Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV Read online

  Praise for the series:

  Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon

  Religious tracts for the rock’n’roll faithful—Boldtype

  Each volume has a distinct, almost militantly personal take on a beloved long-player … the books that have resulted are like the albums themselves—filled with moments of shimmering beauty, forgivable flaws, and stubborn eccentricity—Tracks Magazine

  At their best, these books make rich, thought-provoking arguments for the song collections at hand—The Philadelphia Inquirer

  Reading about rock isn’t quite the same as listening to it, but this series comes pretty damn close—Neon NYC

  The sort of great idea you can’t believe hasn’t been done before—Boston Phoenix

  For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at www.continuumbooks.com

  Erik Davis

  2007

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  Copyright © 2005 by Erik Davis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davis, Erik.

  [Led Zeppelin IV] / Erik Davis.

  p. cm. — (33 1/3)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN 978-1-4411-1422-8

  1. Led Zeppelin (Musical group)

  2. Led Zeppelin (Musical group). Led Zeppelin IV.

  I. Title: Led Zeppelin [four symbols].

  II. Title: Led Zeppelin four. III. Title: Led Zeppelin 4.

  IV. Led Zeppelin (Musical group). Led Zeppelin IV.

  V. Title. VI. Series.

  ML421.L4D38 2005

  782.42166′092′2—dc22

  2005001104

  Contents

  Introduction:

  OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY

  I: PHYSICAL GRAFFITI

  II: LET THE MUSIC BE YOUR MASTER

  III: GOTTA ROLL

  IV: IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR

  V: WANDERING AND WONDERING

  VI: WHEN MOUNTAINS CRUMBLE TO THE SEA

  VII: CODA: IN THE EVENING

  NOTES

  Also available in this series:

  Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

  Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

  Harvest by Sam Inglis

  The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

  Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

  Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli

  Electric Ladyland by John Perry

  Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

  Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

  The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard

  Let It Be by Steve Matteo

  Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk

  Aqualung by Allan Moore

  OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

  Let It Be by Colin Meloy

  Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

  Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

  Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz

  Grace by Daphne Brooks

  Murmur by J. Niimi

  Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

  Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

  Endtroducing… by Eliot Wilder

  Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

  Low by Hugo Wilcken

  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper

  Music from Big Pink by John Niven

  Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy

  Doolittle by Ben Sisario

  There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis

  Stone Roses by Alex Green

  Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth

  The Who Sell Out by John Dougan

  Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

  Loveless by Mike McGonigal

  The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck

  Court and Spark by Sean Nelson

  69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol

  Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy

  Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

  Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

  Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

  Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier

  People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

  Aja by Don Breithaupt

  Rid of Me by Kate Schatz

  Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite

  Forthcoming in this series:

  Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr

  Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

  and many more …

  Where should this music be? i’ th’ air or th’ earth?

  —The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2

  Mystery is not about darkness. It’s about intrigue. There’s a fine line in between, of course. Not even a fine line … it’s a gossamer thread.

  —Robert Plant

  INTRODUCTION:

  OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY

  A few years ago, a British friend and I drove down to Cornwall to ring in the summer solstice at a small sylvan estate called Woodfield. Mark brought a raft of CDs—obscure garage, Japanese psychedelia, Finnish prog—but the rental car only had a tape deck. Driving along the M5 was boring, so when we hit a pit stop, I casually scanned the racks of overpriced cassettes. Nothing grabbed me until my eyes fell across an old codger lugging a load of wood along a country road—or rather the image of said codger, framed against a peeling wall. It was a copy of that literally nameless slab of luminous rune-rock we must stoop to dub Led Zeppelin IV, or Four Symbols, or Zoso. Though it was never my favorite Zep record—I alternate between III and Physical Graffiti—I picked up the tape, figuring that ten quid wasn’t too terribly much for a nostalgic lark on a dull journey.

  It was my first time in southwestern England, and Mark suggested that we get off the M5 and take a detour through Glastonbury, which lies in the shire, or whatever you call it, of Somerset. Glastonbury is Britain’s mystic Mecca, a densely layered faery cake of fantasy and lore that stretches back into the ages. And it is a weird place. Besides a ruined Gothic abbey and a reconstructed sacred well, the hamlet features a high hill known as the Tor: an odd natural feature, topped with a lonely tower, that looms over the surrounding landscape like some pagan barrow mound. Glastonbury was once surrounded by swamps, and ancient tales identified the place as the Isle of Avalon, the Celtic other-world where the wounded King Arthur was dragged to die. Other celebrity visitors are supposed to have included Joseph of Arimathea, said to have sailed from Jerusalem to Glastonbury with the Holy Grail in hand, there to found one of the first churches in Christendom. During the middle ages, Glastonbury’s monks made much of these tales, going so far as to dig up the bones of Arthur. Their marketing savvy made the abbey England’s holiest pilgrimage site until Henry VIII had the abbot drawn and quartered on the Tor. In the nineteenth century, the crumbling monastery and a ferrous spring nearby started attracting British occultists, and today the Tor is routinely topped with New Agers, grotty hippies, and crop circle chasers measuring ley lines with curious electrical machines.

  We approached the town from the east, driving into the enveloping dusk. Despite a wince from Mark, I had slapped on the Zep t
ape 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 po
rtal 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.