Looking back almost 35 years later, Plant could still take great pride in the record. “I think [it] was beautifully written in most areas,” he told Uncut’s Nigel Williamson. “It wasn’t overstated. It was crafted.”
“We were really playing properly,” Jimmy Page told Dave Schulps. “The different writing departures that we’d taken, and the cottage, and the spontaneity aspect, plus things that we’d written at home … really came across in their best … their most disciplined form.”
Even now, the saga of wasn’t quite finished. “There was a holdup about pressings, and whether the masters would stand up to how many pressings,” Plant recalled. “The whole story of the fourth album reads like a nightmare.” Finally, early in July 1971, the mixed tapes were delivered to Soho’s Trident Studios for mastering. The fourth Led Zeppelin album was finished.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t. There were still decisions to be made about the album’s presentation—about its title, its sleeve, and its marketing.
The album’s title was a thorny issue for the band. So angry were they at their treatment by the rock press that they wanted the LP to make a kind of anti-statement. “Names, titles, and things like that don’t mean a thing,” remark Jimmy Page. “What does ‘Led Zeppelin’ mean? It doesn’t mean a thing. What matters is our music. If we weren’t playing good music, nobody would care what we call ourselves. If the music was good, we could call ourselves the Cabbage and still get across to our audience.”
Following the lead of the Beatles’s deliberately nonhyped “White Album” in 1968—and perhaps influenced by the Byrds’s (Untitled) (1970)—Zeppelin decided their fourth album simply wouldn’t have a title. As Page remembered it, “I put it to everybody else that it might be a good idea to put out something [that] was totally anonymous.” Moreover, the sleeve would feature no words of any kind. “We wanted a cover with no writing on it,” Robert Plant said. “No company symbols or anything. The hierarchy of the record business isn’t into the fact that covers are important to a band’s image.”
“When you haven’t put out an album for a year, and there’s this huge enigma that’s blown up, and then you put out an album with no title whatsoever,” Jimmy Page said, “some people would consider that to be suicide. But the whole thing had to be done to satisfy our own minds after all the crap that had gone down in the newspapers—and still does.”
By “all the crap,” Page meant the charges of hype that had accompanied Led Zeppelin from the onset of their career. For the group, the underselling of their fourth album was an opportunity to make a point. “There aren’t any photographs of the band members to be found anywhere on the double jacket or its inner sleeve,” American critic Ron Ross wrote in 1975. “No title, no pix, no gimmicks. Whatever one decided to call Led Zeppelin, a ‘hype’ was never appropriate.”
“I think the genius of Jimmy Page that people are always missing is the idea of the anti-establishment ‘punk’ things that he was doing,” said Jack White. “Things like releasing records with no information and no writing on the cover. I mean, that’s pretty bold. Not releasing singles. Not doing interviews. All those things were pretty punk, man. A lot more punk than the Sex Pistols signing a contract in front of Buckingham Palace.”
Instead of a title, Zeppelin chose to print four runic symbols on the album’s label, as well as on the spine of its cover. The “name” of the band’s fourth album was, literally, the symbols they individually chose to represent themselves. “I think Four Symbols at the time was how it was referred to by us,” Page told the BBC. “But it is runes, yeah, runes. [Though] I don’t think we used to refer to it as the runes album ourselves.”
The runes in question were symbols pictured in Rudolph Koch’s The Book of Signs, a typically esoteric volume owned by Page. “[ Jimmy] showed me this book he had,” John Paul Jones remembered, “and said we should all choose a symbol from the book to represent each one of us.” Later, after they’d picked their symbols, Jones and John Bonham learned that Page and Plant had had their runes custom-designed. “Typical, really,” huffed Jones.
“Each of us,” said Plant, “decided to go away and choose a metaphysical type of symbol [that] somehow represented each of us individually—be it a state of mind, an opinion, or something we felt strongly about, or whatever. Then we were to come back together and present our symbols.”
“At first I wanted just one symbol,” said Page. “But since it was our fourth album and there were four of us, we each chose our own. I designed mine, and everybody else had their own reasons for using the symbol selected.”
The four symbols were arranged in a typical magical formation, with the two strongest symbols— Page’s and Plant’s, naturally— on the outside, supposedly to protect the weaker two on the inside.
Page’s symbol seems to read “ZoSo,” though he never intended it to resemble a word. “That’s not the pronunciation, it’s just a doodle,” he claimed. “Although it looks more like writing than the other three, that wasn’t the intention.” Note, however, that “Zos” was the magical name adopted by artist/magus Austin Osman Spare, a man whose satanic preoccupations rivaled even those of Page’s main man Aleister Crowley.
“To this day, I don’t know what Jimmy’s sign meant,” says Richard Cole. “For all I know, he could have been having a fucking laugh with everyone. It could have just been some old [crap] he thought up to get people at it—which is not unlikely with him.”
Plant’s rune—a feather in a circle—came from Native American symbolism. “My choice involved the feather—a symbol on which all philosophies have been based,” Plant explained. “For instance, it represents courage to many Indian tribes. I like people to lay down the truth. No bullshit. That’s what it was all about.”
Jones’s glyph, from Koch’s book, was a circle overlaid with three interlocking almond shapes. “John Paul chose his because apparently it needed some precision and dexterity to draw it,” Jimmy Page said. Koch himself claimed it was used to ward off evil.
As for Bonzo’s three overlapping rings, they represented his feelings about the family life that meant so much to him. “I suppose it’s the trilogy—man, woman, and child,” Plant remarked. “I suspect it had something to do with the mainstay of all people’s belief. At one point, though—in Pittsburgh, I think— we observed that it was also the emblem for Ballantine beer.”
The relationship between the runes and the album’s cover image is hard to determine. A framed photograph of an old bowler-hatted peasant, stooping beneath the weight of a bundle of branches, hangs on a wall whose flowery paper is peeling badly. When the gatefold sleeve is opened up, we see that the wall belongs to a demolished terrace house, behind which rises a soulless tower block, seen against a glum, off-white sky. (The depressing cityscape was located in Eve Hill, in the Midlands town of Dudley—an area all too familiar to Plant and Bonham. Ironically, the tower block was itself later demolished.)
To the left of the tower block, we can just make out a poster on the wall of a house that’s still standing. The band had hoped it would be clearly identifiable as a poster for the Oxfam charity. “Unfortunately, the negatives were a bit of a bluff, so you can’t quite read [it],” Page said. “It’s the poster where someone is lying dead on a stretcher, and it says that every day somebody receives relief from hunger. You can just make it out on the jacket if you’re familiar with the poster.”
The sleeve concept for was the joint creation of Page and Plant—the latter had bought the print of the old man from a junk shop in Reading. “The picture of the old man was Robert’s,” says Richard Cole. “None of us could work out why the fuck he wanted that old bit of rubbish on the cover.” For Page, the picture represented “the old way on a demolished building, with the new way coming up behind it.”
As uncomfortable as he looked, in Page’s eyes the old man was in harmony with nature. “He takes from nature and gives back to the land,” said the guitarist. “It’s a natural circle. It’s right. His ol
d cottage gets pulled down and they put him in these urban slums, terrible places.”
Page-watchers have identified the old man as George Pickingill, a 19th-century witch and sex magician with Masonic and Rosicrucian connections, and a man said to have staged nocturnal orgies in graveyards. (Aleister Crowley is rumored to have been a member of one of Pickingill’s covens sometime around 1899.) But the resemblance to “Old George” is unlikely to be more than coincidence. Certainly, Pickingill would have held little appeal for Plant, let alone for Jones and Bonham. “I’ve never shared those preoccupations with [ Jimmy],” Plant said in 2005, “and I don’t really know anything about it.”
“No one really delved into what Jimmy did, to be honest with you,” says Richard Cole. “He didn’t really speak about it much. It was as much of a mystery to us as it was to everyone else.” (The first that the others knew of the infamous Crowley dictum “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” that Page had inscribed in the runoff matrix—the spiraling groove that caused the needle to lift off a vinyl LP and return to its dock—of Led Zeppelin III was when they first saw the album’s test pressing.)
On the inside cover of the gatefold was an illustration—in pencil and gold paint—by artist Barrington Colby, an acquaintance of Page’s. Entitled “View in Half or Varying Light,” it showed an old, becloaked man standing atop a mountain with a lantern. “The illustration was my idea,” said Page. “Some people say it has allusions to [Victorian painter] Henry 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.” (Needless to say, there are many who insist the Colby illustration has a more malign occult significance, claiming that when you hold the image up to a mirror, the face of a horned beast is revealed halfway down the mountain. There is also something undeniably sinister about the recreation of Colby’s picture in Page’s fantasy sequence in The Song Remains the Same, filmed near Boleskine House on December 10 and 11, 1973.)
It was Page, too, who chose the art nouveau typeface for the lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven” that were reproduced on the album’s inner sleeve. “I found it in a really old arts-and-crafts magazine called Studio, which started in the late 1800s,” said the part-time aesthete. “I thought the lettering was so interesting, I got someone to work up a whole alphabet.”
Hermits and art nouveau typefaces were one thing, but when Atlantic Records got wind of Led Zeppelin’s plans to release the album without a title, Ahmet Ertegun and his chief lieutenant Jerry Greenberg had kittens. Page and Peter Grant stood firm, however.
“We had trouble initially, but Ahmet believed in us,” Grant recalled. “Again it was a case of following our instincts and knowing that the cover would not harm sales one bit. And we were right again.”
“I remember being in an Atlantic office for two hours with a lawyer who was saying, ‘You’ve got to have this,’ ” Page recalled of a heated meeting in New York. “So I said, ‘Alright, run it on the inside bag. Print your Rockefeller Plaza or whatever it is down there.’ Of course, they didn’t want to have a rerun on it, so there it is. It was a hard job, but fortunately, we were in a position to say, ‘This is what we want,’ because we had attained the status whereby that album was going to sell a lot.”
Robert Plant put it more tersely: “We just said they couldn’t have the master tapes until they got the cover right.” When Zeppelin played Madison Square Garden on September 3, the singer apologized for the delay in the album’s release, adding that “we’ve got problems trying to get a record cover that looks how we want it.” Looking back in the late ’80s on the tussle with Atlantic, Plant told Joe Smith that it was “quite hilarious that we followed everything meticulously right down the line.”
Atlantic finally backed down, and Led Zeppelin had the album the way they wanted it. When at last it appeared—released on November 8, 1971, in the United States and November 19 in the United Kingdom—it was almost a year since the band had begun work on it.
“Once the album was completed and mixed, I knew it was really good,” Page later said. “We actually went on the road in America before the manufacturing process was completed, and somebody at Atlantic said, ‘This is professional suicide for a band to tour without an album.’ In retrospect, that’s rather amusing.”
The strain had taken a heavy toll on Led Zeppelin. Touring throughout the year with no new album to promote despite the frequent live airing of its songs, the group had experienced some hairy moments on its travels. On July 5, the group was inadvertently involved in a full-scale riot in the Vigorelli stadium in Milan. Overreacting to the enthusiastic audience of 15,000, police stormed the stadium with tear gas and water cannons.
“When we went in, we could see these riot police,” Page remembered. “We saw a few of them in a van, but as we started to play … we could see movement [around] the catwalk, and all these riot police coming in. We just carried on playing, and there was smoke at the far end of the outdoor arena, and the promoters ran onstage and said would we tell them to stop lighting fires. So Robert asked them, we carried on playing, and there was a bit more smoke, and suddenly there was smoke by the front of the stage, and it was tear gas!”
After two shows at the Montreux Casino in Switzerland, Zeppelin headed back to North America, beginning a monthlong tour at Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum on August 19. John Bonham later informed Chris Welch that he’d been nervous prior to the tour because he wasn’t sure he would still play well. “Stairway” and “California” featured regularly in the set, “Black Dog” and “Rock and Roll”—still being introduced by Plant as “It’s Been a Long Time”—only intermittently.
The last dates Led Zeppelin played before the release of were five shows in Japan—their first appearances in the Far East. “It was a fantastic place to play,” Richard Cole remembered. “The people were so friendly and we had the best promoters looking after us.”
“I’m going to do my best to make this the best time we’ve ever had,” Robert Plant announced at the start of the band’s first night at Tokyo’s legendary Budokan Hall on September 23. “[Because] it seems to be such a difference to America. America doesn’t seem to be so good anymore, unfortunately. Maybe it’ll get better.” Four days later, fittingly, Zeppelin played a benefit concert for victims of the Hiroshima atom bomb.
A much-needed 6-week break preceded the US release of and the start of a 16-date UK tour. “Today’s the day of the Teddy Bear’s picnic,” Plant announced from the stage of Newcastle’s City Hall on November 11. “And to go with it, the new album came out. I know what they say about the length of time between the two, and I’m sure you can read all sorts of reports and toss a coin!”
Onstage, the four runes could be seen—Page’s “ZoSo” displayed on a Marshall speaker cabinet, Bonham’s linked circles on his Ludwig bass drum, Jones’s symbol draped over his Fender Rhodes electric piano. Less visible, Plant’s feather was painted onto a side speaker cabinet. For some of the UK shows, Page wore a “ZoSo” jumper that a fan had specially knitted for him.
On the freezing weekend of November 20 and 21, Zeppelin played two sold-out dates at Wembley’s Empire Pool, billed as “Electric Magic” and staged as 5-hour shows that were part circus, part vaudeville, complete with jugglers, acrobats, and even animals. “I expected a bit more from the pigs,” Plant remarked, adding that he could have brought some of his own goats along. “This was no job, this was no ‘gig,’ ” wrote Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth. “It was an event for all.”
Despite its stupendous sales over the subsequent decades, never actually topped the US album chart. The album was held off the No. 1 spot by—of all things—Carole King’s classic Tapestry, instead sitting at No. 2 for 5 weeks. (In the United Kingdom, it hit No. 1 on December 4, only to be ousted 2 weeks later by T. Rex’s Electric Warrior.) But by May 1975, the album had been a permanent resident of the US Top 60 for 3½ years.
In the
music press, met with much of the antipathy that Zeppelin was already accustomed to. “I know that there were originally quite a few people who picked up on the fourth album and gave it a good write-up,” commented Page. “But there were the usuals who gave it a good slamming. In England was where we got a major slamming.” Sounds called “a much overrated album,” with “Black Dog” clattering along “with all the grace and finesse of a farmyard chicken” and “Stairway to Heaven” “inducing first boredom and then catatonia.”
But in Rolling Stone, future Patti Smith sideman Lenny Kaye was effusive in his praise, describing as “an album remarkable for its low-keyed and tasteful subtlety” and lauding “the sheer variety of the album,” “the incredibly sharp and precise vocal dynamism of Robert Plant,” and “some of the tightest arranging and producing Jimmy Page has yet seen his way toward doing.”
Even in England there were plaudits. “If Led Zeppelin III gave the first indications that their music was by no means confined to power rock,” said Disc, “then this new album consolidates their expanding maturity. The eight cuts contained herein follow through with unbridled confidence expounding in greater detail the ideas formulated on the previous collection.”
Responses such as these went some way to placating the band, who felt that critics had finally stopped prejudging them. “After this record,” noted John Paul Jones, “no one ever compared us to Black Sabbath.”
“My personal view is that it’s the best thing we’ve ever done,” John Bonham told Melody Maker’s Chris Welch. “It’s the next stage we were at, at the time of recording. The playing is some of the best we’ve done, and Jimmy is like … mint!”
With high in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic—and elsewhere around the world— Led Zeppelin was finally able to take time off, reconvening in February 1972 for a tour of Australia and New Zealand.
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