When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  It’s important to remember, though, that ZoSo is not a word or a name, but a magickal sign, a symbol, made up of constituent parts. Therefore we can be fairly certain that the ‘Z’ depicted thus is a stylised representation for the Capricorn astrological symbol; while the o-S-o, shown as is likely a reference to Crowley’s 666. It’s believed by occult observers to also have some relation to an obscure Crowley work entitled Red Dragon, another occult term for Kundalini energy, or downward travelling sexual energy, as opposed to upwards along the spinal column, to achieve immortality. Again, if Page was deliberately using this as part of his invocation, there can be little doubt that the fourth Zeppelin album is the one that comes closest to gifting him such ‘immortality’.

  Of course, many other such theories have been expounded over the years as to what ‘ZoSo’ really means. The o-S-o, for example, also appears quite similar to the alchemical sign for Mercury, the winged messenger of ancient myth, and therefore some believe ‘ZoSo’ to symbolise a near-death or Tantric sex ritual used to unify the worlds of the living and the dead – the light and the dark – and reveal the secrets of the universe. Others have postulated the theory that ‘ZoSo’ symbolises Cerberus, the three-headed guardian hound at the gates of hell, or that it has something to do with the pyramid of Zoser in Egypt. Some even say it is merely a joke taken from a character known as ZoSo in the children’s book series Curious George the Monkey. But these are false trails, leading nowhere.

  Ultimately, unless Jimmy Page ever decides to come out and discuss the matter more fully – exceedingly unlikely – we can never know for sure. But consider those words again – ‘invoking’ and ‘being invocative’. Clearly, ‘ZoSo’ is an occult sigil. Make of that fact what you will, but Page wasn’t joking when he chose it. As he told Nick Kent in 1973: ‘What you put out, you get back again all the time. The band is a good example of that simply because there’s an amazing chemistry at work there.’ He added: ‘Astrologically it’s very powerful indeed.’ Or as he put it to Chris Welch a year later in an interview for Melody Maker: ‘There are powerful astrological forces at work within the band. I’m sure they had a lot to do with our success.’

  Ironically, after its release, the main focus in attempting to unravel the album’s occult connections was ‘Stairway to Heaven’, with the claim popular in the Seventies and the Eighties – i.e. before the advent of CDs – that if you spun the record backwards it would reveal a Satanic message – according to Pastor Jacob Aranza of Louisiana in his booklet entitled Backwards Masking Unmasked: Backward Satanic Messages of Rock and Roll Exposed, ‘There’s no escaping it. It’s my sweet Satan!’ Given Page’s serious interest in the occult this rather unserious claim is plainly absurd.

  Since then, however, certain religious fundamentalists have made much more detailed claims for the song’s alleged ‘Satanic’ confluence. The best example of this comes from American writer Thomas W. Friend, whose 2004 book, Fallen Angel, goes to inordinate length to ‘prove’ – via a detailed breakdown of the fourth album – that not only was Jimmy Page obsessed with the occult but that he had joined in a special pact with all three of the other members of Led Zeppelin in order to bring down Christianity and ‘convert’ the world’s rock-buying audience to a devil-worshipping belief in Satan. Demonstrating an impressive – up to a point – grasp of the works of Aleister Crowley, as with all ultra-extreme views, there is a terrible plausibility to some of what Friend writes. Or at least there is for the few pages most people manage to wade through before giving up on the 600-page-plus tome after reading statements like the following one: ‘Led Zeppelin are not the Devil’s only messengers, but they are about the most powerful.’ More powerful than political leaders who wage war? More powerful than dictators who would see their own people tortured and killed?

  Yet what Friend has to say about the fourth album in general, and ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in particular, manages to stumble upon certain points that certainly carry resonance, given its principal author’s preoccupations at the time it was recorded. As Jimmy himself told me: ‘There’s lots of subliminal stuff there. [All the albums] were put together, there’s a lot on them – a lot of little areas that you don’t catch first off, sometimes not for a long time. But the more attention you pay to them, the more you get out of them. And they were meant to be that way, and that’s good.’

  Therefore when Friend writes of the fourth album’s evocation of what he calls ‘Aleister Crowley’s bold Luciferian teachings’, one sighs at the inference of ‘evil-doing’ yet cannot entirely dismiss the suggestion as so much else about the album plainly does allude to exactly that. Similarly, when Friend picks up on Page’s comment to Guitar World in January 2002 that ‘if something really magickal is coming through, then you follow it…We tried to take advantage of everything that was being offered to us’, with Friend adding that Plant’s ‘channelling’ of the lyrics put him in touch with malignant spirits, possibly Lucifer himself, and that Lucifer has ‘a female consort in the form of light’, hence the line in the song ‘There walks a lady we all know, who shines white light and wants to show’, it causes one to take a step back and think again. Does this seeming religious fanatic have a point?

  Further references to Lucifer follow, says Friend, in the verse that goes: ‘And it’s whispered that soon, if we all call the tune, then the Piper will lead us to Reason/And a new day will dawn for those who stand long, and the forests will echo with laughter…’ arguing that Pan the Piper, aka the Greek God of the forests, was also characterised by Crowley as ‘Lucifer the Piper, the maker of music’, also citing the verse in Ezekiel chapter 28:13 that describes God creating Lucifer ‘as the celestial composer of music, with celestial pipes’. In short, according to Friend, ‘“Stairway to Heaven” is nothing less than a song about “spiritual regeneration”, or as he puts it: “born again Satanism”, adding that the “reason” the Piper leads us to in the song, in Crowleyan terms at least, is nothing less than “a worship of Lucifer”.’

  At which point one fears he doth protest too much. It’s interesting to note, however, that Kenneth Anger – Crowley acolyte, upper-echelon member of the O.T.O. and, at the time of the fourth Zeppelin album, personal friend of Page’s – would himself later describe ‘Stairway to Heaven’ as Zeppelin’s ‘most Luciferian song’. Certainly, the lyrics seem to be concerned with a quest for a spiritual rebirth. While its unambiguously Pagan imagery of pipers, May Queens, shadows that stand ‘taller than our soul’, whispering winds ‘crying for leaving’, again, for anyone who knows anything about the occult, suggest a desire to get back to an older, lost world governed by older, more plentiful gods who can be directly appealed to and where personal transformation is still a tangible, achievable goal.

  Or maybe not. As Dave Dickson says, ‘I doubt that any but the most hardcore followers of Crowley would still say they want to destroy the Church. I think Page would fit in with the crowd that says, “Okay, I don’t believe in that [the Church], can I just get on and do my own thing in my own way, and just be left alone.”’ Reading too much into Zep’s music, he says, is too easy, like misreading the Bible. ‘Whatever belief system you want to throw up, you can find it. So someone comes along and says “Stairway to Heaven” is actually a “Stairway to Hell”, and if you’re not very smart or you want to believe that, it must be incredibly easy to fall into that. Oh right, yes, of course, why didn’t I know that? You’ve only got to look at Mark Chapman blowing Lennon away, or Manson previously, to see that people will read anything they like into songs or books or whatever they want. Charlie Manson believed the Beatles were talking to him personally. Were they? No, he was actually insane. “Stairway to Heaven” is a great song, but I would be very surprised if Robert Plant could put his hand on his heart and actually tell you what the lyrics are about.’

  Nevertheless, it’s a subject Plant would become increasingly agitated by over the years. Speaking in 1988, he told Q magazine how, despite his later equivocation about the song, at the
time it was recorded, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was ‘important and it was something I was immensely proud of [and] the idea of the Moral Majority stomping around doing circuit tours of American campuses and making money from saying that song is Satanist and preaching their bullshit infuriated me to hell. You can’t find anything if you play that song backwards. I know, because I’ve tried. There’s nothing there…It’s all crap, that devil stuff, but the less you said to people, the more they’d speculate. The only way to let people know where you’re coming from is to talk to the press, and we never said fuck all to anybody. We never made a pact with the devil. The only deal I think we ever made was with some of the girls’ high schools in San Fernando Valley.’

  Could it be possible though that Page had somehow planted the seed in the singer’s mind? Had Jimmy ever discussed the occult with the rest of the band, Nick Kent asked him in 2003? ‘I may well have had discussions with Robert about mysticism,’ he replied somewhat disingenuously. But as Kent pointed out, Plant was always more focused on hippy ideals of peace and love, while Page’s was the much darker presence. ‘Whether I was attracted to the dark, or it was attracted to me, I don’t know,’ Jimmy replied typically enigmatically.

  Whatever the truth, from here on in, nothing would ever be the same again for Led Zeppelin. ‘My personal view is that [the fourth album] is the best thing we’ve ever done,’ John Bonham told Melody Maker at the time of its release. ‘The playing is some of the best we’ve done and Jimmy is like…mint!’ Page later told me he sees the fourth album as a culmination of all the band’s best ideas. ‘Consequently, you started to feel it was tangible – all the areas within the band. It was just a matter of tying it in. That’s why an organic album like the fourth album was so good to do.’ It demonstrated, he said, ‘the difference of what Zeppelin was about – the calibre of the musicians. The four individual parts making this fifth monster, you know…’

  Some would argue that there were even greater albums to come, but it was their fourth resolutely untitled album that enabled Led Zeppelin to finally transcend their status as a ‘heavy rock’ band and transmogrify into something else entirely: a living, fire-breathing legend. From here on in, the story of Led Zeppelin entered a whole new category – epic, trangressional – where the real myth began to take hold, not just the one circulated amongst American groupies, but the stories that have continued to hold audiences spellbound ever since. Or as John Paul Jones once put it: ‘After this record no-one ever compared us to Black Sabbath again.’

  11

  We Are Your Overlords

  If the first four years in the life of Led Zeppelin had been about empire-building, the next four – from 1972 to ’75 – would find them overseeing their kingdom with all the splendid pomp and inherent arrogance of Pharaohs. Self-made millionaires so famous they now hid behind armed guards, employed their own drug-dealers and flew by private jet, the same period also found them at their creative zenith, taking their music far beyond the bounds of most other rock groups. Indeed, only the Stones matched them at this time for musical promiscuousness, as both groups toyed, variously, with funk, reggae, country, West Coast…Arguably, Zep went even further, allowing jazz, synthesisers, folk, doo-wop and Asian raga influences to seep into their signature sound. They went further in terms of on the road outrage too. Keith may still have draped silk scarves over his bedside lamps, carried guns and knives and shot up heroin, while Mick certainly kept the ladeez busy, but no-one was busting up rooms, cars, jaws like Bonzo, nobody was a bigger babe-magnet than rocket-in-my-pocket Plant, and not even Keef could keep up with nocturnal Pagey’s non-eating, non-sleeping regime of smack, coke, Quaaludes, Jack Daniel’s, cigarettes, weed, wine, whatever. Plus, Jimmy was the only one using whips and magic wands on any sort of regular basis. As the then new PR, BP Fallon, says now: ‘Do you remember laughter? Mix in yarns of drugs a go go…and fish. Coke? Smack? A red snapper? Was that most meticulous of musicians Jimmy Page at one point drifting too far from shore in the arms of Morphia? Whack in tales of darkened hotel suites and angels with broken wings and white feathers on the bathroom floor. And thus the seeds to some of the many mysteries of Led Zeppelin…’

  Still basking in the enormous success of the untitled fourth album, the band took the start of 1972 off. All except for Page who began working on a follow-up almost immediately, compiling demos of new ideas at his home studio. By late April, Zeppelin had hired the Stones’ mobile unit again and begun recording at Jagger’s country pile, Stargroves – where engineer Andy Johns had worked on the Sticky Fingers album – continuing later at Olympic, then Electric Lady in New York. Between times they had fitted in their first tour of Australia and New Zealand, a four-week schedule that saw them headlining 25,000-capacity venues like the Western Spring Stadium in Auckland and the Showground Stadium in Sydney. There had also been a large outdoor concert planned for Singapore but the band was refused entry by customs officials who objected to their long hair.

  On their way back from Australia, Page and Plant stopped off in Bombay for a date Jimmy had arranged with the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, recording rough-and-ready versions of ‘Friends’ and ‘Four Sticks’. ‘The idea was to go there and to try and utilise some of the film people because we were told that they were the best musicians,’ Jimmy explained. ‘I had a contact via Ravi Shankar and was put onto somebody who got the musicians together. We went to a studio and all they had was a Revox [reel-to-reel tape recorder]. But the musicians were so fast! In fact, “Four Sticks” was difficult for them because there were lots of changes in the timings. But we also did “Friends” and that was astonishing. I had given them a sort of reward of a bottle of scotch after we’d done “Friends”, cos all we were gonna try was the one number. And they’d all had a tipple and I think they fell apart a bit,’ he laughed. ‘It was purely an experiment to see how we would get on recording like that. One of the things that we always wanted to do was to actually go around doing concerts in places like that and Cairo, going all the way through Asia. Well, the closest we ever got to it was going to Bombay. George Harrison had done the things he did with the Beatles but no-one had actually worked with any of the musicians from India, got a proper orchestra together. It would have been great.’

  The sixteen-date US tour that summer had again been phenomenally successful, including two blistering performances in LA at the Forum on 25 June and Long Beach Arena two nights later. Ticket-wise, Zeppelin was now outselling the Stones (touring their Exile on Main Street album that year) by a ratio of 2:1. In terms of publicity, however, Zeppelin still came a poor second to Jagger and co. with their impossibly glamorous entourage that included Princess Lee Radziwell (sister of Jackie Onassis) and writer Truman Capote. As Jimmy moaned to the NME: ‘Who wants to know that Led Zeppelin broke an attendance record at such-and-such a place when Mick Jagger’s hanging around with Truman Capote?’

  The new album – actually given a title this time, Houses of the Holy – should have been released in August but again there were problems with both the artwork and the mix and it was eventually put back until the start of 1973, by which time the band had completed their second Japanese tour and a long twenty-five-date jaunt around the UK, which began in December and continued to the end of January – the last time the band would ever tour their home country. They didn’t know it then, though. Instead, this was seen as a triumphant homecoming parade.

  Not that everything went smoothly. Bill Harry, the band’s London PR, who had become used to ‘walking into the Speakeasy and a plate of spaghetti comes flying through the air and lands all over your suit’, quit his job after another such ‘adventure’. Bill had been having a quiet drink at the Coach & Horses pub in Poland Street one afternoon when Bonzo walked in with Chicken Shack guitarist Stan Webb, both men ordering a concoction comprising measures from every bottle behind the bar all thrown together in one large glass. After drinking which ‘they went berserk’.

  Ordered by Bonham to fetch a couple of journalists for immed
iate interview, Harry tried to laugh it off. Interpreted as a snub, Bonzo ‘leaned over and ripped the pocket off my trousers and all my money and keys went flying. He ripped my shirt as well and I was absolutely furious. I said, “I’m finished with you; I want nothing whatsoever to do with Led Zeppelin ever again. If I see you in the street, you’d better cross the road”.’ Grant later phoned Harry and apologised, advising him to ‘go out and buy the most expensive pair of trousers you can find and send me the bill.’ But Bill was not for turning, telling Peter, ‘I just can’t handle them anymore.’

  Chris Welch, who had become pals with Bonham, even being invited up on stage in Germany on one tour to play bongos during ‘Whole Lotta Love’, witnessed the incident but insists ‘John wasn’t nasty, just very loud and boisterous. Because John, who was drunk, thought Bill was ignoring him, he grabbed him as he went past and ripped off his trousers.’ Not nasty at all – unless they happened to be your trousers.

  Bill’s replacement was the younger, more flamboyant self-styled ‘PR guru’ B.P. Fallon, a young Irishman who’d made his name in Dublin as a teenage DJ, before becoming a photographer and writer. These days, Beep, as he became known, provides ‘the vibe’ for artists as diverse as U2, Boyzone and Courtney Love. When he began working for Zeppelin in 1972, it was his work with T. Rex that brought him to their attention. As he says now: ‘Dig, the band and G were well aware of my work with Marc Bolan and T. Rex – and that had become the biggest rock’n’roll splash in Britain since the Beatles. Everyone knew that, including the Beatles themselves. So Peter phoned me and we had a meet in his office in Oxford Street and I said “Look, if this is going to work to the max, we all need to spend time together in a band situation to see how we get on, to see if we’re digging each other.” So they flew me out to Switzerland where they were doing a couple of gigs. They knew I loved rock’n’roll and in Montreaux at [promoter] Claude Nobs’ house we bonded over some brilliant Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps French double LPs. Then at the afternoon soundcheck I was sitting on the stage on an amp of Jimmy’s when I heard this thud and realised that in the middle of this very loud music all around me I’d managed to fall asleep – and landed on the floor still asleep. Years later, the band said they’d been impressed by my ability to do that! God! And they knew I was what some folk might call eccentric – for the first gig I turned up in my blue velvet cloak, eye-shadow a-go-go, nail varnish boogie, pushing it, you know, to see what’d happen. Bonzo wasn’t sure what to make of it at first but I caught him smiling. And after the gig, which was spectacular, we had dinner up a snow-covered mountain in this ooh la la restaurant and I was sitting with Jimmy and when the bowls of cherries in Kirsch came I said to the Maitre D, “This is lovely but would you be so kind as to take it away and remove the cherries and bring it back with large glasses so we can drink it more easily, please?” And laughing like lunatics we all slid back down the mountain to the hotel and that was the beginning of Led Zeppelin being stuck with me on and off for seven years…’