All the hippies that I went to school with loved Led Zeppelin, which is ample reason for me to dislike them. Having said that, they were also into Pink Floyd (who I don’t mind) and Radiohead (who I love), so there’s no necessary link between potheads and rubbish music; quite the contrary, perhaps. But having endured this album, I’m struggling to understand the appeal of Led Zeppelin to unwashed, long-haired teenage slackers. I thought that chilled, slightly eerie, Dark Side of the Moon-style psychedelica was more conducive to the experience of being stoned, whereas Led Zeppelin IV sounds hard, borderline heavy metal, in fact, while the vocals are shrieky and a bit jarring. And the lyrics. Christ. There’s little trace of the free love, peace out, take a trip miasma that I generally associate with adolescent potheads; instead, the clearly half-witted Robert Plant sings about set piece battles from J.R. Tolkien novels. It’s unforgivable and staggeringly, surprisingly uncool.
That said, quite a few of the songs on Led Zeppelin IV deal with the more profane subject of bitches screwing Robert Plant over. They invariably follow the same pattern; first, Plant being played for a fool and either abandoned or egregiously messed around by some femme fatale; and then closing verses which quixotically visualise a perfect future with some sweet-natured virginal farmer’s daughter. The rambunctious opener “Black Dog” follows this formula to a tee; it starts with Robert in the throes of passion, then shifts to the inevitable sense of betrayal, and concludes with hopes of a coming redemptive romance. The tender folk number “Going to California” proffers a similar contrast between a toxic present and the purifying fantasy of an impending, idealized romance.
I would suggest that Led Zeppelin instinctively structured their love songs around a narrative of tragic present vs. idealised and pain-free future, around romantic redemption and deliverance – as opposed to, say, the Kinks’ or even the Beatles’ inclination to contrast the glistening “then” with a disappointing “now.” This second arc is inherently melancholy, pining for the lost and unachievable unity with the (m)other, the perceived nirvana of the womb, whereas Led Zeppelin’s whore-to-Madonna trajectory is more millenarian, the unblemished future always just around the corner. That said, the closing verses of “Going to California” dolefully recognize the fantastical character of Robert Plant’s hopes, that the woman he is looking for does not exist and never has.
As mentioned above, the tendency to retreat into fantasy frequently takes on preposterous proportions on Led Zeppelin IV, most unapologetically on “The Battle of Evermore.” This song, which comes slap-bang in the middle of one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the 70s, unironically narrates some kind of Dungeons and Dragons style showdown between a putative “dark lord” and an unhappy band of “mere mortals” who must wait for deliverance from “the Angels of Avalon.” The song starts with what sounds like a Medieval Bouzouki, which Jimmy Page perhaps believed might conjure the ambience of a farmer’s market in the Holy Roman Empire, whereupon Plant intervenes with his shrill narration of the final cataclysmic clash between good and evil on Middle Earth / Narnia / The Forgotten Realms / the arcane setting of whatever dog eared fantasy novel he’d been reading that afternoon on the tour bus while enveloped in an impenetrable cloud emanating from his bucket kit.
This bizarre digression into Tolkienian apocalypticism is no anomaly. In fact, and remarkably, Led Zeppelin proceed to double down on the Monty Python-esque experiment in combining hippie rock music with set piece battles from fantasy novels. It’s there on “Four Sticks”, a song that got its name from John Bonham “pushing the envelope” of rock’n’roll by playing with four (four!) drumsticks, which I for one am enormously impressed by. Given the lyrics about “strong shields” and “lore”, the listener is perfectly entitled to ask whether a 1970s hard rock album is the appropriate place for this not-very-hip subject matter, with sex and drugs and rock’n’roll at its Dionysian zenith. It’s very difficult to imagine Mick Jagger singing about ringwraiths.
The album’s entire middle section is riven with this strange fascination for the medieval and fantastical. “Stairway to Heaven” sounds like something that would have been played by a doleful minstrel in the court of Henry VIII after Catherine of Aragon’s 27th miscarriage. My teenage self was constantly forced to endure this eight-minute “rock classic” because, in the noughties, you couldn’t go in a pub in the North of England without it being put on the jukebox by some ageing, unshowered hippie or malodorous metalhead in a sentimental mood. Then you’d have to wait eight fucking minutes for your songs to come on and, when they did, get disapproving looks for your faggy choice of the Pet Shop Boys. Maybe I am merely relating my own trauma here. But the point is, five minutes into this marathon and Robert Plant is still subjecting us to reinterpreted excerpts from the Silmarillion. In all fairness, I do acknowledge that “Stairway to Heaven” is a good, even affecting song, if you like strange 21st century interpretations of “Greensleeves.” But anyone listening to it in our post-Spinal Tap, post-Wayne’s World, post-Bill and Ted era is unlikely to remain entirely straight-faced.
Alongside chiliastic love songs and bizarre digressions into medieval apocalypticism, there are two songs on Led Zeppelin IV that actually attempt something like explicit social commentary – “Misty Mountain Hop” and “When the Levee Breaks”. The listener might well fear the worst when confronted with the first of these song titles, given that the Misty Mountains provide the setting for the second third of The Hobbit. More comical prattling about “ringwraiths”, “lore”, and “the Angels of Avalon” seems to be on the cards. But the song turns out to be a shrieky, rock-out-with-your-cock-out hippie anthem about almost getting arrested in Hyde Park in 1968 at a rally to legalise pot. Plant is forced to accept that the squares are indifferent to his chemically induced idealism, so he elects to scarper to the Misty Mountains, perhaps in the hope of finding the One Ring to Rule Them All.
“Misty Mountain Hop” has some bite to it, but not as much bite as “When the Levee Breaks”, which is the best song on Led Zeppelin IV. Apparently, the lyrics are a reworking of a 1927 protest song by Memphis Minnie about the consequences of the Great Mississippi Flood, which forced the country folk from their homes and into the cities. But the music here is very much the work of Jimmy Page – a measured, menacing, marauding heavy rock mastodon shot through with shrill, hysterical, abruptly escalating electric guitars. Whatever the precise historical background of the lyrics, in the hands of Plant and Page, they become a malevolent hymn to the pressures of industrialisation and urbanisation, the end of the pastoral ideal which, come to think of it, also lies at the root of fantasy novels and the fascination with the medieval.
What’s compelling about Led Zeppelin IV is, I suppose, the inherent tension between the urban and the rural, the modern and the medieval. The album is laced with references to fantasy novels, its acoustic middle section sounds like the work of a 15th century minstrel, and it closes with a song about the horrors of urbanisation; and yet much of the album sounds intensely metallic, distorted guitars and pounding drums, while the band’s very name connotes modern warfare and German industry. The musical contrast between raucous, pounding guitar and lengthy acoustic bards carries the slight waft of Prussian militarism, the pre-modern social and political structure plonked on top of a thriving modern economy. This tension – the “ambivalences of modernity” – was central to fascism, as it happens. We might add that the album’s romantic narratives of a present despoiled by perfidious whores vs. a coming idyllic future in the arms of a redeeming Madonna would be familiar to anyone who has read Klaus Theweleit’s Männerphatasien, a Freudian analysis of the dreams of violent right-wing German paramilitaries in the aftermath of the First World War.
I’m not suggesting that there’s something incipiently fascist about Led Zeppelin’s music, although Plant’s references on “Going to California” to the “children of the sun” could be taken from the Völkische Beobachter, and we needn’t mention that unfortunate incident with the SS outfit at the Chicago Stadium in 1977. But we are at least dealing here with certain cultural tropes common to the “conservative revolutionaries” of the Weimar Republic, which makes it even more puzzling that all the potheads were into Led Zeppelin, the intriguing discursive connections between hippie environmentalism and National Socialist Blut-und-Boden policies notwithstanding. Anyway, whether or not Led Zeppelin IV is expressive of the same ambivalences of modernity which lead to the Third Reich is beside the point, because the music is a bit forgettable and the lyrics are mostly laughable.
4/10
Highlights: “Stairway to Heaven”, “When the Levee Breaks”