Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (17 page)

So what world do we hear emerging from Page’s resonating strings? Unlike Harrison, Page and Plant never presented themselves as apprentices or curators of Eastern music or spirituality. (The case is complicated by their later work on “No Quarter,” which brings Egyptian and South Asian artists directly into the mix.) What their exoticism evokes, instead, is
the Orientalist mode itself
—not the place but the flight to the place, a movement of the imagination at least as much as the body that travels. As a self-conscious heir to the nineteenth century romantic imagination, Page especially recognized that Orientalism is composed of Western desire as much as Eastern truths, and rather fantastic desire at that. That’s why the mystic epic they wrote about a slog through a parched desert is named after a lush valley near the Himalaya, rich with pines and rivers and snow-capped peaks. Plant and Page are clever gents; they could find Kashmir on a map. Such a “mistake” tells us that their core myth is not the wisdom of the East, but the heretical imagination of the West, an imagination that finds itself in
transport
. This imaginal journey might take the form of a climb to the peak of Kangchenjunga, or a hookah stuffed with Moroccan
hash, or the armchair travel of the book or gramophone. But like Percy, it’s on the move.

Such transport remains problematic, especially if those taking the ride are rich white rock stars. As Fast points out in her discussion of “Kashmir,” playing other people’s music is, perhaps, an inevitable fusion of exploitation and embrace. Waksman believes that Zeppelin cannot sidestep the traps of Orientalism, whose fantasies feed off the spoils of Western—and certainly British—colonialism. But on “Four Sticks,” I hear the opposite: the tune’s pinched and frustrated exotica sounds like a
failure
of the Orientalist quest. Tired of cops and lazy hippies, Percy sets out for the mystical Misty Mountains—for “spirituality,” for a willed transcendence. Like most of the seekers of his day, he heads East, and this turn toward the Orient is sounded in the music of “Four Sticks.” But his efforts fail. He can’t abandon his baby, or the dreams that dog him, those visions of bloody waters whose apocalyptic tide waxes in the final two songs of the album.

The calm elders of “Kashmir” just prove the rule: Unlike so many of their brethren, Zeppelin did not turn East for wisdom, spiritual or musical. Though Page loved to improvise live in the CIA tuning, which he also employed in “Kashmir,” the band never indulged in the sort of free-form raga-rock that signified Eastern
consciousness to the freaks. The closest they came were live performances of “Dazed & Confused,” but there Page would craft his most transcendent tones with a violin bow, an archetypal wand of European music. Similarly, in the midst of the Eastern religion fad, when George Harrison and Pete Townsend and John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana talked about their gurus, Page spoke to the press, when he did, about Western ceremonial magic. We find a similar bent with Robert Plant. Despite his “Song Remains the Same” globalism and his Indian-British wife, Plant rooted his young imagination in the matter of Britain—which certainly includes the matter of Tolkien. When Zeppelin hear the calling that spurs us all both to travel and to seek, they do not face east. Like the elves in Rivendell, they look to the western shores.

Going to California
When the Levee Breaks

One of my favorite images of California pops up midway through
Dogtown and Z-boys
, Stacy Peralta’s documentary about Santa Monica’s ragged surf and skateboard scene in the late 1970s. The hour is dusk, and we see a handful of blond surfers calmly floating astride their boards in the shadow of the scorched and ruined Pacific Ocean Park Pier. Amplified by the hallucinogenic grain of the film stock, the sunset scene radiates a pensive luxury; it is as if, in awaiting their final set of the day, these manboys floating in the gorgeous
purple bloom are silently attending the end of things. With preternatural emotional precision, the filmmakers paired this scene with the slow, elegiac intro to Zeppelin’s “Achilles’ Last Stand.” The fitness of the score goes beyond the fact that Zeppelin first rehearsed the tune in Malibu. It speaks, rather, to the secret sympathy between the band and the golden state, whose enchanting blend of light and shade tickled their loins as well as their fancies.

California was Zeppelin’s summerland, what Stephen Davis calls their “spiritual home.” Meeting in Los Angeles at the start of their triumphant first American tour, the band made a splash in the local rock and groupie scene before they had played a note. Though some consider the tour’s watershed gig a Boston Tea Party performance, Page believed that their Fillmore West run—which Grant also saw as key—was the one where “they’d really broken through. It was just bang!”
⁷³
The band wanted to win America, but they especially wanted to win California. It is not for nothing that the 1972 live show released in 2003 was recorded in LA and Long Beach and named
How the West Was Won
. California held a particularly strong spell over Plant, whose fanboy obsessions had already switched from Chicago blues to West Coast folk-rock by the time he met Page. In early interviews, Plant talks incessantly about Arthur Lee and Love, and though Page did not
entirely share Plant’s enthusiasm for scruffy sunshine pop, California sounds had an important influence on the band’s acoustic material, especially on
Led Zeppelin III
. According to Plant, their goal at their Bron-Yr-Aur sessions was to “get your actual Californian, Marin County blues.”
⁷⁴
“Going to California” is their most explicit tune in this vein, a direct homage to Joni Mitchell, whose own California ode was also released in 1971. But though Plant and Page both idolized Mitchell, she by no means exhausts the identity of the guitar-playing Queen who presides over the song.

Plant was taken with California not just because he dug the bands but because he was drawn, like any self-respecting fuzzy-headed hippie, toward myth. And California was major twentieth century myth, especially to fuzzy-headed hippies. But what sort of myth? One answer lies in Plant’s image of the “children of the sun,” which also happens to the be the name of a remarkable 1998 proto-hippie history by an Ojai-based organic farmer and raw food enthusiast named Gordon Kennedy. With photographs and bios, Kennedy directly traces the West Coast hippie to a number of dropout movements in late nineteenth century Germany, including the
Naturmenschen
(natural people) and
Wandervögel
(migrant birds/free spirits), who espoused “natural” lifestyles, including nudism, vegetarianism, and mystic naturopathy. The hippies thus emerged from
the same underground stream of neopagan romanticism that marked modern occultists like Madame Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, and Crowley. Blavatsky, who co-founded the Theosophical Society, even believed that the next stage of the human race would evolve on the west coast of America, where the local devas were strong.

The image of the sun radiates through this modern stream of nature mysticism. Owners of the classic Rider-Waite Tarot deck can catch the vibe by meditating on the image for the Sun trump, which pictures a bronzed and naked child, with flowers in her hair, riding a white horse—or possibly,
pace
Plant, a white mare. This major arcanum card anticipates the countercultural adoration of children, with their supposed free play and spontaneous pleasures, their innocence in the midst of experience. California was a perfect home for such sentiments, because California has long hosted a youth-oriented culture in many ways indistinguishable from a solar cult. From fruit-crate art to surf music to
Bay-watch
, the sun stands as the central icon of the state’s material bounty, ripening grapes and teenflesh alike. This mythopoetic blaze is particularly intense in southern California; indeed, it seems hardly accidental that Plant was in Los Angeles when he proclaimed himself a golden god.

In “Going to California,” Plant implies that an entire generation of golden gods is awakening, like the creepy
blond tykes in
Village of the Damned
. Despite the mellow vibe, in other words, Percy finds himself in an apocalyptic landscape. The mountains are quaking, while the skies are gray with smog or some other dystopian dust. The oceans bleed armageddon red, as if the red river that coursed through Percy’s head in “Four Sticks” has reached the final shore. Or did some darker deed the multitudinous seas incarnadine? Either way, we face a darkening of the light, what Jack Kerouac called, in a description of 1950s San Francisco, “the late afternoon of time.” California’s failure as a promised land flips over in the collective imagination into a tragic landscape of riots and mudslides and
Blade Runner
dystopias. That’s what the elegiac sunset in Peralta’s skate-rat doc tells you: endless summer is a lie; the end of the west is a land of the setting sun.

This autumnal glow accounts for the air of melancholy and introspective angst that permeates the first great wave of singer-songwriters of the early 1970s, many of whom lived in Los Angeles. By 1971, the bloom was off the counterculture, and many were adrift in a post-Manson miasma of desperate hedonism and spiritual noir. “Going to California” both participates in and prophesies this confessional mode, even as it remains within the mythic framework of Percy’s quest for the ideal Woman, a quest now winding to a close. When “Going to California” opens, Percy is back in the world,
back from the debacle of “Four Sticks,” trying to placate his yen for transcendence with weed and wine. Once again, he is unsatisfied with his partner, who may or may not be the same woman that has irked him since “Black Dog.” If so, she has the patience of Job. But Percy’s heart still can’t get its fill, so, having given up the spiritual quest, he succumbs to the siren call of California girls. And as the song progresses, it becomes clear to him, finally, that the Queen he seeks is nothing more—or less—than a myth.

In both sequence and sound, “Going to California” echoes “The Battle of Evermore,” both of which emerged from what Page calls a “late night guitar twiddle” at Headley Grange. The two ballads both come third on their respective sides, and both share instrumentation, especially Jones’s chiming mandolin. But, in accordance with the more worldly orientation of side two, “California” is a more down-to-earth affair. There is still a mythic dimension to the Queen here—her lack of a king suggests the virgin huntress Artemis, or perhaps Isis, the weeping consort of the dead Osiris. But now the Queen is an actual woman, and Percy’s unquenchable desire reveals itself for what it is: an erotic trap. When he sings the ridiculous line about the white mare and the footsteps of dawn, he is not, as you might think, making fun of early Marc Bolan—he is mocking his own soft-focus sentiment. He knows that he has
been trawling for a figment, for an idealized figure who has “never been born.” That’s a fairly banal bit of human psychology, of course, but hey, Percy’s just a kid. The deeper question concerns the function of mythic forces in our love lives. Are the fantasies that compel the spell of desire simply illusions? Or does that magic madness allow us to encounter another order of presences, celestial powers that we vainly attempt to draw into the human comedy of romance and rutting? Percy doesn’t know. He just knows it’s hard.

California is certainly an appropriate place for Percy’s realization, given that the place is named after a mythical island of Amazons described in a sixteenth century Spanish romance as a land ruled by the gorgeous Queen Califia—definitely a Queen without a King. But the richer irony here lies in the fact that, as far as the men in Led Zeppelin were concerned, California, and especially Hollywood, was Pussy Central, the stankiest of romper rooms. Zeppelin were particularly cozy with the legendary GTOs, a Zappa-affiliated band of outrageously freaky female performance artists who included some of the most vivid groupies of the day, including the gorgeous Pamela Miller, later Pamela Des Barres and the author of
I’m With the Band
. “Miss Pamela” was often seen with Page until the guitarist met Lori Maddox, a native Angelino with voluptuous lips and anime eyes and a scant fourteen years under her
soon-to-be-loosened belt. Though Maddox’s descriptions of her seduction in
Hammer of the Gods
sound a lot like kidnapping, she speaks fondly of the guitarist to this day; his purported skill with whips aside, the guy comes across in her accounts as a bit of a kitten. Eventually, Page switched his affections to Bebe Buell, later the mother of Middle-earth elfbabe Liv Tyler. (It just doesn’t stop, does it!) A catfight between Maddox and Buell may have occurred; in 1974, Page described a recent LA groupie feud as “getting down to razor-blade sandwiches.”
⁷⁵

How does one square the romantic longing of “Going to California” with razor-blade sandwiches, not to mention statutory rape? The answer depends in part on how we integrate biography with art, especially when biography veers toward the vile, or at least the cheesy. After all, this is the band recognized by
Spin
magazine as perpetrators of the single sleaziest moment in rock, involving the judicious insertion of fresh seafood into an apparently game redhead in Seattle’s Edgewater Inn in 1969. Such questionable tastes aside, it can be disconcerting to contemplate the immense banquet of pleasures the cosmos served up to Robert Plant and the boys back in the day. But that’s part of the point: the enjoyment that Led Zeppelin have given so many of us is partly a function of our fantasies about their own engorged enjoyment of the world.
⁷⁶
As with the business
of light and shade, the plangent yearning of Zep ballads like “Going to California” is only intensified by the presumption that these men pursued their passions into the pit.

When it came time to mix
, California turned around and bit Led Zeppelin on the ass. Engineer Andy Johns suggested a well-known studio in Hollywood, claiming that it had the state-of-the-art facilities needed to finesse the album’s final sound. But journalist Andy Fyfe claims that Johns really wanted to visit LA for the sake of a girl and one suspects that Page was hardly bemoaning an excuse to return to Hollywood. When the men arrived in February of 1971, the San Fernando Valley was hit with one of the more devastating earthquakes in California history. After the men mixed the record and returned to the UK, they discovered the tapes sounded like crap. They fought, Johns walked out, and months were wasted finding a new engineer and remixing the album. The name of the ill-starred studio?
Sunset Sounds
.