Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (16 page)

For a band so concerned with visions, Led Zeppelin makes relatively few references, lyric or musical, to drugs. Outside the electronic freak-out in “Whole Lotta Love,” one rarely encounters an explicitly “psychedelic” vibe, and though Page did advertise his unfortunate poppy fixation on his slinky stage-wear, marijuana seems to have been the band’s most important plant, or Plant, teacher. Before he joined Zeppelin, the singer appeared in a
Daily Mail
photograph of a pro-cannabis rally in the Midlands; during live shows, he made frequent references to hashish, or added “Acapulco” to the line in “Over the Hills and Far Away” about a “pocket full of gold.” That said, “Misty Mountain Hop” hardly romanticizes drugs; indeed, the song seems to contrast Percy’s visionary highs elsewhere on the record with the ordinary pleasures and hassles of hippie drug culture, its sloppy tribal bonds and inevitable tangles with the law. By the end of the tune, in fact, Percy seems to have become disenchanted with the whole scene, the meddling fuzz and the fuzzy freaks. So he packs his bags for the higher planes, for the misty mystic peaks, restless again.

Percy’s jaunty pace is perfectly embodied by the chugging riff, once again supplied by Jones, this time on keyboards. As Steve Waksman has pointed out, the
four songs on side two of
roughly mirror those on side one: two rockers start the show, followed by a ballad and an epic tune. I would also suggest that if side one represents the hero’s inner journey, from lust to gnosis, side two represents the external world, its pleasures and pressures. Compared to the chewy, craven riff of “Black Dog,” then, the “Misty Mountain” figure swaggers and grooves, its simple descending line almost annoying in its repetitive self-satisfaction. It certainly does sound like a stroll though. When you take a walk, your scattershot thoughts regularly return to the physical movements of your body; similarly, this riff keeps coming back to center stage, weaving into the chorus as much as the verse. Like Mr. Natural, it just keeps on truckin’. Bonham rocks steady, and the result of his evenly applied power is drive without anxiety—all the better to set off the moments when he arrests the flow of beats for a few measures, signifying, perhaps, the obstructions that stand in Percy’s way.

The main obstruction here is Johnny Law, who makes an unexpectedly quotidian appearance on this aggressively mythic record. What’s a copper doing here? On the one hand, Zeppelin is imaginatively slumming with the rabble that forms the core of their fandom, a scene whose thirst for hassle-free hedonism invariably runs afoul of the Man. But the policeman who descends on Percy and his newfound friends—rather politely, it
must be said—is more than a stock character in the hippie comedy. He also represents Authority and Law. He is the avatar, on the worldly plane, of the forces of judgment that wield their blades in “The Battle of Evermore.” Recall the feather of Ma’at in Plant’s sigil, a figure, not of airy nothings, but of the soul’s final reckoning. The cop in the song bursts the bubble of druggy utopia, not just because cops are a drag, but because Law—the worldly powers that the Gnostics called the archons—holds dominion over this sad rock whereon we dwell. As he himself admits, Percy really doesn’t know much about what is going on, and all the THC in his system can’t be helping matters. But he does know that escaping the bummer of the world is more than a matter of simply dropping out.

To live outside the cosmic law, you must not only be honest: you must also follow an inner law. I listened to this cut for years without paying much attention to the lyrics; the one line that really stood out was Percy’s command that you look in a mirror and describe what you see, and then decide whether or not you like it. This line echoed a suggestion that veteran spiritual freaks once passed on to me, stuff to the effect that acute self-observation is the beginning of freedom. Of course, Percy is probably just picking on his girl, harping on her for not being restless like him, this restlessness he mistakes for wisdom. It’s hard to tell: Percy’s pretty
out of his head. On the one hand he wants us to open our eyes to the harsh reality of the street, of the world and ourselves; on the other hand he’s writing it all off as “only a state of mind.” This is the sort of philosophy that has just enough truth in it to get most of us—and most hippies certainly—in trouble. Either way, Percy’s confusion reflects one of the great problems with the counterculture’s gnostic religion of spiritual experience (or its pharmacological simulation): experiences pass. You hear the mystic tune of oneness, of the unrolled rock, but then you are just back on the sidewalk, wandering and dissatisfied, loosened from the old restraints but befuddled when the cold hard facts shine a flashlight in your face.

On the first side of the album, Percy stumbled into myth and mystery without asking for it, blessed with a kind of fool’s grace. Now that Percy knows the score, he
consciously
sets his sights on returning to the Misty Mountains. This intention raises the problem of escapism. On one level, the Misty Mountains simply represent the lure of fantasy. As one of the more memorable geological features in
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
, the Mountains cradle the Elven Shambhala of Rivendell while concealing terrible evil in their dark interiors. Returning to them is like slapping on a Led Zeppelin record one more time, traveling into your headphones and “over the hills” of sound, with or without
a pocketful of gold in your bong. But such mists abut the mystic; like many an escapist head, Percy hopes his fairy tale can take him farther than fantasy, opening up the sacred zones where the spirits fly. He hopes to find a heaven in the air, a spiritual path far away from the street “down there.” That’s what he wants, but all he
knows
is that he has hit the road yet again. His only hope lies in the line from
The Fellowship of the Ring
still occasionally glimpsed on the bumpers of dilapidated VW vans, a line whose relevance to this record lies in the full couplet:

All that is gold does not glitter

Not all those who wander are lost.

“Four Sticks” is the oddest, most exotic, and by far the least pleasant song on
. Though some lugheads pick “The Battle of Evermore” as the album’s sore thumb, I once found this track the one to skip. The odd time signatures seemed labored, the riff annoying, and Plant’s highly compressed vocals pinched and overly “baby”-laden. Particularly unnerving was the wheezy Moog solo that Jones whips out three minutes into the song; though Jones does a great job of bending the instrument into the microtonal range, we are still
far too close to the terrifying Keith Emerson solo that closes ELP’s 1970 song “Lucky Man” to feel at all comfortable with the situation.

Only later did I realize that “Four Sticks” was
supposed to sound this way
. As with Page’s live explorations of the theremin and, to some extent, the violin bow, “Four Sticks” is a bit of avant-garde experimentalism tucked inside a vaguely psychedelic riff-rocker. That’s the nice thing about experimental music: it’s OK to make stuff that sounds lumbering, or claustrophobic, or repetitive, as long as it serves some larger musical or conceptual purpose. The purpose that “Four Sticks” serves is to reflect the spiritual funk that falls upon Percy when his quest to reach the mystical mountains lands him, instead, in a nightscape of ruined dreams. “Four Sticks” is clearly a quest song; besides Percy’s need to “get away,” the main riff
ascends
, in contrast to the downward hop of “Misty Mountain.” Percy is climbing up the hillside, toward the realms of higher consciousness. But he is haunted by owls and lost in the pines—a place where, as Bill Monroe reminds us in an “old” bluegrass tune, you don’t want to spend much time:

In the pines, in the pines

Where the sun never shines

And we shiver when the cold wind blows

“Four Sticks” is the “Walpurgis Night” of
, the first indication that our hero’s journey is a downward spiral; that he’s no longer heading for heaven but for Styx. Percy began his quest haunted, and, despite his earlier gnostic insights, he remains spooked. He cannot integrate his experience but keeps hungering for more. Besides the night fowl and the uncanny trees, he’s got a red river coursing through his head—an image that recalls the crimson specter that lodged in his skull during “Black Dog.” The paperback fantasies that once kept him going no longer pack a charge, as “shields and lore” collapse before the stomping boots of contemporary violence. Emotionally, he’s a wreck. Instead of finding a pot of gold, Percy discovers what Chuck Eddy calls “the treadmill at the end of the rainbow.” Though he wants to get away from his baby, he spends the whole song crying after her.

Most of the time you can’t even understand what Plant is singing, since his vocals sound like they have been compressed through a metal sieve at the end of a garden hose. It doesn’t matter much, though. Like so much of this record, “Four Sticks” tells its story with sound more than words. Plant’s most emotional moments occur during the wordless melisma of the outro, where we hear him moaning like the pines, or a cat in heat, or a Bedouin witch. The title of the song also refers directly to the music: in order to generate the
rumbling beats that criss-cross the tune like clashing ripples in a pond, John Bonham used four drumsticks, two in each hand. How Bonham used four sticks to such great effect is not entirely clear; perhaps he grew extra arms, like a Hindu god. Part of his challenge is that the song spends a goodly amount of time in five-four; in contrast to “Black Dog,” which also suggested tricky time signatures, “Four Sticks” does not let Bonham stay rooted in four-four time; the song is too trippy, too “high.” One does not get the sense that Bonham particularly enjoys rising to this challenge, but any questions about his skill set are shoved aside at the end of the tune when, immediately following Percy’s final verse, he starts challenging the already challenging beat, adding ornery accents and mean polyrhythmic flourishes. The bravura is aggressive, for sure, but it’s also Bonzo’s way of showing us that Percy has stumbled on his path.

The most important thematic element of “Four Sticks” is its hidden exotica, its sneaky turn to the East. Plant has said that the song was intended to have a “raga vibe,” and his flamboyant wailings at the end of the song clearly reference Arabic and Indian vocal styles. During the chorus, Jones also shapes a melody line that suggests Middle Eastern modes, and therefore forms a chapter in the Orientalist travelogue that begins with “Black Mountain Side” and “Friends,” and that culminates with “Kashmir.” During Jones’s Moog solo, you
can feel the sun of “Kashmir” beating down on your face, the microtones now revealed as a tip of the hat to non-European intonation. Final proof of this covert Orientalism lies in the fact that, in 1972, when Page and Plant made some recordings with the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, they decided to work on “Four Sticks” along with “Friends.”

That said, listening to “Four Sticks” hardly conjures the sandalwood fumes of “Black Mountain Side” or “Kashmir”; here Zeppelin have swallowed their None-such Explorer leanings so much that you barely hear them. Part of this resistance lies in the band’s strong convictions about what constitutes musical authenticity, especially once you go international. Like so many musicians in the 1960s, Page, Plant, and Jones listened beyond their borders. But though Page loved Ravi Shankar, and bought a sitar well before George Harrison, he thought that playing the instrument on record would be lame, a “quick gimmick.” As Susan Fast explains, Zeppelin sought “authenticity” not in exotic instrumentals, but in engaging the music
as music
, as modes and styles that might be integrated into the band’s organic collage. This embrace of world fusion
avant la lettre
also gave them liberty to sample widely from international sounds, appropriating different materials willy-nilly. Page used the term “CIA” to describe his favorite open guitar tuning because it allowed him
to evoke Celtic, Indian, and Arabic music; like an undercover spook, Page was able to sneak into these different exotic environments under modal cover.