Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (13 page)

Musically, “Battle” suggests this balance through the vocal presence of Sandy Denny, whose feminine strength complements Percy’s confusion. Her role in this playette is hardly the waif or vixen we might expect on a cock-rock recording; as “town crier,” she commands the men to take up arms. But Denny’s performance goes deeper than this. When she calls us to dance in the dark and sing to the light, she is, I believe, outside the immediate frame of the battle, speaking not as the town crier but as a wise woman, a mystic juggler of pagan polarities, a witch. She is the Lady returned in the guise of the High Priestess. Denny was a significant enough presence on
to get her own sigil on the inner sleeve, and when we consult Koch, we find that her
signifies the Godhead. In occult iconography, the downward pointing triangle also frequently represents the yoni, the female generative organs. Taking these two together, I’d read Denny’s glyph as a sign of the Triple Goddess. Town crier or not, she introduces Percy to the power of the sacred feminine.

For the rest of the album, Percy struggles with his desire to both serve and master this Lady. Here the
answer is clear and pagan: one honors the Goddess by bringing the balance back, the lost harmony of human labor and the great good earth. The valley’s bounty brings happiness, but it is our “tender care” and peaceful ways that keep the soil rich and the apples good. This labor is not just functional, but spiritual. That’s what Denny’s song and dance routine is about: We repay the earth through ritual; that’s how we cease to forget. In “Down By the Seaside” from
Physical Graffiti
, a song originally recorded in 1970, Plant gives a similar reason for why we should sing for the sunshine and pray for the rain: “show your love for Lady Nature and she will come back again.” After the energetic initiations of “Black Dog” and “Rock and Roll,” Percy discovers the war in heaven and the healing rituals of earth. Polarity brings ambiguity. Perhaps this is why Page joked to a reporter that this song about battle sounded “like a dance-around-the-maypole number.”
⁵⁸
Even the tides of war, with their apocalyptic force of judgment, may serve as a spring-clean for the May Queen.

“Stairway to Heaven” isn’t the greatest rock song of the 1970s; it is the greatest spell of the 1970s. Think about it: we are all very sick of the thing, but in some
primordial way
it is still number one.
Everyone knows it, everyone—from Dolly Parton to Frank Zappa to Pat Boone to Jimmy Castor—has covered it, and everyone with a guitar knows how to play those notorious opening bars. As far as rock radio goes, “Stairway” is generally considered to be the most-requested and most-played song of all time, despite the fact that it runs eight minutes and was never released as a single. In 1991,
Esquire
magazine did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and figured that the total time that “Stairway” had been on the air was about 44 years—and that was over a decade ago. Somewhere a Clear Channel robot is probably broadcasting it as you read these words. And no wonder: when classic rock stations roll out their Top 500 surveys, which they still do with disarming frequency, odds are overwhelming that this warhorse will take the victory lap. Even our dislike and mockery is ritualistic. The dumb parodies; the
Wayne’s World
-inspired folklore about guitar shops demanding customers not play it; even Robert Plant’s public disavowal of the song—all these just prove the rule. “Stairway to Heaven” is not just number one. It is
the One
, the quintessence, the closest AOR will ever get you to the absolute.

If any Zeppelin song deserves to be dubbed a “myth,” it is this one. But what does that mean, to call a song a myth? So far I have been too lazy to define the word,
trusting, like the man said about porn, that you will know it when you see it. You could define myth in the romantic terms that probably informed Page and Plant: Myths are Big Stories that tell poetic truths about humanity and its role in the cosmos. The “hero’s journey,” the monomyth popularized by Joseph Campbell, is such a poetic archetype, and certainly informs my own view of Percy and his ramblings through the landscape of
. After walking the “road of trials” and encountering the Goddess, the hero achieves the apotheosis of the “ultimate boon”—what Percy will glimpse at the heights of heaven’s stairway. Campbell emphasizes that this peak comes halfway through the diagram of the hero’s journey; after this he must return to ordinary reality and reintegrate, as “master of the two worlds.” This is the developmental process that Percy does not follow: He wants further highs and juicier goddesses. And he will rue the day.

Mythology is more than an abstract story or a universal code, however. Mythology is also deeply embedded in human practice. Traditionally, myths are acted out; even their verbal transmission is a highly charged performance. Even more important is the relationship between myth and ritual. Rituals, like taking communion or dancing around a maypole, perform and sustain the transforming fictions of mythology just as much as
mythology explains or demands ritual. So if “Stairway to Heaven” is a successful myth, then what rituals support it? What practice sustains the song that Lester Bangs memorably described as being “lush as a kleenex forest”? The song itself hints at the answer when Percy suggests that great things will happen if we “listen very hard” and all “call the tune.” The central rite of “Stairway to Heaven” was and continues to be this:
hearing the damn thing over and over again.
Whether you call up a file on your iPod, or call your radio station to vote, or call your spouse a goofball for playing the song just one more time, “Stairway” makes its peculiar magic known through the brute force of all ritual: repetition. Even those of us who have no desire to sustain the mystery, who can’t wait for this number to be swept into the dustbin of history, continue to feel its presence in sonic memory. On the surface this presence goes against Walter Benjamin’s famous argument that mechanical reproduction—which churns out all those copies of
in the first place—saps the “aura” from works of art. Though Benjamin was talking principally about visual art, his argument works for music as well: The special magic of live performance is leached away when you record and reproduce the event with modern technology. But in the case of “Stairway,” the very banality that results from the staggering number
of times this track has been played over the last thirty-odd years only underscores the awful majesty of the song, its weird air of
necessity
.

The “magic” of “Stairway to Heaven” lies with a power at once more mechanical and more spellbinding than the commodity fetishism discussed earlier: the power to literally become a part of our minds. Here’s what I mean: close your eyes, shuffle through your mental jukebox for “Stairway to Heaven,” and then drop the virtual stylus or laser beam or whatever you want to call it onto the song in your brain. If you are like millions of other people now living, you can probably reproduce a decent mock-up of this track from memory. If you sit with it for a while, you might even score some personal associations out of the deal—tasty madeleines like the pungent reek of Thai-stick, or the Christmas morning promise of a teenage grope.

All this is all very ordinary of course. All of us have used commercial recordings to sound our souls; all of us know songs that resonate, songs that stick. But we rarely turn the situation around and consider the possibility that, as the nineteenth century Belgian physiologist Joseph Delboeuf wrote, “The soul is a notebook of phonographic recordings.” Delboeuf’s quotation popped out at me from an essay by Friedrich Kittler, the contemporary German media theorist I cited earlier. In his text, Kittler suggests that the analogy between
the brain and the record player is, as the geeks like to say, nontrivial. Like the sounds on a record album, physiological memory is a product of something like
inscription
, as associative neural pathways are laid down, deepened, and reinforced through repetition and reward. Kittler suggests that our experience of listening to a phonograph also models the crucial transition between physiology and consciousness: a stylus tracing a groove reproduces nothing more than physical vibrations in the air, but in our minds these vibrations transform, as if by magic, into the meaningful presence of voice and song. With the phonograph, as with our brains, we move continuously between spark and sense. Kittler takes the analogy even further, and asks: What if the song of our own soul, of our internal psychic life, is simply the result of our peculiar ability to “listen” to the continual playback of recordings etched into myriad neural grooves? This is what Kittler means when he describes the brain as a “conscious phonograph.”

Obviously, the activity of self-awareness and recall is significantly more plastic and creative than this analogy implies. Nonetheless, our ability to rather faithfully “read” Led Zeppelin tracks directly from our internal memory banks proves that, if our brains are exposed to enough repetitions, they can act more or less like a phonograph or a tape recorder. This is evident enough in our recall of the voices of friends and family, but
becomes even more obvious when we are mentally “recording” actual recordings like “Stairway to Heaven.” This juncture, where sound technology and self-awareness coincide, is also where things start to get strange. Listening to familiar recordings, Kittler notes, “[It is] as if the music were originating in the brain itself, rather than emanating from stereo speakers or head phones.”
⁵⁹
The membrane between self and recorded other breaks down, “as if there were no distance between recorded voice and listening ears.” When the tune comes to you at last, it comes from within; but this “within” is no longer your own. “You” are pre-recorded; your head is humming.

Of course, sonic viruses—aka, songs—try to worm their way into our heads every day. And even successful infections do not make magic. A thousand years of heavy rotation would not suffice to enchant “The Piña Colada Song” or “Ice Ice Baby,” to say nothing of that excruciating woman who instructs you on the art of leaving voice mail messages. The forces that transform “Stairway” into ritual lie inside the song, in its charismatic deployment of words and music. However you feel about it personally—and I’ll be fine if I don’t hear it again until I’m old—“Stairway to Heaven” is the quintessence of Led Zeppelin’s commercial sorcery. I choose the term
quintessence
quite consciously: the
quinta essentia
, the fifth element. Plato believed the quintessence to be an
invisible ether that pervades all space, including the distant stars; in alchemy it came to be seen as the animating spirit of all things, a living spark that could be purified and extracted from baser elements but that infused them all. “Stairway to Heaven” is the culmination of an alchemical drama, the fourth song on the fourth album by a quartet consciously invoking the four elements. It lasts about two-times-four minutes long and begins, as more than one writer has described, “squarely”: with four famous phrases, each four measures long, that unfold with a stately charm free of syncopation.