Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV Read online

  These are metaphors, of course, but they are animistic pagan ones. Inside the magic circle of the occult, metaphors like this take on a life of their own; they are not just icing on the poetic cake but forms of experience. Perhaps the primary experience that gets shaped by animistic metaphors is the experience of energy. The countercultural exploitation of electrical energy in the 1960s—through music, radio, feedback, bullhorns, and film—supported the return of animism as a viable cultural metaphor. This is what William Burroughs meant in his strange 1975 Crawdaddy article on Zeppelin, when he wrote that “Rock music can be seen as one attempt to break out of this dead soulless universe and reassert the universe of magic.”34 Given Page’s occult studies and Plant’s love of heathen lore, we should hardly be surprised that a degree of animism leaked into their electronic rhetoric, musical and otherwise. But Page’s animist quip also implies an element of control that, as we shall see, informs his instrumental pyrotechnics as well as his occult mystique. “Rise and shine!” he says, a commander of potentially chaotic energies. He may call these energies a guitar army, but a student of ceremonial magic like Page would also recognize these powers as servitors: earthly or infernal spirits that the magus binds to do his bidding. Satanic pacts are a chump’s game; Page found his allies in electrical sound machines.35

  HOWLING MORE

  In the mid 1970s, Jimmy Page took a thimbleful of his fortune and financed the opening of an occult bookshop in London called the Equinox. A tiny store just off Kensington High Street, the Equinox specialized in the Crowleyania that Page had already been collecting for years. Crowley’s stuff was hard to find in those days, but the Equinox sold many obscure volumes, including some signed by the master himself. The shop also offered a complete first edition of Crowley’s original ten-volume Equinox, whose stated aim was “to synthesize the aim of religion and the method of science.” Page’s enterprise was also set up to republish facsimiles of important occult works, including some written by—hold onto your hats—Aleister Crowley.

  At this point in his life, however, Jimmy Page’s occult side projects could be said to have lacked a certain follow-through. As mentioned earlier, Page had been working on a soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s Thelemite film Lucifer Rising for years. Page first met Anger when he outbid the California underground filmmaker for a pornographic Crowley manuscript at Sotheby’s. The two hit it off, and Anger’s densely symbolic film gave Page a perfect platform to explore the intense electronic trance music his more commercial work kept hinting at. But he couldn’t get it together, and though Anger had one of the most famous rockers in the world working for him gratis, the filmmaker eventually got fed up with Page’s lackluster efforts and turned the soundtrack chores over to the imprisoned Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil.36

  Similarly, by the time the Equinox closed its doors in 1979, the enterprise had managed to publish only two books. The first of these, which appeared in 1976 with the kind of black camelhair wrappers fancied by Crowley, was called The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King. It was the facsimile edition of a sixteenth century magical text edited and published in English by Crowley in 1904, the same year the master channeled the Thelemite revelation The Book of the Law. The Goetia is the first portion of the Lemegeton, or the Lesser Key of Solomon, one of the most famous magical grimoires. On The Goetia’s elaborate title page, Crowley attributes the translation of the book to a “dead hand”; the translator was in fact the still-living MacGregor Mathers, the Golden Dawn co-founder from whom Crowley was then estranged. This seeming rip-off was appropriate, for though there are many exalted and noble works in the canons of magic, The Goetia is not one of them. Its sigils and conjurations are designed to give the mage brute command over an army of several million devils organized into legions headed by seventy-two Kings and Princes of Hell. Goetia, it should be mentioned, is Greek for howling.

  Page’s decision to begin his publishing career with the org charts to Lucifer’s own guitar army should dispel any lingering doubts about which side the guitarist’s bread was buttered on. Friend makes much of this diabolical book in Fallen Angel, and is particularly drawn to the spirit Paimon. A great King with a roaring voice, Paimon is surrounded by musicians; Friend even hears an echo of “The Song Remains the Same” in The Goetia’s promise that this demon can teach you “any … thing thou mayest desire to know.” That’s pretty silly, and Friend would have done well to read the Crowley essay that accompanies the text, wherein the Beast, wearing the skeptical hat he favored at this stage of his career, writes that the goetic demons are just “portions of the human brain.” But Friend gets much closer to the mark when he cites the “Preliminary Definition of Magic” that opens the grimoire. According to this brief commentary, magic is the highest form of natural philosophy, and its operations are driven by the magician’s understanding of the inner or “occult” nature of things. By skillfully applying this understanding to things, the operator can produce “strange and admirable effects … which to the vulgar shall seem to be a miracle.”37

  The magician, then, is a technician of special effects, which seems as good a place as any to consider how Page’s occult predilections may have informed Led Zeppelin’s music. In particular, we can talk about the sound of this music, which not only howls and roars, but plumbs the depths—literally. Live and on record, Zep’s sound was heavy, a chthonic crunch rooted in loud, distorted riffs and the combined power of John Paul Jones and John Bonham, who moved into the lower register like they owned the place. It is possible to make cross-cultural arguments about the shadowy psychic states catalyzed by deep beats and a heavy sound; in his Crawdaddy article, Burroughs mentions the Jajouka trance music of Morocco, whose rites revolve around the goat-god Pan. But you only need to open your ears to hear Led Zeppelin toying with what Johnny Cash called “the beast in me”: something seething and base and more than a little crass. As Page noted, the band made “music from the stomach rather than the head.” You can see it in the way he slung his guitar onstage: Page liked to take it as low as you can go.

  It is a measure of Led Zeppelin’s command that their low-end, folk-fringed crunge—coupled with the castles and ringwraiths that floated through Plant’s lyrics—staked out territory wherein an entire subgenre of rock would grow. Alchemical language is unavoidable: Zeppelin took the weighty riffs of heavy rock and transmuted them into heavy metal, a term which they nonetheless rejected, reasonably enough, for themselves. In any case, their riff mythos launched a thousand black ships. It is as if they forged a sonic portal into the abyss, and then broke the cardinal rule of ceremonial magic and left the damn thing open. Who let the dogs of doom out?

  In fairness, it must be said that many rock bards name Black Sabbath rather than Zeppelin as the true font of heavy metal. After all, Sabbath pack an unparalleled eldritch punch, and in many ways represent a purer source of bane: the riffs more consistently morbid, the stance more prole, and the whole shtick more out-of-nowhere and hence more monstrous, more contrary to nature. But Zeppelin had a vaster palette, a more richly perfumed darkness; perhaps most importantly, they sold way more records. Like all origin stories, this one depends on your frame of reference, your own lineages, your taste. It’s very much like the question of who deserves blame for the genre of heroic fantasy, whose multi-volume sagas of dwarf-lords and magic blades continue to clog the SF sections of bookstores. Hard-core sword-and-sorcery buffs will rightly name the pulp peregrinations of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, while more literary types will nominate, with equal justification, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Sabbath is Conan; Zeppelin is Lord of the Rings.

  But Zeppelin is a special sort of Lord of the Rings, one where you get to root for both sides. Whatever its biographical basis, Page’s apparent diabolism is counterbalanced with the bucolic hippie paganism concentrated in the lyrics, persona, and hairstyles of Robert Plant. Led Zeppelin derives much of their mythic power from this seductive but disturbing ambiguity. Who do Zeppelin swear fealty to? The devil or the s
un? Mordor or Middle-earth? Is Faery really just a theme park of Hell? The polarity between Page and Plant is even reflected in their very names. The plant is the pure green spunk of earth, whereas the page is a work of man, a skeletal void upon which we inscribe our plots and spells.

  A similar polarity underlies Page’s persona, and helps to explain the aura of magical power that characterizes his mystique. Susan Fast cites one fan survey focused on the guitarist: “He is the sage. He knows how to take chances and make it work. He is the producer and ultimate architect of the goods.”38 On the surface, Page’s live performances present typical rockist values of spontaneity, virtuosity, and sweaty abandon. But Page adds a novel element to the figure of the guitar hero, an element that Steve Waksman has identified as mystery. So even as Page bares his cock rock before tens of thousands of fans, the Zoso doodle emblazoned on his clothes and amp remind us that he knows something that we don’t. There is a gap between the hero whose performance we consume and the sage behind the curtain, who remains concealed, literally occult. This mystique makes Page far creepier than Ozzy, who is hiding nothing, except maybe his debt to The Munsters. Though rooted in Page’s personal reserve and esoteric interests, the guitarist’s mystique is also structurally reflected in his musical practice. Page’s live virtuosity was leavened by the fact that he was notoriously sloppy, constantly picking up and discarding ideas with an air of carelessness, even distraction. In the heat of performance, it often seemed like a part of him was somewhere else, at a wise or possibly addled remove. Yet this sloppiness suggested that he had even mastered chance, and could “make it work.” This element of hidden mastery is the key, for behind the scenes, Page was an architect of control: a hands-on producer, a sometimes martinet in the studio, and a tight-fisted investor who, along with Peter Grant, helped wrest unprecedented financial and artistic control away from his record company.39 This air of cunning underlies his mystique. Onstage, he would occasionally direct the other members like a conductor, a performance that Jones has insisted was largely for show.

  Those souls disturbed by Zeppelin’s power seem most threatened by this quality of hidden control. For Tom Friend, Zeppelin’s spell is concentrated in occult technology. In his chapter “Misty Mountain Hop: Satan Takes Possession of Jimmy Page,” the author expends copious prose on the violin bow and the Echoplex; the following chapter is devoted entirely to the theremin. To Friend’s credit, it must be said that Page liked to play the great and terrible Oz. Onstage, he sapped the theremin for all the sorcerous drama he could muster; the guitarist often deployed his bow like a ceremonial magician’s wand, sometimes even seeming to ritually “call the quarters.” To reporters Page dropped cryptic comments about the hypnotic power of riff music; in Sounds, he discussed the “science of vibration,” floating the paranoid chestnut that certain frequencies of infrasound can liquefy your guts or even kill you. Of course, the band heartily denied what Friend and others describe as Zeppelin’s ultimate secret weapon of diabolism: the “backwards-masked” satanic messages supposedly woven into “Stairway to Heaven.”

  We will deal with these garbled hymns to “My Sweet Satan” in a later chapter. What’s important to note here is that these accusations of occult control mirror secular critiques of the band and their “fascist” manipulation of consciousness through media. When a Montreal Star reporter attacked Led Zeppelin for generating “false meaning” through volume, he was not criticizing the group for playing lame songs but for taking technological advantage of listeners. Indeed, with the exception of Susan Fast and Donna Gaines, commentators who address Zep’s core fans tend to characterize them as dupes, teenage zombies with little will or taste of their own. Sometimes drugs take the blame as well. Rolling Stone famously dismissed Zep’s followers as “heavy dope fiends,” while the Los Angeles Times went so far as to attribute the band’s success to the teenage embrace of barbiturates and amphetamines, drugs which seemingly rendered the human nervous system more susceptible to the band’s dirty tricks.

  At the same time, it would be stupid to dismiss the questions of seduction and trance raised by Zeppelin’s live performances and recordings. Such matters are thorny topics in criticism, as they touch upon fundamental issues of autonomy, of who we are when we give ourselves to music. The dissolution of boundaries most of us have experienced dissolves the boundaries of discourse as well, melting aesthetic categories into sacred intuitions and the febrile flashbacks of tribal exotica. It is difficult enough to explain, in anthropological terms, how the phenomenon of possession occurs in traditional sacred dance, say, in Haitian vodun: What blend of cultural narratives, beat science, and psychodynamics boots up the gods? How much harder then to talk about entrancing rock music within the broken frameworks of secular modernity. Christian fundamentalists not only accept the reality of musical hypnotism, but suggest that it is an automatic function of a specific technology or technique, whether subliminal messages or volume or the “Druid beats” condemned by Jack Chick in one of his famous comic-book tracts. And yet this paranoia points to something we all desire on the road to transport: the release of control, or rather, the submission to a choicelessness that can seem both delicious and slightly ominous. Even fundamentalists crave their rapture, their journey to the middle of the air.

  The notion that some magic sonic weapon lies behind Led Zeppelin’s evident power is not just an affront to the complexity of music; it’s an affront to magic. The magician is more than a trickster; as the historian of religion Mircae Eliade wrote, the magician is, by definition, “a stage-producer.” The magus does not just dangle a golden pendulum before your eyes; he shapes a theater around that pendulum, a stage large and suggestive enough to draw you in. Jimmy Page knew that all of the Marshall stacks and effects pedals in the world wouldn’t do diddly if Led Zeppelin did not craft drama and atmosphere out of the aggressive and horny energies they raised. Which brings us back, in a rambling sort of way, to mise-en-scène.

  IT’S TO A CASTLE I WILL TAKE YOU

  As he ate through his allotted span of time, Aleister Crowley produced a number of definitions of magic, most of which emphasized the will. Crowley meant many things by will, things both phallic and mystic, but the basic picture accords with the conventional notion of the magician as an operator, an active manipulator of supernatural agents or sneaky techniques of perception. Crowley also provides a more passive and receptive picture of the magical art in the “Notes for an Astral Atlas” that appends his Magick in Theory and Practice. “Magick,” he writes, “enables us to receive sensible impressions of worlds other than the ‘physical’ universe.”40 In this view, magic does not so much intensify the will as open up imaginative experience, triggering incorporeal sensations and images that have lives of their own. If you replace “magick” with “music” in Crowley’s statement, you will see where we are headed. Music enables us to receive sensible impressions of worlds other than the “physical” universe. Even when we are dancing deep in the groove, music is always prepared to disembody us, to set the spirit wandering through worlds conjured with no more material than vibrating waves of energy.

  Led Zeppelin records embody this virtual power in the definitive sense that they take place somewhere, that they draw you into another world, over the hills and far away. Space is a primary metaphor for understanding and experiencing the band’s music. As Ann Powers notes, “This is why people hated them: they took up so much space. And it’s why people loved them: that space could swallow you up, take you in.”41 Lots of head music in the late 1960s and 1970s had such aspirations; the rhetoric of transport accorded with the drug culture as well as the discovery that the multi-track studio was a great place to build pocket worlds. But while many self-consciously psychedelic bands suggested the intense distortions and phantasmagoria of the drug rush, Zeppelin’s mise-en-scène was more like Crowley’s idea of an astral atlas: an almost storybook panorama of images and characters. They polished rock into a scrying stone: you could see the blazing dunes of “Kashmir,
” the driving snow of “No Quarter,” and the Viking hordes when the thunderous “Immigrant Song” riff kicked in. “The goal was synesthesia,” Page has said. “Creating pictures with sound.”42

  The desire to make pictures with sound accords with Led Zeppelin’s deep romantic leanings. After Beethoven’s symphonic revolution, many nineteenth century composers explored “programme music,” self-consciously linking narrative imagery and events to instrumental themes and developments. Not surprisingly, such symphonies often veered toward the dramatic: large masses of sounds, dynamic and sudden contrasts, expressive and even violent explosions of energy. Composers like Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss knew that sturm und drang makes especially vivid pictures in the mind; Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, with its opium dreams and witches’ sabbath, is “visionary” in more than one sense of the term. Though Zeppelin have much less of a fetish for classical music than other heavy metal artists, the band also rooted their rich dramatics in what Page has called their “inner dynamics.” These dynamics derive from the variety of contrasts Zeppelin employ: elven folk and muddy blues, lightning attacks and molasses riffs, holy majesty and pelvic sleaze, technological effects and pastoral romance. These polarities, often masterfully arranged by John Paul Jones, clasp and crash throughout the course of an album or even a song, carving out a landscape that the electronic media theorist Marshall McLuhan would call an “acoustic space.”