Led Zeppelin FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time (Faq Series)

by George Case

  Page at first wanted to use only a single logo for the record, in lieu of a conventional title, but he soon decided it would fairer to let each of the band’s musicians choose his own. Since it was his idea, of course, he ended up with the most elaborate and obscure design while the others’ were more easily sourced—in retrospect it seems that John Bonham and John Paul Jones were not overly excited about the idea and soon acquiesced to Page’s fait accompli. “He showed us The Book of Signs,” recalled Jones, “and said we should each choose a symbol. So Bonzo and I did this, though later we discovered Jimmy and Robert had gone off and had their symbols specially designed, which was typical.” The Book of Signs, a 1930 reference text by German typographer Rudolf Koch, was a common work tracing a history of European Christian and pre-Christian pictograms and runes. “John Paul Jones’s symbol… was found in a book about runes and was said to represent a person who is both confident and competent because it was difficult to draw accurately,” said Page. Jones’s choice was the circle with a trio of arcs intersecting in its center to form three ovals. Bonham, likewise, soon settled on another Koch talisman, the three interlocking circles. “I suppose it’s the trilogy,” Robert Plant interpreted afterward. “Man, woman, and child… At one point, though, in Pittsburgh, I think, we observed that it was also the emblem of Ballantine’s beer.” A variation on Bonham’s mark was used in the logo for his son Jason’s 1990’s band, Bonham. The drummer and bassist’s pick of symbols that were geometric echoes of each other implied both their musical synergy and their subordinate roles in the group. Guest vocalist Sandy Denny also received her own diminutive sign, three linked triangles, that was again taken from the Koch volume.

  Some of the inscriptions on this design by occultist John Dee resemble the alchemical and astrological symbols later taken up by Jimmy Page for his “ZoSo” trademark.

  Author’s Collection

  Robert Plant’s insignia was a more personal decision. “It represents courage to many red Indian tribes,” said the singer. “I like people to lay down the truth. No bullshit—that’s what the feather in the circle is all about.” This symbol was adapted from English author James Churchward’s The Sacred Symbols of Mu, another book from the 1930s, which purported to summarize the culture and philosophy of a Pacific lost continent; his “research,” like many of the Zeppelin intellectual influences, gained currency during the backlash against Darwin, Marx, and industrialism that drove many British eccentrics and dissenters around the turn of the twentieth century. “All sorts of things can be tied in with Mu civilization, even the Easter Island effigies,” Plant asserted. “These Mu people left stone tablets with their symbols inscribed into them all over the place.” Though few serious archaeologists have time for the Mu theory, studies like Churchward’s were rediscovered by the 1960s counterculture and esteemed as correctives to an increasingly

  Lettering and design from the nineteenth-century British journal The Studio influenced Zeppelin’s graphic style.

  Author’s Collection

  rational and secular society. The airy, delicate symbolism of Plant’s ringed feather well captured his lyrical and spiritual outlook.

  Jimmy Page’s sign from Led Zeppelin IV is not an Icelandic rune, a pseudo-ancient glyph, nor the word “ZoSo,” though many have deciphered it as those and more extreme solutions. John Paul Jones told an interviewer, “Jimmy got his [symbol] from who knows where,” and recalled the guitarist revealing to him it “was something to do with Saturday.” Essentially Page’s design is an astrological stand-in for the planet Saturn, from the centuries when the language of astrology was an advanced discipline rather than the self-help shorthand of lions, fish, twins, and scales served up today. The “ZoSo” emblem has been found in a 1557 document, Ars Magica Arteficii by Jerome Cardan (c. 1490–1565) an Italian physician and mathematician, and later turned up in two nineteenth-century French occult manuals, Le Triple Vocabulaire Infernal and Le Dragon Rouge (the latter a reprint of a 1521 manuscript). Both these and similar works are filled with many twisty, stylized designs that almost resemble words but which were once used as cryptograms in a variety of alchemical and magical practices; in each case, “ZoSo” is some derivative of the planet Saturn, the ruler of Page’s astrological sign of Capricorn. Jones’s recollection of “something to do with Saturday” is accurate insofar as the word itself is from the Latin Saturni dies, day of Saturn.

  It is possible to break down Page’s sigil into both a signification of Saturn (“Z”) and the 666 (“oSo”) as transcribed by Aleister Crowley—some have even explained it as a reference to tantric sex or the three-headed hound Cerberus—but the bottom line is that Page probably intended “ZoSo” to be a kind of written mantra, a private ideogram that applied to his personal birth sign and his own sophisticated knowledge of the occult. Like “abracadabra” or “hocus pocus,” it was an internalized term best understood only by the occultist himself. Aleister Crowley had stated that true magicians should devise numerous such terms, “and he should have quintessentialized them all into one Word, which last word, once he has formed it, he should never utter consciously even in thought, until perhaps with it he gives up the ghost.” A simple horoscope symbol for Capricorn, or the more ordinary runes of Jones and Bonham or the feather of Plant, were either too general or too obvious for Page: “ZoSo” was intricate enough to stand out visually and esoteric enough to baffle most if not all Led Zeppelin listeners. As he said to Mick Wall, “My symbol was about invoking and being invocative. And that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

  The only named credits on IV are for Page as producer, Peter Grant as executive producer, Barrington Colby for “The Hermit,” and Sandy Denny. A little-known firm registered in the very 1971 label of Graphreaks was listed as the design team (Bob Fell and Danny Halperin have been named as the proprietors); among their scant other achievements were the Who’s Live at Leeds, the Move’s Looking On, and the self-titled debut T. Rex, all from the same year. As Led Zeppelin’s biggest-selling record, containing their most popular song and several other perennial favorites, the fathomless riddles of its presentation have become as legendary as the music in its grooves. The four symbols used instead of the players’ real names certified the audience’s view that their beloved artists were not just lineups of compatible musicians but personifications of greater forces, a view begun with the four Beatles’ roles as mind, heart, soul and body, and extending to the Kiss foursome’s as the Starchild, the Demon, the Spaceman and the Cat. In today’s flux of downloading, iPods, ringtones, and other disposable culture, the rich layers of meaning hidden in the cover of Led Zeppelin IV make it not only a classic of rock ’n’ roll album photography and graphics but a triumphant example of a lost art.

  Houses of the Holy

  If not Led Zeppelin’s best album then certainly the one with the most attractive album cover, Houses of the Holy continued the wordlessness of its predecessor and extended the mystical allusions of its layout. Neither Houses nor IV have any zeppelins on their jackets. Here again another gatefold design was used inside and out, augmented with clever and painstaking use of hand-tinting to realize its luminous color effects. Houses of the Holy is one of the masterworks of album illustration credited to the London agency of Hipgnosis (cf. Graphreaks), perhaps the most successful of all the record jacket design houses from the 1970s, whose gallery of spectacular covers includes many of the best-known rock albums of all time, with clients such as Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Yes, Def Leppard, 10cc, and UFO. Founded by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell, Hipgnosis specialized in conceptual, subtly detailed vistas that combined photography and art in mind-warping combinations; one reason the craft practiced by Hipgnosis and its competitors declined in later decades was that record labels invested more of their promotional funds in videos, prohibiting all but the simplest execution of mere album covers. Houses of the Holy was Led Zeppelin’s most complicated sleeve yet, but the results were worth the expense.

  Jimmy Page fir
st approached Hipgnosis after admiring their cover for Wishbone Ash’s Argus. According to Page, Storm Thorgerson’s initial suggestion of a cover concept for the new Zeppelin record was of a tennis

  The ornate Houses of the Holy font showed Art Nouveau influences.

  Courtesy of Robert Rodriguez

  racket. “Racket—don’t you get it?” asked the artist. “Are you trying to imply that our music is a racket?” Page retorted before dismissing him. “We never saw him again,” said the guitarist. “He had some balls! Imagine—on a first meeting with a client.” The job went to Thorgerson’s partner Aubrey Powell instead, who proposed a photo of either the mysterious Nazca lines in distant Peru, or of the geological rock formation at Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. Page and Peter Grant opted for the latter (though costs were not really an issue for the band at this point), while Powell sought to create a picture that recalled the Arthur C. Clarke novel Childhood’s End. By the climax of the science fiction classic, a final generation of Earth children is taken to merge with a cosmic “Overmind.” “The island lay golden in the heartless, unfeeling sunlight…,” Clarke writes. “There was no sound or movement from the children. They stood in scattered groups along the sand, showing no more interest in one another than in the homes they were leaving forever…. The scattered, unutterably lonely figures began to converge….”

  Powell took two child models, siblings Stefan and Samantha Gates, to the Giant’s Causeway location and took a series of photos of them over several early mornings in November 1972. The gatefold shot was taken at the ruin of nearby Dunluce Castle. Because of inclement weather the natural lighting Powell wanted was unavailable and so had to be fabricated in the studio, where Phil Crennell airbrushed in the glowing blues and oranges of the final image. “When I first saw it,” Powell said, “I said, ‘Oh my God.’ Then we looked at it, and I said, ‘Hang on a minute, this has an otherworldly quality.” Page’s recollection is more practical: “When the proofs for the album came back, they didn’t look anything like the original artwork. Again, we were on a deadline and there wasn’t much to be done. I suppose it doesn’t matter now.”

  The nudity of the Gates kids—composite photography multiplied the pair into eleven bodies visible on both sides of the outside cover—has made the Houses cover Led Zeppelin’s closest to a controversial one, and it was reportedly banned in Spain and some states of the US Bible Belt. Today a whiff of exploitation might be detected in the sacrificial pose of the gatefold, where a naked adult holds one of the children aloft, and as even Powell admitted in 2009, “This could never have been done now—we’d be accused of all sorts of horrible things. In those days there was a sort of hippie innocence.” The grown man in the midst of the prepubescent brother and sister has never been identified (he may be the shoot’s makeup artist, Tom Smith), but outtakes from the photo shoot show him on the Giant’s Causeway rocks behind Samantha and Stefan. In a sequence from Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same, Robert Plant’s own children Carmen and Karac frolic naked in a brook, with the same sort of back-to-the-land, dawn-of-a-new-race spirit that informed the Houses of the Holy illustration.

  Inside the jacket, the lyrics for all the LP’s songs were printed, as well as the vocal and instrumental lineup of each track. These were done in a plainer style than the “Stairway to Heaven” typeface from Led Zeppelin IV, but on both sides the album title was inscribed (both frontward and reversed) in another Art Nouveau font, this one designed by freelance Hipgnosis hire Bush Hollyhead. Though adapted from any number of lettering motifs of the late nineteenth century, the curvy and elongated slopes of the characters became the unofficial print of subsequent Led Zeppelin promotions, with the old-fashioned hyphen between the words once more suggesting the band’s affinity for a handcrafted Britannic golden age. This font continued to be employed right up to 2007’s Mothership release. It was Peter Grant’s idea to sell the album with a removable band naming the record and its author, “to shut Atlantic up,” said the manager. Thanks to the powers of Hipgnosis, the surreal radiance of the Houses of the Holy cover makes it the Zeppelin disc that art lovers might enjoy even more than music fans.

  Physical Graffiti

  The sprawling stylistic range of this great double album is reflected in its cover, which contains the most textual and visual information visible on any Led Zeppelin record. In hindsight some of the graphic content here may be too haphazard to carry the heady insinuations of the group’s other jackets, and the façade of miniature reproductions does not translate well to the smaller media of cassette tapes or CDs, but for sheer numbers of odd, revealing, suggestive, or confounding pictures on the sleeves, Physical Graffiti is unbeatable.

  Though many two-record sets of the time came in foldout covers, Physical Graffiti bucked the trend by placing both LPs in a single outside envelope; inside was a wraparound bearing the track listings and production info, while inside that came the two jackets for the separate vinyl records. The brownstone whose windows and doorways are seen at day and night on both sides of the album was located at 96–98 St. Mark’s Place in New York City’s East Village (it’s also seen in the Rolling Stones’ 1981 video for “Waiting on a Friend”). For this project Led Zeppelin turned not to Hipgnosis but to London-based designer Mike Doud of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and New York’s Peter Corriston, who together devised the print and photo containers of the record, the most notable element of which was the die-cut holes made in the brownstone’s windows. “We walked around the city for a few weeks looking for the right building,” Corriston told the New York Times in 2002. “I had come up with a concept for the band based on the tenement, people living there and moving in and out.” The shot of the address was captured by Elliott Erwitt. In fact the real building has five stories but to properly fit onto the album cover it was reduced to four, and accidentally or not a two-story brick structure with similar window openings was used for José Feliciano’s 1973 effort Compartments. Peter Corriston was the man behind several other familiar record jackets, among them the Stones’ Some Girls (with its own cutouts), Emotional Rescue, and Tattoo You.

  From a rich and celebrated act soon to be disparaged by the punk rock explosion, the 1975 release utilized the jumbled “ransom note” lettering style before the Sex Pistols on their influential Never Mind the Bollocks cover, whose DIY technique virtually created the entire punk alphabet: the fifteen songs on the Zeppelin record are titled in exactly the same manner. The foldout sheet that wraps around the inner sleeves had the St. Mark’s Place window frames rendered by Dave Heffernan, topped by evil-looking gargoyles not present on the building. Individual track production notes were listed (the music was assembled from several years’ and locations’ worth of recording), with Page’s dig at engineer Ron Nevison for accidentally erasing early tapes of “The Rover,” which were “Salvaged by the grace of [Keith] Harwood.”

  The images on the inside covers are an incongruous range of subjects—movie stills, great paintings, stray clippings, and snapshots of the Led Zeppelin members and their associates—of which only the private pictures, taken by friends like Roy Harper and B. P. Fallon, likely bore much significance to the musicians. Some of the hokey old advertisements or editorial illustrations recall those dug up for use on Led Zeppelin II and III and anticipate the ones to be featured in Presence.

  Record one, front cover

  • Top row, left to right: Flight of RAF biplanes / Zeppelin manager Peter Grant / actress Carole Lombard / embracing couple / astronaut Buzz Aldrin

  • Second row: Robert Plant / John Bonham / John Paul Jones / Jimmy Page—all during a previous Japanese tour

  • Third row: Horse and dog portrait / Pears shaving soap advertisement / Parmigianino’s Vision of St. Jerome altarpiece / bondage outfit

  • Fourth row: Illustration of children / Wizard of Oz still / John Bonham / coronation of Queen Elizabeth II

  Record one, back cover

  • Top row: Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moo
n / cat / woman crushed by giant foot / burlesque strip reel / Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus

  • Second row: John Paul Jones / Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Prosperine / John Bonham / Robert Plant in drag

  • Third row: Buster Crabbe in Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars / Robert Plant / da Vinci’s Woman with an Ermine / angel

  • Fourth row: Woman with stockings / John Bonham and Jimmy Page in drag / John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page / coronation of Queen Elizabeth II

  Record two, front cover

  • Top row: Nun with umbrella / Laurel and Hardy in Wrong Again / black youth with ice cream cone / Pope Leo XIII / Charles Atlas

  • Second row: Embracing couple / Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra / hands-in-crotch close-up / Jimmy Page

  • Third row: Zeppelin / designer Peter Corriston (?) / designer Mike Doud (?) / bodybuilder

  • Fourth row: John Bonham and Robert Plant / woman on alligator / navy dive effect test photos / coronation of Queen Elizabeth II

  Physical Graffiti contained the most imagery of all Zeppelin album covers.

  Back cover

  • Top row: King Kong / Robert Plant / man falling from building / explosion / harp woman

  • Second row: Nude man at swimming pool (possibly Robert Plant) / Undersea Kingdom 1930s serial / Lee Harvey Oswald / John Bonham

  • Third row: John Bonham (?) / Jimmy Page in drag / Native American woman / girl with dog

  • Fourth row: Serial movie still / kitchen / devils / coronation of Queen Elizabeth II