Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV Page 7

  What results from this is a crudely appealing instance of the “apart playing” found in African music, a crosstalk where, as John Miller Chernoff notes, “there is always at least two rhythms going on.”50 Though “Black Dog” hardly sounds like a drum rite in Dahomey, it is certainly funky, albeit a strangely abstract and irregular funk. Unlike most of the metal acts to follow, Zeppelin birthed their own breed of funkiness, achieved not through superficial “feel,” but through strong arrangements, most likely the work of Jones.51 Besides the hairy groove of “Black Dog,” we have the James Brown parody in “The Crunge,” the jam in “Over the Hills and Far Away,” the bridges in “Kashmir,” “The Ocean,” and the deeply stanky “Wanton Song”; live, the band would occasionally drop “Shaft” into their boogie medleys. Despite Plant’s nearly ridiculous dips into blues mimicry, Zep’s funk proves that the band—unlike many of their peers—did not keep black musical forms under glass. While Jones’s riff was inspired by the rolling bass lines in a Muddy Waters record, the Muddy Waters record in question was itself a mutant: 1968’s Electric Mud, where the Chicago bluesman went psychedelic, an obviously commercial move that horrified white blues fans and critics, with their purist yen for authenticity. But Muddy’s moves did not bug Zeppelin because Zeppelin was not pure. This love of mixture and slop gave their music and beats an almost prophetic force. In the 1970s, Zeppelin’s rhythms often sounded, well, rather leaden. But as Robert Palmer noted in 1990, after years of hip hop and crunchy drums, “the lurching beats and staggered rhythms sound a lot different: they swing like mad.”52

  You could say that funk is why Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” is black. But why is it a dog? There is nothing canine in the cut, although its carnality is rather beastly. Plant says that the tune was named after a black Labrador retriever who wandered in and out of Headley Grange while the band rehearsed and recorded, but this explanation wobbles like a wet noodle. Even if it were true that our boys kept the doors open in the pit of English winter, you do not name the first song of your most epic and self-consciously designed record after a stray animal. While the “black dog” sometimes denotes bouts of depression, I hear no miasma here, nor do I believe that Zep are so crass as to allude to the “great Dane incident” that Cole reports went down at LA’s Chateau Marmont in 1969.

  is a mythological record, and I believe we must track its black canine into the wilds of lore. Returning to the tune’s staggered rhythm, we find that the riff and Bonham’s beats form two lines that go their separate ways before finally rejoining in the sustained chord that closes the main riff. At this point of temporary stasis, these two criss-crossing lines form a sonic crossroads, a juncture in the broiling electric mud. A weird dog and a crossroads is one thing, but when Percy cries out for a “steady rollin’” woman, then we know we’re in Robert Johnson land, since the phrase recalls poor Bob’s “Steady Rollin’ Man,” howlin’ on his bended knee before a cream puff who has taken his cash. I suspect the black dog is a hellhound, or at least its old world ancestor, hot on Percy’s heels as he rolls through the landscape of . After all, British folklore is chock full of spooky black dogs haunting roads and stiles and other liminal passageways. Often associated with death and other bummers, these spectral pups go by a bewildering variety of names, including the Devil’s Dandy Dogs, the Wisht Hound, Black Shag, Padfoot, Hooter, and Skriker, which is vaguely reminiscent of the name of Plant’s own dog Strider. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Hound of the Baskervilles” was inspired by a phantom black beast that was supposed to haunt Dartmoor. And I still get goosebumps when I hear Nick Drake’s posthumously released dirge “Black-Eyed Dog,” where that haunted young man meets a dog at his door, a dog who “knew my name.”

  Headley Grange was not an unlikely place to have a black dog wander across the threshold, given that over forty ghostly black dog sightings have been recorded in the neighboring county of Wiltshire.53 In his discussion of “Black Dog,” Tom Friend also notes that some of these phantoms were said to possess glowing red eyes. This leads Friend to the amusing conclusion that when Percy says “dreams of you all through my head,” he is actually addressing the dog. More meat on these suggestive bones is provided by the British folklorist Bob Trubshaw. In his article “Black Dogs: Guardians of the Corpse Ways,” Trubshaw shows that the UK’s shaggy dog stories derive from a broad swath of Indo-European and shamanic myth that casts the dog as a psychopomp or Cerberus-like guardian of the other-world. Johnson’s hellhound and the hound of the Baskervilles share a common origin in the grave, the charnel ground where the most fearsome tantric rites are held. Here we should note that Andy Johns claimed the band recorded “Black Dog” in some sort of crypt at Headley Grange. And even if Johns just misidentified the Grange’s larder, “Black Dog” remains a haunted tune. After reading Trubshaw’s piece, I listened to “Black Dog” again, and finally put my finger on what those twenty wicka-wicka beats of the “guitar army” actually sound like. Previously I took them to be some random electronic oscillation. But check it out: now I hear a dog, panting.

  HOT DOG

  As the story goes, “Rock and Roll” began as a lark. In the midst of a frustrating rehearsal of “Four Sticks,” John Bonham spontaneously exploded into the opening bars of the 1957 Little Richard tune “Keep a Knockin’.” Page rode in with a hot-rod riff out of thin air and, within four takes, one of the most punk-assed and perfect Led Zeppelin cuts was born. Until the mid-1970s, the band used “Rock and Roll” to open or close their shows, and it’s not hard to hear why: Page channels his adolescent id, Plant trumps loneliness with exuberance, and Bonham bashes out a high-frequency sheen with the high-hat and cymbals he usually employs with canny restraint. Though Zeppelin’s oeuvre has more hope and humor in it than is usually acknowledged (think “Celebration Day,” “The Crunge,” “Hey Hey What Can I Do”), Zeppelin has rarely made such a joyous noise. It’s almost innocent.

  Part of the fun is rooted in the opportunity the song affords Page to indulge in the rockabilly music etched onto the folds of his brain: the giddy twang and raucous goofs of Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, and James Burton, in particular. Picture the scene: a skinny 12-year-old Jimmy, all alone in some boring London suburb, playing Gene Vincent’s “Race the Devil” over and over again, jumping around as Gallup’s jittery licks dizzily slip between keys, while Vincent’s lyric plants a strange seed in the boy’s budding soul. Unlike Eric Clapton, but like his sometimes pal Jeff Beck, Page did not turn his back on rock and roll when he discovered and began to draw from the deeper, or at least more charged, well of the blues. (Page’s collection of Sun records and early rock memorabilia rivals his Crowleyania.) Alvin Lee reports that Page used to carry around a picture of Burton in his wallet, a figure of power despite the fact that the guitarist played with Ricky Nelson and literally lived with Ozzie and Harriet. Page shared this love of rock and roll with Plant, who, despite extensive subcultural peregrinations through beat jazz, washboard blues, and hobbity folk-rock, placed Elvis at the top of his musical identity shrine.

  The origin story of “Rock and Roll” stresses the spontaneous virtuosity of the moment. The tune appeared as a throwaway, a disposable splatter of frustration and fuck-all meant to clear the head. In other words: genuine rock and roll. But what really made it rock and roll was the band’s ability to recognize their little pop rocket for what it was: a concise charge of energy that would please millions of fans. “Rock and Roll” is a brazenly pop seduction that, in the midst of such a “heavy” album, comes across as exuberant honesty—cock rock not as dark mastery, but as commodified adolescent pleasure, like a cherry lollipop. The essence of the song is commercial, its later fate insured from the beginning. During the broadcast of the 2002 Super Bowl, Oldsmobile launched a campaign to reclaim the luxury car market with a series of spots that featured “Rock and Roll” as the soundtrack. “Oldsmobile?!” we Zepheads exclaimed. “How the mighty have fallen!” The irony was only magnified by the fact that, just a decade earlier, Richard Linklater appro
ached Zeppelin about including “Rock and Roll” in Dazed and Confused, the Austin filmmaker’s superb paean to scruffy white teens in low-rent mid-70s America—a scene where Zeppelin were gods whose records functioned, in the words of sociologist Donna Gaines, as “liberation theology in vinyl.” Page and Jones agreed to this worthy (and amply paying) project, but Plant said no. Now, that’s rock and roll!

  So how does “Rock and Roll” fit into Percy’s journey? Why does the horny fool, with a black dog on his tail, wind up fronting a band? I’d say that the record’s first two songs represent the initial phase of the hero’s quest: they prepare Percy for the deeper encounters to come. “Black Dog” is a dark initiation into sacred desire, into a restlessness that sets the soul on the road. In the next tune, Percy channels this volatile energy into a rather conventional emotional and musical framework. He is temporarily establishing himself in the workaday world. If you gotta roll, in other words, you might as well rock and roll; it pleases the females, and makes bank as well. So while it takes Percy a whole verse to find his “I” amidst the confusions of “Black Dog,” here he finds it in the first line, singing with cocky confidence as the band hammers out what is, by 1971, an anachronistic if tried and true container for wayward energies.

  Percy’s lyrics belie this sunny affluence with words that are, in fact, rather sad. As the song barrels forward like a little red coupe with a groovy leather trim, Percy looks in the rearview mirror, and nostalgia reveals itself as yet another vector for his restlessness. “Let me get back,” he pleads, “where I come from.” In terms of musical influences, Led Zeppelin certainly “come from” 1950s rock and roll, but Percy’s plea reflects a more existential longing. He wants to return to the time when he “did the stroll,” which was the name of a corny line dance made famous on American Bandstand. But a stroll is also the sort of unhurried promenade—the romantic “walk in the moonlight”—that the haunted Percy can no longer pull off.

  Nor can he rely any longer on the pages of the “book of love,” an image lifted from a 1958 doo-wop smash by the Monotones. Apparently inspired by the Pepsodent toothpaste tagline (“You’ll wonder where the yellow went”), the Monotones “wonder” who wrote the book of love. “Was it someone from above?” they ask; in other words, did God create lust? This is the question posed by the medieval culture of courtly love, whose troubadours gave birth to the very image of the “Lady” that comes to haunt Percy. Courtly lovers infused a pagan sense of eros into Christian rituals of courtship and marriage, creating our modern experience of love as a consuming idealistic passion. Longing itself became exalted, as the sparks of infatuation were intensified into a heretical alchemy of desire. For the Monotones, though, the book of love remains an orthodox book of commandments, of law: chapter one says to love her, while chapter two demands that you tell her “you’re never, never, never, never, never gonna part.” Though Percy later echoes this line in one of the more peculiar verses of “Going to California,” he is clearly no longer a believer in the book or its vows, which, as he points out, never work right anyway. Percy has wandered beyond established rules, driven and confused by the conjunction of spirituality and desire.

  In November 1971, the same month that was released, a tune by an American singer-songwriter appeared on the charts it would soon come to rule: Don McLean’s epic ballad “American Pie.” Poetically reflecting on the changes that rock and roll had undergone since the death of Buddy Holly in 1959, McLean mourned the loss of sock hops and innocence, while also managing to sing about levees and satanic rock stars. Announcing the religion still tucked inside the pop rituals of attraction, McLean asks us, the listeners, if we wrote the book of love, if we have faith in God. Then he asks the questions that, I believe, are also nagging Percy: “Now do you believe in rock and roll, can music save your mortal soul / And can you teach me how to dance real slow?” McLean’s questions reflect the anxiety induced by the “maturing” of rock and roll. Once considered unselfconscious, adolescent, and ultimately disposable, rock had become, by 1971, an often serious and self-conscious affair. For some critics and fans, this transformation was essentially a fall into decadent self-absorption; for such listeners, Led Zeppelin’s tantric grandeur tasted like the sour fermentation of rock and roll’s freshest and juiciest impulses. But with his mention of the “book of love,” Percy reminds us that even those Pepsodent days were troubled by the spiritual conflict between celestial law and earthly desire. By the early 1970s, that mythic struggle had bloomed into a great battle, a battle that would also stage the next phase of Percy’s quest.

  IV.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR

  The Battle of Evermore

  Stairway to Heaven

  Barely two seconds pass between the final beer-bottle smash of “Rock and Roll” and the first chiming hints of “The Battle of Evermore.” For the listener, the effect is somewhat like stumbling out of rockabilly night at a biker bar and finding yourself in a sylvan glade with Frodo and Sam, hushed and reverent as a troop of high elves pass by on their way to the western lands. We have grown used to such juxtapositions in the sampledelic daze of postmodern media, where mash-ups signify irony or geeky bravado or just the way things work in an era of dataglut. But the bridge Zeppelin builds across these two seconds suggests none of these. Here the sharp contrast between genres attests, not only to Zeppelin’s range of styles and moods, but to the amount of space that creates—space enough for two tunes as different as milkshakes and mead to flow together rather than clash, to follow organically, to make sense.

  The smoothness of this transition also suggests something of the role of acoustic music in Led Zeppelin, perhaps the least analyzed dimension of the band’s sound, and one that is both profound and charming. Page and Plant both loved acoustic music; before meeting the singer, Page wasn’t sure whether he wanted to form a hard rock group or an Anglo-folk combo along the lines of the Pentangle. Given that every album until Presence included acoustic tunes, Page in some ways got to have his cake and eat it too. Though Zeppelin will be studied by our cyborg progeny for the power of their electric rock, some of the band’s most perfect moments are essentially acoustic: “Gallow’s Pole,” “Hey Hey What Can I Do,” “Black Mountain Side,” “Friends,” the beginning of “Stairway.” Though Page is not quite a maestro of the steel string—he once described his finger-picking as a cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and “total incompetence”—he possesses a witchy command of acoustic mood. I have listened to tons of mopey fingerpicking records over the years, but I remain, to this day, inexplicably moved by the 122 seconds of Physical Graffiti’s “Bron-Yr-Aur,” a limpid pool of sad serenity named for the isolated Welsh mountain cabin where Page and Plant first sketched many of their acoustic gems.

  Zeppelin enjoyed acoustic music for its own sake, but the primary function it served on their records was to deepen the elemental contrast of light and shade. Instead of the modern Promethean buzz of electrical djinn, acoustic guitars announce the more ancient powers of wood and bronze—descriptions of Bron-Yr-Aur, for example, usually emphasize that it was without electricity. This musical polarity is, unsurprisingly, also gendered. In contrast to electrical aggression, acoustic ballads allow the boys to cozy up and show their gentler, more intimate and sensitive sides. (Bron-Yr-Aur, it should also be mentioned, means “golden breast.”) These softy moves complicate the cock-rock cartoon that dominates Zeppelin’s gender profile. Acoustic music did not just help Zep craft great make-out soundtracks, thereby increasing the pleasure of boys and girls everywhere; it also let the band further “feminize” themselves and their music. Such gender blur was important to Zeppelin, who enjoyed their New Orleans tranny bars and appeared in drag on the cover of Physical Graffiti three years before Some Girls. Sure Plant has his cock on display, but that’s the point: he parades around stage like a trophy wife. With “sensitive” Jimmy Page at his side, the two frontmen form what one gay Zep fan described as “a more dangerous and more androgynous ‘version’ o
f Mick and Keith.”54

  Gender dynamics play a vital role in “The Battle of Evermore,” which is where the Queen of Light first walks onstage and takes her bow, later to return on the record’s two other more-or-less acoustic songs, “Stairway to Heaven” and “Going to California.” Her cameo here is followed by the lonely Prince of Peace and his embrace of the gloom. These figures, so like Tarot trumps, are enigmatic, but their comings and goings at least remind us how important such gender polarity is to the occult imagination. As Susan Fast argues, Zeppelin’s use of contrasts—including the tension between acoustic and electric moods—suggests an underlying desire for spiritual balance, for yin and yang, for the holistic dance of elements. And indeed, I suspect that it is precisely this pagan “balance” that Percy wants to bring back at the end of “The Battle of Evermore.”

  “Battle” is also the only Zeppelin recording where we hear a female voice, playing the role that Plant calls, somewhat ambiguously, the “town crier.” But it’s not just any female voice. The high and smoky contralto that commands us to dance in the dark of night belongs to Sandy Denny, who had only recently quit the UK’s seminal folk-rock combo Fairport Convention when she agreed to an exhausting recording session with the Zep. Fairport were brilliant, at least in spurts. Originally, the band looked to California folk-rock for inspiration, while covering Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen tunes. But with 1969’s amazing Liege and Lief, they began electrifying traditional faerie ballads like “Tam Lin,” adding the crunchiest sound yet to the UK’s evolving experiment with rooting folk-rock in native soil. Denny’s presence here signals Zeppelin’s desire to both acknowledge and contribute to this marvelous and, until recently, fairly obscure subgenre.