Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis Read Free Book Online

player, playing on an estimated fifty to ninety percent of the records made in England between 1963 and 1965, including early hits by the Who and the Kinks. He was a hack, in other words, but a very capable and well-paid hack. During this time he not only learned how to create a diverse range of styles on command, but also soaked up production tricks and befriended engineers, enabling him to later get the best out of folks like Eddie Kramer, who worked with Hendrix and helped craft many aceZeppelin tracks. Years before orchestrating Led Zeppelin, Page developed an intimate understanding that rock and roll records were built things, a mode of pop production, sometimes canny and sometimes crass.
    Page’s later facility in the studio also reflected a fascination with electrical sound machines that runs throughout his musical career. Performing with Neil Christian and the Crusaders in 1962, the seventeen-year-old Page was one of the first London guitarists to play with a foot pedal; by the mid-1970s, he was using digital delays, guitar synthesizers, and a live setup that included wah-wah, MXR effects, and what he admitted was “total flash”: harmonizer, theremin, Echoplex, and the famous violin bow. By pushing the envelope on sound, these gadgets extended the virtuosity associated with the guitar hero into the domain of techno-acoustic experimentation. But these tools also gave Page a way to create the dramatic atmospheres so important to his sense of “light and shade.” In particular, Page used electronics to explore what music buffs call
timbre
: the textural quality of a tone, its sheen, or grain, or color. Page’s timbral flavors define his guitar playing as much as his licks or his blend of acoustic and electric styles. Think of the slutty bumblebee sting of “Black Dog,” the lacerating wah-wah of “Trampled Underfoot,” or the eldritch majesty of “Achilles’ Last Stand.” By
Physical Graffiti
, Page had transformed the guitar into an errantanalog synthesizer, enabling him to exploit the ambient and atmospheric potentials of electronic sound while remaining rooted in the erotics of the fingered fret-board. In this, Page remained a true sonic child of the psychedelic 1960s, embracing the notion that, as Steve Waksman puts it, “amplified sound has significant transformative potential.” 26
    Of all the guitar heroes from the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix took this transformative potential the furthest, both onstage and in his obsessive and almost extraterrestrial studio work. Still, it seems important to note that Page had Roger Mayer build him a fuzz box in 1964, years before Hendrix pushed Mayer’s gear into the purple haze. Mayer’s excellent machines also give us a different perspective on Page’s “guitar army,” because when Mayer started building his fuzz boxes for guitarists like Jeff Beck and Page, he worked for the British Admiralty researching acoustics. In other words, his intimacy with sonic circuitry ran parallel to his work on underwater warfare. This is no random bit of trivia. It marks how deeply the technologies that make modern culture are intertwined with the technologies that make modern war. The German media theoretician Friedrich Kittler has also drawn attention to the connections between radar and television, as well as the intensified effects that World War I had on the evolution of wireless tube technology; one also must mention Nazi Germany’sdevelopment and deployment of magnetic tape. In Kitttler’s words, “The entertainment industry is, in any conceivable sense of the word, an abuse of army equipment.” 27
    In both sound and imagery, Led Zeppelin drew power from this secret sympathy between media technology and war. On 1969’s
Led Zeppelin II
, for example, where the band appeared in uniforms of the Jasta division of the German Air Force, the boys unfurled the cock-rock apocalypse “Whole Lotta Love.” The tense central riff is answered by a descending guitar chord that sweeps