Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (9 page)

The notion that some magic sonic weapon lies behind Led Zeppelin’s evident power is not just an affront to the complexity of music; it’s an affront to magic. The magician is more than a trickster; as the historian of religion Mircae Eliade wrote, the magician is, by definition,
“a stage-producer.” The magus does not just dangle a golden pendulum before your eyes; he shapes a theater around that pendulum, a stage large and suggestive enough to
draw you in
. Jimmy Page knew that all of the Marshall stacks and effects pedals in the world wouldn’t do diddly if Led Zeppelin did not craft drama and atmosphere out of the aggressive and horny energies they raised. Which brings us back, in a rambling sort of way, to
mise-en-scène.

As he ate through his allotted span of time, Aleister Crowley produced a number of definitions of magic, most of which emphasized the will. Crowley meant many things by will, things both phallic and mystic, but the basic picture accords with the conventional notion of the magician as an
operator
, an active manipulator of supernatural agents or sneaky techniques of perception. Crowley also provides a more passive and receptive picture of the magical art in the “Notes for an Astral Atlas” that appends his
Magick in Theory and Practice
. “Magick,” he writes, “enables us to receive sensible impressions of worlds other than the ‘physical’ universe.”
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In this view, magic does not so much intensify the will as open up imaginative experience, triggering incorporeal sensations and images that have lives of their own. If
you replace “magick” with “music” in Crowley’s statement, you will see where we are headed.
Music enables us to receive sensible impressions of worlds other than the “physical” universe.
Even when we are dancing deep in the groove, music is always prepared to disembody us, to set the spirit wandering through worlds conjured with no more material than vibrating waves of energy.

Led Zeppelin records embody this virtual power in the definitive sense that they
take place somewhere
, that they draw you into another world, over the hills and far away. Space is a primary metaphor for understanding and experiencing the band’s music. As Ann Powers notes, “This is why people hated them: they took up so much space. And it’s why people loved them: that space could swallow you up, take you in.”
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Lots of head music in the late 1960s and 1970s had such aspirations; the rhetoric of transport accorded with the drug culture as well as the discovery that the multi-track studio was a great place to build pocket worlds. But while many self-consciously psychedelic bands suggested the intense distortions and phantasmagoria of the drug rush, Zeppelin’s
mise-en-scène
was more like Crowley’s idea of an astral atlas: an almost storybook panorama of images and characters. They polished rock into a scrying stone: you could
see
the blazing dunes of “Kashmir,” the driving snow of “No Quarter,” and the Viking hordes when
the thunderous “Immigrant Song” riff kicked in. “The goal was synesthesia,” Page has said. “Creating pictures with sound.”
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The desire to make pictures with sound accords with Led Zeppelin’s deep romantic leanings. After Beethoven’s symphonic revolution, many nineteenth century composers explored “programme music,” self-consciously linking narrative imagery and events to instrumental themes and developments. Not surprisingly, such symphonies often veered toward the dramatic: large masses of sounds, dynamic and sudden contrasts, expressive and even violent explosions of energy. Composers like Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss knew that
sturm und drang
makes especially vivid pictures in the mind; Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique
, with its opium dreams and witches’ sabbath, is “visionary” in more than one sense of the term. Though Zeppelin have much less of a fetish for classical music than other heavy metal artists, the band also rooted their rich dramatics in what Page has called their “inner dynamics.” These dynamics derive from the variety of contrasts Zeppelin employ: elven folk and muddy blues, lightning attacks and molasses riffs, holy majesty and pelvic sleaze, technological effects and pastoral romance. These polarities, often masterfully arranged by John Paul Jones, clasp and crash throughout the course of an album or even a song,
carving out a landscape that the electronic media theorist Marshall McLuhan would call an “acoustic space.”

Consider the exquisite ending of “Thank You,” which closes side one of
Led Zeppelin II
. Around 3:30 into the song, as Plant and his lover “walk the miles,” we hear the dewy plaints of Jones’s keyboards, rooted in the church organ playing of his youth, gradually fade into the distance. But what does this mean, to describe Jones’s sounds as fading “into the distance”? Though fade-outs resemble the physical experience of a sound source moving away from our bodies, they are so common in recorded music that we rarely read them as a change in proximity. At first, “Thank You” proceeds normally: Jones’s holy flutters simply dwindle away, along with the bell-like toll of Page’s resonating D. At this point, first-time listeners are ready for the next track. But then, unexpectedly, the instruments return, increasing in volume until they resolve into a sustained, quietly triumphant chord. And that slight return opens up an infinite sense of place, of going and coming, a space of both potential and finality, like the sea. It is one of Zeppelin’s most sublime and subtle moments.

Zeppelin albums do not just lead listeners through the hills and dales of individual tunes, but draw them through the passageways
between
songs. Zeppelin albums are Albums, remember, as consciously sequenced as any records not condemned to the unnerving category
of “concept album.” Consider how “Your Time Is Gonna Come” bleeds into “Black Mountain Side” on the first record: though a jarring juxtaposition, especially rhythmically, it adds another “spice” to the stylistic masala of Page’s acoustic fantasy, with its Celtic and Indian flavors, and prepares our palette, through contrast, for the quarter second of silence that precedes the bangers-and-mash riff of “Communication Breakdown.” Such powerful juxtapositions, which also operate inside songs like “Bring It On Home,” “Ramble On,” and “What Is and What Should Never Be,” not only create dynamics, but make the metaphor of the
journey
inevitable. Listening to Zep Albums is like a cruise through shifting landscapes; in the classic vinyl platform, a one-way spiral jaunt. When Plant yells for the confounded bridge in “The Crunge” from
Houses of the Holy
, he’s not just asking to get out of the groove, but to get his ass over to the other side … of the LP.

The rich sense of acoustic space that pervades Led Zeppelin records derives not only from the music’s inner dynamics, but from Jimmy Page’s mightiest technical spell: his engineering of
ambience
. As Robert Palmer noted in a vital 1990 essay on the band, Page was “extremely conscious of building and maintaining the atmospheric quality of the song from square one.” Inspired by early Sun and Chess records, Page used echo and reverb to soften the separation between instruments;
these techniques also added depth and dimension to the tracks, since both echo and reverberation are rooted in our physical experience of sound-in-space, of the volume of volume. But ambience does more than just shape a sound world; it also transports the listener. Zak compares ambience to the mirror in Cocteau’s film
Orphée
: “it draws the listener into an aural world whose shape, dimensions, lighting, and perspective it helps to define.”
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Ambience tricks us into believing that the recording takes place somewhere, in a sort of spirit realm, “the true world of the disembodied voice.”

Just as the word “atmosphere” can refer to both the surrounding air and the mood of a place, so did Page’s art of ambience extend beyond the shaping of acoustic space into the realm of emotional texture. Hearkening forward to a more “electronic” sense of ambience, Page created atmospheric mood through the exploration of timbre; by layering various textures and multi-tracking his guitars, he created what he called “collages and tissues of sound with emotional intensity.”
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Page brought a similar sensibility to the hotel rooms he would decorate on tour; seeking to replicate the exotic interior design of his homes, the guitarist would lay Persian carpets on top of one another and then bathe the overlapping patterns in candlelight.

Page also engineered ambience through what he called “the science of microphone placement.” Back
when Page was slaving as a studio hack, the engineers he worked with would often place a single microphone in front of an instrument’s amplifier. But Page, again inspired by early rock and roll records, augmented this arrangement by placing additional mics ten or twenty feet away; he’d then record and balance the difference between these mics, capturing a time lag that reflected the acoustic shape of the room itself. “Distance makes depth,” he’d say, tipping his hat to the engineers of the old school. “The whole idea, the way I see recording, is to try and capture the sound of the room live and the emotion of the whole moment.”
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As a producer, Page had a romantic, almost animistic desire to absorb the actual environment where the sounds were made with the bodies of men. As Zak writes, “the master recordist uses microphones to capture not only sonic and musical elements, but also the weight of apparent physical presence.” Such physical graffiti also appears on some Zeppelin tracks as extraneous, documentary slop. Think of the jet that flies overhead before the band launches into “Black Country Woman,” recorded on the lawn at Mick Jagger’s Stargroves estate. Or think of the guitar army that growls before “Black Dog” begins.

And through what sort of acoustic space does the electronic bark of “Black Dog” resound? What ghost of what hall stages the riff symphony that is
?
The bulk of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album was rehearsed and partially recorded in Headley Grange, three stories of stone gloom in the middle of nowhere, or at least eastern Hampshire’s version of nowhere. Built in 1795, Headley Grange was designed to house the poor and infirm, and was sacked by disgruntled workingmen in 1830. The place became a private home in 1870; a century later, rock bands like Fleetwood Mac, Genesis, and the Pretty Things started renting the place out, attracted by the place’s isolation and unique acoustics. When Led Zeppelin arrived in December 1970, with Ian Stewart and the Rolling Stone Mobile Studio in tow, they found the place cold and damp and rather the worse for wear. The band had burned some of the banisters during their previous visit, so they started burning some more, but it only helped so much. Plant and Bonham didn’t like the place, and engineer Andy Johns reportedly thought it was haunted. Page, who lodged beneath the peaked roof in the top floor, dug it. “It was a pretty austere place, but I loved the atmosphere.”
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In order to capture some of this atmosphere, Page and Johns invaded every nook and cranny of the Grange with their mics and amplifiers. “We had amps in toilets, mics hanging down chimneys,” John Paul Jones later told Palmer. “Very often the sound would suggest a tune, and we’d write or arrange with that in mind.” The
example Jones cites is also the most celebrated moment of Zeppelin’s conquest of ambient sound: the recording of John Bonham’s monumental drums for “When the Levee Breaks.” For the session, Bonham placed his new kit on the floor of a large open stone stairwell known by the family who owns the Grange as the “Minstrel’s Gallery.” Two ambient Beyer M160 stereo mics were then strung up on the two landings above, ten and twenty feet overhead, and then run through a guitar echo unit. There is some controversy about whether Page or Johns came up with this peculiar arrangement. Either way, the set-up was heresy: room mics were never used to record drums, and the team didn’t even mic the bass drum. But when you are working with an Orc like Bonham, sometimes heresy is the only way to go: “When the Levee Breaks” opens like a volcanic vent splitting the floor of the sea. As Andy Fyfe puts it, what you hear is not just the drums, but the drums reacting to the acoustic space of the room. But you are also hearing something more uncanny than this: you are hearing
the room respond to the drums.
The Grange itself awakens, just like the guitar army, and gives up its ghost to the magic circle of the reel-to-reel.

Black Dog
Rock and Roll

The star who struts across the stage of
is one Robert Anthony Plant, the most restless of rock gods. From the very beginning of Led Zeppelin, Plant fashioned himself a wanderer, already rambling his way through “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” on their first record. By
Led Zeppelin III
, he was invading like a Viking and hitching like a dharma bum, “lookin’ for what I knew.” But Plant’s pedal doesn’t really hit the metal until
, where his wanderings become a bona fide quest, like
The Odyssey
or
The Hobbit
or
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
. Every song features movement.
First he rolls, then he strolls, then he winds on down the road; he heads for the Misty Mountains, for the rainbow’s end, for California, for Chicago. It is ultimately a spiritual journey, of course. But like most of us, Plant doesn’t really know where he’s going or what he’s looking for. Most of the time, women will do: a lady, or another lady, or The Lady. But larger historical and cosmic forces loom and intrude: war and law and the wreck of the earth. He tastes gnosis but doesn’t learn much. And it ends rather badly.