Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (15 page)

Such nondualism is pretty stock stuff for hippie mystics, however. Far more curious is the gnostic weirdness that may lie in the next line: “to be a rock and not to roll.” At first, this verse seems like more of Plant’s cutesy wordplay. But, again, the very banality should alert us that we are near something important, and what we are
near, at least if a contemporary mystic named Michael Hoffman is to be believed, is a rather bracing insight into the nature of reality. Influenced by esoteric Christianity and Neil Peart’s lyrics for Rush, Hoffman offers, on his immense and compelling Ego Death website, a spiritual vision of absolute determinism. Hoffman believes that the cosmos is an unchanging mass of space-time, a totally fixed continuum that he calls the “block universe.” We live absolutely predetermined lives, like styluses following the groove of an LP. What the gnostic glimpse provides is a direct experience of this block universe, and the recognition that our ordinary sense of agency and control is a cybernetic illusion. Hoffman does believe in a rabbit hole out of this matrix, though it is very narrow: Redemption lies in totally accepting the divine will that infuses the block universe, an experience of transcendental freedom that Hoffman finds mirrored in gnostic Christianity, heroic doses of psychedelics, and some rock lyrics—including “Stairway to Heaven.” This is the goal: to die to our egos and their false sense of moving through a world of choice—to be a rock, in other words, and not to roll.
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Needless to say, Hoffman’s vision is not the dominant Christian interpretation of “Stairway to Heaven.” That such interpretations persist, even to this day, is another sign of this song’s theological import. In their relatively recent covers of the tune, for example, both
Pat Boone and Dolly Parton replaced the final lines with more conventional Godtalk, Boone going so far as to offer this Trinitarian retort: “when three in one is all in all.” But for more extreme Christian readings, we must turn again to Thomas Friend, the most articulate and studied of Led Zeppelin’s inquisitors. In
Fallen Angel
, Friend reasonably argues that if Zeppelin are indeed Satanic proselytizers, then their Satanism is going to show itself here, in their most popular song. Friend begins his exegesis with the vaguely ominous character of the piper. He cites Ezekiel 28, where the prophet rails against the prince of Tyre, conventionally interpreted as a figure for Lucifer. Ezekiel enumerates all the honors God bestowed upon the angel before he rebelled, including the incredible “workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes.” Tabrets are tambourines, like the one Plant often shook live during “Stairway to Heaven,” or the one favored by Tracy on
The Partridge Family
. Friend then connects Ezekiel’s piper to an astral being that Aleister Crowley describes in
The Vision and the Voice
, the Master Therion’s experimental record of scrying his way through John Dee’s Enochian calls. After voicing the 22nd Aethyr, LIN, Crowley encounters a rapturous audio-visual being:

This Angel has all the colours mingled in his dress; his head is proud and beautiful; his headdress is of
silver and red and blue and gold and black, like cascades of water, and in his left hand he has a pan-pipe of the seven holy metals, upon which he plays. I cannot tell you how wonderful the music is, but it is so wonderful that one only lives in one’s ears; one cannot see anything any more.
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Notice these seven metals: not only do they suggest the seven planetary metals of the Mithraic ladder of initiation, but they are here laid out in the stepwise shape of the pan-pipe, itself a kind of stairway. Pan, of course, is the horniest of the Greek deities, a nature god of woods and mountains who hooted tunes when he wasn’t mounting nymphs or partying with Dionysus. With his horns, goat-hooves, and lascivious leer, Pan helped shape the later Christian image of the devil, and Friend is surprising no one when he claims that Crowley’s Enochian friend is actually Lucifer. However, even readers familiar with the febrile ways of anti-rock crusaders may be surprised to learn from Friend that this being’s wonderful music, which Crowley heard in 1909, is actually “Stairway to Heaven.”

Of course, if Aleister Crowley had encountered Lucifer in the astral realms, he would be the first to tell you about it. What Crowley’s vision is really about is music’s daemonic power, its capacity to transport, transmute, and entrance the self. That’s what the piper represents, whether he is the pied piper of Hamlin or the satyr Pan
or the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the unnamed forest god who enchants Rat and Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s deeply Satanic
The Wind in the Willows
. The piper seduces through music, an erotic mystery that binds us in its very wildness. For rural romantics like Grahame, this wildness is associated with nature, with the elemental charm of an earth still capable of absorbing rootless moderns into her sublime flesh. The piper’s appearance in “Stairway to Heaven” not only indicates Zeppelin’s romantic belief in such pagan power, but their attempt—successful, one would have to say—to both unleash the spell and reflect on the musical process of enchantment itself.

Friend’s satanic vision of the piper, then, represents more than the iconographic drift of Pan. To see the piper as Satan is also to refuse the rapture of music, a refusal that derives in part from that paranoid sense of control and agency that Hoffman suggests blocks our access to transcendental freedom—a freedom that sometimes comes when we simply submit to the beat. The divine has nothing to do with it: such rapture is our
natural
right. Passionate music fans all know such transport, those moments when “one only lives in one’s ears.” I pity those who experience such fusions of pleasure and transcendence as threats and not reasons to live. Nonetheless, Friend is not totally off base: there is an edge of darkness to such rapture, as with all genuine
dissolutions of self. We are right to invoke the large metaphors of the supernatural. When William Burroughs saw Zeppelin live, the concert reminded him of the goat-god trance music he had witnessed in the mountains of Morocco, and he warned that such performances “must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.”
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But he also compared “Stairway to Heaven” to a high school Christmas play. So much for fear of music.

The darkest supernatural myth about Zeppelin’s most mythic song is that if you play the recording backwards, you will hear Satanic messages encoded in Plant’s vocals. The idea that some rock records contain “back-masked” messages goes back to the Beatles’ “Revolution 9,” which was rumored to contain the reversed announcement that “Paul’s a dead man.” As far as I can tell, Christian anti-rock crusaders got into the act in 1981, when a Michigan minister named Michael Mills hit Christian radio with the news that phrases like “master Satan,” “serve me,” and “there’s no escaping it” were hidden in the grooves of the Zeppelin hit. Noting wryly that words “certainly do have two meanings,” Mills argued on one program that the “subconscious mind” could hear these phrases, which is why sinful rock musicians put them there in the first place. Soon backmasking became the Satanic panic
du jour
, giving paranoid Christians technological proof that rock bands like Queen,
Kiss, and Styx (!) did indeed play the devil’s music. While most people, Christian or otherwise, found all this rather silly, these fears did reflect more pervasive fears that the media had become a subliminal master of puppets—fears that would themselves come to inspire some 1980s metal.

In retrospect, what stands out most in the backmasking controversy is the marvelous image of all these preachers screwing around with turntables. Though one doubts that Minister Mills was chillin’ with Grandmaster Flash or DJ Kool Herc, rap musicians and Christian evangelicals both recognized that popular music is a material inscription, one that can be physically manipulated in order to open up new vectors of sense and expression. For both evangelicals and rap DJs, the vinyl LP was not a transparent vehicle of an originally live performance, but a source of musical meaning itself, a material site of potential codes, messages, and deformations of time. Alongside the more kinetic and rhythmic innovations introduced by scratch artists like DJ Grand Wizard Theodore, we must also speak of a “Christian turntablism”: slow, profoundly unfunky, obsessed with linguistic “messages.” Some evangelical TV broadcasts from the early 80s even include top-down shots of the minister’s DJ decks so that viewers can admire the technique of squeezing sense from sound. However, while rap and all the sampled music that follows it treats the
vinyl LP as an open form capable of multiple meanings and uses, Christian turntablists remained
literalists
, convinced that they were revealing a single “fundamental” message intentionally implanted in the grooves by a diabolical author. Unfortunately, when it came to “Stairway to Heaven,” these DJs for Jesus could not agree on the exact wording of Led Zeppelin’s insidious messages. Once again, ambiguity trumps.

At the time, Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label responded to the brouhaha with the statement, “Our turn-tables only play in one direction.” Occultists following the controversy also chimed in, pointing out that the first fellow to intentionally play records backwards may have been none other than Aleister Crowley. In an early issue of
The Equinox
, Crowley argues that an aspiring magician should “train himself to think backwards by external means.” He offers some suggestions: learn to walk backwards, speak backwards, and “listen to records reversed.”
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All these reversals recall the original fantasy lurking behind the satanic backmasking scare: the backwards recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, a key element of the Black Mass that Renaissance Inquisitors almost surely invented from the screams of their torture victims. But Crowley is actually being far more methodical here. In seeking to prepare the aspirant for the terrifying act of “crossing the Abyss,” Crowley wants the magician to break the hold of habitual thinking and to understand,
in a dispassionate fashion influenced by Theravadan Buddhist meditation, the causal chains that give rise to the self. In any case, Crowley believed that ordinary consciousness could be subverted and expanded through the technological manipulation of phonographs and film, and he wrote about it in
1912
. No wonder Page described Crowley as the only Edwardian to embrace the twentieth century: he was a media hacker from the very beginning.

So what happens when we take Crowley’s advice and start playing Led Zeppelin records backwards? If you get your hands on a Technics deck or decent sound software and reverse the central verses of “Stairway to Heaven,” you will probably hear the slurring, sucking sonic taffy that you’d expect. But if the appropriate passages are properly isolated, and you are prompted beforehand, then you are likely to hear things like “Here’s to my sweet Satan” or “There’s no escaping it.” I certainly did, although the actual phrases sounded more like “Yish tomai swee Zaydn” and “Hair-airs no esgaybin id.” Weird, yes, but probably nothing more than what the British musician and writer Joe Banks calls “Rorschach Audio.” Banks developed the term to explain Electromagnetic Voice Phenomena, an occult exploration of audio technology that began in earnest in the 1950s. EVP investigators believe that if you tape empty radio frequencies or the silent passages on prerecorded
media, and then listen to these recordings intently, you will eventually stumble across disincarnate voices traditionally ascribed to the dead. Some EVP recordings do indeed sound pretty creepy. But Banks argues that our brains excel at projecting patterns onto ambiguous data, particularly when “experts” prep us by stating beforehand what “messages” we are about to hear—a consistent element of both EVP and backwards masking presentations.
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It’s the lesson of Colby’s gate-fold all over again: The voices, the messages, are in your head.

Some individual words in the purported messages tucked inside of “Stairway” do seem to pop out at you more or less objectively, but this can be explained by the phenomenon of phonetic reversal. Phonemes are the basic chunks of words, like “lay” and “dee,” and when you reverse them, you create widely different combinations of sounds. Inevitably, some of these new combinations will fit together and seem to make sense without any additional tampering. This effect was convincingly demonstrated by the Zephead behind the Achilles Last Stand fansite, who took perhaps the most convincing reversible line in the original recording—the verse about changing the road you’re on—and sampled the same verse from twelve live recordings, nearly all of them bootlegs. He then reversed the samples,
et voilà
! Twelve more-or-less creepy toasts to “mai swee
Zaydn.”
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No subliminal engineering is necessary—only an uncanny coincidence of phonemes. But we should not mock the uncanny, here as anywhere. That fact is that, within only two minutes worth of singing, “Stairway to Heaven” contains at least seven reversed phrases of a suggestively devilish nature, including four mentions of Satan, or Seitan, or Sadie, or something like that. Moreover, these sonic simulacra are buried in a tune about pipers and whispers and listening really hard, a tune that, for a spell, ruled the world. I’m not saying that supernatural forces are afoot. I’m just saying it makes you wonder.

Misty Mountain Hop
Four Sticks

When Percy’s feet first hit the groove of
’s second side, he finds himself back in the mundane world. He has returned from the realm of living myths and gnostic visions, his wanderlust unabated. The time is ordinary time, “just the other day”; the place is just a park, perhaps Hyde Park, or the Panhandle in San Francisco. He is doing the stroll, his stride both purposeful and aimless, when he meets up with a flower-decked freak love-pod, camped, no doubt rather haphazardly, on public land. This being 1970, the freaks sell him some drugs. Exactly what drugs they proffer is
unclear, but given the hazy lyrics and the jangly crunch of this tune, one suspects that reefer is the culprit.