Led Zeppelin IV Read online

  This is one for my great friend and fellow Zephead Tom Butler

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: How Years Ago in Days of Old …

  1. I’ve Only Been This Young Once

  2. Really Got to Ramble

  3. A Somewhat Forgotten Picture of True Completeness

  4. Flames from the Dragon of Darkness

  5. The Tune Will Come to You at Last

  6. Prayin’ Won’t Do You No Good

  7. Satanic Majesty

  8. What Is and What Should Never Be

  Selected Bibliography

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY THANKS to Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones for interviews conducted in 2003. Also to Richard Cole, Henry Smith, Jack White, Pamela Des Barres, Nick Kent, and Nancy Retchin.

  The book would not have been possible without the work or help of Dave (Tight But Loose) Lewis or my agent, Sarah Lazin. Finally, my gratitude goes to Pete Fornatale, who commissioned the book and was supportive and sensitive throughout its writing.

  INTRODUCTION

  HOW YEARS AGO IN DAYS OF OLD …

  EVEN NOW, after all these years of big-hair wannabes, “Get the Led Out” stoners, and idiot tribute bands, there’s something so fierce and coruscating about Led Zeppelin in their prime that it can scare you half to death.

  Watching the live 1970 footage of the group on 2003’s DVD, I was reminded of my first pubescent exposure to these four horsemen of the rock apocalypse, with their strangulated shrieking, their blood-curdling riffology, their serpentine tendrils of hair. I saw all too clearly why the marauding quartet of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John “Bonzo” Bonham was so terrifyingly off-limits to callow teenyboppers such as myself. (My buddy John Smeddle had a Robert Plant poster on the dormitory wall, but my buddy John Smeddle had an Older Brother. And Led Zeppelin was nothing if not Older Brothers’ Rock.)

  When my glam-rock passions flagged circa 1973, what stood lean and mean over Marc Bolan’s ruin was the savage sensuality of those first four Zeppelin albums: the grinding menace of “Dazed and Confused,” the bestial lustfest that was “Whole Lotta Love,” the searing anguish of “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” and the primordial blues-funk bonequake that powered “When the Levee Breaks.”

  The thing that separated these four Men from all the cock-rocking Boys was that they played with feel, with funk. As critic Ron Ross wrote in March 1975, “It’s their unprecedented feel for rhythm and riff cranked up to nerve-numbing volume that makes Zeppelin perhaps the most successful rock and roll band of all time, and it’s this awe-inspiring control of virtually violent sound that justifies that success.”

  Led Zeppelin was the greatest hard rock band of all not because they were pillaging, TV-trashing hedonists—they were and they weren’t—but because they could play. Over the lean, sinewy bass lines of John Paul Jones and the deceptively straight stomping of John Bonham, you had the full-throttle-but-weirdly-girly yelp of Robert Plant and the crunching, multitextured guitar-shapes of Jimmy Page. Arguably, it was the most successful chemistry experiment ever conducted in the name of rock.

  “I knew exactly the style I was after and the sort of musicians I wanted to play with, the sort of powerhouse sound I was really going for,” Jimmy Page told Mick Houghton in 1976. “I guess it proves that the group was really meant to be, the way it all came together. And I was so lucky to find everybody so instantly, without making massive searches and doing numerous auditions that you hear about to fill the gaps.”

  From the word go—the double stab of the opening “Good Times, Bad Times,” on the band’s 1969 debut album—every recorded note and beat of Zeppelin’s music simply careened out of the speakers. “That first album was the first time that headphones meant anything to me,” Robert Plant recalled. “What I heard coming back to me over the cans while I was singing was better than the finest chick in all the land. It had so much weight, so much power, it was devastating.”

  “There just wasn’t anything like it at that time,” John Paul Jones reflected. “Jimmy’s production was very innovative. And when Robert roared in, the initial reaction from people was, ‘Where did you find him?’ ”

  Of the many hard rock bands that came in Zeppelin’s wake, few have come remotely close to the visceral, tight-but-loose grooves patented by Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham. Some have made powerfully sensual metal—AC/DC on Back in Black, Metallica on Metallica, Queens of the Stone Age on Songs for the Deaf—but none has replicated the dark stew of Led Zeppelin’s sound. And that’s without even mentioning the latter’s beauteous acoustic flip side.

  “Jimmy Page revolutionized everything,” producer Rick Rubin told Vanity Fair’s Lisa Robinson. “There was no real blues rock in that bombastic way before Zeppelin. Plus, with the insane drumming of John Bonham, it was radical, playing at a very, very high level—improvisational on a big-rock scale. It was brand new.”

  Of course, there was a time—the time of the punk wars—when Led Zeppelin’s power had to be refuted, resisted, denied. By 1977, any music fan with an ounce of credibility felt obliged to dismiss Zeppelin as dinosaurs, to spit in the face of the stadium behemoth they had become. But once the punk dust had settled, we were all forced to return like contrite puppies, clinging once more to the great Zeppelin albums as life rafts through the desensitized and enervated ’80s.

  “The majority of the music was built on an extreme energy, obsessively extreme at times and joyously so,” said Robert Plant. “Pagey’s ability to take teenyweeny bits and develop them into huge anthemic moments was stunning. And despite people’s desire to think it was dark, it was just an enthusiasm to grab this music, and grab it so tight.”

  How ironic, then, when Led Zeppelin became the presiding animus of ’90s guitar music, the platform for both grunge (Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins) and retro rock (the Cult, the Black Crowes). And how great, come the early years of the new century, to hear that spirit in every guitar lick and vocal snarl laid down by such blues-rooted bands as the White Stripes. Listen to “Little Bird” on the Stripes’ brilliant De Stijl if you doubt me.

  “ ‘Little Bird’ was definitely one of the moments where I thought, ‘I know this sounds like Led Zeppelin, but I’m going to put it on the album anyway,’ ” Jack White said. “All my friends would come over and say, ‘This is very Led Zeppelin.’ And I’d say, ‘I know it is.’ ”

  “I love the way that Jack White says I was the thing he least liked about Led Zeppelin,” said Robert Plant with a chuckle. “And I think, ‘Well, that’s fine, boy, but if you’re going to play “In My Time of Dying,” listen to the master.’ But you know, that sound hasn’t really been heard in the contemporary world, in bedsitcollege land, since 1970. So its sudden re-emergence via the White Stripes is, like, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ ”

  So what was it, exactly? In essence, a hybrid of volume and grace: of sex and spirit, metallic attack and poetic shimmer. A late-flowering bloom of Britain’s ’60s blues boom, Zeppelin was never a group of purists; they were musical mongrels from the start.

  “It came together very quickly,” said Jimmy Page. “Ultimately I wanted the group to be a marriage of blues, hard rock, and acoustic music with heavy choruses, a combination that hadn’t been explored fully before: lots of light and shade in the music.”

  Talking to NME’s Chris Salewicz in 1977, Page expanded the point. Zeppelin’s music, he said, possessed “the root [that] is in all rock and roll … the earthiness.” But he added that it had “all the other facets that, shall we say, musicians of today have been able to get. You know, finger style, folk areas, and things like that. And traces of jazz. Generally the three strong areas. Which is so important.”

  Zepp
elin’s breathtaking eclecticism was immediately evident on their stunning debut album, released at the start of 1969. If its essential undertow was primordial blues (“You Shook Me,” “I Can’t Quit You, Baby”), its range was almost chameleonic, incorporating folk (“Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You”), Indian scales (“Black Mountain Side”), pop rock (“Your Time Is Gonna Come”), and even a sort of pro-to-punk rock (“Communication Breakdown”). “We like to play a cross section of styles,” Page told Melody Maker’s Chris Welch early in 1970. “We’re not a rabble-rousing group. We’re trying to play some music.”

  If Led Zeppelin II, also released in 1969, was heavy on Heavy—with its storming übermetal masterpieces “Whole Lotta Love,” “Heartbreaker,” et al—the band still found room on the record for “Ramble On” and “Thank You,” the first a Tolkien-imbued acoustic-into-electric beauty of a song, the second a plangent ode to Robert Plant’s Indian-born wife, Maureen.

  With Led Zeppelin III (1970), the group took their biggest risk to date, packing the album with acoustic tracks that mystified the hard core of their fans. III blasted off with the fearsome “Immigrant Song,” Zeppelin at their most mercilessly heavy, but offered pastoral alternatives in several of their finest ballads (“Tangerine,” “That’s the Way”) and folk hollers (“Gallows Pole,” “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp”).

  “The idea of using acoustic guitars and developing much more of a textural thing came about because, if we weren’t careful, we were going to end up part of a whole Grand Funk Railroad/James Gang thing,” Robert Plant said. “By the time ‘Whole Lotta Love’ had been such a statement, it was definitely time to veer over to the left and see how far we could take it in another direction.”

  The fourth Led Zeppelin album, the subject of this book, may be the most perfectly realized display of the group’s range. Combining the electric density of Led Zeppelin II with the acoustic lacework of Led Zeppelin III, the album known variously as Four Symbols, IV, “ZoSo,” and offset the ferocious blues-rock grind of “Black Dog” with the golden utopianism of “Going to California,” the chiming folk mandolins of “The Battle of Evermore” with the shuddering drive of “When the Levee Breaks,” the nostalgic blast of “Rock and Roll” with the slow-building, multitiered “Stairway to Heaven.”

  “Music is very like a kaleidoscope,” Robert Plant told NME’s Roy Carr in April 1972. “And I feel that particular album was just a case of us stretching out. It was a very natural development.”

  With 1975’s double-album Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin arguably stretched out even more. But for all that “Kashmir” and “In My Time of Dying” remain towering peaks of the group’s work, Graffiti has too many weak links, too many off-the-cuff sketches, to rival the fourth album—or even, in my estimation, the first three.

  stands like a monument in the landscape of rock and roll, a benchmark against which all rock albums are measured. Eight tracks long, it’s a blueprint for the journey on which a great album should take you, from sludgy blues-metal to swampy demolition grooves via Little Richard drum intros, Fairport folk convention, medieval prog symphonics, and California dreaming. The fourth biggest-selling album of all time. It ranks behind the Eagles’ Greatest Hits album. also boasts in “Stairway to Heaven,” the most-played track in American FM radio history.

  made Zeppelin’s fans a global tribe of cultist devotees—suburban potheads turned disciples of darkness. With its runic symbols, its allusions to magic, and its gatefold-sleeve depiction of the Hermit of the Tarot, the album courted controversy from the moment of its release. Ever since, it has been a beacon for disaffected metalheads the world over. Jimmy Page’s chosen symbol, misread as “ZoSo,” became a diabolical touchstone for every small-town stoner in ’70s America.

  “By 1975, ‘ZoSo’ was painted or carved on every static thing rocker kids could find,” wrote American sociologist Donna Gaines, PhD. “It had become a unifying symbol for America’s suburban adolescents. The children of “ZoSo” are Zep’s legacy. Mostly white males, nonaffluent American kids mixing up the old-school prole(tariat) values of their parents, mass culture, pagan yearnings, and ’60s hedonism.”

  As much as the Rolling Stones defined the decadence of British rock bands for America, Zeppelin took the concept of satanic majesty a significant step further. Jimmy Page in particular, with his interest in the notorious occult writer Aleister Crowley, made the sinister foppishness of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards look tame. Stories of Page’s and the band’s touring antics—backstage and in hotel rooms— became part of rock folklore.

  “Led Zeppelin … made records that fed this yen for power and enchantment, for hedonistic mystique,” wrote Erik Davis in his brilliant 2005 study of . The band, he noted, were “rock gods who staged their own Götterdämmerung.”

  For the group itself, the stories ultimately detracted from the music. Notoriety overshadowed what was actually there in the grooves of their albums. “That whole lunacy thing was all people knew about us, and it was all word-of-mouth,” Plant sighed to Cameron Crowe in 1975. “All those times of lunacy were okay, but we aren’t and never were monsters. Just good-time boys, loved by their fans and hated by their critics.”

  Thirty years later, Led Zeppelin’s frontman maintained an uneasy relationship with his past. “No matter what you do,” he told Sylvie Simmons in 2005, “there are people who are still waiting for the return of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. You only have to have a tiny, weeny bit of common sense to see that that’s been and gone, the times are different now….”

  “There’s no point in competing with my past,” Plant told me in September 2003. “I mean, I’d love to work with Jimmy and John Paul, but I don’t see how we could give it anything constructive without falling back into the sort of general melee of everybody’s expectations.”

  Five months earlier, I’d met with Plant in Birmingham, the city in and around which he’d grown up. Freshly exposed to Led Zeppelin’s might in the form of DVD and the 1973 live recording released as How the West Was Won, his pride was only too clear.

  “It was such an amazing time, and things moved at such a rate of knots,” he said. “And even though the currency of Led Zeppelin has been re-evaluated so many times for different reasons—out in the cold, back in again, big riffs, here comes the Cult—it’s stunning stuff.

  “Eighty percent of the time, Led Zeppelin was an absolute extravaganza. It was the greatest adventure of my life.”

  1

  I’VE ONLY BEEN THIS YOUNG ONCE

  THINGS WEREN’T looking up for young Robert Plant as he alighted at Pangbourne Station on a sultry afternoon in the summer of 1968. The Black Country boy with the big bluesy voice had sung with several promising bands and had even released a couple of singles, but he couldn’t get a break and was beginning to despair of his career ever taking off. Traveling from Birmingham to Berkshire on that late July day, “it was the real desperation scene, man, like I had nowhere else to go.”

  Plant’s old band, an outfit known as the Band of Joy, had played covers of songs by such West Coast bands as Love, Moby Grape, and Buffalo Springfield, in contrast to the blues and blue-eyed soul in which he had specialized just a couple of years earlier. Smitten with tales of free love and flower power in San Francisco and Southern California, Robert had been reborn as a midlands hippie, a groovy androgyne with curly blond locks who dressed in loon pants and Carnaby Street caftans.

  “I really just wanted to get to San Francisco and join up,” Plant recalls. “I had so much empathy with the commentary in America at the time of Vietnam that I just wanted to be with Jack Casady and with Janis Joplin. There was some kind of fable being created there, and a social change that was taking place, and the music was a catalyst in all of that.”

  But if the Band of Joy’s renditions of Buffalo Springfield songs had, in Plant’s words, “saved me from ending up being the typical English pub singer,” the group hadn’t exactly set the world on fire. “There were very few other groups around at the
time doing that sort of thing,” Plant told the underground paper International Times the following spring. “Eventually we were getting sixty, seventy-five quid [or approximately $113–$142 US] a night. In the end, however, I just had to give it up. I thought, ‘Bollocks [Crap], nobody wants to know.’ ” Later he claimed that “everyone in Birmingham was desperate to get out and join a successful band … everyone wanted to move to London.”

  As he stepped on to the platform at Pangbourne, a sedate town in the Thames Estuary, Plant’s appearance caused a few eyebrows to rise: Carnaby Street this wasn’t. Barely had the singer closed the door of the compartment behind him when he was set upon by an indignant matron of advancing years, berating him for his unkempt locks and effeminate apparel.

  “There I was with my suitcase, and suddenly this old woman starts slapping my face and shouting about my hair,” Plant told International Times. “Well, I was staggered, so I called a cop and he says it was my own fault for having long hair. So much for British justice.” Recovering from the assault, Plant found a taxi and asked the driver to convey him to a nearby boathouse on the river. He had come to see a guitarist whose hair was no shorter than his own, and who—just a few days before—had driven up to the midlands to watch Plant perform with his new group, the oddly named Hobstweedle.

  Unlike Robert Plant, Jimmy Page’s career was unmistakably on the rise. From the early ’60s onward, “Little” Jimmy was one of the premier studio guitarists on the London music scene, adding his licks to literally hundreds of hits by artists as diverse as the Who, Lulu, and Val Doonican. He’d played on sessions for American producers Bert Berns and Burt Bacharach. He was seldom out of work.

  There was another string to Page’s bow, moreover: He could produce. Hours upon hours in London’s recording studios had afforded him the opportunity to study the technical side of record production and to pick up tips from hitmakers such as Mickie Most (producer of the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, and Donovan) and Shel Talmy (producer of the Kinks, the Who, and Manfred Mann). By 1965, Page was sufficiently versed in recording techniques for Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham to hire him as in-house producer for the new Immediate label.