When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Flying home to London via Geneva, there was a short break before their sixteen-date UK tour began at Newcastle’s City Hall on 11 November – three days after the fourth Zeppelin album was released in the US and a week before it finally appeared in Britain. Untitled, fans simply assumed it was called Led Zeppelin IV. After all, none of the other Zep albums had a title either, just a number. What no-one understood until the reviews pointed it out was that the new album didn’t even have a number – there was no lettering or information whatsoever included on the gatefold sleeve, not even the Atlantic logo. With the British tour now in full swing, it would be some time until the full significance of the new Zeppelin album sleeve became a subject for debate, at home and abroad, the only allusion to any sort of title the four hand-drawn symbols that elliptically adorned the brown inner bag, all of which were now reproduced as stage images, with Page even wearing a specially knitted sweater depicting his own symbol – what appeared to be the word ‘ZoSo’.

  Even more inexplicable than an album with no title, some fans found the introduction of a new acoustic set hard to swallow. It was a new section of the show first developed in the US, where they sat on stools weaving their way through ‘Going To California’, ‘That’s The Way’ and ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’. Plant, who used the acoustic section as a chance to take a breather mid-set, was forced to yell at fans to ‘Shut up and listen!’ before adding a conciliatory: ‘Give us a kiss…’ The tour reached its climax with two landmark, five-hour shows at London’s Empire Pool (now Wembley Arena) on 20 and 21 November. Dubbed ‘Electric Magic’, there was even a support bill for once, including Stone the Crows, plus Bronco on the Saturday night and Home on the Sunday. The festive atmosphere of both shows was completed by an array of novelty circus acts including performing pigs (with huge ruffs around their necks), jugglers and plate spinners. ‘That wasn’t my idea, the big circus show,’ said Jimmy, ‘it was probably Peter Grant’s. And I don’t really know how successful it all was. Electric rabbits out of an electric hat,’ he smirked.

  It was the sheer power of the music, though, that people took away with them from the Empire Pool. An entirely different proposition from the band that had tiptoed through their new material back in the spring, this was Zeppelin at full, unstoppable force. As Roy Hollingworth wrote in his Melody Maker review: ‘Nothing, just nothing, was spared. This was no job. This was no gig. It was an event for all.’

  A fortnight after the tour ended, the album sat at no. 1 in the UK charts, with demand for it so great that Richard Branson’s newly established Virgin Records was forced to set up special stands to sell that album alone. In America, the album reached no. 2, where it stayed for five weeks, held off the top spot by Carole King’s Tapestry. Six months later, aided by overwhelming airplay of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ (despite its steadfastly non-single status), it was still riding high in the US charts. It would be another three years, in fact, before the album would finally slip from the US Top Forty, on its way to its first 25 million sales, its astonishing influence on every subsequent generation of rock bands – unquantifiable yet unmistakable.

  Not that any of the reviews it received at the time foresaw its eventual eminence. In Britain, Sounds called it ‘a much overrated album’ with ‘Black Dog’ lumbering around ‘with all the grace and finesse of a farmyard chicken’, while ‘Stairway to Heaven’ ‘palls dramatically with repeated plays inducing first boredom and then catatonia’. Disc & Music Echo came closer to the truth but was still only lukewarm when it said: ‘If Zep III gave the first indications that their music was by no means confined to power rock then this new album consolidates their expanding maturity.’ For once, it was left to Rolling Stone to nail it, future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye describing it as ‘an album remarkable for its low-keyed and tasteful subtlety’ while applauding its ‘sheer variety…incredibly sharp and precise vocal dynamism [and] the tightest arranging and producing Jimmy Page has yet seen his way toward doing.’

  Ironically, given their determination to escape easy pigeonholing by making the album sleeve as seemingly anonymous as possible, a great part of the Zeppelin myth is now rooted in public and private perception of its true ‘meaning’. A framed photograph of a grizzled old hermit figure – stooped beneath the weight of a large bundle of branches he is carrying on his back – is tacked to a wall of badly peeling wallpaper which gives way, as we see when the outside of the gatefold sleeve is opened, to the crumbling wall, through which we sight a row of old-fashioned terraced houses beyond which rises a council tower block, the defining symbol of modernity in early Seventies Britain – and taken from a real photograph of the then new high-rise flats in Eve Hill, Dudley, where Bonham had recently lived with his young family, and which were eventually demolished in 1999.

  ‘When I was living in Pangbourne,’ said Jimmy, ‘I always used to go down into the second-hand shops in Reading, getting furniture and bits and pieces. And Robert came down with me one day and he spotted the Hermit picture. It was there in a second-hand shop, in the corner. I’m not talking about an antique shop, I’m talking about a real dingy second-hand shop, stuff piled all over everything, you know. Robert spotted that, and he bought it. And well spotted, you know. The idea of using it on the album was to sort of show the progress…It was done in quite a subtle way, really. The old being knocked down, the new buildings going up. They don’t look so new now, do they? But they did in that time. And there was the old ways left on the wall.’

  Of course, talk of a ‘Hermit picture’ depicting ‘the old ways’ inevitably leads to further speculation about what else attracted Page to using the picture. On the inside of the gatefold was ‘a drawing that a friend of mine had done’ in pencil and gold paint, of another, much more obviously occult Hermit figure, this time standing atop a steep mountain incline, his staff – or wand – in one hand, a burning lamp held aloft in the other, his face looking directly down the slope towards the tiny figure of a young man down on one knee, arms flung wide in supplication, and beyond him in the distance the zigzagging path he has taken from his home in a small, distant town with its church and barely visible steeple.

  Although there is no acknowledgment on the album sleeve, the illustration was by a mysterious friend of Page’s named Barrington Coleby (not ‘Colby’ as is usually reported) entitled View in Half or Varying Light. ‘The illustration was my idea,’ Jimmy told me. ‘Some people say it has allusions to [Victorian painter] William Holman Hunt, but it hasn’t. It actually comes from the idea from the Tarot card of the Hermit, and so the ascension to the beacon and the light of truth. The whole light, so to speak…’

  There are two points of interest here. The first concerns who exactly Barrington Coleby is. Extensive research unearths little or nothing about him or his work, save for just two other pictures, both in a remarkably similar style to ‘The Hermit’ of the Zeppelin sleeve. Perhaps he was not a career artist, then. A friend of Page’s who now, it seems, resides in Switzerland – the ideal place, of course, for maintaining a profile so low as to be positively subterranean; some have speculated that either he has an alternate, possibly private, source of income – or that he may not exist at all. That ‘Barrington Coleby’ was no more than a pseudonym for the art school-trained Page himself. Certainly no-one from Zeppelin ever seems to have met Coleby. As Jimmy said to me, it was ‘a drawing that a friend of mine had done, which I volunteered for the inside cover and everyone agreed’. So that was that.

  Whatever the truth, the second and more important point about the illustration given such generous space on the fourth Zeppelin album sleeve is to do with its subject matter. As Page himself has pointed out, it is clearly based on the Hermit card in the Tarot – a symbol of self-reliance and wisdom. Hence, the remark about it being to do with ‘the ascension to the beacon and the light of truth’. Might there be more to it though than this fairly pat explanation? In the O.T.O., the eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth degrees – i.e. the very highest levels of the Order, from P
erfect Pontiff of the Illuminati up to Frater Superior (the level Crowley attained) – are known as The Hermit Triad. Some believe that the Hermit, in occult terms, is also synonymous with the Magus – or Master Magician. To quote from Crowley’s The Book of Thoth: ‘…one of his [The Hermit’s] titles is Psychopompos, the guide of the soul through the lower regions. These symbols are indicated by his Serpent Wand…Following him is Cerberus, the three-headed Hound of Hell whom he has tamed. In this Trump is shewn [sic] the entire mystery of Life in its most secret workings.’ In other words, The Hermit and The Magus are both guiding lights, spirits for lesser creatures – i.e. humanity. Therefore, would it be stretching the imagination to suggest that Page, self-confessed Crowley devotee, might be suggesting that the true path to knowledge – or at least the ‘road he was on’, to paraphrase ‘Stairway to Heaven’ – is via the occult beliefs of Aleister Crowley, Eliphas Levi and the rest, all the way back to King Solomon and indeed Enoch himself? Moreover, as Dave Dickson points out: ‘If you hold the gatefold sleeve up to the mirror, it is possible to work out the figure of a black dog beneath the Hermit [which] appears to have two heads, even though Cerberus had three. So is it that big a leap to imagine that this black dog might have a third head that is less visible, perhaps pointing away from us?’

  The occult resonances of the album sleeve – and indeed the album itself – don’t end there. The original vinyl record came in a brown inner bag with the merest info on one side and the lyrics of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the other. The ornate typeface used for the lyrics was also Page’s idea, taken from the nineteenth-century arts and crafts magazine Studio. ‘I thought the lettering was so interesting I got someone to work up a whole alphabet.’ In the left-hand corner there is a small picture of an Elizabethan-looking gentleman holding a book with some mystical inscriptions engraved behind him. No-one has ever been able to offer an explanation as to who this might be. Dave Dickson, however, believes it to represent Dr John Dee, court magician and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. According to The Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley, edited by Stephen Skinner, Dee’s ‘system of Enochian Magic was one of the keystones of Crowley’s practice. Both Dee and Crowley considered that spiritual practices should be recorded in as much detail as the laboratory notes of a research chemist or physicist, or even in more detail, as the grounds of magical practice are even more shifting than those of the physical sciences. It is ironic that Crowley claimed John Dee’s amanuensis, Edward Kelly, as one of his past incarnations, showing a further kinship of spirit extending over three and a half centuries of occult practice.’

  However, it is on the other side of the brown bag that the depth of Page’s occult fascination is more obviously revealed, in the four hand-drawn symbols (or sigils) that sit atop the page: one for each member of the band. First introduced to the public via a series of teaser ads placed in the music press in the weeks leading up to the release, each depicting a particular symbol alongside a previous Zep album sleeve, as with all symbols, clearly there was a mystery here waiting to be unravelled.

  Again, this was an idea of Page’s that the band felt obliged to go along with, not really knowing what he was asking them. Arranged in magical formation, with the two strongest symbols – Page and Plant’s – placed on the outside to protect the weaker two on the inside, each carried a very specific meaning. (Sandy Denny was also given a token symbol placed next to ‘The Battle of Evermore’ – three triangles, an ancient symbol for Godhead, almost certainly chosen for her by Page or Plant, semi-jokingly, to denote her guest appearance on the track.)

  But while both Page and Plant came up with their own sigils, Jones and Bonham were content to browse through a book Jimmy had given them to choose from – Rudolf Koch’s 1930 opus, The Book of Signs. Considering how apt the signs they chose were, it seems Page knew what he was doing. For Jones, the single circle intersecting three vesica-Pisces that he found of Koch’s book symbolises a person with confidence and competence (partly because of the difficulty in drawing accurately) – the very attributes, apart from his musicianship, that John Paul most embodied in Zeppelin. There was also an occult connection in that this sign also appears in various esoteric texts, such as the Rosicrucians’. Bonham’s three intersecting circles– found of the Koch book – symbolise the man-wife-child trilogy. Again, entirely apt, for as anyone who knew John would tell you, it was the home-loving, family-obsessed Bonham that lay beneath the beer-guzzling, room-wrecking Bonzo of tour legend. Like Jones’ choice, Bonham’s also had occult resonances, the three intersecting circles also evident in the Tarot, where it represents the three evolutionary ages of Osiris (past), Isis (present), and Horus (future) – another Crowley, O.T.O. tenet.

  When Jones discovered that Page and Plant had actually designed their own symbols, he was not best pleased. ‘Typical!’ he blustered. But as Jimmy later told me: ‘They might all have had a look in the book, me and Robert too. But it was like, if you want to design your own or put something else in that was fine, too.’

  Positioned on the far right of the line, Plant’s sigil – a circle with a feather in it – was chosen by him, he later explained, because it was ‘a symbol on which all philosophies have been based. For instance, it represents courage to many Red Indian tribes. I like people to lay down the truth. No bullshit, that’s what the feather in the circle is all about.’ Whether Plant knew the encircled feather was originally the sign of Ma’at, Egyptian goddess of justice and fairness, and an occult emblem of a writer, remains unclear – though Page would surely have known. The original can be found in the book, The Sacred Symbols of Mu by the interestingly named Colonel James Churchward.

  The only symbol that remained a real mystery was the one positioned at the start of the line on the left and chosen by Page – that one that appeared to read as ‘ZoSo’. Although he never intended it to resemble a word, in the prolonged absence of any rational explanation for its meaning – the guitarist usually glaring silently at anyone rude or stupid enough to ask him outright for one – ‘ZoSo’ is what Page’s sigil has continued to be called to this day.

  Having always refused to talk about it, I was taken aback when one day, during a discussion about the fourth album’s enigmatic artwork, I simply asked Jimmy outright what ‘ZoSo’ meant and he actually answered me. First, though, he explained that the original idea he had for the album was just one symbol. ‘But that didn’t seem to be fair.’ From which I took it to mean he had intended his own ZoSo symbol. No, he said, ‘It wasn’t going to be any of the symbols that you know it to be. It was going to be like a tradesman’s symbol. You know, they used to have those sort of like…’ Like a seal? ‘Yeah…It was gonna have something like that. But in the end we thought, well, no, that isn’t quite right cos someone’s not going to be happy. So in the end, we had the four.’

  But why? Why not just give the album a conventional title? ‘Originally, because they [the music press] were going on about Zeppelin being a hype, we wanted to put out an album with no information whatsoever on the cover. But I had to go in personally and argue with the record company about it. That’s why the album took so long to come out, because they wanted to put a name on the cover. But I went in there with Peter, and I stayed in there even after Peter left, talking to them about it. I mean, I wouldn’t do that now, but then – I just didn’t want anything on the cover. Finally, it came down to, well, let’s have a symbol on it. I don’t know where that came from but I said, “You can’t have one symbol, because no-one’s going to agree on what it should be. Let’s have four symbols, and everyone can choose their own.”. And with the four symbols, that also made it “Zeppelin IV”, so it was a completely organic process.’

  And what did your sign mean? ‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘let’s just say we were breaking a lot of rules, and that was our intention.’ A pause, and then: ‘My symbol was about invoking and being invocative. And that’s all I’m going to say about it.’ A small chuckle: ‘I take it you know what Robert’s symbol is about?’ Re
mind me. ‘It’s about American Indians and bravery. Though you might also say it’s about a French maid tickling someone’s bum. But I didn’t say that…’

  ‘Invoking’ and ‘being invocative’ – a sign with magickal power then. But to invoke what? Power? Well-being? Success? As Dave Dickson says: ‘The only reason people get interested in magick is because they are interested in power. You use the skills you possess to improve your lot, everybody does.’ Is that what the ‘ZoSo’ symbol is supposed to be doing for the fourth Led Zeppelin album then? Well, it certainly became their most successful album. But might there more to it than that?

  The earliest appearance of what looks very much like the ‘ZoSo’ symbol was in the classical 1557 work Ars Magica Arteficii by a hermeticist named J. Cardan. Long out of print, a reproduction of the same symbol can now be found in the 1982 publication, Dictionary of Occult, Hermetic and Alchemical Sigils by Fred Gettings. in the Planetary Symbols section, the sigil for the planet Saturn appears to be Cardan’s ‘ZoSo’ symbol. As Page is a Capricorn, the astrological sign ruled by Saturn, this is unlikely to be mere coincidence (remembering also that Crowley taught that coincidence does not exist). The same symbol was also used by another renowned Capricorn, Austin Osman Spare, a psychic painter, Crowley disciple and another favourite of Page’s. Spare was known by the magickal name of ‘Zos’.