Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (8 page)

These are metaphors, of course, but they are animistic pagan ones. Inside the magic circle of the occult, metaphors like this take on a life of their own; they are not just icing on the poetic cake but forms of experience. Perhaps the primary experience that gets shaped by animistic metaphors is the experience of
energy
. The countercultural exploitation of electrical energy in the 1960s—through music, radio, feedback, bullhorns, and film—supported the return of animism as a viable cultural metaphor. This is what William Burroughs meant in his strange 1975
Crawdaddy
article on Zeppelin, when
he wrote that “Rock music can be seen as one attempt to break out of this dead soulless universe and reassert the universe of magic.”
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Given Page’s occult studies and Plant’s love of heathen lore, we should hardly be surprised that a degree of animism leaked into their electronic rhetoric, musical and otherwise. But Page’s animist quip also implies an element of
control
that, as we shall see, informs his instrumental pyrotechnics as well as his occult mystique. “Rise and shine!” he says, a commander of potentially chaotic energies. He may call these energies a guitar army, but a student of ceremonial magic like Page would also recognize these powers as
servitors
: earthly or infernal spirits that the magus binds to do his bidding. Satanic pacts are a chump’s game; Page found his allies in electrical sound machines.
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In the mid 1970s, Jimmy Page took a thimbleful of his fortune and financed the opening of an occult bookshop in London called the Equinox. A tiny store just off Kensington High Street, the Equinox specialized in the Crowleyania that Page had already been collecting for years. Crowley’s stuff was hard to find in those days, but the Equinox sold many obscure volumes, including some signed by the master himself. The shop also offered
a complete first edition of Crowley’s original ten-volume
Equinox
, whose stated aim was “to synthesize the aim of religion and the method of science.” Page’s enterprise was also set up to republish facsimiles of important occult works, including some written by—hold onto your hats—Aleister Crowley.

At this point in his life, however, Jimmy Page’s occult side projects could be said to have lacked a certain follow-through. As mentioned earlier, Page had been working on a soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s Thelemite film
Lucifer Rising
for years. Page first met Anger when he outbid the California underground filmmaker for a pornographic Crowley manuscript at Sotheby’s. The two hit it off, and Anger’s densely symbolic film gave Page a perfect platform to explore the intense electronic trance music his more commercial work kept hinting at. But he couldn’t get it together, and though Anger had one of the most famous rockers in the world working for him gratis, the filmmaker eventually got fed up with Page’s lackluster efforts and turned the soundtrack chores over to the imprisoned Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil.
³⁶

Similarly, by the time the Equinox closed its doors in 1979, the enterprise had managed to publish only two books. The first of these, which appeared in 1976 with the kind of black camelhair wrappers fancied by Crowley, was called
The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the
King
. It was the facsimile edition of a sixteenth century magical text edited and published in English by Crowley in 1904, the same year the master channeled the Thelemite revelation
The Book of the Law. The Goetia
is the first portion of the
Lemegeton
, or the
Lesser Key of Solomon
, one of the most famous magical grimoires. On
The Goetia
’s elaborate title page, Crowley attributes the translation of the book to a “dead hand”; the translator was in fact the still-living MacGregor Mathers, the Golden Dawn co-founder from whom Crowley was then estranged. This seeming rip-off was appropriate, for though there are many exalted and noble works in the canons of magic,
The Goetia
is not one of them. Its sigils and conjurations are designed to give the mage brute command over an army of several million devils organized into legions headed by seventy-two Kings and Princes of Hell. Goetia, it should be mentioned, is Greek for
howling
.

Page’s decision to begin his publishing career with the org charts to Lucifer’s own guitar army should dispel any lingering doubts about which side the guitarist’s bread was buttered on. Friend makes much of this diabolical book in
Fallen Angel
, and is particularly drawn to the spirit Paimon. A great King with a roaring voice, Paimon is surrounded by musicians; Friend even hears an echo of “The Song Remains the Same” in
The Goetia
’s promise that this demon can teach you “any … thing
thou mayest desire to know.” That’s pretty silly, and Friend would have done well to read the Crowley essay that accompanies the text, wherein the Beast, wearing the skeptical hat he favored at this stage of his career, writes that the goetic demons are just “portions of the human brain.” But Friend gets much closer to the mark when he cites the “Preliminary Definition of Magic” that opens the grimoire. According to this brief commentary, magic is the highest form of natural philosophy, and its operations are driven by the magician’s understanding of the inner or “occult” nature of things. By skillfully applying this understanding to things, the operator can produce “strange and admirable effects … which to the vulgar shall seem to be a miracle.”
³⁷

The magician, then, is a technician of special effects, which seems as good a place as any to consider how Page’s occult predilections may have informed Led Zeppelin’s music. In particular, we can talk about the sound of this music, which not only howls and roars, but plumbs the depths—literally. Live and on record, Zep’s sound was
heavy
, a chthonic crunch rooted in loud, distorted riffs and the combined power of John Paul Jones and John Bonham, who moved into the lower register like they owned the place. It is possible to make cross-cultural arguments about the shadowy psychic states catalyzed by deep beats and a heavy sound; in his
Crawdaddy
article, Burroughs mentions the Jajouka
trance music of Morocco, whose rites revolve around the goat-god Pan. But you only need to open your ears to hear Led Zeppelin toying with what Johnny Cash called “the beast in me”: something seething and base and more than a little crass. As Page noted, the band made “music from the stomach rather than the head.” You can see it in the way he slung his guitar onstage: Page liked to take it as low as you can go.

It is a measure of Led Zeppelin’s command that their low-end, folk-fringed crunge—coupled with the castles and ringwraiths that floated through Plant’s lyrics—staked out territory wherein an entire subgenre of rock would grow. Alchemical language is unavoidable: Zeppelin took the weighty riffs of heavy rock and transmuted them into heavy metal, a term which they nonetheless rejected, reasonably enough, for themselves. In any case, their riff mythos launched a thousand black ships. It is as if they forged a sonic portal into the abyss, and then broke the cardinal rule of ceremonial magic and left the damn thing open.
Who let the dogs of doom out?

In fairness, it must be said that many rock bards name Black Sabbath rather than Zeppelin as the true font of heavy metal. After all, Sabbath pack an unparalleled eldritch punch, and in many ways represent a purer source of bane: the riffs more consistently morbid, the stance more prole, and the whole shtick more out-of-nowhere
and hence more monstrous, more contrary to nature. But Zeppelin had a vaster palette, a more richly perfumed darkness; perhaps most importantly, they sold way more records. Like all origin stories, this one depends on your frame of reference, your own lineages, your taste. It’s very much like the question of who deserves blame for the genre of heroic fantasy, whose multi-volume sagas of dwarf-lords and magic blades continue to clog the SF sections of bookstores. Hard-core sword-and-sorcery buffs will rightly name the pulp peregrinations of Robert E. Howard’s
Conan,
while more literary types will nominate, with equal justification, Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
. Sabbath is
Conan
; Zeppelin is
Lord of the Rings.

But Zeppelin is a special sort of
Lord of the Rings
, one where you get to
root for both sides
. Whatever its biographical basis, Page’s apparent diabolism is counterbalanced with the bucolic hippie paganism concentrated in the lyrics, persona, and hairstyles of Robert Plant. Led Zeppelin derives much of their mythic power from this seductive but disturbing ambiguity. Who do Zeppelin swear fealty to? The devil or the sun? Mordor or Middle-earth? Is Faery really just a theme park of Hell? The polarity between Page and Plant is even reflected in their very names. The plant is the pure green spunk of earth, whereas the page is a work of man, a skeletal void upon which we inscribe our plots and spells.

A similar polarity underlies Page’s persona, and helps to explain the aura of magical power that characterizes his mystique. Susan Fast cites one fan survey focused on the guitarist: “He is the sage. He knows how to take chances and make it work. He is the producer and ultimate architect of the goods.”
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On the surface, Page’s live performances present typical rockist values of spontaneity, virtuosity, and sweaty abandon. But Page adds a novel element to the figure of the guitar hero, an element that Steve Waksman has identified as
mystery
. So even as Page bares his cock rock before tens of thousands of fans, the Zoso doodle emblazoned on his clothes and amp remind us that
he knows something that we don’t
. There is a gap between the hero whose performance we consume and the sage behind the curtain, who remains concealed, literally
occult
. This mystique makes Page far creepier than Ozzy, who is hiding nothing, except maybe his debt to
The Munsters
. Though rooted in Page’s personal reserve and esoteric interests, the guitarist’s mystique is also structurally reflected in his musical practice. Page’s live virtuosity was leavened by the fact that he was notoriously sloppy, constantly picking up and discarding ideas with an air of carelessness, even distraction. In the heat of performance, it often seemed like a part of him was somewhere else, at a wise or possibly addled remove. Yet this sloppiness suggested that he had even mastered chance, and could
“make it work.” This element of hidden mastery is the key, for behind the scenes, Page was an architect of control: a hands-on producer, a sometimes martinet in the studio, and a tight-fisted investor who, along with Peter Grant, helped wrest unprecedented financial and artistic control away from his record company.
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This air of cunning underlies his mystique. Onstage, he would occasionally direct the other members like a conductor, a performance that Jones has insisted was largely for show.

Those souls disturbed by Zeppelin’s power seem most threatened by this quality of hidden control. For Tom Friend, Zeppelin’s spell is concentrated in occult technology. In his chapter “Misty Mountain Hop: Satan Takes Possession of Jimmy Page,” the author expends copious prose on the violin bow and the Echoplex; the following chapter is devoted entirely to the theremin. To Friend’s credit, it must be said that Page liked to play the great and terrible Oz. Onstage, he sapped the theremin for all the sorcerous drama he could muster; the guitarist often deployed his bow like a ceremonial magician’s wand, sometimes even seeming to ritually “call the quarters.” To reporters Page dropped cryptic comments about the hypnotic power of riff music; in
Sounds
, he discussed the “science of vibration,” floating the paranoid chestnut that certain frequencies of infrasound can liquefy your guts or even kill you. Of
course, the band heartily denied what Friend and others describe as Zeppelin’s ultimate secret weapon of diabolism: the “backwards-masked” satanic messages supposedly woven into “Stairway to Heaven.”

We will deal with these garbled hymns to “My Sweet Satan” in a later chapter. What’s important to note here is that these accusations of occult control mirror secular critiques of the band and their “fascist” manipulation of consciousness through media. When a Montreal Star reporter attacked Led Zeppelin for generating “false meaning” through volume, he was not criticizing the group for playing lame songs but for taking technological advantage of listeners. Indeed, with the exception of Susan Fast and Donna Gaines, commentators who address Zep’s core fans tend to characterize them as dupes, teenage zombies with little will or taste of their own. Sometimes drugs take the blame as well.
Rolling Stone
famously dismissed Zep’s followers as “heavy dope fiends,” while the
Los Angeles Times
went so far as to attribute the band’s success to the teenage embrace of barbiturates and amphetamines, drugs which seemingly rendered the human nervous system more susceptible to the band’s dirty tricks.

At the same time, it would be stupid to dismiss the questions of seduction and trance raised by Zeppelin’s live performances and recordings. Such matters are thorny topics in criticism, as they touch upon fundamental
issues of autonomy, of who we are when we give ourselves to music. The dissolution of boundaries most of us have experienced dissolves the boundaries of discourse as well, melting aesthetic categories into sacred intuitions and the febrile flashbacks of tribal exotica. It is difficult enough to explain, in anthropological terms, how the phenomenon of possession occurs in traditional sacred dance, say, in Haitian
vodun
: What blend of cultural narratives, beat science, and psychodynamics boots up the gods? How much harder then to talk about entrancing rock music within the broken frameworks of secular modernity. Christian fundamentalists not only accept the reality of musical hypnotism, but suggest that it is an
automatic
function of a specific technology or technique, whether subliminal messages or volume or the “Druid beats” condemned by Jack Chick in one of his famous comic-book tracts. And yet this paranoia points to something we all desire on the road to transport: the release of control, or rather, the submission to a choicelessness that can seem both delicious and slightly ominous. Even fundamentalists crave their rapture, their journey to the middle of the air.