Whatever you end up calling it (most people say Led Zeppelin four as it's easiest and still accurate) this is the hardest one to approach as it is such an icon of its age and for hard rock records throughout the era. So, I'll begin with how I came to know it.
My sister went to a folk club on Sunday nights. She joined things. If it wasn't a roomful of people older than her growling, "er-lye in the mornin'" then it was the anti-pollution gang who held pickets and protests and made banners. If it wasn't either of those it was something as it had been ballet or horse riding and would be theatre groups at uni. Nita was popular and liked belonging. For a while this looked ok to me, as well, as it seemed to offer a short cut to a kind of fame, extreme locality notwithstanding. But, as time has demanded I admit, joining is not my forte. I think Nita liked the leadership opportunities. She got to know just enough about medieval and Renaissance culture to buy just enough of the right records to be able to settle into a world of unicorn headdresses and armour while drawing those very things in pen and ink in the rumpus room.
I was happy to join in these sessions as I drew compulsively (my scenes were from the eighteenth century or The Great War) and I came to know and enjoy Pentangle and the more scholarly early music group records she found and bought. This extended my classical-only tastes and I was soon allowing things like The Incredible String Band or the more orchestral Moody Blues albums in. And then one day Nita thought I might get along with one particular song. It started as an instantly appealing acoustic guitar apreggio and then a recorder section, a sound I had grown to adore, played a beautiful accompaniment which rose and flew like a choir. And then between the clicks of the well played groove the vocals started and I was heading for my room until the song was over. I had fled.
Some context: I was afraid of rock music. It was on the radio all the time and there was plenty on tv. There were two strains to this. The first is forgivable considering my age: I thought of it as an inevitable gateway to a blueskinned death from a heroin overdose. Yes, there were stations to this but that was at the end of all of them. This terrified me. The second was that I thought of rock music as a reduction of musical form to the level of the boofhead; the music of the mob and the sport; it was the din of joining, the kind of belonging I had already witnessed in the nightmarish drawings of Kathe Kollwitz and Georg Grosz. Not for me.
Later, when the rumpus room was clear I went down and found the record which was only a few covers down from the top of the stack Nita had left out. I am compulsively attracted to that which I fear. At this age (about eleven) I also inhale ghost stories. I didn't believe in ghosts but the stories gave me nightmares. I'd swear off them until I found another anthology. Similarly, I had at least to hear the introduction of that song again. It wasn't hard to find by the needle dipping method whereby you sample tiny amounts of LP tracks by dropping the needle on them for seconds at a time before, the tone arm handle still in your hand, you whip it back off and try another. Then again, the guitar arpeggio shining out of the dark of the vinyl surface made brighter by the pure white light of the recorders. The click click of the surface damage heralded the entrance of the vocals and, grimacing, I let it go on for a few lines before the needle came off again. I went away to think about all of this.
If you only know one Led Zeppelin song you will have worked out I am writing about Stairway to Heaven. I didn't meet it as a rock classic but as an object of terror.
It didn't convert me, I would have washed it away with Mozart that afternoon, but it was there if ever I needed it. The very name Led Zeppelin carried a kind of horror for me as I imagined bombing raids, death and mayhem. I put the strange ripped looking cover back in the vertical shelves under the turntable and left it there.
High school meant a lot of changes including a circumstantial enforcement of the need to negotiate with the herd. Seeing how my affection for classical music changed my social status from aloof twit to leper I started listening to 4TO and watching Countdown. Most of it was passable and some risible and dire but Sherbert's Life is for Living with its octave leaping chromatic riff mixed with vocal harmonies caught me as did Fox on the Run's hard front and suggestion of something creepy under its stiff choruses. Hush looked like hippos in tutus and ACDC was footballer music (still is, as far as I'm concerned). I had changed one obsession for another and rather than one of the gang I was a know-it-all twit but I could live with that as it meant that the leprosy cleared up.
There was so little I actually liked in the charts at the time that I had to reach back a generation and a half to the 60s. Beatles, then Stones, then Who, then Yardbirds came to me. Wayne Fallon, the other most musical kid at school, and I formed a cabal around the Beatles. This was great because the friendship was a strong one and he was both popular and aloof, the association proved fruitful. I was promoted to having my retorts to the herd heard. They didn't always win the moment but they met the air.
When the Beatles waned a tad (it took months) the next step for me was Zeppelin. I'd already immersed myself in II and III and it was long past time to get that grey green sleeve out from under the turntable and blast the rumpus room walls with it. Well, that copy really had been loved. I got a fresh one from Chandler's and put that on.
I didn't rush to Stairway to Heaven. The thing that really drove me to it was hearing not it but the final track played in full on the radio one night. I sat back from my homework and let it bellow through from my brother's room. After that I had to have it.
Needle on side one. The dull click of the drop and the low frequency presence that precedes the sound. Black Dog. There's a strange clucking sound like a machine warming up. Plant opens with a scream: "Hey hey, Mama, said the way you move. Gonna make you sweat. Gonna make you groove." Less than a breath later the band crashes in with one of rock's most iconic barnstormer riffs. A few more of these and a strange calm wordless harmony the middle 8 kicks in with solid chords and a screaming vocal that seems too high and aggressive to be true. When the voice and band response kick back in there's a shift to the fifth that gets stuck and then goes back to the tonic with a timing glitch that is very hard to work out. It doesn't seem to be about anything but a screaming concupiscent id but that's not such a bed job if you can get it. Decades later a flatmate shared her altered lyrics to this one: "I don't know but I been told, a three legged woman aint got no hole." I struggle not to hear that now.
Rock and Roll. Every band in the seventies had a song called Rock and Roll. There was meant to be a distinction between Rock and Roll and Rock. Rock was meant to be the progressive heavier end of Guitar Band World. A seventies band called a song Rock and Roll to do a fifties style twelve bar with seventies style excess. It was a joke but, if done well, it could also be listenable. Zeppelin's take is blistering. A huffing drum intro is broken by a guitar riff on the third and seventh and when Plant comes screaming in with, "Been a long time since I rock and rolled," you know it's not going to let up. Page and Jones provide a huge sustained power figure between the drums and the vocals and the stop start end of every verse gets funnier and tenser each time. Goofy made strong.
After this loud start we fade into the light tinkle of mandolins for The Battle of Evermore, a folky evocation of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. Plant's in his very appealing head voice register and sings a lovely modal tune about the Queen of Light. Then fading in from under his voice is the pure light of Sandy Denny's, clear and cooling: "dance in the dark of night..." There is a constant interplay between the voices with Plant easily matching Denny's notes and blending them as enjoyably as he did decades later with Alison Kraus. If you were lulled into thinking that this would be a limping acoustic number you would be surprised and delighted to hear the way Plant incorporates his signature scream and how Denny matches that without breaking a sweat. I don't love this song but I'll leave it on if its starts if only for the vocal interplay.
Then the acoustic arpeggio starts and we're back at the stairway. I had heard it before this new copy and at that stage loved it, feeling it transcended its hippy dippy beginnings to form a contemporary paean to nature and life in the universe. Also, I loved the clever way that the vocal melody stayed essentially the same even though the chords under it went from a melancholy minor key progression to an epic major key one. I loved the electric twelve string that played through most of it up to the fanfare that turned into the solo that gave way to the hard screaming rock of the coda which left the solo plaintive voice for the song's final phrase. Now for some elephant shooting.
There is a lawsuit being brought by the survivors of Randy California to claim co-credit and of course money from Led Zeppelin. This stems from a perceived similarity between the opening minor chords of the first section of Stairway to Heaven and a song by Spirit called Taurus.
Here are some facts:
Zeppelin shared a bill with Spirit in the late 60s while touring America and while not definite it is quite likely that Page heard the Spirit track.
Both songs feature a progression in A minor that features a descent by semitones from A to F. The tempo and scansion of the changes is the same up to a point though the arpeggios are not.
Both songs feature a section that ventures into the relative major key of C.
However:
The two songs use of the A minor descent resolve completely differently. Page goes from F major to A minor. Spirit goes from A minor down the scale to F, D major, A minor G major. Thus.
Spirit's venture into C takes an appealing but very basic route and does not resemble Stairway to Heaven's major key sections to any damning extent.
Most of Stairway to Heaven is in the progression that starts with C major.
Taurus is an instrumental but contains none of the material that comprises Plant's vocal melody.
The contested section accounts for seven seconds of a ten second sequence. The sequence is played five times in the space of two and a quarter minutes and is never repeated after that in Stairway to Heaven which then goes to the major key sequence, the fanfare and coda which account for the six remaining minutes. So eight minutes plus for the whole thing and the incompletely similar progression times five adds up to thirty-five seconds ... out of eight minutes.
Sorry, there's more: descending by semitones while a single minor chord is playing is an old composition technique which was not invented by Randy California. Go and listen to My Funny Valentine or a very large number of songs from the jazz age to hear what I mean. Led Zeppelin are charged with lifting a song that only resembles theirs in a seconds-long section that many other people had also used before. I cry bullshit.
If you can, load both pieces into a multitrack sound editor (Audacity is free), line them up so the minor chord progressions start at the same time and see how quickly it gets discordant. If you still think, after hearing that, that there's plagiarism going on it's probably because you like the idea.
The problem is complicated by the history of this band who wrongly attributed other people's songs to themselves from their very first album. In most of those cases what they added was immense but in all cases where the derivation is substantial the act of claiming the music was wrong. There are details here and there on other albums but these thin to insignificance as soon as the band begins writing for itself full time and establishing its compositional personality. Really, when you get down to accusations of plagiarism based on the use of a few well worn blues phrases you're at the bottom of the barrel.
Oh, the guy at the centre of this who had decades to bring his own lawsuit died in 1997. May he rest in peace, if his old bandmates will let him.
Here's the thing about this for me. While I can live through this song with pleasure these days I really have no remaining affection for it. Some pleasant textures and tones come through but it isn't the anthem it was.
Side two.
A thick sounding Fender Rhodes piano plays a bell like phrase long enough to absorb before Page reinforces it with a fuzzed up Les Paul and Bonzo smashes in. The vocals are a multitracked Plant in odd harmony. A kind of brighter chorus section ensues with some fine screamy vocals. The forward motion is deliciously relentless. Page takes a multitracked guitar solo that is both joyful and brief. It seems to be about a drug bust or maybe just the kind of post-hippy culture the band found in America in the late 60s. Plant ends over the verse groove through a tremolo and fadeout with a lovely phrase in high scream: "I really don't o-ow o-ow o-ow...."
Four Sticks has elements that I really like: experimental song structure; a textural mix going from metal riffing to sudden string sections and open chord acoustic guitar. A screaming Plant is mixed low and grabs of strange lyrics like crying pines and owls and rivers running dry. There's a dark panic running through the entire piece. The mix of rock riff and eastern sounding washes creates a tension. Something strange and horrifying has befallen the song's narrator and the forces of a dark nature are on his tail. I just wish I liked it better.
Going to California couldn't be more different from this or the song that follows it. A gentle arpeggio guitar starts before a bright and folky mandolin comes in with a major key figure. Plant folds himself out of the music with a tail of travel both physical and metaphyiscal. He ends one verse with the lowest note I've heard from him. Then the bridge turns minor and pained as Plant's vocal shoots several octaves up to deliver a kind of nightmare sequence where the wrath of the gods has nose bleed that floods the land and he cries out for a lifeline. Back in folky major key land (though on a tuned-down acoustic guitar which makes it sound a little strange) and he's still on his quest for a woman who's never been born. He tells himself it's not as hard, hard, hard as it seems in a pained high voice. Fade out in a light choral sunset. I like rather than love but I leave it on and enjoy it if I hear it.
The next song is the last and the one I knew warranted the purchase of my own copy, a fresh and crackle free one. When the Levee Breaks starts with the biggest drum sound in history. If you set a film of a levee breaking in slow motion you would want this music to go with it. The power and destructive force are only widened and worsened when the bluesy grind comes in after two bars. The giant drums continue beneath it like the cracking earth. A harmonica wails in pain overhead like a bird witnessing the end of the world. The blues grind gives way to a major mode but equally strong upward progression. After a breath's pause, Plant comes in with a low scream about the levee breaking and life ending. Suddenly, a complete change happens when all the chords all turn major and Page comes in with a thick and enormous slide figure before Plant in a beautiful scream delivers
a soaring and oddly jubilant middle eight which then plummets back to the grind again. After another pause he starts the last verse with despair: "Cryin' won't help ya, prayin' won't do ya no good..." When we get back to the major figure it very strangely fits in with the bluesy grind. Bonzo's rolls and crashes get more apocalyptic and powerful as the inundation gorges on, Plant screaming from the sky above and the harmonica wailing in futile prayer. As the destruction moves forward there is an unbalancing shift in the panning of major instrument streams as they flow from left to right and back again like the tide that is consuming the land, glacial, stoppable. Finally, we end with a straining metal slide and harmonica wail before a single babble on electric guitar (similar to the opening warm up sounds) and it's just us and the flooded land. Man, if Kashmir weren't so great this would be my favourite Zeppelin song.
I read someone on an ol' time usenet group say that when he listened to Levee he wanted to become the music and I know what he meant. The force coupled with the huge textural banquet make this an irresistible piece. But that goes for the entire album because the main feature of this album is range: we start and end with maximum force but between those points we take a long and eventful journey through landscapes urban and distant, identifiable and mystical. All the way to the apocalypse it's a fun ride that might well have served as a last album of a band that reached a peak unmatched by any of their rivals.
John Paul Jones said that after this album no one compared them to Black Sabbath. Many consider it to be the band's apex. For me it's one peak before the next two albums which form their own peaks. After that, the band's problems mounted and affected its output with increasing impact resulting in two mediocre discs and an outdated and sloppy live double. For most of the first year of my being into rock music of any sort this was the latest Zeppelin album known to me. I hadn't heard the earliest but from II to III to IV there was a clear line of progress in the sound and sophistication of the music and presentation. On that...
Led Zeppelin II has a jokey confidence to its cover which well compliments the contents and the brash mix of cock rock and exploration. Led Zeppelin features a heavily treated image of the exploding Hindenberg and the music is appropriately massive and incendiary. The second album's cover art repeats the image but it's highly abstracted, a white negative image of the shape emerging in the background from a fiery golden explosion. III blended pop idolatry with a kind of folky utility which is what you got inside.
IV's cover is a gatefold. The image on the front is of a wall with the paper cracked and peeling. In the centre is a framed picture of an old man bending severely under the weight of a huge bundle of sticks. Folding it out reveals that the wall is from a party demolished house and the view past it is of a lush garden, houses of a similar era to the one at the front and in the distance a massive towerblock which bears a sinister character as though everyone's future will be marching toward the veiwers and crushing them if they don't join it. The greenish khaki overcast affecting the whole image adds to the sickness of the thought.
The reverse view, folded out, is a drawing of a hermit holding a lantern at the top of a rocky peak. In the distance is a village and, when you find him far below, is a young pilgrim climbing toward the sage. The Jimmy Page fantasy sequence from The Song Remains the Same film is an enactment of this scene (possibly why it's the only one that works). It's an intriguing picture. It has little direct relevance to anything on the album but makes sense if you know the band's career by this third year of existence into the top spot globally, largely through American tours might point to a kind of pilgrimage. The band were right to leave it unexplained though. They had nothing if not mystique.
Inside is a khaki paper sleeve. On one side is a track list and acknowledgements as well as four odd looking symbols. The font is very olde worlde, all alchemy and candle wax. On the other side the lyric of Stairway to Heaven is printed in that font. There is an old engraving in the lower left corner of a Durer-like image of a scholar with a book. Neither title nor attribution appear here. When you take the record out of the sleeve the Atlantic label bears only the name of the band and the four symbols from the inner sleeve.
In a few of these posts I've gone on about all the Hipgnosis cover art and how dated I find it but in this case there's a real thing going on. After the third album's Led Zep for teens scrapbook wheel and the ever hostile music press chided them for sailing on hype the band decided to package the next one with no hype at all. No mug shots, no band name, no title, just a mysterious sleeve, strange centrepiece drawing, a quartet of symbols and the name only on the record label. No hype at all.
Well, the record company made sure that no one walked past it and plastered the media with the fact of the cover's plainness and low profile approach until that built into its own hype and the band were slugged with a charge of arrogant pretension. Can't win. Then again, I bet they felt like abject losers when the sales figures rolled in and the next mega tour of the USA started. But both are true: it's very daring and very hypey. The sense of solid mystique crafting is impossible to ignore.
Ok, so it's grade nine and I'm still thirteen. Wayne Fallon, Peter Broadstock and I have made it through the school gate undetected. We're not wagging it, it's lunch time, but you're meant to stay on the grounds. We're heading to the milk bar a few blocks away for hot chips. Wayne smirks when I call the guy behind the counter "sir" as though he was a teacher. We stroll back to school, heading for the cover of the trees near J-Block. But when we reach the gate something's different. I can't remember when it started or what stopped it but for a while we were allowed to play records in the music room and put them through the PA. Mostly this was girl crap like Billy Don't Be a Hero or Afternoon Delight but today its: "hey hey, mama, said the way you move ..." It's Black Dog. It's BIG BAD BLOODY BLACK DOG. The riff kicks in with the drums and guitars and screaming voice and it's like the stone tablets of the elders falling to the ground. It's like - It's like nothing I can form a thought about because we're already running towards it. It's so loud. It's like they're playing live. The whole eastern oval is being assaulted by this giant music. When we get to the music block we get a good position right between the tannoys. The big black tide of sound hits us. I notice without gawping that Dora Earl and her friend Jan Carstairs are here, too. They're sitting on the steps of H-Block and can see us. And there we are, dipping our hands into our paper parcels, eating contraband chips that everyone can see as the biggest music in the solar system is turning the air into stone. None of us know it but this is almost as good as girls.
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