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  Friend’s satanic vision of the piper, then, represents more than the iconographic drift of Pan. To see the piper as Satan is also to refuse the rapture of music, a refusal that derives in part from that paranoid sense of control and agency that Hoffman suggests blocks our access to transcendental freedom—a freedom that sometimes comes when we simply submit to the beat. The divine has nothing to do with it: such rapture is our natural right. Passionate music fans all know such transport, those moments when “one only lives in one’s ears.” I pity those who experience such fusions of pleasure and transcendence as threats and not reasons to live. Nonetheless, Friend is not totally off base: there is an edge of darkness to such rapture, as with all genuine dissolutions of self. We are right to invoke the large metaphors of the supernatural. When William Burroughs saw Zeppelin live, the concert reminded him of the goat-god trance music he had witnessed in the mountains of Morocco, and he warned that such performances “must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.”69 But he also compared “Stairway to Heaven” to a high school Christmas play. So much for fear of music.

  The darkest supernatural myth about Zeppelin’s most mythic song is that if you play the recording backwards, you will hear Satanic messages encoded in Plant’s vocals. The idea that some rock records contain “back-masked” messages goes back to the Beatles’ “Revolution 9,” which was rumored to contain the reversed announcement that “Paul’s a dead man.” As far as I can tell, Christian anti-rock crusaders got into the act in 1981, when a Michigan minister named Michael Mills hit Christian radio with the news that phrases like “master Satan,” “serve me,” and “there’s no escaping it” were hidden in the grooves of the Zeppelin hit. Noting wryly that words “certainly do have two meanings,” Mills argued on one program that the “subconscious mind” could hear these phrases, which is why sinful rock musicians put them there in the first place. Soon backmasking became the Satanic panic du jour, giving paranoid Christians technological proof that rock bands like Queen, Kiss, and Styx (!) did indeed play the devil’s music. While most people, Christian or otherwise, found all this rather silly, these fears did reflect more pervasive fears that the media had become a subliminal master of puppets—fears that would themselves come to inspire some 1980s metal.

  In retrospect, what stands out most in the backmasking controversy is the marvelous image of all these preachers screwing around with turntables. Though one doubts that Minister Mills was chillin’ with Grandmaster Flash or DJ Kool Herc, rap musicians and Christian evangelicals both recognized that popular music is a material inscription, one that can be physically manipulated in order to open up new vectors of sense and expression. For both evangelicals and rap DJs, the vinyl LP was not a transparent vehicle of an originally live performance, but a source of musical meaning itself, a material site of potential codes, messages, and deformations of time. Alongside the more kinetic and rhythmic innovations introduced by scratch artists like DJ Grand Wizard Theodore, we must also speak of a “Christian turntablism”: slow, profoundly unfunky, obsessed with linguistic “messages.” Some evangelical TV broadcasts from the early 80s even include top-down shots of the minister’s DJ decks so that viewers can admire the technique of squeezing sense from sound. However, while rap and all the sampled music that follows it treats the vinyl LP as an open form capable of multiple meanings and uses, Christian turntablists remained literalists, convinced that they were revealing a single “fundamental” message intentionally implanted in the grooves by a diabolical author. Unfortunately, when it came to “Stairway to Heaven,” these DJs for Jesus could not agree on the exact wording of Led Zeppelin’s insidious messages. Once again, ambiguity trumps.

  At the time, Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label responded to the brouhaha with the statement, “Our turn-tables only play in one direction.” Occultists following the controversy also chimed in, pointing out that the first fellow to intentionally play records backwards may have been none other than Aleister Crowley. In an early issue of The Equinox, Crowley argues that an aspiring magician should “train himself to think backwards by external means.” He offers some suggestions: learn to walk backwards, speak backwards, and “listen to records reversed.”70 All these reversals recall the original fantasy lurking behind the satanic backmasking scare: the backwards recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, a key element of the Black Mass that Renaissance Inquisitors almost surely invented from the screams of their torture victims. But Crowley is actually being far more methodical here. In seeking to prepare the aspirant for the terrifying act of “crossing the Abyss,” Crowley wants the magician to break the hold of habitual thinking and to understand, in a dispassionate fashion influenced by Theravadan Buddhist meditation, the causal chains that give rise to the self. In any case, Crowley believed that ordinary consciousness could be subverted and expanded through the technological manipulation of phonographs and film, and he wrote about it in 1912. No wonder Page described Crowley as the only Edwardian to embrace the twentieth century: he was a media hacker from the very beginning.

  So what happens when we take Crowley’s advice and start playing Led Zeppelin records backwards? If you get your hands on a Technics deck or decent sound software and reverse the central verses of “Stairway to Heaven,” you will probably hear the slurring, sucking sonic taffy that you’d expect. But if the appropriate passages are properly isolated, and you are prompted beforehand, then you are likely to hear things like “Here’s to my sweet Satan” or “There’s no escaping it.” I certainly did, although the actual phrases sounded more like “Yish tomai swee Zaydn” and “Hair-airs no esgaybin id.” Weird, yes, but probably nothing more than what the British musician and writer Joe Banks calls “Rorschach Audio.” Banks developed the term to explain Electromagnetic Voice Phenomena, an occult exploration of audio technology that began in earnest in the 1950s. EVP investigators believe that if you tape empty radio frequencies or the silent passages on prerecorded media, and then listen to these recordings intently, you will eventually stumble across disincarnate voices traditionally ascribed to the dead. Some EVP recordings do indeed sound pretty creepy. But Banks argues that our brains excel at projecting patterns onto ambiguous data, particularly when “experts” prep us by stating beforehand what “messages” we are about to hear—a consistent element of both EVP and backwards masking presentations.71 It’s the lesson of Colby’s gate-fold all over again: The voices, the messages, are in your head.

  Some individual words in the purported messages tucked inside of “Stairway” do seem to pop out at you more or less objectively, but this can be explained by the phenomenon of phonetic reversal. Phonemes are the basic chunks of words, like “lay” and “dee,” and when you reverse them, you create widely different combinations of sounds. Inevitably, some of these new combinations will fit together and seem to make sense without any additional tampering. This effect was convincingly demonstrated by the Zephead behind the Achilles Last Stand fansite, who took perhaps the most convincing reversible line in the original recording—the verse about changing the road you’re on—and sampled the same verse from twelve live recordings, nearly all of them bootlegs. He then reversed the samples, et voilà! Twelve more-or-less creepy toasts to “mai swee Zaydn.”72 No subliminal engineering is necessary—only an uncanny coincidence of phonemes. But we should not mock the uncanny, here as anywhere. That fact is that, within only two minutes worth of singing, “Stairway to Heaven” contains at least seven reversed phrases of a suggestively devilish nature, including four mentions of Satan, or Seitan, or Sadie, or something like that. Moreover, these sonic simulacra are buried in a tune about pipers and whispers and listening really hard, a tune that, for a spell, ruled the world. I’m not saying that supernatural forces are afoot. I’m just saying it makes you wonder.

  V.

  WANDERING AND WONDERING

  Misty Mountain Hop

  Four Sticks

  When Percy’s feet first hit the groove of ’s second side, he finds himself bac
k in the mundane world. He has returned from the realm of living myths and gnostic visions, his wanderlust unabated. The time is ordinary time, “just the other day”; the place is just a park, perhaps Hyde Park, or the Panhandle in San Francisco. He is doing the stroll, his stride both purposeful and aimless, when he meets up with a flower-decked freak love-pod, camped, no doubt rather haphazardly, on public land. This being 1970, the freaks sell him some drugs. Exactly what drugs they proffer is unclear, but given the hazy lyrics and the jangly crunch of this tune, one suspects that reefer is the culprit.

  For a band so concerned with visions, Led Zeppelin makes relatively few references, lyric or musical, to drugs. Outside the electronic freak-out in “Whole Lotta Love,” one rarely encounters an explicitly “psychedelic” vibe, and though Page did advertise his unfortunate poppy fixation on his slinky stage-wear, marijuana seems to have been the band’s most important plant, or Plant, teacher. Before he joined Zeppelin, the singer appeared in a Daily Mail photograph of a pro-cannabis rally in the Midlands; during live shows, he made frequent references to hashish, or added “Acapulco” to the line in “Over the Hills and Far Away” about a “pocket full of gold.” That said, “Misty Mountain Hop” hardly romanticizes drugs; indeed, the song seems to contrast Percy’s visionary highs elsewhere on the record with the ordinary pleasures and hassles of hippie drug culture, its sloppy tribal bonds and inevitable tangles with the law. By the end of the tune, in fact, Percy seems to have become disenchanted with the whole scene, the meddling fuzz and the fuzzy freaks. So he packs his bags for the higher planes, for the misty mystic peaks, restless again.

  Percy’s jaunty pace is perfectly embodied by the chugging riff, once again supplied by Jones, this time on keyboards. As Steve Waksman has pointed out, the four songs on side two of roughly mirror those on side one: two rockers start the show, followed by a ballad and an epic tune. I would also suggest that if side one represents the hero’s inner journey, from lust to gnosis, side two represents the external world, its pleasures and pressures. Compared to the chewy, craven riff of “Black Dog,” then, the “Misty Mountain” figure swaggers and grooves, its simple descending line almost annoying in its repetitive self-satisfaction. It certainly does sound like a stroll though. When you take a walk, your scattershot thoughts regularly return to the physical movements of your body; similarly, this riff keeps coming back to center stage, weaving into the chorus as much as the verse. Like Mr. Natural, it just keeps on truckin’. Bonham rocks steady, and the result of his evenly applied power is drive without anxiety—all the better to set off the moments when he arrests the flow of beats for a few measures, signifying, perhaps, the obstructions that stand in Percy’s way.

  The main obstruction here is Johnny Law, who makes an unexpectedly quotidian appearance on this aggressively mythic record. What’s a copper doing here? On the one hand, Zeppelin is imaginatively slumming with the rabble that forms the core of their fandom, a scene whose thirst for hassle-free hedonism invariably runs afoul of the Man. But the policeman who descends on Percy and his newfound friends—rather politely, it must be said—is more than a stock character in the hippie comedy. He also represents Authority and Law. He is the avatar, on the worldly plane, of the forces of judgment that wield their blades in “The Battle of Evermore.” Recall the feather of Ma’at in Plant’s sigil, a figure, not of airy nothings, but of the soul’s final reckoning. The cop in the song bursts the bubble of druggy utopia, not just because cops are a drag, but because Law—the worldly powers that the Gnostics called the archons—holds dominion over this sad rock whereon we dwell. As he himself admits, Percy really doesn’t know much about what is going on, and all the THC in his system can’t be helping matters. But he does know that escaping the bummer of the world is more than a matter of simply dropping out.

  To live outside the cosmic law, you must not only be honest: you must also follow an inner law. I listened to this cut for years without paying much attention to the lyrics; the one line that really stood out was Percy’s command that you look in a mirror and describe what you see, and then decide whether or not you like it. This line echoed a suggestion that veteran spiritual freaks once passed on to me, stuff to the effect that acute self-observation is the beginning of freedom. Of course, Percy is probably just picking on his girl, harping on her for not being restless like him, this restlessness he mistakes for wisdom. It’s hard to tell: Percy’s pretty out of his head. On the one hand he wants us to open our eyes to the harsh reality of the street, of the world and ourselves; on the other hand he’s writing it all off as “only a state of mind.” This is the sort of philosophy that has just enough truth in it to get most of us—and most hippies certainly—in trouble. Either way, Percy’s confusion reflects one of the great problems with the counterculture’s gnostic religion of spiritual experience (or its pharmacological simulation): experiences pass. You hear the mystic tune of oneness, of the unrolled rock, but then you are just back on the sidewalk, wandering and dissatisfied, loosened from the old restraints but befuddled when the cold hard facts shine a flashlight in your face.

  On the first side of the album, Percy stumbled into myth and mystery without asking for it, blessed with a kind of fool’s grace. Now that Percy knows the score, he consciously sets his sights on returning to the Misty Mountains. This intention raises the problem of escapism. On one level, the Misty Mountains simply represent the lure of fantasy. As one of the more memorable geological features in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the Mountains cradle the Elven Shambhala of Rivendell while concealing terrible evil in their dark interiors. Returning to them is like slapping on a Led Zeppelin record one more time, traveling into your headphones and “over the hills” of sound, with or without a pocketful of gold in your bong. But such mists abut the mystic; like many an escapist head, Percy hopes his fairy tale can take him farther than fantasy, opening up the sacred zones where the spirits fly. He hopes to find a heaven in the air, a spiritual path far away from the street “down there.” That’s what he wants, but all he knows is that he has hit the road yet again. His only hope lies in the line from The Fellowship of the Ring still occasionally glimpsed on the bumpers of dilapidated VW vans, a line whose relevance to this record lies in the full couplet:

  All that is gold does not glitter

  Not all those who wander are lost.

  TO TRIP IS JUST TO FALL

  “Four Sticks” is the oddest, most exotic, and by far the least pleasant song on . Though some lugheads pick “The Battle of Evermore” as the album’s sore thumb, I once found this track the one to skip. The odd time signatures seemed labored, the riff annoying, and Plant’s highly compressed vocals pinched and overly “baby”-laden. Particularly unnerving was the wheezy Moog solo that Jones whips out three minutes into the song; though Jones does a great job of bending the instrument into the microtonal range, we are still far too close to the terrifying Keith Emerson solo that closes ELP’s 1970 song “Lucky Man” to feel at all comfortable with the situation.

  Only later did I realize that “Four Sticks” was supposed to sound this way. As with Page’s live explorations of the theremin and, to some extent, the violin bow, “Four Sticks” is a bit of avant-garde experimentalism tucked inside a vaguely psychedelic riff-rocker. That’s the nice thing about experimental music: it’s OK to make stuff that sounds lumbering, or claustrophobic, or repetitive, as long as it serves some larger musical or conceptual purpose. The purpose that “Four Sticks” serves is to reflect the spiritual funk that falls upon Percy when his quest to reach the mystical mountains lands him, instead, in a nightscape of ruined dreams. “Four Sticks” is clearly a quest song; besides Percy’s need to “get away,” the main riff ascends, in contrast to the downward hop of “Misty Mountain.” Percy is climbing up the hillside, toward the realms of higher consciousness. But he is haunted by owls and lost in the pines—a place where, as Bill Monroe reminds us in an “old” bluegrass tune, you don’t want to spend much time:

  In the pin
es, in the pines

  Where the sun never shines

  And we shiver when the cold wind blows

  “Four Sticks” is the “Walpurgis Night” of , the first indication that our hero’s journey is a downward spiral; that he’s no longer heading for heaven but for Styx. Percy began his quest haunted, and, despite his earlier gnostic insights, he remains spooked. He cannot integrate his experience but keeps hungering for more. Besides the night fowl and the uncanny trees, he’s got a red river coursing through his head—an image that recalls the crimson specter that lodged in his skull during “Black Dog.” The paperback fantasies that once kept him going no longer pack a charge, as “shields and lore” collapse before the stomping boots of contemporary violence. Emotionally, he’s a wreck. Instead of finding a pot of gold, Percy discovers what Chuck Eddy calls “the treadmill at the end of the rainbow.” Though he wants to get away from his baby, he spends the whole song crying after her.

  Most of the time you can’t even understand what Plant is singing, since his vocals sound like they have been compressed through a metal sieve at the end of a garden hose. It doesn’t matter much, though. Like so much of this record, “Four Sticks” tells its story with sound more than words. Plant’s most emotional moments occur during the wordless melisma of the outro, where we hear him moaning like the pines, or a cat in heat, or a Bedouin witch. The title of the song also refers directly to the music: in order to generate the rumbling beats that criss-cross the tune like clashing ripples in a pond, John Bonham used four drumsticks, two in each hand. How Bonham used four sticks to such great effect is not entirely clear; perhaps he grew extra arms, like a Hindu god. Part of his challenge is that the song spends a goodly amount of time in five-four; in contrast to “Black Dog,” which also suggested tricky time signatures, “Four Sticks” does not let Bonham stay rooted in four-four time; the song is too trippy, too “high.” One does not get the sense that Bonham particularly enjoys rising to this challenge, but any questions about his skill set are shoved aside at the end of the tune when, immediately following Percy’s final verse, he starts challenging the already challenging beat, adding ornery accents and mean polyrhythmic flourishes. The bravura is aggressive, for sure, but it’s also Bonzo’s way of showing us that Percy has stumbled on his path.