Led Zeppelin IV

by Barney Hoskyns

  Plant addressed the subject on Physical Graffiti’s “Sick Again,” a song about LA’s platform-booted Lolitas. “Clutching pages from your teenage dream in the lobby of the Hotel Paradise,” he sang; “through the circus of the LA queens, how fast you learn the downhill slide.”

  “The words show I feel a bit sorry for them,” he told Cameron Crowe. “One minute she’s 12 and the next minute she’s 13 and over the top. Such a shame. They haven’t got the style that they had in the old days … way back in ’68.”

  LA groupies aside, Zeppelin’s US tours became increasingly debilitating for the band. Plant damaged his voice so badly during the summer of 1973 that he was forced to undergo an operation on his vocal cords before the group could resume work on Physical Graffiti in early 1974. The filming of The Song Remains the Same—which included live footage from the group’s Madison Square Garden shows in July—didn’t help matters. At one point, John Paul Jones informed Peter Grant that he’d had enough and wanted to quit.

  “It was kept low-key,” Grant remembered. “I told Jimmy, of course, who couldn’t believe it. But it was the pressure. He was a family man, was Jonesy. Eventually, I think he realized he was doing something he really loved. It was never discussed again.”

  As for Jimmy Page, corruptor of Lori Lightning and other nubile ultravixens, the US tour of 1973 left him completely burned out. “I was thinking that I should be in either a mental hospital or a monastery,” he recalled. “It was like the adrenaline tap wouldn’t switch off….” The guitarist’s use of cocaine can only have exacerbated that sensation.

  To Cameron Crowe, Page emphasized that he loved playing live as much as he’d ever done. “If it was down to just that, it would be utopia,” he said. “But it’s not. It’s airplanes, hotel rooms, limousines, and armed guards standing outside rooms. I don’t get off on that part of it all.” (He added that he was “still searching for an angel with a broken wing,” adding that it wasn’t “easy to find them these days, especially when you’re staying at the Plaza Hotel.”)

  Physically shattered, Page nonetheless symbolized Led Zeppelin’s satanic majesty. The guitarist’s enervated appearance and sphinx-like smile suggested some malign force lurked beneath the surface. “This was not a wholesome man,” wrote Erik Davis after cataloging “the silk threads emblazoned with poppies and magus stars, the SS cap, [and] the slit puffy eyelids that lent his face a stoned Orientalism.” The ongoing stories about Jimmy’s obsession with Aleister Crowley only bolstered his sinister reputation.

  Known as “the Wickedest Man in the World,” Crowley (1875–1947) was a writer, painter, occultist, and sexual libertarian who wrote about and practiced the magic arts in the early 20th century. After breaking with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he formed a mystical system known as Thelema, based on the primacy of the individual will. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” was one of the principal commandments of his philosophy. His publications included The Book of the Law and Diary of a Drug Fiend.

  “I don’t want to do a huge job on Crowley or anything,” Page told Nick Kent. “I mean, if people are into reading Crowley, then they will and it’ll have nothing to do with me. It’s just … well, for me, it goes without saying that Crowley was grossly misunderstood … I mean, how can anyone call Crowley the world’s most evil man—and that carried over to the ’30s when Hitler was about?”

  Page had been fascinated by the occult and by parapsychology since the age of 11, when he claimed to have first read Crowley’s Magic in Theory and Practice. In 1975, he opened the Equinox, a Kensington bookshop that sold occult literature and specialized in Crowley’s works, even publishing the facsimile of a 16th-century magical text called The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King, edited and originally published by Crowley in 1904.

  He told Sounds’s Jonh Ingham that Crowley was “a misunderstood genius of the 20th century,” adding that “[Crowley’s] whole thing was liberation of the person, of the entity, and that restriction would foul you up, lead to frustration [that] leads to violence, crime, mental breakdown, depending on what sort of makeup you have underneath.”

  Yet as much as he championed Crowley as a force for “liberation,” Page loved to revel in the more macabre aspects of his hero’s life. Asked about Boleskine House, which Crowley had bought in 1899 with a view to attempting a magical rite known as The Operation of Abra-Melin the Mage, he said that a man had been beheaded there and that “sometimes you can hear his head rolling down.” Since Crowley had moved out of Boleskine, Jimmy added, “there have been suicides, people carted off to mental hospitals….”

  Plumpton Place, it seems, was almost as spooky as Boleskine. “All my houses are isolated,” he told Cameron Crowe. “Many is the time I just stay home alone. I mean, I could tell you things, but it might give people ideas. A few things have happened that would freak some people out, but I was surprised actually at how composed I was.”

  “Jimmy was incredible,” singer Michael Des Barres told Stephen Davis. “Because he was the classic rock star with the moated castle, the velvet clothes, the fabulous cars he couldn’t drive, and the 80,000 rare guitars. I was dabbling with the Crowley thing at the time. I used to go down to see Jimmy at Plumpton and he’d pull out Crowley’s robes, Crowley’s Tarot deck, all of Crowley’s gear that he’d collected. I thought, ‘This is great.’ It was all so twisted and debauched, their whole thing. That’s what Jimmy represented to me.”

  Not long after Page moved to Plumpton, he received another visitor, a man who gave his Crowley fixation a new slant. American avant-garde director Kenneth Anger was at work on a Crowley-inspired film called Lucifer Rising, and he had become aware of the guitarist’s interest in “The Great Beast” when outbid by him in an auction for a rare Crowley manuscript at Sotheby’s. Anger, who had himself spent time at Boleskine, came to Sussex to ask whether Page would be interested in composing the soundtrack for his film.

  Page, who admired Anger’s earlier film Invocation of My Demon Brother, was intrigued by the proposal and accepted the director’s offer. He quickly decided that the music would all be played on synthesizers.

  “With a synthesizer, every instrument is different from what it’s meant to sound like,” Page told Nick Kent. “Which is especially interesting when you get a collage of instruments together not sounding the way they should and you think, ‘What’s that?’ That’s the effect I wanted to get, so you didn’t immediately realize it was five instruments playing together. Because Anger’s visuals have a timeless aspect.”

  Page was so entranced by the 20-minute clip of Lucifer Rising that Anger had given him that he would endlessly play it in hotel rooms, sometimes to friends such as David Bowie and usually under the influence of cocaine.

  “It’s just so arresting,” he said. “I had a copy, and while I was in the States, I hooked it up to a big stereo and frightened the daylights out of everyone. I was on the sixth floor and there were complaints from the twelfth. There’s a real atmosphere and intensity. It’s disturbing because you know something’s coming. I can’t wait for it to come out.”

  The relationship with Anger, however, was destined to be an unhappy one. Page remained smitten with Anger’s cinematic style, but the director became increasingly impatient with the guitarist’s laissezfaire attitude and drugged-out procrastination.

  By 1977, things had reached the boiling point. For several months, Anger used film-editing equipment in the basement of Page’s London home, but one night in the fall of that year, he was abruptly banished from the house.

  “I haven’t laid eyes on Jimmy Page since early June,” the director said after rescuing his film from the house. “I’ve been trying to get in contact with him since then. I’ve fixed meetings through his office and been stood up half a dozen times. I’ve left messages on his Kafkaesque answering machine. All I’ve had is promises that the soundtrack is on its way, but nothing’s materialized. I’ve got a fucking film to finish.”

  Anger said
that Page’s behavior was “totally contradictory to the teachings of Aleister Crowley and totally contradictory to the ethos of the film,” adding that Page was “dried up as a musician” and didn’t have another “Stairway to Heaven” in him. “I’m seriously questioning whether to use a musician from the rock world,” he said. “It seems like most of today’s rock music is savage, deliberate bad taste. It’s not optimistic, constructive, or even fun anymore.” Page’s replacement? Charles Manson acolyte Bobby Beausoleil.

  Asked about the hostility between him and Anger, Page tried to be diplomatic. “I think it’s more the problems he’s had with himself,” he told Chris Salewicz. “All I know is that at the end of the film, I promised him—as I had before—the loan of a three-speed projector, which makes the editing so much easier. I said to him, ‘Well, it’s just going to be your own time invested.’ And I also told him that he must put the music on after he put the footage together, so I was just waiting for him to contact me, really. He had other music that I’d done instead of the stuff that I’d delivered, which he said he wanted to use. Nevertheless, I still needed to hear from him. And I never heard anything.”

  Matters reached a diabolical crescendo when Anger nailed a black-magic curse to the doors of Led Zeppelin’s record company, Swan Song. “It was pathetic,” Page said. “His curse amounted to sending letters to people. Silly letters saying ‘Bugger off, Page’ and this sort of thing.”

  Anger had the last word, however. “I’m certainly jaded with the rock superstar syndrome,” he said of his dealings with Page. “They’re like renaissance bandits. Who needs those people?”

  8

  WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD NEVER BE

  1975 WAS the year of Physical Graffiti—the last testament of Led Zeppelin at Headley Grange—and of the band’s legendary 5-night stand at London’s Earl’s Court arena. But it was also the year in which Robert and Maureen Plant nearly died after their hired car careered off a mountain road on the Greek island of Rhodes.

  “I know that my kind of vision, or the carefree element I had, disappeared instantly when I had my accident,” Plant told Joe Smith. “That kind of ramshackle ‘I’ll take the world now’ attitude was completely gone.”

  Plant was still in a wheelchair when Zeppelin recorded Presence at Munich’s Musicland studios in November of that year. If the sessions lifted the singer’s spirits, the music was tired and labored. “Achilles’ Last Stand” was a thunderous 10-minute epic, and “Tea for One” harked back to the scorched blues balladry of “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” But on most of Presence, inspiration was notable by its absence. On the eve of punk, the album was nothing short of dull, and Led Zeppelin had never been dull.

  Much of 1976 was spent on sabbatical, with Plant slowly recuperating from the accident while the band worked on the finishing stages of The Song Remains the Same. 1977 saw them return to America with a vengeance, setting a new indoor-arena record when more than 76,000 saw them at the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan on April 30. The band also repeated its weeklong Earl’s Court stand with 6-night residencies at Madison Square Garden and the LA Forum.

  “It’s funny,” said John Paul Jones. “After playing to 70,000 people, going back to Madison Square Garden was like a small club again. It was like, ‘Ah, this is cozy!’ ”

  Not so cozy was the violent altercation that occurred backstage at Oakland’s Alameda County Coliseum on July 23 when Peter Grant, Richard Cole, and Zeppelin heavy John Bindon beat up three members of promoter Bill Graham’s security staff.

  The US tour was almost over when Robert Plant was hit with the devastating news that a severe respiratory virus had killed his 6-year-old son, Karac, in England. The band did not play live again for another 2 years. During that period, moreover, Zeppelin’s collective health declined drastically.

  “It was just a mess,” remembers Robert Plant, who sank into deep grief and depression, barely able to see the point of music. “After the death of my son, I received a lot of support from Bonzo, and I went through the mill because the media turned on the whole thing and made it even worse. I found that the excesses that surrounded Led Zeppelin were such that nobody knew where the actual axis of all this stuff was. Everybody was insular, developing their own world. The band had gone through two or three really big—huge—changes. The whole beauty and lightness of 1970 had turned into a sort of neurosis.”

  Plant healed at home, tending to his family and withdrawing to the local pub. “I tinkered on the village piano,” he said, “and grew so obese drinking beer that nobody knew who I was.” When the worst of the grief was past, he applied to take a job at a Rudolph Steiner teacher’s college in Sussex.

  With Jimmy Page scrambling to deny that the group was calling it a day—and to refute the callous insinuations that his Crowley fixation was somehow to blame for Karac’s death—Zeppelin attempted to get themselves back on track with a meeting in May 1978 at Clearwell Castle in the Forest of Dean. It was Bonham who persuaded his old Birmingham friend to join them.

  “Bonzo came over and worked on me a few times with the aid of a bottle of gin,” Plant remembered. “He was the only guy that actually hugged me, that helped me at all. And he said, ‘C’mon, we’re gonna go down to Clearwell and try some writing.’ But it had changed so much. And I really like being light and being happy, and it was just almost turning up to keep it going in a way.”

  “I think Robert was interested,” said John Paul Jones, “but he was seeing things in a different light. He was wondering whether it was all worth it. He and I were getting a bit closer, and probably splitting from the other two in a way. We were always to be found over a pint somewhere thinking, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

  It didn’t help that Page and Bonham were in the grip of drink and drugs—heroin included—in ways that Plant and Jones had never been. “These days everybody knows so much about helping people, but in those days it was other people’s personal life and area,” Jones said. “And while you say, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t do this’ or ‘Be here then,’ you didn’t really know enough to start telling other people how to live their lives. We were beginning, I suppose, to think, ‘Well, wait a minute, it may be coming apart more than it should.’ ”

  The growing schism between Plant/Jones and Page/Bonham was only too evident when the group left for Stockholm in late 1978 to record their ninth album.

  “The band was splitting between people who could turn up at recording sessions on time and people who couldn’t,” said Jones with a serene smile. “I mean, we all got together and made the album in the end, but it wasn’t quite as open as it was in the early days.” The more nocturnal contributions of the guitarist and the drummer brought the others still closer. Indeed, Plant and Jones wound up writing most of In Through the Out Door.

  “It was kind of odd,” said Plant, “but it gave the whole thing a different feel and a different texture. When Jimmy came in, his contribution generally was spot-on. We weren’t gonna make another ‘Communication Breakdown,’ but I thought ‘In the Evening’ was really good, and I thought parts of ‘Carouselambra’ were good, especially the darker dirges that Pagey developed. The lyrics on ‘Carouselambra’ were actually about that environment and that situation. The whole story of Led Zeppelin in its latter years is in that song.”

  “Powerless the fabled sat, too smug to lift a hand,” Plant sang in one of the song’s most telling couplets; “toward the foe that threatened from the deep.” Jimmy Page, however, is keen to dispel some of the rumors about the threat. “There are people who say, ‘Oh, Jimmy wasn’t in very good shape,’ ” he said. “But what I do know is that Presence was recorded and mixed in 3 weeks, and In Through the Out Door was done in a little over 3 weeks. So I couldn’t have been in that bad a shape.”

  In Through the Out Door was pretty poor. The riffs were lame, the choruses limp, the keyboards cheesy. There was no blues groove to any of the seven tracks. The album sounded like a hard rock band trying to reinvent itself as some kind
of AOR/new wave hybrid. “Carouselambra” was over-exaggerated progressive rock. The funky-shuffle muso-samba of “Fool in the Rain” was unconvincing and couldn’t mask the fact that Plant’s singing was flat. The bland boogie of “South Bound Saurez” and the knees-up hoedown of “Hot Dog” were hopeless. Only “All My Love,” an elegy for Karac, was affecting on any level whatsoever.

  “1979 dawned with the album done,” said Plant. “I was lucky enough to be given another son, Logan. It was lifting again. And we decided we could work, and we should start all over again. We’d done these things again, like ‘Led Zeppelin Go Back to the Clubs.’ Well, [crap]. Playing Nottingham Boat Club for four cases of Nut Brown. All these great ideas in that great naive time. But it was agreed that we should play in England, and the preparations were made for Knebworth.”

  At the beginning of August 1979, Zeppelin played two shows in front of more than a quarter of a million people at Knebworth, the Hertfordshire estate where five festivals had been held in the ’70s. Not having played live in Britain since Earl’s Court shows of 1975, the four horsemen were scared to death.

  “It was dumbfounding to see what had happened, that 260,000 tickets had been sold in 2 days,” recalled Plant, who’d been reluctant to do the shows. “Fred Bannister, who used to book me in the Town Hall in Stourbridge for 8 quid [or approximately $15 US], was going, ‘Well, I say, Robert, I think you’ve made a bit of a killing here.’ And in some ways it was a bit of a shambles, and in another way I think I was a bit embarrassed about how big it was.”

  “Robert didn’t want to do it, and I could understand why,” said Jones. “But we really did, and we thought he would enjoy it if we could just get him back out there. And I think he did enjoy Knebworth. On the DVD he looks like he’s enjoying it!”