Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (14 page)

Having set up all these quaternities, Zeppelin squeezes something
quintessential
from them over the course of the tune. As Susan Fast demonstrates, the melodic and rhythmic “squareness” that opens the song also conceals “a harmonic and formal openness and irregularity” that runs throughout the piece, and that breaks the initial static formality. This motive essence carries Percy, and us, through the different stages of the song, the best description of which belongs to Chuck Eddy:

[The song is] constructed
as
a stairway, with four steps; on every subsequent one, the music gets louder, and you can either turn the volume higher or turn the radio off. If you vote ‘yeah,’ to reach the top step, the altar, you will do anything.
⁶⁰

My only beef with Eddy here is the number of steps; as you might expect, I count
five
.
⁶¹
But no matter. The quintessence of the piece lies in this
Yeah!
, the assent to the ascent, the embrace of Percy’s apotheosis in the final verse, when he finally groks the unity of all things. Here the volume and tempo produce a culminating sense of
arrival
, but even more important is the fact that, following Page’s heavenly Telecaster solo, the instruments all play in unison for the first time in the piece. The polyphony and counterpoint that characterize the song’s opening—which interlaced distinct melodies and separate instrumental lines—have finally given way to a single riff, to fusion. This unity mirrors Percy’s glimpse into the nondual nature of reality. But it also reflects the alchemy that characterizes great rock combos: a sense of togetherness, like fair D’Artagnan and the three musketeers. All for one and one for all.

The journey of “Stairway to Heaven” also progresses from acoustic to electric, a classic Zeppelin move that here suggests the passage from an enchanted pastoral world into a contemporary zone of power and aggression. Robert Walser claims that the song thus “combines contradictory sensibilities without reconciling them,” and is therefore “postmodern.”
⁶²
I’m not sure what Walser is talking about here. For all its prettiness, “Stairway to Heaven” is a volatile song; it is not balanced but
spills forward
toward the final refrain. But by the
standards of rock and roll, the tune’s musical development is quite organic, which is hardly a typical postmodern value. The transition between the song’s steps recalls a description of musical composition that Page gave a reporter in 1970: “the whole thing just grows like an acorn or something.”
⁶³
As Walser would say, such organicism is certainly an “ideology”—in the same interview, Page admits that he’s “a romantic” with a soft spot for pre-Raphaelite ideals. The point, though, is that Page is a
realized
romantic, that “Stairway to Heaven” embodies the pre-Raphaelite combination of medieval romance and modern rule breaking. “Stairway to Heaven” resonates, not because it mashes up contradictions, but because it
integrates
the traditionalism of the acoustic into the propulsive domain of electric pop. During the final riff, for example, Page supplies rhythm guitar with a clean Fender XII twelve-string; instead of the crunchy Les Paul one might expect at the climax, we hear a chiming, essentially acoustic timbre. The dramatic fanfare that announces the transition to the electric finale (at 5:35) is also probably the most traditional element of the piece; in the West, such three-note flourishes have been used for centuries to indicate auspicious events. Playing this passage live, Page would underscore its ceremonial function by pointing his double-necked guitar—itself looking more like a weird Renaissance lute than a postwar electric instrument
—directly toward the heavens, as hieratic a gesture as we have in rock.

That said, I agree with Fast that the shift from acoustic to electric in “Stairway” suggests a movement away from mythological time and into present circumstances. That’s what happens to Percy anyway, when you look at the placement of “Stairway to Heaven” in the album’s song sequence. When Percy first steps onto the stairs, he leaves the wisdom of Evermore’s ancestral vale behind; when he jumps off at the end, he finds himself in the urban park of “Misty Mountain Hop,” surrounded by potheads and cops. On the original LP, of course, Percy also had to pass through silence to get from the end of “Stairway” to the next song: the silence that stretched, sometimes interminably, between the end of side one and the beginning of side two. This rupture, imposed by the vertical ascent of the stylus, marks “Stairway to Heaven” as the discontinuous peak of Percy’s journey, and not just another stage of his horizontal wandering across the plain. When Percy reaches the top of the stairway, the gods, their noses as yet unpunched, satisfy his spiritual wanderlust by showing him clips of a visionary drama before granting him, finally, a transcendent flash of gnosis.

We could spend all day with the lyrics. You’d get tired, and I’d get sued, and we still wouldn’t be any closer to unpacking all the hints and allusions buried
in Percy’s frothy shaman chant. It’s a zoo in there. Walser makes the excellent point that the song’s various images, characters, and philosophical concerns are fundamentally fragmentary: they suggest myth without telling us one. For him, again, this becomes a postmodern gesture: “Stairway” is a “very open text” that “invite[s] endless interpretation.” Robert Plant said as much himself when he noted, “The only thing that gives [‘Stairway to Heaven’] any staying power at all is its ambiguity.”
⁶⁴
And the lyrics themselves tell you that words have more than one meaning, that you can always change whatever (interpretive) path you are on. But none of this explains why Zeppelin’s fractured fairy tale
resonates
while so many pomo pastiches provide little more than the tinny clash of ironic referentiality.

One hint lies in a story that Plant has told about the composition of the lyrics. Page brought the elements of the tune more or less finished to Headley Grange, and one night, sitting before the fire and in a somewhat sour mood, Plant set pen to paper and the words flowed out of him with unnatural ease. “There was something pushing it saying ‘You guys are OK, but if you want to do something timeless, here’s a wedding present for you.’ “
⁶⁵
Why Plant mentions a wedding is unclear. Who is marrying whom? In any case, Plant lays the lyrics at the feet of an external agent, a creative daemon. Thomas Friend will tell you that this daemon is a demon, of
course, while others might invoke Moroccan hashish or the singer’s uncanny knack for self-mythologizing. No matter. What Plant’s tale articulates is the “mythic” sense that, behind the lyric fragments, behind the scenes,
something mysterious is calling us forward
. These lyric fragments are aligned so that, like the constellations of the night sky, they suggest patterns that draw us, and Percy, deeper into the gloom. That’s why Percy almost disappears as a character in the song. We feel his familiar wanderlust when he looks toward the west and feels a gnostic longing for “leaving.” But now his longing has made him an empty vessel for larger forces, for a visionary capacity beyond his usual ken.

I agree with Friend that the Lady we meet at the beginning of the song is not the light-shining goddess at the end, although the latter may be the transfiguration of the former. Instead, this first lady is a sort of Everysoul, the spark in us all. In this, she recalls the gnostic figure of Sophia, the exiled female power who must climb her way back to heaven and whose name means knowledge, just as this lady is associated with “knowing.” Her stairway is clearly a bridge between worlds, a symbol that the comparative religionist Mircea Eliade connected with ideas of sanctification, death, and deliverance. The journey suggested in the first two verses, then, is a gnostic journey through the afterlife. I know I am out on a limb here, but it’s the only way I can
explain the curious word substitution that Robert Plant makes in many live performances of the song, including those featured on
The Song Remains the Same
and the 2003 DVD. During the second verse, Plant rather clearly says “if the
stars
are all closed.”
⁶⁶
Bootleg listeners know that Plant sometimes changed lyrics live, throwing in alternate words and warping his diction. But I hear something deeper in the claim that, if the “stars” are closed, then “a word” can still win the Lady her goal.

The roots of the gnostic-hermetic tradition, including the Order of the Golden Dawn and Crowley’s Thelema, lie in Egypt. And the root of Egyptian religion lies in death and magic. Around 2300
B.C
., at the end of the fifth dynasty, hieroglyphic writings began to appear for the first time on the walls inside the pyramids built to house the dead kings in the great necropolis of Saqqara. These collections of spells and prayers, appropriately known as the Pyramid Texts, are devoted to providing the dead pharaoh with the spells and instructions he will need on his harrowing journey through the afterworld. The pharaoh’s goal was the heaven of the “imperishable stars,” where he would partake in the eternal life of the sun god Re, though the joint was eventually taken over by Osiris, the dying and resurrected consort of Isis, the Queen of Light. Pharaoh had many paths to go by on his journey, but one sure route described in the texts was a stairway or ladder—perhaps
the first stairway to heaven in world religion, if you don’t count the pyramids themselves. Once the pharaoh made his ascent, he would face various barriers and malevolent threshold dwellers. This is where magic came in, because only the proper words and spells would allow him to pass.

Two millennia later, the symbol of the stairway to heaven reappeared in some mystery cults and gnostic sects of Late Antiquity. One of the central symbols of the Mithraic mystery cult—a powerful rival to Christianity in the last centuries of pagan Rome—was a ladder with eight rungs. The first seven rungs, as well as the seven different metals that composed them, were associated with the seven planets, or “wandering stars.” At that time the cosmos was widely considered to be a sort of onion, with earth at the center and each higher layer ruled by one of the planets. Beyond these seven heavens lay the empyrean, the eighth “rung” of the fixed stars. This model was interpreted in different ways, but for many gnostics, the planetary rulers were essentially demonic: they imprisoned the soul through the machinery of fate, an oppressive system of astral control that trickles down to us today in the gentler lore of astrology. Like the Egyptian pharaoh, the gnostic prepared for death by learning the proper spells that would allow him to circumvent the various boss characters and portals
that this cosmic computer game placed between him and the highest heaven. If the gateways of these star-worlds are closed, in other words, a word will open them up. In “Stairway to Heaven,” once the Lady utters her magic word, the scene shifts and we enter the “Celtic” landscape of forests and pipers and hedgerows that will dominate the tune until the finale. With this passage, the Lady’s word becomes song.

The mystic in me likes this gnostic reading of the Lady’s stairway. But it doesn’t account for the most notable aspect of Plant’s slippage between “stars” and “stores”: that the Lady’s astral journey is a commercial undertaking. This may be the strangest juxtaposition of the entire record: bathed in an acoustic mood that radiates pastoral nostalgia, Percy sings about shopping. The lady doesn’t even barter for the stairway; she
buys
it. Tom Friend insists that she pays for it with her immortal soul, of course, but that satanic fantasy misses the true “evil” of her heretical purchase, which is its utter banality. Our modern commercial culture has disenchanted the world by reducing every possible value—“all that glitters”—to a single gold standard (which isn’t even gold anymore). Everything has its price: Celtic magic, bardo maps, mystic rapture. Everything is part of the market. So the Lady buys her stairway, says the word, and gets a songbird that sings, just like a record that
plays. Could it really be this simple? Is the stairway to heaven that the Lady buys just … a copy of “Stairway to Heaven”?

Such self-referentiality would help explain a crucial feature of the song’s lyrics: the persistence of images involving music, voices, listening, and sound. We hear a songbird and a babbling brook, while Percy somehow “sees” voices; then we hear whispers about some tune we might call; then we meet a piper who, it seems, will preside over a giggling forest. As the verses progress, Percy also shifts his focus from “I” to “we” and finally to “you,” to the “dear Lady.” He tells her that the humming in her head will not go away because the piper continues to call “you.” In many live performances, however, a different story emerges. In the Earls Court appearance captured on the DVD, for example, Plant directly addresses the listeners of the song: “Dear
people
,” he sing-says, “can you hear the wind blow?” His eyes smolder like a feral cherub, and he splays the fingers of his right hand open as he lets us in on the secret: “
our
stairway lies on the whispering wind.” Then we realize that the wind he’s talking about is blowing off the Marshall stacks, that the stairway is made of the song and sound all around us, carrying us up and forward. And that’s exactly when Jimmy’s resplendent fanfare erupts.

Now unless we snuck into the show or ripped the DVD, we
bought
this stairway. The point is obvious
but crucial: Rock’s head-humming ecstasies and mythic leaps toward authenticity are embedded in the commercial and technological matrix of media culture. Tucked within Percy’s medieval image of the piper lies an idiom of the modern market: Those who pay the piper call the tune. The piper is not calling all the shots; we exercise control because
we give Led Zeppelin our money
. If we stop, they stop. But this service economy does not prevent gnosis, at least within the song’s virtual world. That is what the fanfare and the song’s finale are all about. As Walser rightly notes, heavy metal guitar solos often signify transcendence over and against the oppression created by the drums, which “rigidly organize and control time.” Page’s Telecaster jingle signifies such transcendence here, without necessarily delivering it. But the real apotheosis lies in the final riff, where “we” join Percy as he winds down the phonograph road, toward that perfect moment when all is one and one is all. This flash is the goal of all mystic yearning: the awareness of nonduality, the total grok, the secret sauce on the Big Enchilada.