Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV Read online

  Consider the exquisite ending of “Thank You,” which closes side one of Led Zeppelin II. Around 3:30 into the song, as Plant and his lover “walk the miles,” we hear the dewy plaints of Jones’s keyboards, rooted in the church organ playing of his youth, gradually fade into the distance. But what does this mean, to describe Jones’s sounds as fading “into the distance”? Though fade-outs resemble the physical experience of a sound source moving away from our bodies, they are so common in recorded music that we rarely read them as a change in proximity. At first, “Thank You” proceeds normally: Jones’s holy flutters simply dwindle away, along with the bell-like toll of Page’s resonating D. At this point, first-time listeners are ready for the next track. But then, unexpectedly, the instruments return, increasing in volume until they resolve into a sustained, quietly triumphant chord. And that slight return opens up an infinite sense of place, of going and coming, a space of both potential and finality, like the sea. It is one of Zeppelin’s most sublime and subtle moments.

  Zeppelin albums do not just lead listeners through the hills and dales of individual tunes, but draw them through the passageways between songs. Zeppelin albums are Albums, remember, as consciously sequenced as any records not condemned to the unnerving category of “concept album.” Consider how “Your Time Is Gonna Come” bleeds into “Black Mountain Side” on the first record: though a jarring juxtaposition, especially rhythmically, it adds another “spice” to the stylistic masala of Page’s acoustic fantasy, with its Celtic and Indian flavors, and prepares our palette, through contrast, for the quarter second of silence that precedes the bangers-and-mash riff of “Communication Breakdown.” Such powerful juxtapositions, which also operate inside songs like “Bring It On Home,” “Ramble On,” and “What Is and What Should Never Be,” not only create dynamics, but make the metaphor of the journey inevitable. Listening to Zep Albums is like a cruise through shifting landscapes; in the classic vinyl platform, a one-way spiral jaunt. When Plant yells for the confounded bridge in “The Crunge” from Houses of the Holy, he’s not just asking to get out of the groove, but to get his ass over to the other side … of the LP.

  The rich sense of acoustic space that pervades Led Zeppelin records derives not only from the music’s inner dynamics, but from Jimmy Page’s mightiest technical spell: his engineering of ambience. As Robert Palmer noted in a vital 1990 essay on the band, Page was “extremely conscious of building and maintaining the atmospheric quality of the song from square one.” Inspired by early Sun and Chess records, Page used echo and reverb to soften the separation between instruments; these techniques also added depth and dimension to the tracks, since both echo and reverberation are rooted in our physical experience of sound-in-space, of the volume of volume. But ambience does more than just shape a sound world; it also transports the listener. Zak compares ambience to the mirror in Cocteau’s film Orphée: “it draws the listener into an aural world whose shape, dimensions, lighting, and perspective it helps to define.”43 Ambience tricks us into believing that the recording takes place somewhere, in a sort of spirit realm, “the true world of the disembodied voice.”

  Just as the word “atmosphere” can refer to both the surrounding air and the mood of a place, so did Page’s art of ambience extend beyond the shaping of acoustic space into the realm of emotional texture. Hearkening forward to a more “electronic” sense of ambience, Page created atmospheric mood through the exploration of timbre; by layering various textures and multi-tracking his guitars, he created what he called “collages and tissues of sound with emotional intensity.”44 Page brought a similar sensibility to the hotel rooms he would decorate on tour; seeking to replicate the exotic interior design of his homes, the guitarist would lay Persian carpets on top of one another and then bathe the overlapping patterns in candlelight.

  Page also engineered ambience through what he called “the science of microphone placement.” Back when Page was slaving as a studio hack, the engineers he worked with would often place a single microphone in front of an instrument’s amplifier. But Page, again inspired by early rock and roll records, augmented this arrangement by placing additional mics ten or twenty feet away; he’d then record and balance the difference between these mics, capturing a time lag that reflected the acoustic shape of the room itself. “Distance makes depth,” he’d say, tipping his hat to the engineers of the old school. “The whole idea, the way I see recording, is to try and capture the sound of the room live and the emotion of the whole moment.”45 As a producer, Page had a romantic, almost animistic desire to absorb the actual environment where the sounds were made with the bodies of men. As Zak writes, “the master recordist uses microphones to capture not only sonic and musical elements, but also the weight of apparent physical presence.” Such physical graffiti also appears on some Zeppelin tracks as extraneous, documentary slop. Think of the jet that flies overhead before the band launches into “Black Country Woman,” recorded on the lawn at Mick Jagger’s Stargroves estate. Or think of the guitar army that growls before “Black Dog” begins.

  And through what sort of acoustic space does the electronic bark of “Black Dog” resound? What ghost of what hall stages the riff symphony that is ? The bulk of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album was rehearsed and partially recorded in Headley Grange, three stories of stone gloom in the middle of nowhere, or at least eastern Hampshire’s version of nowhere. Built in 1795, Headley Grange was designed to house the poor and infirm, and was sacked by disgruntled workingmen in 1830. The place became a private home in 1870; a century later, rock bands like Fleetwood Mac, Genesis, and the Pretty Things started renting the place out, attracted by the place’s isolation and unique acoustics. When Led Zeppelin arrived in December 1970, with Ian Stewart and the Rolling Stone Mobile Studio in tow, they found the place cold and damp and rather the worse for wear. The band had burned some of the banisters during their previous visit, so they started burning some more, but it only helped so much. Plant and Bonham didn’t like the place, and engineer Andy Johns reportedly thought it was haunted. Page, who lodged beneath the peaked roof in the top floor, dug it. “It was a pretty austere place, but I loved the atmosphere.”46

  In order to capture some of this atmosphere, Page and Johns invaded every nook and cranny of the Grange with their mics and amplifiers. “We had amps in toilets, mics hanging down chimneys,” John Paul Jones later told Palmer. “Very often the sound would suggest a tune, and we’d write or arrange with that in mind.” The example Jones cites is also the most celebrated moment of Zeppelin’s conquest of ambient sound: the recording of John Bonham’s monumental drums for “When the Levee Breaks.” For the session, Bonham placed his new kit on the floor of a large open stone stairwell known by the family who owns the Grange as the “Minstrel’s Gallery.” Two ambient Beyer M160 stereo mics were then strung up on the two landings above, ten and twenty feet overhead, and then run through a guitar echo unit. There is some controversy about whether Page or Johns came up with this peculiar arrangement. Either way, the set-up was heresy: room mics were never used to record drums, and the team didn’t even mic the bass drum. But when you are working with an Orc like Bonham, sometimes heresy is the only way to go: “When the Levee Breaks” opens like a volcanic vent splitting the floor of the sea. As Andy Fyfe puts it, what you hear is not just the drums, but the drums reacting to the acoustic space of the room. But you are also hearing something more uncanny than this: you are hearing the room respond to the drums. The Grange itself awakens, just like the guitar army, and gives up its ghost to the magic circle of the reel-to-reel.

  III.

  GOTTA ROLL

  Black Dog

  Rock and Roll

  The star who struts across the stage of is one Robert Anthony Plant, the most restless of rock gods. From the very beginning of Led Zeppelin, Plant fashioned himself a wanderer, already rambling his way through “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” on their first record. By Led Zeppelin III, he was invading like a Viking and hitching like a dharma bum, “l
ookin’ for what I knew.” But Plant’s pedal doesn’t really hit the metal until , where his wanderings become a bona fide quest, like The Odyssey or The Hobbit or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Every song features movement. First he rolls, then he strolls, then he winds on down the road; he heads for the Misty Mountains, for the rainbow’s end, for California, for Chicago. It is ultimately a spiritual journey, of course. But like most of us, Plant doesn’t really know where he’s going or what he’s looking for. Most of the time, women will do: a lady, or another lady, or The Lady. But larger historical and cosmic forces loom and intrude: war and law and the wreck of the earth. He tastes gnosis but doesn’t learn much. And it ends rather badly.

  That, in any case, is how I read this record: as a single journey through a changing landscape of moonlight, hedgerows, and trembling mountains; a movement unified, at the very least, by Plant’s anxious need to move. Whether or not Zeppelin consciously intended their record to tell the story of one man’s restless quest is beside the point; after literally hundreds of millions of repetitions in the collective ear holes of humanity, this particular sequence of recordings has fused into a single tale. Nonetheless, we need to mark the distinction between the character who makes this journey and the howlin’ hippie-boy from Birmingham who sings about it. So let’s call the character Percy, which was Plant’s nickname, and an appropriate one. For one thing, Percy recalls Parsifal, the errant Arthurian knight who stumbles across the Holy Grail early in his career but is too dumb to recognize the mystic relic for what it is, and so continues to wander. Percy is also British slang for penis. And so we have our hero: the cock as holy fool.

  “Black Dog” reflects the initial motivation for Percy’s quest, which, as you might expect, is sexual obsession, here expressed as a mutant blues. For Zeppelin, blues is the language of lust, not just because it suggests the tantalizing frisson of black sex but because blues heroes like Robert Johnson, Elmore James, and Howlin’ Wolf present sexual desire as a haunting, a possession. All the usual complaints about Zeppelin’s domineering cock rock are mitigated by the fact that, in his words and his cries, Plant is not an erotic overlord but a masochistic slave to romantic desire; as the Village Voice writer Emily XYZ put it, he is “PUSSY-WHIPPED.”47 The Percy whose a cappella cries open “Black Dog” is slain in the spirit by the lady in his sights: a sweating, burning, stinging thing whose dripping honey more than matches the obscenity of the gushing juice in “The Lemon Song.” Faced with this voluptuous theophany, Percy can initially only “watch,” like a kid with a Hustler, like so many online. That’s why the riff is gnarled and weirdly timed, in contrast to the clear-cut “phallic” drive of “Whole Lotta Love” or “Immigrant Song”: it’s the sound of frustrated lust bending the singer out of shape. That’s also why there is no personal pronoun in the whole first verse: Percy is overwhelmed to the point of obliteration.

  Of course, the devouring female presence is a stock character in the sexist imagination, and the song’s later verses will shape this sorceress, perhaps parodistically, into a more traditional blues bitch. But here I am interested in the spectral, even “tantric” dimension of Percy’s desire. Of all the polarities that drive Zeppelin’s music, the tension between sex and spirit is perhaps the most essential—and the most overlooked. Sex and magic are the two horns of Zeppelin’s mystique, the cock and the devil, and yet the occult dimension of sexual energies rarely enters into critical discussions of the band’s erotic politics. But as Susan Fast points out in her discussion of Zeppelin fandom, the link between sex and spirit is of vital importance to many Zepheads.

  If practitioners of BDSM are to be believed, the ritualized submission to dark and aggressive sexual energy can provoke an egolessness that may, if you are lucky and the cosmos kind, bloom into spiritual ecstasy. This is one aspect of the Hindu goddess Kali, at least to Western tantrists: with her fangs and tongue and dark nude body, Ma devours attachments. But such submission is also terrifying, and in “Black Dog,” Percy passes up this infernal grail by doing what most restless and red-blooded men would do when the erotics gets rough: he hits the road. The first time he says “I,” at the beginning of the second verse, it’s to say “I gotta roll, can’t stand still.” With this blues cliché, Percy recovers himself by shifting the object of his desire toward its underlying lack, by recognizing that he “can’t get my fill.” He imagines a kinder, steadier woman, a woman who will hold his hand and tell him no lies. As progresses, this woman will grow more idealized and more impossible, until finally she is totally supernatural, a Queen of Light, without a king, beyond birth and death. And Percy’s failure to either achieve or abandon that ideal will destroy him.

  Desire, then, is spectral; it is a haunting. The spookiest lines in “Black Dog” lie in the pivotal second verse: “Eyes that shine burnin’ red,” Percy moans. “Dreams of you all through my head.” The question here is simple: Whose eyes are burning red? Given Plant’s tendency to swallow personal pronouns, which may have something to do with the drive for engulfment, it’s impossible to know. I suspect, though, that the eyes don’t belong to the woman but to Percy himself. In this the song anticipates Jimmy Page’s flashing red eyes while he plays the hurdy-gurdy in The Song Remains the Same; it also recalls the creature hidden in the Colby drawing reproduced in the inner gatefold of , which some identify as a black dog. The message again? The beast is within; it looks out of your eyes.

  So “Black Dog” does not demonize woman’s sexual power but rather the male’s own lust, experienced as a possession from within. This experience of desire as occult possession finds us all at some point in our lives but can seem particularly acute in the minds of young males riding their first flush of adolescent hormones. Indeed, one function of the violent fantasy worlds that bewitch so many boys at that age, from computer games to heavy metal to the tentacle monsters in Japanese hentai, is to imaginatively exteriorize and contain desires that threaten the boundaries of the self. The fantasy world becomes a masturbatory magic circle where desire can take shape but remain in sublimated bounds. But though Percy’s shrieks resonate with adolescent angst, they also express spiritual fear: that intense desire unleashes a terrifying infinity. I could cite any number of decadent romantic writers here—Huysmans, or Baudelaire, or Clark Ashton Smith. But a bit of Crowley’s corny “Hymn to Satan” should do the trick:

  By its thirst, the cruel craving

  For things infinite, unheard-of,

  Dreams devouring and depraving,

  Songs no God may guess a word of,

  Songs of crime and songs of craving—

  Despite its basis in quotidian blues images, “Black Dog” and its song of craving marks the point where sexual obsession goes supernatural. Dreams devour Percy, but they also push him onwards, into song, into a world where he knows from the beginning he “can’t get no fill.”

  The 24-year-old Berlioz was similarly bewitched by an actress when he wrote his Symphonie Fantastique in the 1820s. But how did our boys, of similar age, body forth this supernatural craving in “Black Dog”? For one thing, the timbre of the tune’s massed guitars is gloriously nasty. For all three guitar parts, Andy Johns ran Page’s Gibson through a microphone amp and two UA 1176 compressors, creating a sound that recalls Zappa’s assertion that, while saxophones can be sleazy, only the electric guitar can be obscene. But “Black Dog,” like so much Zeppelin, really belongs to the rhythm section. John Paul Jones composed the odd and justly celebrated riff and arranged the tune, while John Bonham’s rock-solid beats create enormous tension by resisting the complexities of the riff. Though I cannot break down these complexities with the sophistication or clarity that Susan Fast achieves in In the Houses of the Holy, I can at least cite her conclusions: the song’s metric displacement “takes the listener off guard, destroying expectations.” The riff’s frequent return to the tonic also unbalances us, despite the fact that, as the “home-base” note, the tonic is characteristically associated with a sense of resolution and rel
ief. Here, though, the rhythmic displacement ensures that the root note of the riff keeps returning to different points in the measure, making the sense of resolution arrive “either too early or too late.”48 Only at the open chord at the end of the riff, before Plant’s a cappella vocals return, do we confidently land. Reynolds and Press say that the song’s “turgid, grueling riff incarnates sex as agony and toil,” but that’s not what I hear. “Black Dog” incarnates sexual energy as a serpent fire, twisting and turning in a dark internal dance that suggests progressive stages of sinuous virtuosity rather than the rut of toil. Though sometimes resting, the energy never resolves, and ordinary climax is suspended. “Black Dog,” then, is a bit of sonic tantra, teaching the body—which is strongly pushed and pulled by the metrical weirdness—to embrace and even enjoy the state of tension, to sublimate frustration into surprise. Inflamed, yes, but hardly agonized.

  The song’s tension, again, emerges from the disjunction between the gnarly riff and Bonham’s almost defiant refusal to budge from the four. Bonzo is not just in the pocket here; he is a bear in a cave, methodically swatting at wasps. This defiance may be rooted in the fact that Jones’s original arrangement demanded more complex time signatures than what we hear. Jones claims that nobody else could play it; Page called the tune “a hairy one.”49 One might even say that Jones, with his telltale pageboy haircut, was trying to tempt the band into prog. A bootleg recording of an early rehearsal shows Bonham playing eighth-notes and accents that fall more closely in line with the riff, as if he had not yet found his separate groove. Jones explains that the band was particularly challenged by the turnaround that leads into the bridge, until Bonham realized he could just dig in his heels and count four-four time as if there were no turnaround at all.