When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  The idea that rock music might also be related to occult practices hardly began, or indeed ends, with the long-held view that Page – and, ergo, Led Zeppelin – were dabblers in black magic and/or holders of so-called Satanic beliefs. Indeed, the most enduring myth about the band is that three of its members – the exception being the ‘quiet one’, John Paul Jones – entered into a Faustian pact with the Devil, signing away their immortal souls in exchange for Earthly success. Only someone who knew nothing about the occult could indulge in such an obvious fantasy, though. That is not to say that Jimmy Page has never been involved in occult practices; rather, the opposite – that Page’s interest in occult ritual is so serious and longstanding it would be facile to suggest anything as feeble-minded as a pact with the Devil. As for involving anyone else in the band…that would have been like inviting them to co-produce the Zeppelin albums with him: a recipe for disaster that would only dilute and distort – completely ruin, in fact – what this master musician and would-be magician was attempting to do. Or as he would have put it back then – to invoke.

  Even in 1970, the year Page’s deepening interest in the works of the charismatic Crowley became public for the first time with the abbreviated inscription of his famous maxim, Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law, into the various run-out grooves of Led Zeppelin III, rock as devil’s music was hardly a new idea. Even mama-loving, god-fearing Elvis stood accused early on of doing the Devil’s work with his dangerously gyrating rhythms and head-turning beats. While other stars of Presley’s generation like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were so convinced of the intrinsic ungodliness of their music they would eventually give up years of their respective careers to wrestling painfully with the idea that what they’d been doing – inciting young people to utterly lose themselves in the wilful abandonment of rock’n’roll – was somehow wrong; not just subversive but fundamentally perverted; unfit for consumption by decent churchgoing folk. It was a notion compounded by the common-held belief that the blues – the forefather of rock’n’roll – was propagated by itinerant black men who, it was claimed, had been taught to play while sitting atop gravestones at midnight, or, in the case of Robert Johnson, from the Devil himself, encountered after dark at a certain crossroads. Such fanciful ideas were lent unsettling credence by the fact that so many early blues songs were built on notions of eternal damnation begun here on Earth, the outsider following his lonely doom-laden path, itself a perversion of the real roots of the music, which lay in preaching, the church, gospel and the praise of God, but which the blues now delivered unto the jook-joints, roadhouses and dollar-a-go brothels populated by gun-toting, fatherless men and evil, duplicitous women to whom it was a foregone conclusion a po’ boy would surely lose his soul.

  However, compared to the more intentionally subversive ideas being espoused just a decade later in the music of those flamboyantly attired, long-haired, album-oriented groups that took their cue from the Beatles and the Stones, what the original Fifties generation of rock’n’rollers was up to is now seen as woefully innocent, quaint almost. The image of Aleister Crowley had already shown up at the personal request of John Lennon on the cover of Sgt. Pepper – glaring balefully out from between Mae West and one of George Harrison’s Indian gurus – three years before a sniggering, stoned Jimmy Page instructed engineer Terry Manning to scratch Crowley-isms into the run-out grooves of the third Zeppelin album. And the Stones – influenced as much by Brian Jones’ girlfriend Anita Pallenberg’s enthusiastic but amateurish interest in the occult as by Mick Jagger’s passing fascination with intellectual notions of good and evil and Keith Richards’ more down-to-earth but steadily increasing use of cocaine, heroin and anything else that could take him to ‘a different realm’ – had released Their Satanic Majesties Request while Jimmy was still scrabbling around on Dick Clark package tours with the Yardbirds.

  But the Stones’ flirtation with the dark side had come to an ignominious and bloody end when Meredith Hunter was murdered at Altamont, just as the band was reaching the climax of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. After that, whatever the Stones’ involvement with the occult – from Jagger’s brilliantly convincing portrayal of a degenerate rock star in the 1968 movie Performance (scripted and co-directed by Donald Cammell, son of Crowley biographer and friend, Charles R. Cammell) to his relationship with Crowley disciple, Kenneth Anger, whose 1969 underground film Invocation Of My Demon Brother (Arrangement In Black & Gold) featured the singer’s specially composed synthesiser soundtrack – was rapidly curtailed, leaving the field open for less serious but more determinedly outré rock acts like Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper to base their entire acts on an ersatz but clearly signposted association with the occult, elaborating on the earlier pantomime shtick of self-styled tremble-tremble merchants like Screaming Lord Sutch (who would come on stage in a coffin) and Arthur ‘God of Hellfire’ Brown. Even on those occasions when these next-generation rockers showed a more serious interest in the occult, their basic lack of education in the subject left them as nonplussed as most of their easily shocked audience. Terry ‘Geezer’ Butler, bassist and chief lyricist of Black Sabbath, insists he had a ‘genuine interest in the occult’ when the band first started in 1968, but it was less to do with any serious reading of Crowley and his ilk and more ‘an extension’ of his fondness for ‘science-fiction stories, horror films, anything that was kind of out there’. He also flatly denies that he or anyone else in Sabbath ever took part in any magickal rituals or spell-casting. ‘I just had a morbid interest in it,’ he told me. ‘Everybody was reading up about it. All the love and peace thing had gone, the Vietnam War thing was happening and a lot of kids were getting into all kinds of mysticism and occultism.’ His own interest ended abruptly after an incident which so frightened him, ‘I just went off the whole thing.’ Living in a one-bedroom flat that he had painted completely black, ‘I had all these inverted crosses around the place and all these posters of Satan and all that kind of stuff. Then I was just lying in bed one night and I woke up suddenly, and there was like this black shape standing at the foot of me bed. And I wasn’t on drugs or anything, but for some reason I thought it was the Devil himself! It was almost as if this thing was saying to me, “It’s time to either pledge allegiance or piss off!”’ He was so shaken he immediately repainted the flat orange. ‘I took all the posters down, put like proper crucifixes in there, and that’s when I started wearing a cross. We all did.’

  For Butler, it was partly the era as much as anything else that led so many young musicians in the late Sixties to take an interest in the occult. In an age when drugs were still considered mind-expanding and sex was based on loving the one you’re with, keeping an open mind on the subject of God and the Devil, and how the two might relate to the modern world, was clearly the more informed option. Hence, the slightly less frivolous antics of someone like Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, who in the Seventies was fond of using an Ouija board to hold séances in hotel rooms. The British writer, Peter Makowski, a confidant of Blackmore’s back then, recalls an occasion he witnessed at the Château d’Herouville studios in France when ‘Blackmore did this séance with an Ouija board. You never knew with Ritchie, though, how much was real and how much was just a wind up. He got the Ouija board out and started manipulating it himself, sending so-called messages from some malevolent spirit to this girl that was in the room, telling her she was gonna die and all this. She ended up screaming and running from the room and Ritchie just laughed.’ He adds: ‘You have to remember, there were no PlayStations in those days, no twenty-four-hour TV or internet. You had to make your own amusement.’

  A fair point, yet a cursory flick through the pages of any well-known heavy metal magazine today will reveal an endless parade of ghost-faced, zombie-like creatures, their eyes glassy with contact-lens cataracts, their nail polish black; skin pancake white, trickles of fake blood crusting at the edges of grimacing mouths. Most simply enjoy the dressing-up, weekend Goths by any other name. Ot
hers, like Britain’s Cradle of Filth, have claimed to be the real thing, while certain grisly Norwegian ‘black metal’ bands in the Nineties took to church-burning, drinking human blood, even murder in the case of former frontman, Count Grisnackh (real name: Kristian Vikernes), currently serving a twenty-one year sentence for the 1993 murder of Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth of rival Norwegian black metallists Mayhem, and the burning of three stave churches.

  Hard rock and heavy metal had become self-consciously identified with notions of ‘black magic’ and ‘devil worship’ ever since the music itself became so ultra-commoditised in the Eighties that it became an entirely niche-driven pursuit, with groups like Iron Maiden – whose knowledge of Crowley’s work, they were the first to admit, was limited solely to hearsay – having hits with intentionally headline-grabbing songs like ‘666 The Number Of The Beast’, or Ozzy Osbourne’s similarly uninformed album track from the same era, ‘Mr Crowley’, with lyrics by songwriter Bob Daisley, done purely for shock value, as befitting Ozzy’s ‘controversial’ image in the Eighties.

  It’s not just hard rock and heavy metal musicians, either. Though he now plays down his former involvement, conspicuously wearing a crucifix around his neck, David Bowie famously dabbled in occult rituals and sang of being ‘closer to the Golden Dawn, immersed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery’ in the song ‘Quicksand’ from his 1971 album, Hunky Dory. The ‘golden dawn’ being a reference to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the secret nineteenth-century Masonic society based on the arcane rituals of ancient Egypt, that boasted such illustrious members as actress Florence Farr, writer Arthur Machen, chemist (and would-be alchemist) George Cecil Jones and the poet William Butler Yeats – and to which Crowley also became a leading light in 1898. But Bowie’s interest, fuelled by mountainous supplies of cocaine and the first egocentric ravages of superstardom, tailed off in stupefied horror after the 1975 exorcism of the swimming pool at his Hollywood mansion. Present at the ritual – conducted in amateurish, coke-riven style by Bowie himself – was his then wife, Angie, who later claimed: ‘The pool was definitely, absolutely, no doubt about it, bubbling with an energy for which there was no possible physical explanation.’ When it was over, she said: ‘On the bottom of the pool was a large shadow, or stain, which had not been there before the ritual began. It was in the shape of a beast of the underworld; it reminded me of those twisted, tormented gargoyles screaming silently from the spires of medieval cathedrals. It was ugly, shocking, malevolent; it frightened me.’

  Jazz rocker Graham Bond was another unfortunate dabbler in the occult who insisted he was actually Crowley’s illegitimate son, before hurling himself – or being hurled, depending on who you believe – under a London tube train in 1974. A decade later, Genesis P-Orridge, founding member of Seventies electronic rock pioneers Throbbing Gristle, led an outfit called Psychic TV which, he claimed, was a musical art platform for a Crowleyan cult called the Temple Ov –Psychick Youth. Many other musicians such as The Only Ones, who in 1978 opened their debut album with the track ‘The Whole Of The Law’ Killing Joke, whose leader Jazz Coleman was rumoured to have taken part in Crowley-esque rituals with Page in the early Eighties; and, more recently, David Tibet, whose folk-rock outfit Current 93 are said to be ardent occultists – continue to claim Crowley as an important influence on their work. The fact remains, however, that for all their public posturing very few really well-known rock musicians can boast a truly encyclopaedic knowledge of the occult, be it of Pagan, Pantheist, Kabbalistic, Masonic, Druidic, or any other esoteric origin. A major exception to that rule, however, would be Jimmy Page.

  No mere meddler he, I once asked Jimmy if the apparently mystical aspect of much of Zeppelin’s oeuvre – be it the music, the album artwork, or simply the stage performances – was a product of the era the band reigned over (like Sabbath et al) or whether it was to do with a more longstanding personal interest. He replied: ‘I was like that at school. I was always interested in alternative religions.’ He added with a smile: ‘These days it’s alternative medicine, isn’t it? But, yes, I was always interested in mysticism, Eastern tradition, Western tradition. I used to read a lot about it so consequently it became an influence.’ And, I wondered, as the Zeppelin phenomenon grew ever larger and more unstoppable, did he feel he was tapping into something greater, some form of energy more profound than just good-time rock’n’roll, perhaps? He nodded. ‘Yeah, but I’m reluctant to get into it because it just sounds…pretentious. But, yeah, obviously, you can tell that from the live things. It was almost a trance-state sometimes, but it just sounds, you know…’ He fell silent.

  Page wasn’t always so reticent to speak on the record about such things, talking to writer Nick Kent in 1973 of the ‘incredible body of literature’ that Crowley left behind and which involved ‘a life’s study’. He went even further while being interviewed for Sounds magazine in 1976, describing Crowley as ‘a misunderstood genius of the twentieth century. Because his whole thing was liberation of the person, of the entity, and [how] that restriction would foul you up, lead to frustration which leads to violence, crime, mental breakdown, depending on what sort of make-up you have underneath. The further this age we’re in now gets into technology and alienation, a lot of the points he made seem to manifest themselves all down the line.’ Asked to elaborate, he continued: ‘[Crowley’s] thing was total liberation and really getting down to what part you played. What you want to do, do it…In an Edwardian age that’s just not on. He wasn’t necessarily waving a banner, but he knew it was going to happen. He was a visionary and he didn’t break them in gently. I’m not saying it’s a system for anybody to follow. I don’t agree with everything, but I find a lot of it relevant…’

  Or as he told Circus magazine in America the same year: ‘I read Crowley’s technical works. I read those a number of years back and still refer to them from time to time just because of his system…The more I was able to obtain of his own, as opposed to what other people wrote about him, I realised he had a lot to say.’ He denied trying to spread the word, however. ‘I’m not trying to interest anyone in Aleister Crowley any more than I am in Charles Dickens. All it was, was that at a particular time he was expounding a theory of self-liberation which is something which is so important. He was like an eye into the world, into the forthcoming situation,’ he added enigmatically. ‘My studies have been quite intensive but I don’t particularly want to go into it because it’s a personal thing and isn’t in relation to anything apart from that I’ve employed his system in my own day-to-day life…The thing is to come to terms with one’s free will, discover one’s place and what one is, and from that you can go ahead and do it and not spend your whole life suppressed and frustrated.’

  As Page said, it all began for him at school, when at the age of fifteen, he first read Crowley’s magnum opus, Magick In Theory And Practise. However, it wasn’t until Page was in his early twenties that he began to further his interest in Crowley and the occult: ‘Reading about different things that people were supposed to have experienced, and seeing whether you could do it yourself.’

  By the time Page joined the Yardbirds, he was already a frequent visitor to the studio flat in South Kensington where Brian Jones lived with Anita Pallenberg. Brian was into Paganism, Zen, Moroccan tapestries…and drugs. Anita was an aspiring film star and model, into magick, sex, hanging out with rock stars…and drugs. A small-time crook as a teenager, not only was Brian a gifted and successful musician, he was up for anything. He and Anita would hold séances at the flat using an Ouija board; or they would pile in the car and drive off to look for UFOs in the dead of night. Swinging by the Indica gallery and bookstore, buying the latest occult tomes, searching for ‘Satanic spells to dispel thunder and lightning,’ according to Winona, a mutual friend. When Jimmy bought his boathouse in Pangbourne he furnished it in a similar style to Brian and Anita’s pad, except he took better care of his growing collection of rare books, paintings, rugs and antiques. And he began to take
his ‘studies’ more seriously.

  In 1966, when Jones was hired to provide the instrumental soundtrack to a German film Pallenberg was appearing in called Mort Und Totschlag (A Degree of Murder), he rented out the same Olympic studio Zeppelin would later record in, playing sitar, banjo, dulcimer, harmonica, organ and autoharp. Ironically, the only instrument he didn’t play was guitar. Instead he asked engineer Glyn Johns to hire Page (which he did, along with keyboardist Nicky Hopkins). The music was abstract but tinged with country-and-western, blues and soul, in places ghostly and dissonant, not least on the suitably spooky title track. Ultimately, none of it was ever issued on album and the film was never shown commercially outside Germany. Nevertheless, the experience left a huge impression on Page. Clearly, what Brian was doing lay outside the bounds of what the Stones would consider for one of their own albums, and Jimmy dug that – a lot. He even began wondering what it would be like to have a group that could, somehow, contain both elements: the rock and the experimental. Page was also on hand to witness the less palatable side of Jones’s immersion in the dissolute, as over the next two years, first Pallenberg then the Stones abandoned him, rats fleeing a rapidly sinking ship. When Jones’ messy departure from the band was made public in June 1968, around the same time as news of the Yardbirds’ own break-up, Page’s name was one of the first mentioned as his possible replacement. But there was simply no way. When he wasn’t touring with the Yardbirds, Jimmy was one of the few old friends of Brian’s who made a point of visiting him at Cotchford Farm, the lonely mansion on the edge of Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, which the increasingly desperate guitarist had retreated to and was eventually found dead at, floating face-down in the swimming pool.