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

between the stereo channels like a V2 screaming across the sky, while the urgent central riff intensifies a blues come-on to the point of violence, leading Charles Shaar Murray to dub the song a “thermonuclear gang rape.” That seems rather over the top, but one still does not doubt Stephen Davis’ claim that the tune was a particular favorite with the boys in Nam, who bolted 8-tracks to their tanks and played it as they moved into combat. But the riff’s macho drive is also interrupted by a freeform passage of psychedelia that features Page and engineer Eddie Kramer indulging themselves in pure effects, twiddling knobs like the Kingston producers who were inventing dub music around the same time, or George Clinton behind the dials for the first Funkadelic album. Here Page unveils his use of the theremin, one of the world’s oldest and weirdest electronicinstruments, while Plant’s vocals are treated with a trippy “backwards echo” technique that Page had invented earlier in a Yardbirds session. The resulting psychedelic bardo swoons with both pleasure and pain, as Plant’s orgasmic moans compete with sirens, muffled explosions, and the disorientation of battle. Some critics have argued that this freak-out subtly undermines the masculine prerogative of the main riff, but the analog electronica also delivers a message hidden by the era’s more utopian fantasies about amplified sound: that your novelties and pleasures are won in part from the war machine; that there is no sex without power, no transcendence without death.
    “Whole Lotta Love’s” apocalyptic undertow foreshadowed a growing unease among some rock writers that “heavy rock,” with its exploitation of power and volume, was cheapening rock’s transformative cultural potential. These concerns were bound up as well with fears about rock’s exploding commercialism. For such commentators, Page’s technical bravura was just another reason to hate the band. Claiming that listening to Page live was “about as satisfying as watching a television picture signal,” a
Montreal Star
rock critic compared the guitarist to an encyclopedia salesman demonstrating the range of sounds and gimmicks that could be coaxed from an electric guitar. 28 This same fellow also condemned what he believed was the “false meaning” thatfans attached to Zeppelin’s music because of its volume; in this view, Zeppelin’s evident hold on the masses was not really musical at all, but an effect of brute technology.
    Other critics explicitly associated the force, heaviness, and sheer volume of Zeppelin’s sound with violence. Their legendary 1969 show at Boston Tea Party, after all, had ended with scores of kids literally banging their heads against the stage. In the same year, a lamenting Jon Landau described the band’s live demeanor as “loud, impersonal, exhibitionistic, violent and often insane.” 29 Perhaps the crispest comment along these lines was from the British writer Mick Gold: “what comes across most strongly in their live music is a feeling of violent emotions internalized.” Gold meant this as a slag, a morbid contrast to the Stones and Faces, whom he describes as providing spontaneity and joy in their shows. Zeppelin plays body music, Gold says, but they offer no climax. “Because it doesn’t swing, it doesn’t set the audience dancing; it aims for the temples, not the feet, and its total effect is one of stupefaction.” 30
    Zep’s transformation of aggressive forces into mental effects, to say nothing of their resistance to climax, reflects a wayward tantric magic; submission to such a sublimated inner journey might indeed look like stupefaction to folks who just want to boogie with the babes. But you know what Gold means: Led Zeppelin overwhelmedtheir audience. “They’re like a vibrator,” wrote Charles Shaar Murray about an Earls Court show from 1975. “It can get you off something ridiculous, but it can’t kiss you goodnight.” 31 In the