Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (2 page)

We approached the town from the east, driving into the enveloping dusk. Despite a wince from Mark, I had slapped on the Zep tape after getting off the M5, settling into grooves so familiar that the car speakers seemed merely to amplify waveforms lifted from my own neural circuitry. As the chiming “The Battle of Evermore” faded into the opening flutter of “Stairway to Heaven,” that matchless and ridiculous wedding song, the Tor rose up before us against bruised and blazing clouds. A splash of light suddenly illuminated the tower, as if myriad wee folk had just whipped out their Bics. As the band clambered up their sonic stairway, I melted into a profound and adolescent reverie. I recalled a childhood dream of Nordic fjords, and a particularly skunky bong-load beneath the California stars, and my most incandescent high school crush, a blond named Barbara Zinke whom I half-believed was a white witch. I gazed past the Tor, past the golden heaps of cloud beyond. And there was a feeling I got, as I looked to the west, a feeling that reminds me now of a passage from Lord Dunsany, one of the first and finest writers of the modern fantasy tale:

… in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight,
which brings him rumors of beauty from however far away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered: and this spring-tide of current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, the old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song.
¹

Now what I was listening to was “Stairway to Heaven,” the anthem that launched a thousand keggers, a song more tired than ancient, like a coin worn thin or an old Polack joke. And yet I felt the same tide of pagan legend surging through my chest. So it was with a peculiar blend of awe and shame that I turned to Mark and said: “You have no idea what this moment means.” He just laughed at me, and we and our shadows turned from the Tor and drove into town.

I want to stay with this moment a bit, because when you want to write about an album as massive and canonical as the fourth Led Zeppelin record, you need an in, and this twilight reverie is my in. For twilight was not a power lost on this band. Their Swan Song logo was ripped from an obscure nineteenth century painting called “Evening (Fall of the Day),” while their last great ode to sexual angst was “In the Evening.” But my favorite moment of crepuscular Zep occurred in 1970, when the band turned down high-paying gigs in Boston and New Haven to play a major outdoor summer festival
at Bath, which happens to lie about thirty miles from Glastonbury Tor. At the time, America had already showered the band with love and lucre, but England was playing hard to get. Bath, with its ace line-up and 150,000 attendees, was the chance for Led Zeppelin to triumph on their own turf.

The weather was crap during the day, but by the end of the afternoon it was clear that a dramatic sunset would soon fall upon the land. Peter Grant, Zeppelin’s behemoth bruiser of a manager, had already arranged to have the band hit the stage at eight o’clock sharp so that dusk would bloom behind them as the stage lights came on. But as the hour approached, an act called the Flock continued to play, drawing out the encores as the sun disappeared. Grant told Zep’s mischievous roadie king Richard Cole, the orchestrator of much mayhem and later a tattle-tale supreme, to terminate the performance. So Cole and a few roadies walked onstage, unplugged the Flock’s gear and started lugging it away. When a Flock roadie objected, the story goes, Grant hauled off and slugged him; Cole supposedly threw some punches as well. In any case, Zeppelin got their way. A bearded Robert Plant walked into the sun’s dwindling spotlights with blue jeans a’ bulging while Jimmy Page wrapped himself against the wind in a tweed topcoat and a goofy Gilligan cap. Launching into “Immigrant Song,” they hammered home their dominion.

From this episode we draw forth Zeppelin’s motto: Magic by any means necessary. And it is this rough magic that I will try to explore in this book you hold. We have all experienced “the magic of music”: its narcotic gift of transport, its manner of weaving together memory and imagination, of sharpening feelings to a keen blade. But in Zeppelin’s case we must take this cliché almost literally—and not just because Jimmy Page is almost certainly the best-selling black magician in the history of recorded music. For though Page probably cast some mighty spells in his varied dungeons, I know nothing of them. What I know is that Led Zeppelin, with great cunning and an elemental command of “light and shade,” crafted records into mythic enchantments—and nowhere more so then on their fourth album.

As you can probably tell, I write as one once thoroughly enchanted. As with many boys (and some girls) growing up in the long fade of classic rock culture, Led Zeppelin offered me more than a soundtrack for getting loaded and making out. Listening and loving the band was also a rite of passage, a guided journey through an internal landscape that was changing as dramatically as the body and the loins and the world were changing. The novelist Michael Chabon has written that the imagination is perhaps the only sure capital that teenagers possess, a jealously guarded “fortress of solitude” flush with violence and fantasies of power. In my case, this
fortress was also inscribed with the symbols of the occult. I grew up along the southern California coast, surrounded by the spent fuel rockets of the spiritual counterculture, and I definitely absorbed some of the hazy hippie mysticism in the air. I smoked pot, dropped acid, and stared into mirrors to provoke hallucination. I practiced lucid dreaming, and once awoke in a vaulted Maxfield Parrish heaven only to guide my doppelganger to some shoddy simulacrum of AP Trig, where I pawed the pert astral breasts of a girl whose name I have long forgotten. I wrote Lovecraftian poetry and decorated my walls with Roger Dean posters, maps of Middle-earth, and hermetic diagrams ripped from the
Man, Myth & Magic
books I lifted from the library. Girls I knew wanted pop stars or jocks; I wanted … well, I wanted the girls, but if I couldn’t have them I’d take wizardry, the invisible rebellion of the internal life.

And no one offered a better song cycle for my escape into shadow than Led Zeppelin. In his delirious potboiler
Hammer of the Gods
, Stephen Davis called the band “a mystery cult with several million initiates.” It’s more than a metaphor: Zeppelin offered fans a peculiarly powerful mytho-poetic identification beyond the boundaries of the music itself. As Andy Fyfe writes, “
Led Zep IV
plus
The Lord of the Rings
plus discovering girls and booze equals Very Powerful Teenage Male Experience.”
²
Sure it was cock rock, but it was also a mystery,
wrapped in an enigma, stuffed into a cock. Zep’s theatrical soundscapes, cool covers, and scattered allusions to
The Lord of the Rings
served as a secret wink, an affirmation that between the cracks of what I already suspected was going to turn out to be a rather disenchanted world nestled some resplendent other. Led Zeppelin
knew
something, but they weren’t fessing. If only I could decode those four notorious sigils, I thought. If only I could turn the idiotic wheel on the cover of
Led Zeppelin III
in just the right way! Then these figures would tell their tales: the Queen of Light, the Keepers of the Gloom, the Black Dog, the guy named (Roy) Harper. Then I’d know who was going to receive that nude girlchild held aloft inside the gatefold of
Houses of the Holy
.

The born-again surfers in my typing class knew: Satan. And while I wasn’t ready to go that far, it wasn’t clear to me, then or now, which side of the force made Zeppelin’s majesty. Sure, Robert Plant seemed more like a randy hippie pretty-boy than a servant of the pit. But Jimmy Page, obsessed with the willfully scandalous occultist Aleister Crowley, was another story. Posters on my wall showed Page immersed in what Bowie called “Crowley’s uniform of imagery”: the silk threads emblazoned with poppies and magus stars, the SS cap, the slit puffy eyelids that lent his face a stoned Orientalism,
the Les Paul slung so low it seemed plugged into the
muladhara chakra
where the kundalini coils. This was not a wholesome man. Like so many fans, I heard about the soul-swap rumors, the occult bookstore, the haunted mansion near Loch Ness. Digging deeper, I devoured, and then destroyed, John Symond’s 1951 Crowley biography
The Great Beast
, whose scandalous and seductive hyperbole in some ways anticipates
Hammer of the Gods
. My studies did not end there. For me, as for many, Led Zeppelin served as an occult gateway drug, a comicbook portal into esoterica, with its fantastic ruins and bewitching herbs and maps of realms beyond the fields we know. For better and for worse, I owe them for this.

This book, then, is a sort of tribute: an ode to the Himalaya of heavy rock, a paganish take on rock and roll, ringwraiths, and the iconic fetish of the gatefold LP. I write not as a believer but as an “occulture critic,” fascinated with esoteric lore but convinced of no secret keys beyond the central revelation of the human imagination. So though I will take Led Zeppelin’s magic seriously, I won’t, I hope, be too serious about it. I am certainly not interested in sprinkling more pixie dust on a band already bloated with myth, or in speculating about what Page was up to in the basements of Boleskine. Instead I want to tease out that gossamer thread of mystery that Plant describes above—the one
that so narrowly separates darkness and intrigue—and then just see where it leads. The specters may not be real, but I just call ’em as I see ’em.

Such a course is arguably dangerous when dealing with such a powerful, seductive, and, as they say, “problematic” band. For Zeppelin has been accused of many evils besides devil worship. In today’s more academic rock discourses, where the group has become an important point of reference in a number of pitched debates, Zep have drawn accusations of phallocentrism, Orientalism, colonialism, fascism, misogyny, and the crass appropriation of African American intellectual property. There is much of value to these debates, although they seem to have been handled best by scholars generally sympathetic to Zeppelin and hard rock, including Steven Waksman, Robert Walser, and especially Susan Fast. But for the most part I have sidestepped these concerns and, more importantly, the language they generally compel. Instead, I have tried to articulate the mythic imagination at work in Zeppelin’s music by submitting, in a half-remembered way, to their daemonic intensity.
³
In essence, I have tried to give the ensorcelled boy I was the temporary reins of a man’s mind.

The issue of critical enchantment brings to mind a medieval tale about ancient Glastonbury. During one
of the darker of the dark ages, the story goes, a Welch saint named Collen set up shop at the foot of the Tor. One day he overheard two locals praise Gwyn ap Nudd, the King of the Faeries and the Lord of Annwyn, aka the Celtic land of the dead. Collen stuck his head out his cell and told the fellows not to stand in awe of the faeries, who, he claimed, were most certainly demons. The two guys, who I imagine looked something like John Bonham, snarled at the saint, warning that he had just earned himself a face-to-face meeting with Gwyn. Collen retired to his hovel until the King of Faeries sent one of his roadies to fetch the saint to the top of the Tor. Realizing that resistance was futile, Collen eventually took some holy water and climbed to the hilltop, where he found himself surrounded by a castle filled with glamorous musicians, court retainers, and beautiful young women. King Gwyn sat in a golden chair, and offered Collen something to eat. Collen, wise to the ways of faeries, declined the goods. Gwyn then asked the saint if he admired the red and blue liveries of his roadies. “The dress is good of its kind,” answered Collen. “But the red is the red of burning fire and the blue is the blue of freezing cold!” In other words, Faery is Hell. The saint flung his holy water around him. The castle vanished, the faeries disappeared, and Collen stood on the windy Tor, alone.

And that is where we stand today, at least most of the time: alone on an earth whose ancient spells have dissolved into thin air. In this Collen is a thoroughly modern thinker. Behind the saint’s theological claim is the more damning demonstration that pagan glamour is simply illusion, that the visionary realm is just special effects, that the great and terrible Oz is a fraud. Such saintly work of skepticism and exposure is part of what it means to write about culture critically. I have certainly packed my own vial of holy water for the ramble ahead, and plan to use it when I see fit. But I cannot stop my ears from the weird piping on the wind, just as few of us can resist the call of technology’s magic theater, with its Middle-earths and matrixes and passionate Christs. We may still live in the light of Enlightenment, but the sun is falling in the west, and the gloaming grows, and the gloaming makes heathens of us all.

I don’t know if rock matters much anymore, and most of the time I don’t really care. But when and where it did matter, it mattered, at least in part, because it
was
matter. Literally. Among its many meanings, rock signified an inscribed disc of petroleum product wrapped in a more-or-less vibrant and compelling cardboard square coated with words and images. Whatever airs the music wore—of sex or transport or rebel fun—rock was also a
thing
, a manufactured and packaged chunk of media whose stimulating powers over body and soul lay coiled in a black groove, awaiting the vibrating probe of an electrically charged machine.

For a long time, music fans collected these discs and their CD spawn the way people putter about their gardens. We stocked fresh new bulbs, weeded and
trimmed, let sections go fallow, and complained about not having enough space. Occasionally, we passed on cassette tape cuttings to friends or potential dates. But then the infectious virus of the MP3 hit, and the culture of collecting and owning music changed. Now, with CD burners and MP3 players, our garden walls are down and everyone’s cloning from everyone else. The pirate potlatch is on, even as record corporations move in like Monsanto, maintaining control over the genetically engineered files they pretend to “sell” to us. The music consumer is becoming what Julian Dibbell calls a “tenant farmer,” buying licenses rather than chunks of sound. Our physical collections, dusty, increasingly disused, seem more like ruins than living libraries.