Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (7 page)

opens with five seconds of pulsating electronic spooge. We hear the brief warping sound of magnetic tape beginning to roll, followed by two plucks of Jones’s bass. But the principal sound is a quick series of twenty or so growling
wicka-wicka
beats that begin to slip out of phase before dwindling into an aimless scratching noise, like a DJ losing steam. These pulses sound regular and “electronic”; they do not sound like they were produced by a guitar, at least in any conventional sense. According to Chris Welch, Jimmy Page describes the sound as “the guitar army waking up. Rise and shine!”
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The “guitar army” is a phrase Page has used to describe his innovative and intensely satisfying use of chorused, effects-laden, and multi-tracked guitars. (It’s also the name of a 1972 book by MC5 manager John Sinclair.) In a 1977 interview, after a journalist asked him about his best solos, Page talked instead about “orchestrating the guitar like an army”: building up harmonies, layering different guitars, amps, and timbres, exploring “collages and tissues of sound.” In other words, rather than represent himself as a virtuoso, Page spoke as someone who enjoyed command of the entire field. As the guitarist put it, “My vocation is more in composition really than in anything else.” Page hit his own nail on the head here, but only if we take “composition” in its broadest sense: not just the creation and orchestration of music per se, but the assemblage of many elements—guitars, effects, multi-track recording, production, song sequencing, album covers—into an entire
world of sound
. Page was a great record producer, a master with what film critics call
mise-en-scène
, the director’s art of placing action within the space of the frame. Ira Konigsberg has defined
mise-en-scène
as

the composition of the individual film—the relation of objects, people and masses; the interplay of light and dark; the pattern of color; the camera’s position
and angle of view—as well as the movement within the frame.
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Replace “camera” with “listener” and you understand what Page means by “composition”: a symbolic and emotional choreography that involves masses of sound, Plant’s lyrical evocations, instrumental colors, and the movement of instruments through sonic space. The visual metaphor here is no accident. Page treats sound as a kind of moving image, a spectral synesthesia reflected in his famous description of his art as a “kind of construction in light and shade.”

As perhaps the most realized of these constructions,
demands that we take a closer look at Page as producer, acknowledging from the get-go that, like many producers, he gets credit for things that others did. Before forming Led Zeppelin and playing with the Yardbirds, Page spent three years as a session player, playing on an estimated fifty to ninety percent of the records made in England between 1963 and 1965, including early hits by the Who and the Kinks. He was a hack, in other words, but a very capable and well-paid hack. During this time he not only learned how to create a diverse range of styles on command, but also soaked up production tricks and befriended engineers, enabling him to later get the best out of folks like Eddie Kramer, who worked with Hendrix and helped craft many ace
Zeppelin tracks. Years before orchestrating Led Zeppelin, Page developed an intimate understanding that rock and roll records were built things, a mode of pop production, sometimes canny and sometimes crass.

Page’s later facility in the studio also reflected a fascination with electrical sound machines that runs throughout his musical career. Performing with Neil Christian and the Crusaders in 1962, the seventeen-year-old Page was one of the first London guitarists to play with a foot pedal; by the mid-1970s, he was using digital delays, guitar synthesizers, and a live setup that included wah-wah, MXR effects, and what he admitted was “total flash”: harmonizer, theremin, Echoplex, and the famous violin bow. By pushing the envelope on sound, these gadgets extended the virtuosity associated with the guitar hero into the domain of techno-acoustic experimentation. But these tools also gave Page a way to create the dramatic atmospheres so important to his sense of “light and shade.” In particular, Page used electronics to explore what music buffs call
timbre
: the textural quality of a tone, its sheen, or grain, or color. Page’s timbral flavors define his guitar playing as much as his licks or his blend of acoustic and electric styles. Think of the slutty bumblebee sting of “Black Dog,” the lacerating wah-wah of “Trampled Underfoot,” or the eldritch majesty of “Achilles’ Last Stand.” By
Physical Graffiti
, Page had transformed the guitar into an errant
analog synthesizer, enabling him to exploit the ambient and atmospheric potentials of electronic sound while remaining rooted in the erotics of the fingered fret-board. In this, Page remained a true sonic child of the psychedelic 1960s, embracing the notion that, as Steve Waksman puts it, “amplified sound has significant transformative potential.”
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Of all the guitar heroes from the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix took this transformative potential the furthest, both onstage and in his obsessive and almost extraterrestrial studio work. Still, it seems important to note that Page had Roger Mayer build him a fuzz box in 1964, years before Hendrix pushed Mayer’s gear into the purple haze. Mayer’s excellent machines also give us a different perspective on Page’s “guitar army,” because when Mayer started building his fuzz boxes for guitarists like Jeff Beck and Page, he worked for the British Admiralty researching acoustics. In other words, his intimacy with sonic circuitry ran parallel to his work on underwater warfare. This is no random bit of trivia. It marks how deeply the technologies that make modern culture are intertwined with the technologies that make modern war. The German media theoretician Friedrich Kittler has also drawn attention to the connections between radar and television, as well as the intensified effects that World War I had on the evolution of wireless tube technology; one also must mention Nazi Germany’s
development and deployment of magnetic tape. In Kitttler’s words, “The entertainment industry is, in any conceivable sense of the word, an abuse of army equipment.”
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In both sound and imagery, Led Zeppelin drew power from this secret sympathy between media technology and war. On 1969’s
Led Zeppelin II
, for example, where the band appeared in uniforms of the Jasta division of the German Air Force, the boys unfurled the cock-rock apocalypse “Whole Lotta Love.” The tense central riff is answered by a descending guitar chord that sweeps between the stereo channels like a V2 screaming across the sky, while the urgent central riff intensifies a blues come-on to the point of violence, leading Charles Shaar Murray to dub the song a “thermonuclear gang rape.” That seems rather over the top, but one still does not doubt Stephen Davis’ claim that the tune was a particular favorite with the boys in Nam, who bolted 8-tracks to their tanks and played it as they moved into combat. But the riff’s macho drive is also interrupted by a freeform passage of psychedelia that features Page and engineer Eddie Kramer indulging themselves in pure effects, twiddling knobs like the Kingston producers who were inventing dub music around the same time, or George Clinton behind the dials for the first Funkadelic album. Here Page unveils his use of the theremin, one of the world’s oldest and weirdest electronic
instruments, while Plant’s vocals are treated with a trippy “backwards echo” technique that Page had invented earlier in a Yardbirds session. The resulting psychedelic bardo swoons with both pleasure and pain, as Plant’s orgasmic moans compete with sirens, muffled explosions, and the disorientation of battle. Some critics have argued that this freak-out subtly undermines the masculine prerogative of the main riff, but the analog electronica also delivers a message hidden by the era’s more utopian fantasies about amplified sound: that your novelties and pleasures are won in part from the war machine; that there is no sex without power, no transcendence without death.

“Whole Lotta Love’s” apocalyptic undertow foreshadowed a growing unease among some rock writers that “heavy rock,” with its exploitation of power and volume, was cheapening rock’s transformative cultural potential. These concerns were bound up as well with fears about rock’s exploding commercialism. For such commentators, Page’s technical bravura was just another reason to hate the band. Claiming that listening to Page live was “about as satisfying as watching a television picture signal,” a
Montreal Star
rock critic compared the guitarist to an encyclopedia salesman demonstrating the range of sounds and gimmicks that could be coaxed from an electric guitar.
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This same fellow also condemned what he believed was the “false meaning” that
fans attached to Zeppelin’s music because of its volume; in this view, Zeppelin’s evident hold on the masses was not really musical at all, but an effect of brute technology.

Other critics explicitly associated the force, heaviness, and sheer volume of Zeppelin’s sound with violence. Their legendary 1969 show at Boston Tea Party, after all, had ended with scores of kids literally banging their heads against the stage. In the same year, a lamenting Jon Landau described the band’s live demeanor as “loud, impersonal, exhibitionistic, violent and often insane.”
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Perhaps the crispest comment along these lines was from the British writer Mick Gold: “what comes across most strongly in their live music is a feeling of violent emotions internalized.” Gold meant this as a slag, a morbid contrast to the Stones and Faces, whom he describes as providing spontaneity and joy in their shows. Zeppelin plays body music, Gold says, but they offer no climax. “Because it doesn’t swing, it doesn’t set the audience dancing; it aims for the temples, not the feet, and its total effect is one of stupefaction.”
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Zep’s transformation of aggressive forces into mental effects, to say nothing of their resistance to climax, reflects a wayward tantric magic; submission to such a sublimated inner journey might indeed look like stupefaction to folks who just want to boogie with the babes. But you know what Gold means: Led Zeppelin overwhelmed
their audience. “They’re like a vibrator,” wrote Charles Shaar Murray about an Earls Court show from 1975. “It can get you off something ridiculous, but it can’t kiss you goodnight.”
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In the ferocious “Immigrant Song,” which opened their third album and many a show, Zep thematize their power and aspiration as a kind of Viking violence. The land of ice and snow is not the land of spontaneity and joy, but of forceful telluric energies and the dark vision of the midnight sun. At the same time, Plant’s pagan boast also nods toward the modern technology that makes Zep’s marauding guitar army possible. Mjölnir, the “hammer of the gods” that drives their ships, is Thor’s way of making lightning—
electricity
, in other words, the literal “power” that would drive Zeppelin all the way to the western shore—to America, that is, even unto the hotels of California.

The mythic life of electricity recalls another curiosity about Page’s quip about his guitar army: he describes it as “waking up.” This awakening depends on the flow of electrons; other accounts of the album’s weird opening fanfare suggest that we are just hearing the amplifiers warm up. In any case, the analogy is apt: Electricity enlivens and enchants music, not only adding volume and dimension, but also giving musical signals another order of presence—in other words, a
life of their own
. In the case of the electric guitar, this liveliness is rooted
in the enhancement of overtones that characterize distortion as well as the overdriving loops that produce feedback. As Page put it, the electric guitar “can start
singing on its own
through the electronics which you can’t engineer on an acoustic guitar”
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(my emphasis). An even more definitive statement of this electronic animism appears in a Swan Song press release from 1977: “[Led Zeppelin] were the first group to take high volume and distortion, make it a distinct, creative entity and key it directly to the emotional thrust of each song.”
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Leaving the braggadocio of this assertion aside (Hendrix or Blue Cheer, anyone?), the key word here is
entity
. The implication is that Zep shaped electrical effects into a vital autonomous power, a distinct creature that lent its energies to the more traditional values of the song.