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  Zeppelin’s relationship to Britfolk is complex, partly because the subgenre itself is so loosely defined. When “The Battle of Evermore” was released, the UK had already produced fantastic but very different records by Fairport, the Incredible String Band, Bert Jansch, the Pentangle, Forest, the Trees, and the Third Ear Band, each of which explored, remade, and fabulated “folk” music drawn, along with other sources, from Celtica and the British Isles. Page regularly praised Jansch’s Jack Orion to reporters; Plant called ISB “an inspiration and a sign.” Though Zeppelin drew at least as much from American sources, they spliced in their own roots as well, especially with “The Battle of Evermore,” “Black Mountain Side,” and the opening bars of “Stairway.” As with many Britfolk acts (certainly Fairport) Zeppelin engaged tradition as both history and myth. “Battle” is a mixture of the two modes, a “playette” that struts across two stages: the earthly plane of plows and swords and apple trees, and the “sky” full of spiritual forces, of ringwraiths and angels, of “good and bad that mortals never know.” Young Robert Plant, who was reading a book on the Scottish border wars at the time he wrote the lyrics, often spoke to the press about his fascination with history and “the ancient characters from whence we stemmed.”55 As with so many of the counterculture’s creative anachronists, Plant used history to romanticize and enact an alternative lifestyle—in other words, to live halfway in myth. In 1972, he said, “You can live in a fairyland if you read enough books and if you’re interested in as much history as I am, you know, the Dark Ages and all that.”56 But why study history at all, if you just want Faery? Why bother with border wars when you can read Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion, or plough through Tolkien one more time? The answer is that the sparks don’t really fly unless myth is forged against the unyielding anvil of actual events.

  So poor Percy steps out of the rock club one day and finds himself a conscript in the nightmare of history. “The Battle of Evermore” is no Viking war cry; its picture of pain and woe could be said to retell “Immigrant Song” from the peasant’s point of view. As we know all too well these days, the situation recurs throughout history: A war-crazed tyrant rules the land, the earth is poisoned, and a dread battle with some quasi-supernatural enemy looms. During the verses, Percy rises to the occasion and sings as a bard, giving us a transpersonal view of events, a view he will also sustain in “Stairway to Heaven.” During the chorus, though, when his “I” returns, Percy is just another soldier, clutching his dull sword with the other grunts, whose collective presence is suggested by the multiple vocal overdubs. Awaiting carnage at dawn and probably shitting their pants, they pray for backup from the angels of Avalon, that enchanted Arthurian island-of-the-dead that may or may not have been Glastonbury Tor. Here Percy discovers one of the basic drives of myth: to redeem the wreck of the real, or at least to get the hell out of it.

  With so much myth oozing out, it is hardly surprising that “The Battle of Evermore” includes one of Zeppelin’s three explicit references to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, unless you count the time Plant yells “Strider” on the Led Zeppelin DVD.57 Some fans believe the entire song reflects events in The Return of the King: Eowyn, the Queen of Light, bids Aragorn adieu; the Prince of Peace walks the gloomy paths of the dead; the ringwraiths and the dragon Sauron are bested at the Battle of Pelennor Fields. In any case, these Middle-earth shout-outs not only reflect Plant’s hippie sensibility, but Zeppelin’s audacious and, it must be said, largely successful bid to forge twentieth century myth that resonates, and rakes in, as much as Tolkien’s novels. In America, where the rabid fandoms for both Tolkien and Zeppelin began, the two British exports both gave Anglo-Americans the opportunity to re-imagine Britain as a paradoxically exotic heritage. While Zeppelin repackaged blues Americana as much as the Stones or Clapton, they also hit the western shore packing wild Child ballads of Avalon, fantasies of deep identity whose fey excesses are pruned by the industrial buzz of the electric guitar.

  Tolkien also gave Zep another way to model the dark side of the force. On Led Zeppelin II’s “Ramble On,” which serves as a seed crystal for with its quest for a Queen, Plant finds himself in Mordor, where Gollum and “the evil one” steal his girl. In “The Battle of Evermore,” the Dark Lord has invaded the human realm, with black-robed ringwraiths at his side. Why does Zeppelin allude to Tolkien’s bad guys, rather than elves or ents or hobbits? Because with Led Zeppelin, you earn whatever consolations myth has to offer by embracing the gloom, by confronting the “darkest of them all.” Theirs is not your earth-mama’s paganism, with its Marin County rainbow mush of relativism. Like the Catholic Tolkien, Zeppelin sense a dark core in the cosmos, a source of evil in intent and horror in execution. “Battle” is a battle after all. Zeppelin are not going to invoke pagan lore without invoking violence, not only the violence against the pagan world, or the violence within the pagan world, but the violence in the spiritual imagination itself: the war in heaven. This is the war St. Paul alluded to in Ephesians 6:12 when he spoke about wrestling, not against flesh and blood, but against “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

  The battle stakes are high: this is “Evermore” we are talking about, when time will tell us all. But like all battles, this one is full of confused alarms of struggle and flight, of subterfuge and communication breakdown. Percy barely knows what side he’s on. Is the enemy evil or merely bad? Is darkness just the “balance” of light, or must it be sliced away with a sword? At first, the final image of “Battle” suggests the triumph of the Good: Morning arrives, the dragon is blinded by the sun, and the forces of light pour into the valley the way Gandalf and the exiled Riders of Rohan spill down the mountain-side in Peter Jackson’s version of the Battle of Helm’s Deep. But Percy’s syntax is strange, and the slight return of the burning eyes from “Black Dog” does not help matters. Would a flaming dragon really be so sensitive to the sun? Who exactly is blinded? The triumphant feel of this chorus, with its bright shift to major sevenths, dissolves into the woe of aftermath as the song’s droning intro music returns. Percy moans over a drawn-out arpeggiated minor chord before finally coming to rest, pensively, in a low E. Page holds the eerie minor space with some more Ren Faire plucking before renewing the verse, during which Percy, echo-drenched and increasingly hysterical, demands to “bring it back”—it presumably being the “balance” which he earlier claimed would be restored by the magic runes.

  Musically, “Battle” suggests this balance through the vocal presence of Sandy Denny, whose feminine strength complements Percy’s confusion. Her role in this playette is hardly the waif or vixen we might expect on a cock-rock recording; as “town crier,” she commands the men to take up arms. But Denny’s performance goes deeper than this. When she calls us to dance in the dark and sing to the light, she is, I believe, outside the immediate frame of the battle, speaking not as the town crier but as a wise woman, a mystic juggler of pagan polarities, a witch. She is the Lady returned in the guise of the High Priestess. Denny was a significant enough presence on to get her own sigil on the inner sleeve, and when we consult Koch, we find that her signifies the Godhead. In occult iconography, the downward pointing triangle also frequently represents the yoni, the female generative organs. Taking these two together, I’d read Denny’s glyph as a sign of the Triple Goddess. Town crier or not, she introduces Percy to the power of the sacred feminine.

  For the rest of the album, Percy struggles with his desire to both serve and master this Lady. Here the answer is clear and pagan: one honors the Goddess by bringing the balance back, the lost harmony of human labor and the great good earth. The valley’s bounty brings happiness, but it is our “tender care” and peaceful ways that keep the soil rich and the apples good. This labor is not just functional, but spiritual. That’s what Denny’s song and dance routine is about: We repay the earth through ritual; that’s how we cease to forget. In “Down By the Seaside” from Physical Graffiti, a song originally recorded in 1970, Plant gives a similar reason
for why we should sing for the sunshine and pray for the rain: “show your love for Lady Nature and she will come back again.” After the energetic initiations of “Black Dog” and “Rock and Roll,” Percy discovers the war in heaven and the healing rituals of earth. Polarity brings ambiguity. Perhaps this is why Page joked to a reporter that this song about battle sounded “like a dance-around-the-maypole number.”58 Even the tides of war, with their apocalyptic force of judgment, may serve as a spring-clean for the May Queen.

  IN THE LIGHT YOU WILL FIND THE ROAD

  “Stairway to Heaven” isn’t the greatest rock song of the 1970s; it is the greatest spell of the 1970s. Think about it: we are all very sick of the thing, but in some primordial way it is still number one. Everyone knows it, everyone—from Dolly Parton to Frank Zappa to Pat Boone to Jimmy Castor—has covered it, and everyone with a guitar knows how to play those notorious opening bars. As far as rock radio goes, “Stairway” is generally considered to be the most-requested and most-played song of all time, despite the fact that it runs eight minutes and was never released as a single. In 1991, Esquire magazine did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and figured that the total time that “Stairway” had been on the air was about 44 years—and that was over a decade ago. Somewhere a Clear Channel robot is probably broadcasting it as you read these words. And no wonder: when classic rock stations roll out their Top 500 surveys, which they still do with disarming frequency, odds are overwhelming that this warhorse will take the victory lap. Even our dislike and mockery is ritualistic. The dumb parodies; the Wayne’s World-inspired folklore about guitar shops demanding customers not play it; even Robert Plant’s public disavowal of the song—all these just prove the rule. “Stairway to Heaven” is not just number one. It is the One, the quintessence, the closest AOR will ever get you to the absolute.

  If any Zeppelin song deserves to be dubbed a “myth,” it is this one. But what does that mean, to call a song a myth? So far I have been too lazy to define the word, trusting, like the man said about porn, that you will know it when you see it. You could define myth in the romantic terms that probably informed Page and Plant: Myths are Big Stories that tell poetic truths about humanity and its role in the cosmos. The “hero’s journey,” the monomyth popularized by Joseph Campbell, is such a poetic archetype, and certainly informs my own view of Percy and his ramblings through the landscape of . After walking the “road of trials” and encountering the Goddess, the hero achieves the apotheosis of the “ultimate boon”—what Percy will glimpse at the heights of heaven’s stairway. Campbell emphasizes that this peak comes halfway through the diagram of the hero’s journey; after this he must return to ordinary reality and reintegrate, as “master of the two worlds.” This is the developmental process that Percy does not follow: He wants further highs and juicier goddesses. And he will rue the day.

  Mythology is more than an abstract story or a universal code, however. Mythology is also deeply embedded in human practice. Traditionally, myths are acted out; even their verbal transmission is a highly charged performance. Even more important is the relationship between myth and ritual. Rituals, like taking communion or dancing around a maypole, perform and sustain the transforming fictions of mythology just as much as mythology explains or demands ritual. So if “Stairway to Heaven” is a successful myth, then what rituals support it? What practice sustains the song that Lester Bangs memorably described as being “lush as a kleenex forest”? The song itself hints at the answer when Percy suggests that great things will happen if we “listen very hard” and all “call the tune.” The central rite of “Stairway to Heaven” was and continues to be this: hearing the damn thing over and over again. Whether you call up a file on your iPod, or call your radio station to vote, or call your spouse a goofball for playing the song just one more time, “Stairway” makes its peculiar magic known through the brute force of all ritual: repetition. Even those of us who have no desire to sustain the mystery, who can’t wait for this number to be swept into the dustbin of history, continue to feel its presence in sonic memory. On the surface this presence goes against Walter Benjamin’s famous argument that mechanical reproduction—which churns out all those copies of in the first place—saps the “aura” from works of art. Though Benjamin was talking principally about visual art, his argument works for music as well: The special magic of live performance is leached away when you record and reproduce the event with modern technology. But in the case of “Stairway,” the very banality that results from the staggering number of times this track has been played over the last thirty-odd years only underscores the awful majesty of the song, its weird air of necessity.

  The “magic” of “Stairway to Heaven” lies with a power at once more mechanical and more spellbinding than the commodity fetishism discussed earlier: the power to literally become a part of our minds. Here’s what I mean: close your eyes, shuffle through your mental jukebox for “Stairway to Heaven,” and then drop the virtual stylus or laser beam or whatever you want to call it onto the song in your brain. If you are like millions of other people now living, you can probably reproduce a decent mock-up of this track from memory. If you sit with it for a while, you might even score some personal associations out of the deal—tasty madeleines like the pungent reek of Thai-stick, or the Christmas morning promise of a teenage grope.

  All this is all very ordinary of course. All of us have used commercial recordings to sound our souls; all of us know songs that resonate, songs that stick. But we rarely turn the situation around and consider the possibility that, as the nineteenth century Belgian physiologist Joseph Delboeuf wrote, “The soul is a notebook of phonographic recordings.” Delboeuf’s quotation popped out at me from an essay by Friedrich Kittler, the contemporary German media theorist I cited earlier. In his text, Kittler suggests that the analogy between the brain and the record player is, as the geeks like to say, nontrivial. Like the sounds on a record album, physiological memory is a product of something like inscription, as associative neural pathways are laid down, deepened, and reinforced through repetition and reward. Kittler suggests that our experience of listening to a phonograph also models the crucial transition between physiology and consciousness: a stylus tracing a groove reproduces nothing more than physical vibrations in the air, but in our minds these vibrations transform, as if by magic, into the meaningful presence of voice and song. With the phonograph, as with our brains, we move continuously between spark and sense. Kittler takes the analogy even further, and asks: What if the song of our own soul, of our internal psychic life, is simply the result of our peculiar ability to “listen” to the continual playback of recordings etched into myriad neural grooves? This is what Kittler means when he describes the brain as a “conscious phonograph.”

  Obviously, the activity of self-awareness and recall is significantly more plastic and creative than this analogy implies. Nonetheless, our ability to rather faithfully “read” Led Zeppelin tracks directly from our internal memory banks proves that, if our brains are exposed to enough repetitions, they can act more or less like a phonograph or a tape recorder. This is evident enough in our recall of the voices of friends and family, but becomes even more obvious when we are mentally “recording” actual recordings like “Stairway to Heaven.” This juncture, where sound technology and self-awareness coincide, is also where things start to get strange. Listening to familiar recordings, Kittler notes, “[It is] as if the music were originating in the brain itself, rather than emanating from stereo speakers or head phones.”59 The membrane between self and recorded other breaks down, “as if there were no distance between recorded voice and listening ears.” When the tune comes to you at last, it comes from within; but this “within” is no longer your own. “You” are pre-recorded; your head is humming.

  Of course, sonic viruses—aka, songs—try to worm their way into our heads every day. And even successful infections do not make magic. A thousand years of heavy rotation would not suffice to enchant “The Piña Colada Song” or “I
ce Ice Baby,” to say nothing of that excruciating woman who instructs you on the art of leaving voice mail messages. The forces that transform “Stairway” into ritual lie inside the song, in its charismatic deployment of words and music. However you feel about it personally—and I’ll be fine if I don’t hear it again until I’m old—“Stairway to Heaven” is the quintessence of Led Zeppelin’s commercial sorcery. I choose the term quintessence quite consciously: the quinta essentia, the fifth element. Plato believed the quintessence to be an invisible ether that pervades all space, including the distant stars; in alchemy it came to be seen as the animating spirit of all things, a living spark that could be purified and extracted from baser elements but that infused them all. “Stairway to Heaven” is the culmination of an alchemical drama, the fourth song on the fourth album by a quartet consciously invoking the four elements. It lasts about two-times-four minutes long and begins, as more than one writer has described, “squarely”: with four famous phrases, each four measures long, that unfold with a stately charm free of syncopation.

  Having set up all these quaternities, Zeppelin squeezes something quintessential from them over the course of the tune. As Susan Fast demonstrates, the melodic and rhythmic “squareness” that opens the song also conceals “a harmonic and formal openness and irregularity” that runs throughout the piece, and that breaks the initial static formality. This motive essence carries Percy, and us, through the different stages of the song, the best description of which belongs to Chuck Eddy: