Led Zeppelin, Gods of Rock on the Celestial Staircase

Young rock enthusiasts of the 21st century, those of you who listen to your music on a little shiny thing with earphones and who read only on an LCD screen, come near and we your grandparents shall tell you of a long-ago time when men with Gibsons were the knights errant of the land, striding across stages shrouded in mist, soloing at great length! What’s that? You don’t really know what Led Zeppelin is or was? And you’ve never read that salacious earlier biography, Stephen Davis’s “Hammer of the Gods”? Well, do I have a story for you. Or at least this Mick Wall does, this fellow from England who has also written or co-written definitive biographies of Ozzy, Bono and Iron Maiden.

The back story is like this: A hot session guitarist named Jimmy Page kills some time in a band called the Yardbirds (“Shapes of Things,” etc.) until he decides he can do better by assembling the New Yardbirds — except that he is unable to lure away the Who’s rhythm section, which he devoutly wishes to steal, or Steve Marriott of Small Faces, a singer of note. He settles instead for a couple of country yokels, Robert Plant and John Bonham, vocals and drums respectively, and another somewhat frustrated session dude, John Paul Jones, who plays the bass. Of these, Page is most happy about Bonham, who hits the drums as if he is trying to affect seismic activity in the British Isles. About the singer, who is very good looking, he’s not sure. Page doesn’t pay much attention to the bass player at all.

The band performs its first gig within weeks of its initial rehearsal and books time in the studio not long after. Mostly they borrow their material, in Wall’s account, which means they take other people’s songs and change them very little. If this were literature, young rock enthusiasts, these songs would amount to instances of plagiarism, but since this narrative takes place not long after the folk revival and some of these Zeppelin songs were trad, adopted from earlier folk and blues pieces, the band somehow, at least initially, escapes with changing a couple of lines and giving the song a new title — “Black Mountain Side” instead of “Black Water Side,” and so forth. Turns out that a lot of Led Zeppelin stuff was “borrowed” to one degree or another, including “Dazed and Confused,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “When the Levee Breaks” and even (yikes!) their biggest, most gargantuan hit, a track called “Stairway to Heaven” that most of us have now heard so many times we would rather die than hear it again. Some people, according to Mick Wall, believe the opening guitar lines of “Stairway” were filched from the band Spirit.

Notwithstanding their compositional deficits, Zeppelin has that elusive band chemistry, and so they make some more albums, which sell really shocking numbers of copies, tens of millions, and between albums they tour the United States a lot, and do really horrible, morally offensive things to young women who offer themselves up for delectation.

We used to think, young rock enthusiasts, that this behavior was somehow marginally explicable, and that is the big difference between this book about Led Zeppelin and earlier books. For example: included herein is the famous story of the groupie and the shark, which has been dealt with elsewhere at some length. This bit of lore is now so upsetting and so repellent that it makes you never want to listen to the band again. Nor do the band’s demurrals on the groupie issue convince you otherwise. (Robert Plant: “The thing people forget when they tut-tut about this stuff is what a laugh we were having. People have a tendency to look back on the band as this dark force spreading its wings when we were just young guys, having a good time. The main thing I remember most about those days now is the laughter.”)

And then there is the Aleister Crowley part of the story. Back then, you see, people had their alternative spiritual systems. This inspired them to create, I suppose, and so this guy Page, he went in search and came up with a very recondite philosophical backwater. He got into this necromancer, Crowley. How did the Crowley program work exactly? Wall, in perhaps the very best and most cogently argued section of his account (which often manages elsewhere to feel both rushed and repetitious), does include a great deal on exactly what Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis stood for, among which was, “heterosexual magickal acts (adoration of the phallus as the microcosmic counterpart to the sun)” and “masturbatory and autosexual techniques (referred to as the Lesser Work of Sol).”

The weird symbols with which the band adorned its fourth album? Those were Crowley-influenced pictograms, including that sort-of word “ZoSo,” which, in the bedrooms of high school students, we believed was some kind of obscure album title. In fact, it appears to be a reference to Crowley’s 666, or that’s what Wall thinks, and it is Page’s very own icon. Even “Stairway to Heaven,” the aforementioned monster hit, the one that Dolly Parton later covered, was not free of its Crowley-esque imagery (ascending into light being a Luciferian conceit), though Robert Plant, the singer, wrote the lyrics, not Page.

Of course, there were intoxicants in profusion! Perhaps as a result of these, the effective period of Led Zeppelin was brief. In Wall’s view, it lasted only from 1968 until 1975. By then, the neglected bass player had already tried to resign once, and the drummer, who used to get so violently homesick on tour that he had to throw things out the window and pull guns on people, began compensating for his pain by drinking truly voluminous amounts. After 1975, the curse of Led Zeppelin (meted out specifically by Kenneth Anger, another Crowley disciple, after he was ejected from the Page residence) took effect, and Plant was in a horrible car accident, and then his son died, and then Page dwindled into a prolonged period of heroin addiction.

Finally, John Bonham managed to abbreviate his unhappiness once and for all by consuming the equivalent of 40 shots of alcohol in one day, of which Page says: “The thing is, it wasn’t new to us to see Bonzo drink and pass out. I knew a lot of people who used to do that. Maybe in this day and age it might ring alarm bells. But in those days it was the norm within the sort of people that you knew.” After Bonham’s death, the remaining members disbanded.

Young rock enthusiasts! The thing that this sensational material neglects is the music. In Wall’s biography you will learn that Page has voted Tory repeatedly, and you will learn that Peter Grant, the Zeppelin manager, also snorted mountains of cocaine and was very large, and you will also get very many italicized second-¬person portions of the text — the deep history — passages that are more showoffy than necessary but easily skimmed.
What you may not get enough of is the astonishment of the music. Because, no matter how horrible they were as people — and, frankly, they do seem as if they were rather unlikable people who wasted immense talent in a spendthrift fashion — the music is still remarkable, even when borrowed.

What enabled that spooky end section of “When the Levee Breaks,” which used to give me the chills when I first heard it in the eighth grade? What about Robert Plant’s amazing harmonica solo on “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” on the considerably underrated “Presence”? And what about the Indian strings on “Kashmir”? Whose arrangement? And beyond saying that Page and Bonham banged out most of “Kashmir” by themselves, what accounts for this mesmerizing and timeless composition? And is it really possible that John Paul Jones has nothing to say, though many of the really interesting frills and ornaments are his? The tamboura on “In the Light,” or the electric piano on “No Quarter” or the lovely faux-Cuban piano riff on “Fool in the Rain.” Should we not, young rock enthusiasts, use language, use paragraphs, to account for these splendid moments?

Maybe this is arcana. And maybe the time for arcana is past, the time for the picayune details of dinosaur rock — such that it’s the dirt, not the song, that remains the same. Maybe some publisher was looking over Mick Wall’s shoulder saying, “Put more about the shark incident in there!” Or maybe the members of Led Zeppelin are themselves somewhat to blame, as Robert Plant muses aloud at one point, despairing of the true story ever getting out: “We thought it was time that people heard something about us other than that we were eating women and throwing the bones out the window.” Indeed! Wall is conflicted enough about the facts that he allows this mythologizing title to be appended to his work: “When Giants Walked the Earth.” But these were no giants, these were just young people, like you, who for a time happened to have more power and influence than was good for them. In the midst of it all, they made extraordinary music.

By Rick Moody

Published: December 24, 2009 - The New York Times