Communication Breakdown

Much to the chagrin of some. Led Zeppelin’s animosity towards rock journalists was legendary, and perhaps rivaled only by the rock press’s animosity towards them. Despite making a huge splash with the fans, the band was slagged from the start, to the extent that early reviews of Plant had to be hidden to prevent shattering his confidence. All this negativity was understandably bewildering to the group, for whom the only plausible explanation was that the critics didn’t know shit about music.

That seems a little extreme too, but what else could it be? Maybe the media were just jealous because Zep happened to have a manager in Peter Grant who—unlike the famously inept Brian Epstein—actually secured them a lucrative advance and favorable contract terms. To the press, it seemed like Led Zeppelin arrived out of nowhere and made it big without effort. So, they were immediately dismissed as pure hype—Superhype, in fact. How else could a new band comprised mostly of complete unknowns and with only the most tenuous association with the Yardbirds—a group long in decline, irrelevant in the UK, and frequently a disaster on the road—become rich and successful without paying their dues?

Of course, these accusations were absurd.¹ Led Zeppelin had already produced a killer album at their own expense prior to being signed, and at least part of the reason Atlantic ponied up the money² was because when they heard it, they were rightly blown away. That’s not to deny the group benefitted from a combination of luck and good timing. Other reasons for Atlantic’s eagerness to attract Zep to the label included the eminent demise of Cream, the enthusiastic endorsement of John Paul Jones by Dusty Springfield, the commercial success of the Experience and Jeff Beck Group in the US, and the fact that Atlantic would incur very little studio expense in signing Zep since the recording costs of the first LP had already been absorbed by Page.

Luck notwithstanding, so far from coasting to fame and fortune without paying their dues, Jones and Page had been making hits for other bands for years. The sonic impact of Led Zeppelin I was light-years ahead of just about anything else at the time, and that was made possible because of production techniques absorbed by Page over the course of his long apprenticeship in the studio. Plant and Bonham meanwhile had been struggling to put food on the table rather than abandon playing the music they loved: Plant spread asphalt to make ends meet (kind of a Black Country version of workin’ on the railroad) and Bonham worried he couldn’t afford to join the band unless they also hired him to drive the van. The fact is, Led Zeppelin were probably the most determined and hardworking group in the biz, producing four albums in their first two years while touring virtually non-stop. In 1969 alone they released two albums, toured the US four times, toured the UK once, and played numerous additional concerts in Europe and elsewhere! But of course, that only meant Zep were sell-outs, neglecting their native Isle for the more lucrative shores of America.

Although the reports of bad press have been exaggerated—Zep certainly had their champions, too—the comments of some journalists were so negative and over-the-top you have to wonder, “Were these guys really listening to the albums they were writing about?” All questions of dues paying aside, Zep’s detractors seemed positively eager to attack the music itself. Rather than write original material and perform it with sincerity and restraint, the group was initially dismissed as just another band of white boys ripping off African American bluesmen. After all, how authentic could a London dandy (or, as Lester Bangs put it, an “emaciated fop”) like Jimmy Page covering Willie Dixon really be? The first two albums, critics complained, were loud, overblown, obvious and totally undisciplined. Without doubt, the group had legions of fans, but the masses easily mistake musical excess for musical success. Thankfully, the press were there to make damn sure they knew the difference.

When the group decided to incorporate a more acoustic vibe into III—which, given the broad acceptance of The Band, Fairport Convention, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and CSN might have been thought a welcome change of pace—they were condemned for departing from their previously successful formula. (Disc & Music Echo, for example, greeted the album with the headline “Zepp Weaken!”) But if Led Zeppelin were anything, they were most definitely not a band who stuck to prescribed formulas and that was part of their magic, their mystery. This really became apparent with the fourth album.

IV summarized, synthesized and transcended everything the band had accomplished to that point. A masterpiece by any reasonable standard, it was nevertheless dismissed by critics as a boring, airy-fairy departure from the blues-based rock that the band did best. Even when granted a certain grudging admiration, it was damned with faint praise.³ Houses of the Holy—one of the group’s most underrated efforts—received some of the worst reviews of all and it seemingly wasn’t until Physical Graffiti that mainstay rags like Rolling Stone had a kind word. But thereafter the band began to slip. The remainder of its catalogue—Presence, the Soundtrack, In Through the Out Door, and the posthumous collection of outtakes, Coda, proved somewhat uneven, frequently failing to capture the excitement of the band in its prime. By then the Punks had arrived and Zep had become lumbering dinosaurs knee-deep in the tar pits, representatives of an elite and outmoded Rock aristocracy whose primary, anti-democratic sin was actually being able to play their instruments. In other words, the musical antithesis of anarchy.

The Philosopher’s Stone

And yet! With all due respect to anarchy, Zep attracts new fans in each generation because genuine musicianship never goes out of fashion or ceases to inspire admiration and respect. Plus, they totally rock! Like Page, the time-defying wizard in his filmed fantasy sequence, the band has retained its aura and magic through the decades because “the four musical elements of Led Zeppelin making a fifth is magick itself. That’s the alchemical process.” ⁴

Alchemy seeks to transmute base metals like lead into precious ones,⁵ and there can be little doubt Jimmy Page—the consummate heavy-metal Merlin—accomplished the feat in record time. By the second LP the first album’s earthbound black and white balloon had been transformed into pure gold—the gleaming, yellow, spotlit zeppelin of II’s inner gatefold. Having gone gold, it went platinum. Then diamond. The flaming dirigible crashing to the tarmac had become a blazing Mothership blasting into the stratosphere.⁶ (Unfortunately, what goes up must come down, whether the space shuttle Columbia, the agonized Icarus figure of the Swan Song logo, a randy rock-star erection, or the TVs in the upper-floor suites of Bonzo’s hotel accommodation!)

That Zep were to be a dynamic, evolving, transformative band was all according to plan. Page wanted Zeppelin to implement his original vision for a new kind of rock, one both light and heavy, soft and hard, light and dark. So far from being a formula, though, this was the rejection of all genres, of everything formulaic. The band’s music defies easy classification, and attempts to pigeon-hole them as “hard rock,” “heavy metal,” or “psychedelic blues” invariably over-simplify their creative legacy. And just as the richness and complexity of Zep’s musical output challenge and stubbornly resist our tidy musical categories, philosophy challenges and clarifies the customary and everyday categories we use to think about creativity, experience, recognition, consciousness, reality, ethics, knowledge, religion, art, beauty, meaning, identity, love, and yes, sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll.

These Things Are Clear to All from Time to Time

When friends and colleagues found out that I was editing a philosophy book on Led Zeppelin, their reaction quickly became predictable: “What does Led Zeppelin have to do with philosophy?” Apparently, because Zep can bump, pound, pump, grind, and drink, lots of people assume they’ve got nothing very profound to say (and, more to the point, that nothing very profound can be said about them). This is a book on Led Zeppelin and philosophy, not the philosophy of Led Zeppelin (though some of the contributions within do argue that there’s a philosophy of the group and set out to explore that philosophy). But Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were not shallow people. Page was an ardent student of esoteric thought, and Plant was very well read in mythology and British history. They were keenly aware of non-western philosophic and spiritual traditions through their travels in the Orient, India, and Arabic North Africa, and both “yearned for wider recognition, not only of their talent but of their increasing sophistication and worldliness.”⁷ They were, in their own ways, travelers of both time and space, spiritual aspirants seeking the truth (a point emphasized by Page’s ascent and transformation in The Song Remains the Same).

For many this first became obvious when Zep firmly asserted their artistic prerogatives over the packaging of their fourth album.⁸ The hermit that graces the inner gatefold of IV is a figure from the Tarot signifying wisdom, the inner search, philosophy, selfreliance and truth. Plant’s feather symbol on the inner bag of IV connotes truth also. Robert sings on “Stairway”—the first lyrics ever printed on a Zeppelin album and the only lyrics printed from IV—that “if you listen very hard, the tune will come to you at last.” The piper will lead us to reason.

He also, at the end of three verses, expresses childlike wonder—at our words, meanings, thoughts, voices and choices. Aristotle claimed that philosophy begins in just such wonder. If you’ve ever wondered how much there is to know, the contributors to this volume offer some signposts to the confounded bridge.

SCOTT CALEF