Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (18 page)

In the film
The Song Remains the Same
, each member of Led Zeppelin gets to fulfill his own fantasy in celluloid. Robert Plant plays a mounted knight who rescues a maiden from a Welsh castle, no doubt with an eye to
mounting the maiden as well. Jones impersonates the Scarecrow, a masked eighteenth century highwayman who took on the King’s men in defense of smugglers. Jimmy Page climbs a mountain near Boleskine and mystically fuses with the hermit from the gatefold of
, a figure that Page claimed symbolized “Father Time” but which Thomas Friend identifies as the Holy Guardian Angel of Thelemic magic. What does John Bonham do? He races an AA Fueler at 260 mph down California’s Santa Pod Raceway.

Chunky and sometimes mullet-headed, Bonham was the most down-to-earth of the Zeps, the most working-class, the simplest in tongue and tastes. Shown in the Zeppelin film at his hundred-acre Old Hyde farm in Worcestershire, where he raised prize-winning Hereford bulls, Bonham seems at home in the material world, surrounded by fast machines and productive beasts. Bonham also could be something of a Beast himself, having earned the nickname for his habit of growling like an animal when sufficiently inebriated, which was frequent. On September 24, 1980, he passed out after downing something like forty shots of vodka at Page’s estate, and choked to death on his own vomit. Though by some accounts the friendliest of the four, Bonham could also morph into a ferocious Orc, and the drummer committed a number of appalling assaults on men and women alike over the clipped course of his life.

How much is Bonham’s drumming informed by his personality, which we can only know through a cartoon veil of rumor and report? It remains an open question, especially with this band, where personality, myth, and performance blur. I suspect that Zeppelin’s Viking hype relates in some way to the vulgarity that many hear in Bonzo’s beats (Robert Christgau called him “ham-handed”). But Bonham’s physical strength as a drummer and his relative lack of technical sophistication does indicate something primal at work in this man and the sounds he made. Though a savvy drummer, his work is most essentially characterized by his barely restrained power, by his ability to smack a drumhead with enough force and control to propel sound waves into your skull with the crisp conviction of a grizzly bear swatting a hatchback. But even this sounds too
mammalian
. Unlike Keith Moon, a power drummer that Bonham justifiably idolized, Bonham does not even really play with “heart,” because heart implies passionate excess. Bonham never gushes, at least on record, never drips over the brim. What we hear in his drums is more deeply rooted than heart, an absolute pulse that bubbles up from Earth’s molten core, that grinds time with the monumental calm of a continental plate. Bonham is not primal, but primeval.

Bonham’s
sigil, emblazoned on his single bass drum, suggests the element of earth; within the alchemical
dynamics of the band, he concretized and contained. With the hollow thundering beats that open “When the Levee Breaks,” it is clear that the final chapter of
is driven by his telluric energies, by the drum’s invocation of fate rather than the guitar’s bid for freedom. These beats are the molten core of rock grooves: a heaviness that flows, that lifts us up with a sinking feeling. The denouement of
is not some misty peak—that came earlier, with “Stairway to Heaven.” Instead we fall away from myth and return to the root, to matter, to a dirge of the earth. This is a song, after all, about an ecological disaster, about the triumph of the elements over our pathetic attempts at control. If there is a Lady in this song, it is Dame Nature, and she’s got more cataclysmic things to think about now than Robert Plant’s latest roll in the hay.

As a blues number, “Levee” returns to the root in another sense as well, not because the blues are somehow closer to nature, but because British musicians of Zeppelin’s generation considered the blues to be the Source. The genealogy of rock and roll is more complex than this, of course, but under the rootless conditions of modernity, we often choose our ancestors, and for a number reasons, noble and not, British rockers chose black American blues musicians. Revisionist blues is also where Zeppelin first came together musically. As their blistering early bootlegs show, blues helped the band
discover the volcanic energies they would later refine and arrange into their unique combo work. Robert Christgau points out that Zep’s blues recastings generally sound at once oddly cerebral and almost parodic in their overstatement. But with “Levee,” he notes, the band simultaneously transcends these peculiarities and fully realizes them, creating a song that “really sounds like a blues” even as it crescendos like a symphony. “When the Levee Breaks” is Zeppelin’s definitive blues song on record; it puts the vision into revisionism.

As practitioners of white Brit blues go, however, Zeppelin has a particularly vexed relationship with the genre. The issue is appropriation—specifically, the band’s refusal, ultimately costly, to give much credit to the blues musicians whose lyrics and licks they lifted. In rehearsal and onstage, Plant freely drew from the blues canon, and he honestly seemed to believe that these songs in turn had emerged from some collective well of folk memory that welcomed all comers. Given the way that early American music was repackaged for young consumers during the folk and blues boom of the early 1960s, this was not an unreasonable assumption. But intention is not really part of the controversy. With cuts like “Bring It On Home,” which smears on blackface even as it trumpets white moves, Zeppelin reignited a racial narrative that goes back to Elvis: White popularizers get rich off the backs of American blacks.
On some level, it’s all about the benjamins, and one would be churlish not to applaud whatever out-of-court settlement Willie Dixon won after suing Zeppelin in the 1980s for swiping his lyrics for “Whole Lotta Love.” On the other hand, the fact that Zeppelin squeezed their lemons all the way to the bank doesn’t dissolve the complex questions about how artists cut and paste their way toward novelty within a genre. Moreover, given today’s intense conflicts over intellectual property—which set public culture against the omnivorous corporate exercise of copyright—it is harder to see Dixon’s suit as the simple triumph of an aggrieved musician over arrogant white pirates.

That’s not to say that Zeppelin could not be, as Will Shade called them, “thieving magpies.” In an article in
Perfect Sound Forever
, Shade meticulously and acerbically catalogs Plant’s lyric borrowings and Page’s sometimes-miserly swipes from his heroes and peers.
⁷⁷
Shade has done his homework, although his big revelation—that Page appropriated the opening bars of “Stairway to Heaven” from Spirit’s “Taurus” “note for note”—is pretty feeble.
⁷⁸
Perhaps the most important point to make about Zeppelin’s creative appropriation here is that, while they could be magpies, they were
equal-opportunity
magpies. In all the brouhaha over Zeppelin’s blues piracy, one rarely comes across critics rallying around the flag of Bert Jansch, despite the fact that
Jimmy Page lifted major elements of “Black Mountain Side” from Jansch’s 1966 gem “Blackwaterside.” Though Jansch rightly listed the song as “Trad.,” Page felt his own stylings original enough to give himself sole songwriting credit.

Given such conduct, we might glimpse the hand of some cosmic ironist behind the fact that the beats that open Zeppelin’s greatest blues song have become rock music’s most widely used sample. Besides making its way onto myriad breakbeat compilations, Bonham’s “Levee” riff has been sampled by Ice T, Dr. Dre, Derek B, Puff Daddy, Eminem, Coldcut, and Massive Attack, among many others. Though not on the par with “Funky Drummer” or the Amen break, Bonham’s snippet has woven itself permanently into hip-hop and dance music’s collective DNA. The Beastie Boys committed perhaps the most notable (and thematically appropriate) swipe of Bonham in “Rhymin’ and Stealin’,” which opens their hip hop masterjerk
License to Ill
. Given the Beastie Boys’ snarky white bum’s rush on what at the time was a definitively black genre, it is perhaps appropriate that their album’s opening volley sampled the heaviest white rock drummer who could also swing; certainly the song’s lyrics betrayed a debt to Zeppelin’s marauder mythos. (“Skirt chasing, freebasing, killing every village / We drink and rob and rhyme and pillage.”) Some histories of sampling claim that Zeppelin
or their lawyers tried to sue the Beasties for copyright infringement, a move that marked the beginning of the end of sampling’s open range. But Mike D insists that Zeppelin never contacted the group regarding beats, rhymes, or fashions. “Maybe that’s ’cause they got all three categories on lock,” he added.

“When the Levee Breaks” raises another question about props: Why, given their historic parsimony in the matter, does Zeppelin credit the song to Memphis Minnie as well as to all four members of the band? Minnie wrote and recorded “When the Levee Breaks” with her husband Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929, shortly before the guitar-playing couple migrated from Tennessee to Chicago. Admittedly, though Zeppelin’s music is entirely different, Plant does retain most of the original verses. But I think greater significance lies in this invocation of Minnie at the close of
. For though Minnie’s original recording of the tune sounds pretty quaint, the woman who performed it was a powerhouse. A bridge between the country blues of the Delta and Chicago’s urban groups, as well as a link to the classic female blues singers of the 1920s, Minnie was an early architect of the postwar Chicago sound. With her guitar combos, Minnie always played lead, and her intricate fingerpicking won her many a showdown. But her most visionary move was to strap on an electric guitar, picking up the instrument at least a year before Muddy Waters.
Minnie’s electric playing was never recorded, but if a 1943 column by Langston Hughes is to be believed, she was fierce—worlds away from the clean sound of Charlie Christian or the supper-club stuff she recorded as part of Lester Melrose’s self-consciously sophisticated Bluebird roster: