What Is and What Should Never Be

Freud almost had a fetish for his theory of the fetish. He kept returning to it, publishing an essay on it in 1905 in Three Essays on the History of Sexuality; addressing the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society about it in 1909; and writing another essay about it in 1927.³⁹ Maybe he should have talked to someone about that. Anyway, in Freud’s theory a little boy looks at a little girl and is horrified to discover that she does not have a penis. In the little boy’s mind this absence is a lack which can only have come about as the result of some kind of calamitous accident. In other words, he believes little girls to be castrated boys. Pretty terrifying stuff for the little boy. The little girl is, therefore, a terrible warning to him. He can’t look at the little girl’s genitals without fearing that he, too, might be castrated. He transfers his desires, therefore, to a thing which he associates with the female genitals, but which is not actually them. This ‘thing’ is the fetish object. It’s a substitute, a safe item or talisman which means the boy need not confront his fears about castration because his focus is on the fetish object, not on the girl’s ‘castrated’ genitals. It’s important, however, not to take one’s eye off the ball too much (if you’ll pardon the expression): on Presence, the song “Royal Orleans” tells the story of John Paul Jones’s dalliance with a woman who turned out to be most definitely not castrated. She was a he. With whiskers. Oops.

Back to Vienna. As the boy grows up he should, according to Freud’s ideas about sexual maturity, begin to understand more fully the woman’s ‘lack’, developing a healthier relationship with his father whom he no longer regards with an Oedipal rage or jealousy, but with whom he instead identifies. (Mythical Greek king, Oedipus, unknowingly killed his father, married his mother, and blinded himself in an act of symbolic castration.) Freud argued that when the boy fails to resolve his psychological rivalry with his father, and fixates instead upon his mother, he has an ‘Oedipus Complex’, and will remain tied into an intense relationship with his primary caregiver, the mother. She, by virtue of being female, is seen as ‘castrated’ and both enthralling and terrifying to him. So, he has to look away from her castrated state and, as we have said, his focus becomes the fetish object. In his 1927 essay Freud thought that the choice of fetish-object was made on the basis of what the male child saw in the last moment before the traumatic sight of the ‘castrated’ genitals. Hence the prevalence of fetishes for feet, shoes, or stockings—in other words, the last item seen while mother could still be believed to be reassuringly phallic.

One young man discussed by Freud in his 1909 talk was more excited by the clothes a woman wore than by her body. The man refused to recognize female sexual difference—the focus on her clothes meant that he did not have to look underneath and see her ‘castrated’ self. The packaging of Physical Graffiti invites us to do precisely this, however: to look underneath. The die-cut brownstone windows turn us into voyeurs as through one we glimpse a striptease; in another a woman is literally turned into an object as she stands in for the supporting strut of a harp; elsewhere a woman in bondage gear is depicted from the neck down; and a cheerily seductive woman is caught in the act of removing her black stockings.

What is perhaps most provocative about the cover is the way in which the band members themselves invite our gaze and play with sexual ambiguity as they appear in drag: Jimmy Page blows a kiss from behind a huge yellow feather boa; a skirted Robert Plant drapes himself in furs; and a heavily made-up John Bonham closes his eyes, apparently naked apart from a fetching silk turban, and seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’s sharing the frame with a grinning Page still wrapped in his boa. We could go on all day about the album sleeve images—the phallic zeppelin plummeting to earth; the young woman trampled underfoot by a giant; the tailor doing what is technically known as ‘copping a feel’ as he takes an inside leg measurement—but we won’t. That would be fetishistic: we wouldn’t be listening to the music itself, but would be dazzled instead by an associated substitute. Enough already with the ‘clothes’ of Physical Graffiti! On with the body underneath (the music. Pay attention. We’re being metaphorical).

Soul of a Woman was Created Below

Before looking at the fetishism of Physical Graffiti, we need to think about the connection between fetishism and misogyny. Freud assumed that male adults, while knowing rationally that the female adult’s body is not the site of some terrible trauma which resulted in her penis being cut off, still hang on to an element of that belief. So, many men find many women frightening. At the same time that heterosexual men desire women, deep down they are frightened little boys cupping their egos protectively in their sweaty little hands. It’s not too much of a stretch, then, to see how Freud’s castration complex might lead to a general deep-seated fear and distrust—even hatred—of women. This ‘misogyny’ is exhibited in many ways in everyday life. One way is by making women into objects (as is often done in pornography and advertising); another, the fetishistic route, is to make objects—at least symbolically—into women. Either process denies women individuality and power. They are instead passive, voiceless, even mechanized. Where they are not objectified they are a source of terror and mistrust.

Several songs on Led Zeppelin I are meditations on the unreliable, sexually promiscuous and generally devious behavior of women. In fact, so common are such activities that they are natural to women, somehow part of their physical make-up. It’s on this album, of course, that we actually hear, in a deliciously medieval image, that women’s souls are made in Hell (“Dazed and Confused”). Their nether regions hail from the nether regions, if you like. Robert Plant’s no Shakespeare, although some of you reading this will dispute that, but his suggestion that women are devils does recall a misogynist tradition traceable back to the Bard.⁴⁰ “Down from the waist / They’re centaurs, though women all above,” rants crazy King Lear: “But to the girdle do the gods inherit; / Beneath is all the fiend’s. There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit.”⁴¹ So, she’s just a devil woman: “Soul of a woman,” laments Plant, “was created below.” Freud wouldn’t have been surprised by this. Plant and Shakespeare both seem preoccupied with going down. Behave. We mean “going down to hell.” Not only is the woman from hell, but her sexuality is like hell: steamy and scary. “Below” refers both to Satan’s abode and to the woman’s genitals—which in turn gives a whole new frisson to “the devil’s in his hole” (“Achilles’ Last Stand”).

If the native unreliability of the woman doesn’t altogether rule out men and women having relationships, then such relationships need, the album’s lyrics suggest, to control her naturally roaming eye. In “You Shook Me,” the influence is the Blues as much as it is the Bard: when Led Zeppelin revived Muddy Waters’s version of Willie Dixon’s and J.B. Lenoir’s song, the overriding suggestion was that marriage was the only way to tame a woman.

There’s an irony in this album’s misogyny, especially as it’s demonstrated in “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.” The idea of calling a loved one ‘babe’ or ‘baby’ is in itself an interesting move, since it removes maturity from the object of affection. It infantilises “woman” who is promised that “one day” she will be reunited with him and they’ll “walk through the park everyday.” Plant justifies his abandonment of his “baby” because of his wanderlust, and, contradictorily, his being called “back home.” We need to be careful in this analysis, however, as it was originally a woman, Anne Bredon, who wrote the song, and it had already featured as the opening track on Joan Baez’s 1963 LP, “Joan Baez in Concert, Part 1.” However, a very similar sentiment is expressed in “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” which is another ‘tribute’ to the corrupting, fearsome power of female sexuality: Plant cries out to his mistress that he must try to escape her to return home.

The elusive, if not impossible, nature of the ideal woman can at times be quite poignant in the band’s lyrics on other albums, as suggested by the “girl with love in her eyes” of “Going to California.” The ideal woman here is again portrayed as a “girl,” that is, made infant-like and so subservient to the male. This transformation of the sexually active and, therefore, sexually aggressive, female into an idealized, controllable ‘child’ or ‘baby’ is another facet of fetishism running through the band’s lyrics. Indeed, this figuring of the ‘child’ woman was evident in the practices of the band and their entourage in their heyday. Bob Hart, a journalist covering the 1973 US tour, commented on how badly groupies were treated, and on how some of the ‘babes’ were indeed—allegedly—only fourteen or fifteen years old.

Elsewhere on Led Zeppelin I women are told that their “Time is Gonna Come” (a rather empty threat, as it turns out, since the male speaker is in fact frightened of the dominant female partner); they experience a “Communication Breakdown” with verbally impotent men; and dismiss the male of the species in “How Many More Times.” Here “Little Robert Anthony” threateningly—misogynistically —pleads with his beloved to come home, declaring that he has her “in the sights of [his] . . . gun.” In fact, it appears that the only track on Led Zeppelin I which does not focus on the fraught relationships men and women share is “Black Mountain Side.” Fact. (Those of you reading this who are still awake will realize that “Black Mountain Side” is an instrumental. Those of you reading this who are not still awake: HEY! There’s drool running out of the corner of your mouth.)

Trampled Underfoot: Consuming the Her-She Car

The misogyny is clear, then, in the lyrics of Zeppelin’s first album. At the same time that women are desired, they are rejected. The fetishistic expression of this apparently contradictory state is still in evidence—as we have already suggested—by the time of their sixth album, Physical Graffiti. The songs here, on the surface at least, seem to be obsessed with women’s bodies. However, those bodies are always displaced so that the focus is significantly away from the female form: she can’t be looked at because—remember Freud—in her castrated form, she’s too threatening. Arguably, making music is an act of fetishistic displacement. In other words, for a heterosexual man, it’s in itself an attempt to experience an almost sexual release without a woman being present.⁴² Jimmy Page summed up his sense of exertion and release in making music in saying: “I came up with that title because of the whole thing of graffiti on the album cover and it being a physical statement rather than a written one, because I feel that an awful lot of physical energy is used in producing an album.”⁴³ It’s maybe worth mentioning here that Physical Graffiti was the first Zeppelin release on the band’s own label, Swan Song, which had been set up the year before, but was originally going to be named either ‘Slut’ or ‘Slag’, names that recalled, for Plant at least, their US tours. Wisely, they decided this was not the way to cement their reputation. Nevertheless, the Swan Song launch party, held on Halloween 1974 in Chislehurst Caves in south London, featured naked women and strippers dressed as nuns. And, if that’s not hard enough to swallow, the final three gigs of the second leg of the Physical Graffiti US tour were introduced by Linda Lovelace, star of the infamous porn movie Deep Throat. So much for reputation.

Physical Graffiti’s “Trampled Underfoot” marked a stylistic departure for the band with its repetitive funk-influenced rhythms and motifs. Its automobile-fetishism, however, marked Zeppelin’s continuation of a longstanding musical convention with its origins in Robert Johnson’s 1936 “Terraplane Blues.” “When I mash down on your little starter,” Johnson sang to his beloved, “then your spark plug will give me fire.” Whoever said romance was dead? As well as Zeppelin, other classic rock bands of the 1970s engaged with the tradition. In “Highway Star” Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan expressed his “love” and “need” and, most worryingly perhaps (and proof of the fact that the most appropriate rhyme in songwriting is not always the first one which suggests itself to you), his desire to “seed” all eight cylinders of his car. Quite. Freddie Mercury made no secret of the fact that he was also “In Love with [his] Car,” not least because, presumably unlike human lovers, “Cars don’t talk back.”

What is it about the car, then, that squeezes so many rockstars’ lemons? Marc Bolan and Cozy Powell died in theirs; Keith Moon took his swimming; Nick Mason (Pink Floyd) and Jay Kay (Jamiroquai) collect them with a fervour Bonzo would certainly have recognised. ZZ Top pimped theirs to the point where it became synonymous with the band; Status Quo didn’t want “Baby” to drive theirs; and the Cars . . . just were. In terms of status symbol, of course, the car provides an immediate shorthand for the observer. The Hummer screams excess (or, some would argue, overcompensation); the red Chevy Corvette suggests middle-aged denial; the Thunderbird is the Road Trip; the Volvo implies suburban sobriety; and the Dune Buggy conjures up hazy memories of the excesses of spring break.

The car, then, constructs a public image for the rock star which, psychologically speaking, protects the private individual. That image, or persona, is also, in popular belief at least, the same one which binges on drinks or drugs, throws TVs through hotel windows, or sleeps with numerous women. It’s interesting to note that Bonzo, the band’s biggest car fanatic, was the member most renowned for his excesses, not only in terms of the booze, but also musically: he used the biggest drumsticks he could find in order to pound out his rhythms. In this formulation, the woman, the drugs and the car are all objects which serve the purpose of maintaining the rockstars’ public image. To borrow some Marxist terminology for a moment (we promise to give it back as soon as we’re done with it), these objects are commodified.

Custard Pie: Food for Thought

The step from commodification to fetishism is easy to see: people and things are all . . . things. The recurrent image of the commodification of the female body establishes a narrative theme where the spurned lover focuses his energies by creating a fetish object out of the female. In “Candy Store Rock” for example, the object of desire is seen as sweet and is “good enough to eat” (“got my spoon in your jar”), while in “Custard Pie” the song is not just about the consumption of baked goods, but is, to borrow another term from Freud, about an altogether different kind of ‘oral fixation’ which requires that the woman “drop down, drop down.” “Black Dog” transforms the power of female sexuality into a dangerous, addictive foodstuff (honey) to satisfy male appetites. In “South Bound Suarez” the lovers’ congress is referred to as “sweet con carne,” while the singer tries to reject all treats in “Boogie with Stu” (“I don’t want no tutti-frutti, no lollipop”). Portraying the woman as able to be eaten or consumed is akin to possessing and, therefore, controlling her. In one of his Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud wrote that children must experience—and in most cases pass through—a period of “cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization. Here sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food.” ⁴⁴ Again, there’s evidence of this Freudian train of thought materializing as behavior in one of the most notorious episodes of Zeppelin folklore, the incorrectly-named ‘Shark episode’ of the 1969 US tour. The story goes that there was a hotel in Seattle where you could hire fishing tackle and bait in the lobby and go fishing from your bedroom window, which is precisely what Richard Cole, tour manager at the time, did. When he caught a red snapper fish, there followed a lewd drunken incident involving Cole, Bonzo, a member of Vanilla Fudge, the red snapper and a naked red-headed woman. This unsavory episode also conjures up the myth of the vagina dentata, or vagina with teeth, feared by some men as the means by which they will suffer the castration they associate with women’s sexual organs.

Transforming the woman into woman-as-food, woman-as-car, or woman-as-‘vixen’ (“Ten Years Gone”) neutralizes her phallic threat, a threat which looms large in “The Wanton Song” where the predatory Succubus-like woman steals the singer’s “seed” from his “shaking frame.” The use of the adjective “shaking” here emphasizes that the male is both afraid and orgasmic; he is subject to the desires of a sexually dominant female figure. The image of the earth moving was also key to “Going to California” where the earthquake that caused “the mountains and the canyons [to] start to tremble and shake” was surely not just a geophysical phenomenon. “Houses of the Holy” begins like a conventional-sounding love song, but the tone quickly changes and we’re back in those ol’ sulphurous pits of female sexuality, here located in an Eden-gone-bad where the Adam figure wants to sow “seeds of love” to fertilize the “garden” not of Eve, but of “Satan’s Daughter.” Indeed, such seed-sowing does seem to be a prominent theme in the band’s lyrics. The female, as we have seen, must be remade as fetish object in order for the male to be able to engage with her—when she is not fetishized but instead is in control, the male singularly fails to consummate the relationship: “Squeeze my lemon,” begs Plant on Led Zeppelin II, in imitation of Robert Johnson, “’til the juice runs down my leg,” and the singer’s “children” spill onto the “killing floor” in an image of ejaculation. The ‘juice’ has not ‘run’ into, or been in any way appropriated by, the potentially castrating woman. In other songs, too, a terror of the castrating vagina is apparent. On Presence it’s regarded as safer by far to let a woman grab your citrus fruit than your genitals (the threat of castration is thus averted): “You said I was the only, with my lemon in your hand” sings Plant on “For Your Life.” In “Whole Lotta Love” the singer proposes being a “backdoor man,” that is, engaging in anal sex with his partner, and oral sex seems to be the preoccupation both in the ‘going south’ image of “South Bound Suarez” and in the gold-lined mouth of the later “Travelling Riverside Blues” (another substitute object to be found in this song, of course, is a “brown-skinned sugar plum”).⁴⁵

My Woman Left Home: Cock Rock and Doomed Relationships

We’ve already discussed how, in Freud’s formulation, it’s virtually impossible for a man and a woman to have a healthy relationship of equals. Men’s deep-seated fear of castration leads them to demonize women. It also enables them to cope with what they would regard as inevitable betrayal in a heterosexual relationship—if sexual desire has been focussed not on the woman herself but on a fetishistic substitute for her, she can leave but the substitute remains (a pot of honey or an automobile cannot up and leave of their own will. Unless you’re Stephen King and the car’s called Christine. But that’s unlikely). The inevitability of this betrayal is repeatedly expressed in the band’s lyrics, as we’ve seen in “You Shook Me.” On Led Zeppelin III the woman has either “gone and left me” (“Friends”); or she is “1000 years” away (“Tangerine”); the singer is thwarted by a disapproving mother (“That’s the Way”); or the beloved must be shot to be controlled (“Hats off to Roy Harper”).

The only real hint of fidelity comes in the “Bron-y-aur-Stomp,” but the song turns out to be about a Welsh sheepdog (and that’s a whole other chapter right there). On Houses of the Holy the optimism of “Rain Song” is somewhat washed out; the lover of “Over the Hills and Far Away” laments that “Many have I loved, many times been bitten”; pleads to his woman not to leave him in “D’yer Mak’er”; and only finds any kind of peace in the upbeat “Dancing Days” and the meditative “Ocean”—this latter written for an entirely unthreatening female: a three-year old daughter. (A similarly affirmative sentiment had appeared on “Thank You” on Led Zeppelin II.) On Physical Graffiti, the most sadistic punishments are visited on the singer’s body: in the course of one song, “Black Country Woman,” he moves from having beer thrown in his face to being “crucified” by his lover (his revenge in this case is, one might venture, somewhat dastardly—he sleeps with his ex’s sister). By the time of In Through the Out Door the sense of abandonment has scarcely abated—the singer’s jilted in the cautionary “In the Evening”; he’s a “Fool in the Rain” because he’s been stood up; and a hard-hearted Texan woman left him in “Hot Dog.” Coda provides a satisfactory coda to the pattern, as the singer is cuckolded in “Poor Tom” and is almost destroyed by jealous, lustful feelings in “Darlene.”

In live performance Plant’s particularly flamboyant variety of Cock Rock relied heavily on sexual suggestiveness and on fetishism. Otherwise it would have been ‘Castrated Rock’ (which does not have quite the same commercial appeal). In Cock Rock, “music is loud, rhythmically insistent, built around techniques of arousal and release.”⁴⁶ As anyone who has ever watched The Song Remains the Same will tell you, the camera angles in the movie often unapologetically center on Plant’s improbably bulging crotch as he sings (Spinal Tap armadillos, anyone?). Early on, Plant expressed some surprise that he should be seen as a sex symbol, saying “maybe if the audience can see a cock through a pair of trousers, then that must make you a sex symbol. Since I’m the only one of us who doesn’t have a guitar or drums in front of mine, I suppose I started out with a bit more chance than anybody else in the band.”⁴⁷ Despite this false modesty, by the time of the shooting of The Song Remains the Same in the summer of ’73, Plant seemed to have adjusted to the label of sex symbol as he brought together a whole mess of the concepts we’ve been discussing here. In his own segment of the movie, which he insisted on writing, he portrays himself as a romanticised medieval Welsh soldier-monarch who overcomes his enemies using a sword (phallic image) given to him by a fair maiden (actually played by his wife), to whom he returns the weapon (a symbol of his virility, remember) to be rewarded with gold (the woman is controlling his sexuality, even commodifying him; the gold might also function as fetish-object), before he then leaves her and is on his own again (men and women are fundamentally incompatible, after all).

I’m Gonna Crawl

Contradictory sexualized symbols surround Led Zeppelin, the men and the music. The image on the cover of Led Zeppelin I shows the Hindenburg airship in flames; the potent male symbol has, literally, crashed and burned. On Remasters the blimp’s shadow overlays a Yoni-shaped crop circle in a suggestively penetrative image. On Led Zeppelin II the image is potentially more macho. The dirigible is reprised, but this time as a vast blank in front of which is a sepia photo of world war one flying aces onto whose bodies the faces of the band are superimposed. The cover of Houses of the Holy continues to attract controversy today because of the naked pre-pubescent children on the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland crawling across its cover; and the creepily nuclear family stare fixedly at the mysterious phallic object on their table on the sleeve of Presence. (The album was originally going to go by the even more suggestive title of Obelisk.) Onstage, too, there is a phallic forest of mic stands, guitar necks, and drumsticks, emphasising erect male agency and overcompensating in the face of the threat of castration. Plant promised—and delivered—every inch of his love to his audience.

Images of domination and control in Zeppelin’s songs result in the active female body being both demonized and neutralized. The process of substituting an inanimate object as the object of desire allows the hero (in this case Plant) to conquer the enduring and horrific fear of castration. Exactly who is ‘trampled underfoot’ has become key—a symbolic relationship with a car (“Guaranteed to run for hours, mama it’s a perfect size”) is considerably less threatening for the male singer than one with a human female, and it is one that still delivers an almost orgasmic satisfaction: “Gun down on my gasoline, I believe I’m gonna crack a head.” This chapter should, at the very least, offer a possible explanation for the band’s repeated—almost compulsive—return to the impossibility of an unproblematic relationship between men and women. This theme was dramatised in their albums in new and innovative ways but also had at its heart age-old psychological and musical impulses and traditions. Human relationships transcend time and place, and, to use one last metaphor, whether it’s the Sacher-Torte of early twentieth-century Vienna, or the Custard Pie of the English Midlands in the 1970s, the pie remains the same.