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

ferocious “Immigrant Song,” which opened their third album and many a show, Zep thematize their power and aspiration as a kind of Viking violence. The land of ice and snow is not the land of spontaneity and joy, but of forceful telluric energies and the dark vision of the midnight sun. At the same time, Plant’s pagan boast also nods toward the modern technology that makes Zep’s marauding guitar army possible. Mjölnir, the “hammer of the gods” that drives their ships, is Thor’s way of making lightning—
electricity
, in other words, the literal “power” that would drive Zeppelin all the way to the western shore—to America, that is, even unto the hotels of California.
    The mythic life of electricity recalls another curiosity about Page’s quip about his guitar army: he describes it as “waking up.” This awakening depends on the flow of electrons; other accounts of the album’s weird opening fanfare suggest that we are just hearing the amplifiers warm up. In any case, the analogy is apt: Electricity enlivens and enchants music, not only adding volume and dimension, but also giving musical signals another order of presence—in other words, a
life of their own
. In the case of the electric guitar, this liveliness is rootedin the enhancement of overtones that characterize distortion as well as the overdriving loops that produce feedback. As Page put it, the electric guitar “can start
singing on its own
through the electronics which you can’t engineer on an acoustic guitar” 32 (my emphasis). An even more definitive statement of this electronic animism appears in a Swan Song press release from 1977: “[Led Zeppelin] were the first group to take high volume and distortion, make it a distinct, creative entity and key it directly to the emotional thrust of each song.” 33 Leaving the braggadocio of this assertion aside (Hendrix or Blue Cheer, anyone?), the key word here is
entity
. The implication is that Zep shaped electrical effects into a vital autonomous power, a distinct creature that lent its energies to the more traditional values of the song.
    These are metaphors, of course, but they are animistic pagan ones. Inside the magic circle of the occult, metaphors like this take on a life of their own; they are not just icing on the poetic cake but forms of experience. Perhaps the primary experience that gets shaped by animistic metaphors is the experience of
energy
. The countercultural exploitation of electrical energy in the 1960s—through music, radio, feedback, bullhorns, and film—supported the return of animism as a viable cultural metaphor. This is what William Burroughs meant in his strange 1975
Crawdaddy
article on Zeppelin, whenhe wrote that “Rock music can be seen as one attempt to break out of this dead soulless universe and reassert the universe of magic.” 34 Given Page’s occult studies and Plant’s love of heathen lore, we should hardly be surprised that a degree of animism leaked into their electronic rhetoric, musical and otherwise. But Page’s animist quip also implies an element of
control
that, as we shall see, informs his instrumental pyrotechnics as well as his occult mystique. “Rise and shine!” he says, a commander of potentially chaotic energies. He may call these energies a guitar army, but a student of ceremonial magic like Page would also recognize these powers as
servitors
: earthly or infernal spirits that the magus binds to do his bidding. Satanic pacts are a chump’s game; Page found his allies in electrical sound machines. 35
HOWLING MORE
    In the mid 1970s, Jimmy Page took a thimbleful of his fortune and financed the opening of an occult bookshop in London called the Equinox. A tiny store just off Kensington High Street, the Equinox specialized in the Crowleyania that Page had already been collecting for years. Crowley’s stuff was hard to find in those days, but the Equinox sold many obscure volumes, including some signed by the master himself. The shop