Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (4 page)

Page has explained this mute jacket sleeve as a response to rock critics who slagged the band’s previous record, to my mind one of their best. Though the hostility of the rock press toward Led Zeppelin has been
overstated, many did chalk up the band’s thunderous early rise to cheap tricks, excessive volume, and marketing hype. Stripping their famous name off their fourth record was an almost petulant attempt to let their Great Work symbolically stand on its own two feet. But the wordless jacket also lent the fourth record charisma. Fans hunted for hidden meanings, or, in failing to find them, sensed a strange reflection of their own mute refusal to communicate with the outside world. From the lemons critics hurled their way, Zeppelin had squeezed lemonade: mystique. This conscious communication breakdown helped create one of the supreme paradoxes of rock history: an esoteric megahit, a block-buster
arcanum
. Stripped of words and numbers, the album no longer referred to anything but itself: a concrete talisman that drew you into its world, into the frame. All the stopgap titles we throw at the thing are lame:
Led Zeppelin IV, [Untitled], Runes, Zoso, Four Symbols
. In an almost Lovecraftian sense, the album was
nameless
, a thing from beyond, charged with manna. And yet this uncanny fetish was about as easy to buy as a jockstrap.

Strictly speaking, however, the album is not nameless. As the LP label and 1993’s Complete Studio Recordings box set make clear, the album’s name is
. At the time of the album’s release, Atlantic went so far as to supply trade magazines with the
fonts so they could list the record on the charts. Like the YHVH of the Jews and alchemists,
is unpronounceable, a verbal tangle that underscores the most important thing about these four sigils: that they seem to communicate something without saying anything at all. When confronted with such inscrutable signs, our natural impulse is to
decode
them, to “know what they mean.” But when it comes to
, strict meanings are neither their nature nor their function. These sigils, and the musical sounds they announce, don’t
mean
stuff so much as
make stuff happen
. And they make stuff happen by frustrating the conventional process of meaning. And this, by the way, is one of the basic procedures of the occult. The signs on the wall are unclear, so they draw you in, like strange lights on the horizon. And by the time you see that they’re nothing like what you expected, it’s too late: you have already crossed the threshold.

A grizzled geezer peers out at you, bent over a rough cane with the weight of the wood he lugs. He is clearly a rural dweller, a
paganus
, but a nineteenth century one, wearing a bowler hat and tweed duds decorated with an almost professorial knee patch. An intriguing character,
though only a print, we note, framed and nailed to a crumbling wall papered with a drab floral pattern. Upon opening the outside gatefold, we take another step back from the picture of the old man, as what we took to be an interior wall resolves into a ruin, already half torn down. There are shrubs and weeds and more crumbling row houses, while some ugly postwar British tower blocks rise in the distance, already gone slummy. There’s a nearly unreadable Oxfam poster on one wall: “Someone dies from hunger everyday.”

Here there is no reason to doubt Jimmy Page’s explanation: “The old man on the cover carrying the wood is in harmony with nature. He takes from nature and gives back to the land. It’s a natural cycle. It’s right. His old cottage gets pulled down and they put him in these urban slums, terrible places.”
¹¹
Page reported that Plant found the print of the old man in a junk shop in Reading, while others suggest that the fellow may actually be George Pickingill, a nineteenth century “cunning man” from Essex whose Christian-bashing covens were claimed by a few fanciful occultists in the 1970s to have influenced both Crowley and Gerald Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca. There’s one tiny image of Pickingill online, and both men have the same crab apple face, but it’s tough to say if it’s him, and doesn’t really matter.
¹²
The important point is that this exemplar
of the Old Ways is an ordinary modern person, and not a bare-chested warlock besting goblins in some Frank Frazetta fetishscape.

Though charged with fantasy, Led Zeppelin’s “paganism,” and especially Page’s occult interests, emerge from a real history. From the time of Shelley and Byron, British culture has produced movements and persons who resist the disenchanted landscape of industrial modernity: the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris, the Golden Dawn (an influential occult order that included both Crowley and W. B. Yeats), and Tolkien. Like many of his fellows, a young Jimmy Page alluded to this romantic and often nostalgic cultural current by wearing foppish duds in the 1960s. But Page took it further, collecting “Pre-Raphaelite furniture” (presumably, Arts and Crafts) and immersing himself in Crowley, whose occultism emerged from a
fin-de-siècle
matrix of art and decadence that both resisted and embraced the modern turn. “I think I’m basically a romantic,” Page told one interviewer in 1970. “I can’t relate to this age … ”
¹³
Not relating to this age, one looks back, through a crumbling frame, and imagines another one. That’s why the old man is not in black and white, but tinted with funny colors: We are projecting as well as seeing. This projection is the cunning movement that draws us inside the frame, inside the fold of an imagined
“tradition” of magic. At the same time, the old man’s backbreaking labor reminds us that “harmony with nature” is no picnic. The rituals that sustain such harmony require physical work, and though one suspects the old man’s heavy load is destined for some ritual, some solstice pile or burning man, it doesn’t look like much fun to haul.

The most ingenious reading of these bundles of wood I’ve come across refers to a short text that Crowley penned for the third volume of
The Equinox
, the literary organ for the Astrum Argentium, which was the magical order he founded after getting booted out of the Golden Dawn. Crowley begins the passage with loosely alchemical imagery: man constantly strives with those elements in his being that
sink
, especially the elements of wood and water. Crowley suggests that the appropriate magical tool against these forces is fire, and he looks forward to the time when the Law of Thelema “shall set the world ablaze.” Crowley doesn’t expect this blaze to begin with “the small dry sticks that kindle quickly and die” nor with “the great logs, the masses of humanity.” Instead, he looks forward to those “middle faggots” that will burn long and hard until “the great logs blaze.” Led Zeppelin, in this reading, see themselves as these middle fagots, the “Four Sticks” who will ignite their vast forests of fandom with Crowley’s apocalyptic word.
¹⁴

The guy who came up with this doozy is one Thomas W. Friend, whose self-published, 632-page book
Fallen Angel: The Untold Story of Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin: Based on the Stairway to Heaven Album
is without a doubt the most exhaustive occult reading of Zep yet attempted. That such a reading is justified should be beyond argument. Plant was immersed in hippie lore, while Jimmy Page stands as rock and roll’s most prominent student of the occult. But did he
practice
? The facts we know, though widely reported, only tantalize: Page is one of the world’s top collectors of Crowleyania, having scarfed up the Beast’s first editions, paintings, Tarot decks, and ritual robes; in 1970, he purchased Boleskine House, an eighteenth century mansion on the southeastern shores of Loch Ness once owned by Crowley. Page worked on a soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s film
Lucifer Rising,
a ritual invocation on celluloid heavily influenced by Anger’s knowledge and experience of Thelema. In interviews, Page has mentioned attending séances and practicing yoga. Going out on a limb, one might argue that Page also fits a certain sort of occult profile: an only child born under Saturn, imaginative and isolationist, obsessed with control. But Page has always held his Thoth cards close to his chest. We have no idea how he may have passed from theory to practice, though I suspect he didn’t buy Boleskine for the views.

What Page’s occultism has to do with Led Zeppelin’s music or Robert Plant’s lyrics is another question, of course. Friend believes it explains everything, and that’s because the guys in Led Zeppelin are, as he felicitously puts it, “four of the most dangerous Devil worshipers to ever walk the earth.” Friend, you see, is a born-again Christian. But he was a hardcore Zephead in 1977, when he saw his favorite band at Madison Square Garden during their triumphant return to touring after two years of personal strife. During “No Quarter,” Jimmy Page broke out a peculiar electronic instrument called the theremin, whose uncanny soundscapes he had been exploring since the psychedelic falderal in the middle of “Whole Lotta Love.” When Page began to wave his hands around the instrument’s two antennae, Friend, who was both dizzy and stoned, felt a “quick narcotic rush” as the space around him filled with demons. He was overwhelmed with the temptation to give his will over to Satan. He resisted, and thirty years later, wrote and published
Fallen Angel
to warn other fans about the infectious diabolism that lurks at the core of Led Zeppelin’s music, and especially
. To complete his task, Friend read over thirty of Crowley’s books, and he now has a better handle on occult Kabbalah than he does on all but the crudest strains of fundamentalist Christianity. The fellow is no scholar: He
cites an illustrated
Wizards and Witches
Time–Life book and quotes Faust as a source—the fictional character, that is, not the text. He makes much of synchronicities and numerology, and takes poetic language for supernatural fact, which makes the more imaginative passages in his book entertaining and occasionally illuminating.
¹⁵
Unfortunately, Friend’s final interpretive move is maddeningly predictable. Every mythic figure who struts across the stage—Apollo, King Arthur, Horus—turns out to be Satan in disguise, with all your favorite rock musicians his eternal acolytes. Even Abba gets exposed for the devilish pacts alluded to in the title of their box set
Thank You for the Music
.