Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV Read online

  This sinking feeling lies behind much of the “pop occulture” that exploded during the early 1970s: the flowering of sects and gurus, the publishing boom in occult fantasy and “metaphysical” titles, and the diffusion of a vaguely pagan, vaguely druggy mysticism through the minds, arts, and lifestyles of a generation. This mythic turn partly represented a retreat from the real. But it also reflected the degree to which the 1960s had torn the lid off the unconscious and loosed its delirious contents into the popular mind and its commercial twin: popular media. Led Zeppelin, with their air of mastery and mystery, made records that fed this yen for power and enchantment, for hedonistic mystique. Their commercial success, like their savage reputation, was intrinsic to their glamour, in a way it was not for the Beatles or the Stones; they had raided the top of the mountain, and were engorging themselves like crowned and conquering kids. But this vulgar command was offset by the restlessness in their music, by Plant’s rambling and Page’s fretwork, by the band’s genre-hopping and epic touring. Led Zeppelin were rock gods who staged their own Götterdammerung, idols who painted themselves with twilight, and this pagan melancholy resolved their brute power into a more lasting and resonant chord. Like Beowulf or Moby Dick, sounds the tragic note of its times, and of others: the cry for passage that echoes through all sagas of the unredeemed.

  NOTES

  1. Lord Dunsany, “The Bride of the Man-Horse,” in In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin, 2004), 186.

  2. Andy Fyfe, When the Levee Breaks (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003), 14.

  3. Fundamentalists note: daemonic is not the same as demonic, but denotes a more ambiguous divine presence.

  4. Julian Dibbell, “Unpacking Our Hard Drives: Discophilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” in This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project, ed. Eric Weisbard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 287.

  5. Robert Duncan, “Light Song,” in Selected Poems, ed. Robert Bertholf (New York: New Directions, 1997), 47.

  6. David Toop, Haunted Weather (London: Serpents Tail, 2004), 168.

  7. Albin Zak III, The Poetics of Rock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 20.

  8. Zak, 12.

  9. P. J. O’Rourke, “The Album Jacket as Art Form,” in Very Seventies, ed. Peter Knobler and Greg Mitchell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 96.

  10. The full motto also appeared in its entirety on the stateside single “Immigrant Song / Hey Hey What Can I Do.”

  11. Chris Welch, Dazed and Confused (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998), 56.

  12. www.controverscial.com/Pickingill.gif; accessed June 2004.

  13. Robert Gordon, Led Zeppelin: The Press Reports (Burlington, Ontario: Collectors Guide Publishing, 1998), 91.

  14. Thomas W. Friend, Fallen Angel (Sherman Oaks, CA: Gabriel Publications, 2002), 6.

  15. For example, in the midst of an archeology of pagan solar symbolism, he points out that Elvis Presley—the King to whom Robert Plant owes the greatest fealty—recorded for Sun records.

  16. Friend, 399.

  17. Joe Banks, “Rorschach Audio,” Strange Attractor 1 (Winter 2003/2004), 151.

  18. Fyfe, 106.

  19. Friend, 349.

  20. www.inthelight.co.nz/spirit.htm; accessed September 2004.

  21. Fyfe, 110.

  22. Austin Osman Spare, “The Book of Pleasure,” in From the Inferno to Zos (Seattle: First Impressions, 2003), 50.

  23. This willed forgetting might shed light on the most amusing story about . According to Plant, Page once took the singer aside and told him the meaning of the sigil, a meaning that Plant then forgot. “And now Pagey won’t tell me.”

  24. Welch, 59.

  25. Ira Konigsberg, The Complete Film Dictionary (New York: New American Library, 1987), 240.

  26. Steven Waksman, Instruments of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 275.

  27. “Gramaphone,” from GramaphoneFilmTypewriter, http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Kittler/GramFilmTypewriter/Kittler_Gramophone.html#fn0; accessed September 2004.

  28. Gordon, The Press Reports, 114.

  29. Led Zeppelin: In-Frequently Murmured Trivia List, http://www.iem.ac.ru/zeppelin/docs/IFMTL-3.html; accessed summer 2004.

  30. Stephen Davis, Hammer of the Gods (New York: Ballantine, 1985), 252.

  31. Gordon, The Press Reports, 321.

  32. Ibid, 259.

  33. Ibid, 375.

  34. William Burroughs, “Led Zeppelin Meets Naked Lunch,” in Very Seventies, op cit, 125.

  35. In this light, it is perhaps no accident that the first tune that Led Zeppelin played together was “Train Kept A Rolling”; because of a damaged amplifier, the 1956 Johnny Burnette tune was arguably the first rock and roll song to feature distortion.

  36. Page’s morbid doodles, occasionally bootlegged, eventually mutated into the sonic squalls that open “In the Evening.”

  37. The Book of the Goetia, ed. Aleister Crowley (London: The Equinox, 1976), 6.

  38. Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 182.

  39. It is perhaps worth noting that Page’s first job was as a lab assistant, and that, after playing guitar on the Huw Wheldon Show in the late 1950s, he told the audience that, when he grew up, he wanted to be a biotechnologist and work with germs.

  40. http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/aba/app3.html; accessed October 2004.

  41. Waksman, 267.

  42. Jim DeRogatis, Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2003), 390.

  43. Zak, 77.

  44. Gordon, The Press Reports, 403.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Welch, 55.

  47. Waksman, 257.

  48. Fast, 122.

  49. Ritchie Yorke, Led Zeppelin: the Definitive Biography (Novato, CA: Underwood-Miller, 1993), 135.

  50. http://daize.puzzling.org/school/africanmusic.html; accessed June 2004.

  51. Thanks for this point to Charles Kronengold.

  52. Robert Palmer, “Led Zeppelin: the Music,” booklet, Led Zeppelin, Atlantic Records, 1990.

  53. Bob Trubshaw, “Black Dogs in Folklore,” http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/bdogfl.htm; accessed October 2004.

  54. Fast, 175.

  55. Gordon, The Press Reports, 258.

  56. Ibid, 220.

  57. Strider being Aragorn’s early nickname, like Percy, except nobler.

  58. Gordon, The Press Reports, 260.

  59. “Gramaphone,” op cit.

  60. Chuck Eddy, Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe (New York: Harmony, 1991), 13.

  61. Here they are: 1) Acoustic intro (0:00); 2) electric instruments (2:15); 3) drums (4:19); 4) fanfare/solo (5:35); 5) final riff (6:44).

  62. Robert Walser, Running with the Devil (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993), 158.

  63. Gordon, The Press Reports, 89.

  64. Robert Gordon, The Making of (Burlington, VT: CG Publishing, 1996), 48.

  65. Yorke, 137; in his book on the album, Gordon quotes Plant as saying wedding song.

  66. Plant makes this change on most of the bootlegs I have heard.

  67. Perhaps this is the state that Crowley described in his account of a hash-fueled encounter with the Holy Guardian Angel: “we have got rid of motion, but matter remains.”

  68. http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/l418/aetyr22.html; accessed October 2004.

  69. Burroughs, 122.

  70. http://www.the-equinox.org/vol1/no7/eqi07015.html; accessed October 2004.

  71. If you check out these recordings online, you might try listening to them first without knowing what they are supposed to say. They can be found at: http://www.triplo.com/ev/reversal/

  72. http://www.led-zeppelin.org/multimedia/sweetsatan.html; accessed September 2004.

  73. Yorke, 74.

  74. Cameron Crowe, “Led Zeppelin
/Light and Shade,” booklet, Led Zeppelin Box Set, Atlantic Records, 1990.

  75. Gordon, The Press Reports, 296.

  76. As the Beastie Boys put it: “If I played guitar I’d be Jimmy Page, the girlies I like are underage.”

  77. Will Shade, “Thieving Magpies,” http://www.furious.com/perfect/yardbirds2.html; accessed October 2004.

  78. Despite its similar descending line—which Page was certainly familiar with by 1969—“Taurus” lacks the counterpoint and cadence that makes the opening of “Stairway to Heaven” sound like an Elizabethan madrigal rather than a rote dollop of West Coast psych.

  79. Langston Hughes, “Memphis Minnie on the Icebox,” http://www.ralphmag.org/CB/memphis-minnie.html; accessed October 2004.

  80. Simon Reynolds and Joy Simon, Sex Revolts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 96.

  81. DeRogatis, 390.

  82. Eddy, 13.