example, usually emphasize that it was
without electricity
. This musical polarity is, unsurprisingly, also gendered. In contrast to electrical aggression, acoustic ballads allow the boys to cozy up and show their gentler, more intimate and sensitive sides. (Bron-Yr-Aur, it should also be mentioned, means “golden breast.”) These softy moves complicate the cock-rock cartoon that dominates Zeppelin’s gender profile. Acoustic music did not just help Zep craft great make-out soundtracks, thereby increasing the pleasure of boys and girls everywhere; it also let the band further “feminize” themselves and their music. Such gender blur was important to Zeppelin, who enjoyed their New Orleans tranny bars and appeared in drag on the cover of
Physical Graffiti
three years before
Some Girls.
Sure Plant has his cock on display, but that’s the point: he parades around stage like a trophy wife. With “sensitive” Jimmy Page at his
side, the two frontmen form what one gay Zep fan described as “a more dangerous and more androgynous ‘version’ of Mick and Keith.”
⁵⁴

Gender dynamics play a vital role in “The Battle of Evermore,” which is where the Queen of Light first walks onstage and takes her bow, later to return on the record’s two other more-or-less acoustic songs, “Stairway to Heaven” and “Going to California.” Her cameo here is followed by the lonely Prince of Peace and his embrace of the gloom. These figures, so like Tarot trumps, are enigmatic, but their comings and goings at least remind us how important such gender polarity is to the occult imagination. As Susan Fast argues, Zeppelin’s use of contrasts—including the tension between acoustic and electric moods—suggests an underlying desire for spiritual balance, for yin and yang, for the holistic dance of elements. And indeed, I suspect that it is precisely this pagan “balance” that Percy wants to bring back at the end of “The Battle of Evermore.”

“Battle” is also the only Zeppelin recording where we hear a female voice, playing the role that Plant calls, somewhat ambiguously, the “town crier.” But it’s not just
any
female voice. The high and smoky contralto that commands us to dance in the dark of night belongs to Sandy Denny, who had only recently quit the UK’s seminal folk-rock combo Fairport Convention when she agreed to an exhausting recording session with the
Zep. Fairport were brilliant, at least in spurts. Originally, the band looked to California folk-rock for inspiration, while covering Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen tunes. But with 1969’s amazing
Liege and Lief,
they began electrifying traditional faerie ballads like “Tam Lin,” adding the crunchiest sound yet to the UK’s evolving experiment with rooting folk-rock in native soil. Denny’s presence here signals Zeppelin’s desire to both acknowledge and contribute to this marvelous and, until recently, fairly obscure subgenre.

Zeppelin’s relationship to Britfolk is complex, partly because the subgenre itself is so loosely defined. When “The Battle of Evermore” was released, the UK had already produced fantastic but very different records by Fairport, the Incredible String Band, Bert Jansch, the Pentangle, Forest, the Trees, and the Third Ear Band, each of which explored, remade, and fabulated “folk” music drawn, along with other sources, from Celtica and the British Isles. Page regularly praised Jansch’s
Jack Orion
to reporters; Plant called ISB “an inspiration and a sign.” Though Zeppelin drew at least as much from American sources, they spliced in their own roots as well, especially with “The Battle of Evermore,” “Black Mountain Side,” and the opening bars of “Stairway.” As with many Britfolk acts (certainly Fairport) Zeppelin engaged tradition as both history
and
myth. “Battle” is a mixture of the two modes, a “playette” that
struts across two stages: the earthly plane of plows and swords and apple trees, and the “sky” full of spiritual forces, of ringwraiths and angels, of “good and bad that mortals never know.” Young Robert Plant, who was reading a book on the Scottish border wars at the time he wrote the lyrics, often spoke to the press about his fascination with history and “the ancient characters from whence we stemmed.”
⁵⁵
As with so many of the counterculture’s creative anachronists, Plant used history to romanticize and enact an alternative lifestyle—in other words, to live halfway in myth. In 1972, he said, “You can live in a fairyland if you read enough books and if you’re interested in as much history as I am, you know, the Dark Ages and all that.”
⁵⁶
But why study history at all, if you just want Faery? Why bother with border wars when you can read Charlotte Guest’s
Mabinogion
, or plough through Tolkien one more time? The answer is that the sparks don’t really fly unless myth is forged against the unyielding anvil of actual events.

So poor Percy steps out of the rock club one day and finds himself a conscript in the nightmare of history. “The Battle of Evermore” is no Viking war cry; its picture of pain and woe could be said to retell “Immigrant Song” from the peasant’s point of view. As we know all too well these days, the situation recurs throughout history: A war-crazed tyrant rules the land, the earth is poisoned, and a dread battle with some
quasi-supernatural enemy looms. During the verses, Percy rises to the occasion and sings as a bard, giving us a transpersonal view of events, a view he will also sustain in “Stairway to Heaven.” During the chorus, though, when his “I” returns, Percy is just another soldier, clutching his dull sword with the other grunts, whose collective presence is suggested by the multiple vocal overdubs. Awaiting carnage at dawn and probably shitting their pants, they pray for backup from the angels of Avalon, that enchanted Arthurian island-of-the-dead that may or may not have been Glastonbury Tor. Here Percy discovers one of the basic drives of myth: to redeem the wreck of the real, or at least to get the hell out of it.

With so much myth oozing out, it is hardly surprising that “The Battle of Evermore” includes one of Zeppelin’s three explicit references to Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
, unless you count the time Plant yells “Strider” on the Led Zeppelin DVD.
⁵⁷
Some fans believe the entire song reflects events in
The Return of the King
: Eowyn, the Queen of Light, bids Aragorn adieu; the Prince of Peace walks the gloomy paths of the dead; the ringwraiths and the dragon Sauron are bested at the Battle of Pelennor Fields. In any case, these Middle-earth shout-outs not only reflect Plant’s hippie sensibility, but Zeppelin’s audacious and, it must be said, largely successful bid to forge twentieth century myth that resonates,
and rakes in, as much as Tolkien’s novels. In America, where the rabid fandoms for both Tolkien and Zeppelin began, the two British exports both gave Anglo-Americans the opportunity to re-imagine Britain as a paradoxically exotic heritage. While Zeppelin repackaged blues Americana as much as the Stones or Clapton, they also hit the western shore packing wild Child ballads of Avalon, fantasies of deep identity whose fey excesses are pruned by the industrial buzz of the electric guitar.

Tolkien also gave Zep another way to model the dark side of the force. On
Led Zeppelin II
’s “Ramble On,” which serves as a seed crystal for
with its quest for a Queen, Plant finds himself in Mordor, where Gollum and “the evil one” steal his girl. In “The Battle of Evermore,” the Dark Lord has invaded the human realm, with black-robed ringwraiths at his side. Why does Zeppelin allude to Tolkien’s bad guys, rather than elves or ents or hobbits? Because with Led Zeppelin, you earn whatever consolations myth has to offer by embracing the gloom, by confronting the “darkest of them all.” Theirs is not your earth-mama’s paganism, with its Marin County rainbow mush of relativism. Like the Catholic Tolkien, Zeppelin sense a dark core in the cosmos, a source of evil in intent and horror in execution. “Battle” is a battle after all. Zeppelin are not going to invoke pagan lore without invoking violence, not
only the violence against the pagan world, or the violence within the pagan world, but the violence in the spiritual imagination itself: the
war in heaven
. This is the war St. Paul alluded to in Ephesians 6:12 when he spoke about wrestling, not against flesh and blood, but against “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

The battle stakes are high: this is “Evermore” we are talking about, when time will tell us all. But like all battles, this one is full of confused alarms of struggle and flight, of subterfuge and communication breakdown. Percy barely knows what side he’s on. Is the enemy evil or merely bad? Is darkness just the “balance” of light, or must it be sliced away with a sword? At first, the final image of “Battle” suggests the triumph of the Good: Morning arrives, the dragon is blinded by the sun, and the forces of light pour into the valley the way Gandalf and the exiled Riders of Rohan spill down the mountain-side in Peter Jackson’s version of the Battle of Helm’s Deep. But Percy’s syntax is strange, and the slight return of the
burning eyes
from “Black Dog” does not help matters. Would a flaming dragon really be so sensitive to the sun? Who exactly is blinded? The triumphant feel of this chorus, with its bright shift to major sevenths, dissolves into the woe of aftermath as the song’s droning intro music returns. Percy moans over a drawn-out arpeggiated minor chord before finally coming to rest,
pensively, in a low E. Page holds the eerie minor space with some more Ren Faire plucking before renewing the verse, during which Percy, echo-drenched and increasingly hysterical, demands to “bring it back”—
it
presumably being the “balance” which he earlier claimed would be restored by the magic runes.