Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV Read online

  Strictly speaking, however, the album is not nameless. As the LP label and 1993’s Complete Studio Recordings box set make clear, the album’s name is . At the time of the album’s release, Atlantic went so far as to supply trade magazines with the fonts so they could list the record on the charts. Like the YHVH of the Jews and alchemists, is unpronounceable, a verbal tangle that underscores the most important thing about these four sigils: that they seem to communicate something without saying anything at all. When confronted with such inscrutable signs, our natural impulse is to decode them, to “know what they mean.” But when it comes to , strict meanings are neither their nature nor their function. These sigils, and the musical sounds they announce, don’t mean stuff so much as make stuff happen. And they make stuff happen by frustrating the conventional process of meaning. And this, by the way, is one of the basic procedures of the occult. The signs on the wall are unclear, so they draw you in, like strange lights on the horizon. And by the time you see that they’re nothing like what you expected, it’s too late: you have already crossed the threshold.

  THE CURVING PATH

  A grizzled geezer peers out at you, bent over a rough cane with the weight of the wood he lugs. He is clearly a rural dweller, a paganus, but a nineteenth century one, wearing a bowler hat and tweed duds decorated with an almost professorial knee patch. An intriguing character, though only a print, we note, framed and nailed to a crumbling wall papered with a drab floral pattern. Upon opening the outside gatefold, we take another step back from the picture of the old man, as what we took to be an interior wall resolves into a ruin, already half torn down. There are shrubs and weeds and more crumbling row houses, while some ugly postwar British tower blocks rise in the distance, already gone slummy. There’s a nearly unreadable Oxfam poster on one wall: “Someone dies from hunger everyday.”

  Here there is no reason to doubt Jimmy Page’s explanation: “The old man on the cover carrying the wood is in harmony with nature. He takes from nature and gives back to the land. It’s a natural cycle. It’s right. His old cottage gets pulled down and they put him in these urban slums, terrible places.”11 Page reported that Plant found the print of the old man in a junk shop in Reading, while others suggest that the fellow may actually be George Pickingill, a nineteenth century “cunning man” from Essex whose Christian-bashing covens were claimed by a few fanciful occultists in the 1970s to have influenced both Crowley and Gerald Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca. There’s one tiny image of Pickingill online, and both men have the same crab apple face, but it’s tough to say if it’s him, and doesn’t really matter.12 The important point is that this exemplar of the Old Ways is an ordinary modern person, and not a bare-chested warlock besting goblins in some Frank Frazetta fetishscape.

  Though charged with fantasy, Led Zeppelin’s “paganism,” and especially Page’s occult interests, emerge from a real history. From the time of Shelley and Byron, British culture has produced movements and persons who resist the disenchanted landscape of industrial modernity: the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris, the Golden Dawn (an influential occult order that included both Crowley and W. B. Yeats), and Tolkien. Like many of his fellows, a young Jimmy Page alluded to this romantic and often nostalgic cultural current by wearing foppish duds in the 1960s. But Page took it further, collecting “Pre-Raphaelite furniture” (presumably, Arts and Crafts) and immersing himself in Crowley, whose occultism emerged from a fin-de-siècle matrix of art and decadence that both resisted and embraced the modern turn. “I think I’m basically a romantic,” Page told one interviewer in 1970. “I can’t relate to this age … ”13 Not relating to this age, one looks back, through a crumbling frame, and imagines another one. That’s why the old man is not in black and white, but tinted with funny colors: We are projecting as well as seeing. This projection is the cunning movement that draws us inside the frame, inside the fold of an imagined “tradition” of magic. At the same time, the old man’s backbreaking labor reminds us that “harmony with nature” is no picnic. The rituals that sustain such harmony require physical work, and though one suspects the old man’s heavy load is destined for some ritual, some solstice pile or burning man, it doesn’t look like much fun to haul.

  The most ingenious reading of these bundles of wood I’ve come across refers to a short text that Crowley penned for the third volume of The Equinox, the literary organ for the Astrum Argentium, which was the magical order he founded after getting booted out of the Golden Dawn. Crowley begins the passage with loosely alchemical imagery: man constantly strives with those elements in his being that sink, especially the elements of wood and water. Crowley suggests that the appropriate magical tool against these forces is fire, and he looks forward to the time when the Law of Thelema “shall set the world ablaze.” Crowley doesn’t expect this blaze to begin with “the small dry sticks that kindle quickly and die” nor with “the great logs, the masses of humanity.” Instead, he looks forward to those “middle faggots” that will burn long and hard until “the great logs blaze.” Led Zeppelin, in this reading, see themselves as these middle fagots, the “Four Sticks” who will ignite their vast forests of fandom with Crowley’s apocalyptic word.14

  The guy who came up with this doozy is one Thomas W. Friend, whose self-published, 632-page book Fallen Angel: The Untold Story of Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin: Based on the Stairway to Heaven Album is without a doubt the most exhaustive occult reading of Zep yet attempted. That such a reading is justified should be beyond argument. Plant was immersed in hippie lore, while Jimmy Page stands as rock and roll’s most prominent student of the occult. But did he practice? The facts we know, though widely reported, only tantalize: Page is one of the world’s top collectors of Crowleyania, having scarfed up the Beast’s first editions, paintings, Tarot decks, and ritual robes; in 1970, he purchased Boleskine House, an eighteenth century mansion on the southeastern shores of Loch Ness once owned by Crowley. Page worked on a soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising, a ritual invocation on celluloid heavily influenced by Anger’s knowledge and experience of Thelema. In interviews, Page has mentioned attending séances and practicing yoga. Going out on a limb, one might argue that Page also fits a certain sort of occult profile: an only child born under Saturn, imaginative and isolationist, obsessed with control. But Page has always held his Thoth cards close to his chest. We have no idea how he may have passed from theory to practice, though I suspect he didn’t buy Boleskine for the views.

  What Page’s occultism has to do with Led Zeppelin’s music or Robert Plant’s lyrics is another question, of course. Friend believes it explains everything, and that’s because the guys in Led Zeppelin are, as he felicitously puts it, “four of the most dangerous Devil worshipers to ever walk the earth.” Friend, you see, is a born-again Christian. But he was a hardcore Zephead in 1977, when he saw his favorite band at Madison Square Garden during their triumphant return to touring after two years of personal strife. During “No Quarter,” Jimmy Page broke out a peculiar electronic instrument called the theremin, whose uncanny soundscapes he had been exploring since the psychedelic falderal in the middle of “Whole Lotta Love.” When Page began to wave his hands around the instrument’s two antennae, Friend, who was both dizzy and stoned, felt a “quick narcotic rush” as the space around him filled with demons. He was overwhelmed with the temptation to give his will over to Satan. He resisted, and thirty years later, wrote and published Fallen Angel to warn other fans about the infectious diabolism that lurks at the core of Led Zeppelin’s music, and especially . To complete his task, Friend read over thirty of Crowley’s books, and he now has a better handle on occult Kabbalah than he does on all but the crudest strains of fundamentalist Christianity. The fellow is no scholar: He cites an illustrated Wizards and Witches Time–Life book and quotes Faust as a source—the fictional character, that is, not the text. He makes much of synchronicities and numerology, and takes poetic language for supernatural fact, which makes the more imaginative passages in his book e
ntertaining and occasionally illuminating.15 Unfortunately, Friend’s final interpretive move is maddeningly predictable. Every mythic figure who struts across the stage—Apollo, King Arthur, Horus—turns out to be Satan in disguise, with all your favorite rock musicians his eternal acolytes. Even Abba gets exposed for the devilish pacts alluded to in the title of their box set Thank You for the Music.

  Probably the most famous soul-swap in rock and roll lore was committed by Led Zeppelin, who supposedly pulled a Robert Johnson in exchange for musical greatness. (If so, they certainly got a better deal than the Delta bluesman, who died at age twenty-seven, probably poisoned, after making a handful of largely poorly-selling sides.) The Zep rumor was tawdry, teen-mag stuff, but its cheesy ubiquity attests to the band’s power to make mass mythology with teeth. Just compare Zep to the Stones, darkside dabblers widely embraced as Bad Boys by the press. Yes, the Stones doffed Papa Ghede top hats and expressed sympathy for the devil. But who really holds more satanic majesty? Eurotrash Mick with the MBA or the priapic Pan from Birmingham? Charming Charlie Watts or the potentially barbaric John Bonham? Or try running this little thought experiment: You step into an elevator and there’s Keith Richards, leaning against the wall, grinning at you. You murmur something fannish and grateful, awed that this grizzled, fabulously wealthy wraith still walks the earth. Now imagine you’re in the same situation, facing Jimmy Page: silent, feline, ominously puffy. You’d probably just want to get the hell out of there.

  Taken literally, Zep’s Satanism is silly, but as a figure for their cultural power, it warrants attention, especially when brought to you by an imaginative if paranoid obsessive like Thomas Friend. One of Friend’s most audacious but intriguing claims concerns the image on the inside of the gatefold, which was conceived by Page and brought into being, in pencil and gold, by his friend Barrington Colby. Atop a mountain stands another old man, an idealized geezer based on the classic Rider–Waite Tarot image of the Hermit—a symbol of self-reliance and wisdom, according to Page. Though the Hermit is usually read as a figure of solitary illumination, here he waits for a scruffy seeker below to make his way up the mountain. This ascent is mirrored in Page’s “fantasy sequence” during the film The Song Remains the Same, which shows the guitarist climbing up a mountain to encounter an old man—also played by Page—whose face goes through various lysergic morphs before the figure waves his wand, itself a psychedelic echo of Page’s own onstage use of the violin bow. Friend points out that the sequence was shot behind Boleskine House on a full moon night. He also reminds us that Crowley bought the isolated mansion in 1899 in order to attempt the arduous Operation of Abra-Melin the Mage, the successful completion of which results in “the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.” For Thelemites, this close encounter with the HGA—aka, one’s daemon or higher self—signifies the discovery of one’s True Will.

  Friend claims that Crowley contacted the HGA at Boleskine, and that Page purchased the place to perform the same operation (Stephen Davis reports that Page also hired “the Satanist Charles Pierce” to restore some of Crowley’s murals). Unfortunately, Crowley’s diaries strongly suggest that he encountered his HGA much later, down in Surrey, where he was hiding from his wife and experimenting with hashish and prayer. Nonetheless, there is a certain crazy charm to Friend’s claim. Friend notes that Zeppelin did not tour during the fall of 1970, a break that ended only when the band gathered in December to begin rehearsing and recording their fourth album. Though the time frame was rather cramped by true Solomonic standards, Friend believes that Page succeeded in contacting the HGA, who of course is actually Satan, and that this triumph is mirrored in Colby’s gatefold, the later fantasy sequence, and the phenomenally popular music on . And that’s why the band didn’t put their name on the jacket. They didn’t write the music. Satan did.

  Of course, Jimmy Page probably just spent the fall of 1970 getting stoned, playing guitar, and listening to Band of Gypsies and the Trees. But there are certain peculiarities about Colby’s image that should be noted. There is only one significant difference between Colby’s hermit and the Rider–Waite image, a difference Friend notes with an admirable clarity: “THERE ARE HORNS STICKING THROUGH THE HOOD!!!”16 There is another surprise beside this hint of diabolical iconography: If you hold the gatefold open vertically and place the right side of the image along a mirror, a beast will shape itself out of the mountain rubble and leap into your eyes. Go ahead, try it at home. Is the beast a dragon? A hound of hell? The black dog? Friend does not discuss this simulacrum, although he does claim to find an image of a hawk tucked away in Colby’s mountain. After performing a Lesser Banishing Ritual and meditating with this image for a few hours, however, I believe that this avian totem is actually a penguin.

  How do we account for these creatures that form themselves from random squiggles? Think back to when you were a kid, and elephants and pirate ships formed themselves on the fly from floating clouds or weathered stone. Those spontaneous cartoons remind us that our brains are not just passive receivers of data but active projectors of meaning, constantly weaving the information they pick up into holistic perceptions. In certain situations, these projections draw heavily from the dream-store of the imagination, especially when the visual data is shadowy or ambiguous, a liminal condition that makes our projections tend toward the fantastic. Leonardo da Vinci famously suggested that novice painters should spend some time staring at stained walls and mottled rocks until “the likeness of divine landscapes” emerged.17 This phantasmagorical response to visual ambiguity also explains why the slanted shades of twilight can lay a faery glamour across the land. It also explains the alternate name of Colby’s drawing: “View in Half or Varying Light.” The word “View” here, which you might take to be a noun, may actually be a command. By viewing the drawing in half (mirrored) or varying light, the drawing’s capacity to invoke your imagination is enhanced. You get it? The beast is inside you.

  MAGIC RUNES

  Yanking out the inner sleeve from the gatefold, we come across the lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven,” some recording data, and four peculiar symbols emblazoned on the parchment-colored paper. These notorious symbols, or sigils, concentrate and refract the mystery of the entire record. The first thing that must be said is that there are four of them, and that they appear on the fourth record released by a quartet, a record that features four songs on each side. On a talismanic disc like , all these fours suggest the most fundamental of occult quaternities: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, the four elements once believed to make up the whole of material reality. As Crowley suggested in the quote from the Equinox cited above, these elements are also spiritual qualities, and were decisively linked to the four suits of the Tarot deck by the French magus Éliphas Lévi. In his influential 1855 book Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, which kick-started the modern occult revival. Lévi expanded magic’s network of correspondences by correlating Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to, respectively, Discs, Swords, Wands, and Cups.

  John Bonham’s sigil, later emblazoned on his single bass drum, is made up of three Discs; with only a tad bit more imagination, we can see John Paul Jones’s sign as three stylized Cups knotted together over a central circle. Earth and water are base elements; Jones played bass, and Bonzo was base, at least when he was drunk. The wordsmith Plant’s feather clearly belongs to air, the element of speech and thought pictured by the Tarot as the suit of Swords, one of which Plant wields in his fantasy sequence in The Song Remains the Same. And to Page, of course, goes the element of fire, of transformative energies and the magical Will. In Lévi’s scheme, fire and will are associated with the suit of Wands (or violin bows); besides including a number of wand-like shapes, the Zorro slash of recalls the electrical fire of lightning, the spark of the alchemical process.

  When music critics attempt to describe the synergy that great musical combos can generate, they often fall back, rather loosely, on the notion of alchemy. In alchemy, which differs from chemistry
in its sensitivity to psychospiritual dynamics, various base materials are combined, sometimes under great tension, in order to transform those substances into things rare and noble. Alchemy is the metallurgy of the spirit, and so makes a fit analogy for music, perhaps the most spiritual of arts. But with Led Zeppelin, we move beyond mere metaphor, or at least to the magical edge of metaphor, for in sound and spirit the band invoked elemental forces to craft their soundscapes and song. Many of the group’s unique characteristics—their drama and dynamics, their range of genres and moods, their imaginative command and tremendous success—speak to their ability to creatively combine and contrast basic musical elements into transforming presences. And is their Great Work, where they turned lead into gold, then platinum, and finally diamond, the ultimate fusion of hardness and light.

  Page asked the band to choose their sigils from an existing source, Rudolph Koch’s Book of Signs, but Plant and Page wound up designing their own. (“Typical, really,” Jones later noted.18) Koch was a German type designer and artist, and his collection of ancient and medieval glyphs was primarily intended as a sourcebook for graphic artists. Though brief explanations are attached to the signs, Koch’s intent reminds us that the band’s sigils have no more necessary “meaning” than most elements of design. Is there a meaning to the nifty Arts and Crafts typeface that Page lifted for the “Stairway to Heaven” lyrics on the other side of the sleeve? Or just a vibe? Part of the cleverness of these sigils is that they compel us to decode them. It is not enough to simply watch them whip around the spindle of a turntable, blurring design into op-art phantasmagoria. They must be made to speak.