The Return of Led Zeppelin

Critics and fans alike are universally praising as a rousing success the most anticipated reunion gig in rock history, Led Zeppelin's ostensibly one-off performance Monday night at the O2 in London. Joined by the son of deceased drummer John Bonham, the three surviving members of the original quartet romped through a two-hour set and miraculously managed to live up to the mythic expectations of both aged Zep-head baby boomers and youthful converts. In an age dominated by bubble-gum pop and innocuous computer-manufactured sound -- three-minute shots of catchy mediocrity to import into one's iPod -- there's undoubtedly something exhilarating about the Robert-Johnson-on-acid primal thunder of Jimmy Page (it's easy to forget, when marveling at the sheer muscularity of Zep's recorded output, that the band features only one lead/rhythm guitar player!) and the libido-unloosed pomp of Robert Plant. And face it, for sheer spectacle value, a Zeppelin gig at this stage of the game is hard to beat: Can Robert Plant, now a grandfather, still pull off wailing about giving every inch of his love? Can Zeppelin, the band whose mammoth popularity paved the way for every Spinal-Tap rock-band cliche, overcome the seemingly inevitable fate of self-parody? (That the Led Zeppelin mythos has reached absurdly large proportions, observe that Wikipedia has an entire entry devoted to the infamous shark episode).

Apparently the answer to both questions is yes, as "Whole Lotta Love" exhilaratingly exploded from the stage during the band's first encore, and "Stairway to Heaven" -- a song whose hyper-overexposure has transformed it from mystical ineffability to pretentious comedy -- actually somehow sounded fresh. I can comment on all this because, like an estimated half a million other people, I watched the morning-after fan-filmed clips that dutifully appeared on YouTube -- only to be removed by Warner music group, then placed back on, then removed again, ad infinitum. And this brings me to the real crux of what I want to say about Zeppelin. In the wake of this overwhelmingly successful return, as they face immense pressure from fans and critics alike to take the show on the road for a world tour that industry execs estimate would be the biggest tour in rock history (the band would reportedly earn a minimum of 300 million dollars), Plant, Page, and Jones once again confront the paradox of Led Zeppelin: from the beginning of their fame in the late sixties, the band's explosive popular success has been both a response to and a perversion of what is truly special about Led Zeppelin.

In the midst of the psychedelic late sixties and early seventies, drug-drenched hippie self-exploration and social activism merged with a sudden pastoral fantasy of return -- decidedly not a Rockwellian return to conventional values and comforting archetypes, but a mystical and myth-soaked longing to uncover the hidden roots of culture in the marginal, the problematic, the strange (what Greil Marcus, writing about Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, calls "the old, weird America"). Bob Dylan likely set this pastoral turn in motion, rebelling against the prescribed role of social savior with scandalously-plugged-in high modernism (Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde), and then, as if rebelling against his own rebelling, secluding himself in rural upstate New York with his touring band (the band that would later become The Band) and plunging into obscure blues and folk material, and the Bible. A critique of a psychedelic hippie culture that itself was becoming conventional, the music that Dylan and The Band made in the basement of Big Pink (among other places) sounded as scratchy and strange as the mysterious, remarkably influential six-album Anthology of American Folk Music put together by Harry Smith in 1952 (Smith, by the way, whose parents read Madame Blavatsky and described themselves as pantheist theosophists, was a lifelong occultist, and his work as an ethnomusicologist attempted to locate within forgotten American folk and blues recordings a nascent mystical spirituality). Out of the occult laboratory of that Big Pink basement ultimately came The Band's debut, Music From Big Pink, one of the greatest albums of the sixties, an album -- along with the bootlegged Basement Tapes -- that was heard by British folk-rock groups and in turn inspired their own culture-specific pastoral creations: most notably Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief and the Kink's Village Green Preservation Society. Taken as a whole, the pastoral turn that arose out of and to some extent in rebellion against psychedelia (nota bene: drugs still played a decided role in various bands' pastoral explorations -- witness The Band's Robbie Robertson describing the Basement recordings as "a period of reefer run amok") led to some of the most moving, inventive music of the period, even if the pastoral turn itself would inevitably become all-too-conventional and hackneyed (two words: The Eagles).

Tracing lines of musical influence is of course a critical abstraction, as is naming as "pastoral" a no-doubt multifaceted phenomenon in late-sixties music. But, since every perception and insight in the world at large is made possible only by perceptual/intellectual "fictions," so an engagement with music history must proceed by means of critical fictions. Regardless, the above digression was necessary because I believe that Led Zeppelin is indeed most fruitfully appreciated when located within such a pastoral line. "Led Zeppelin" is what happens when American folk and blues influences (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, etc., etc.) are blended with hippie psychedelic sensibilities, British/Celtic pastoral mysticism, rockabilly, classical music, and 1970's excess. There is thus a cultural and imaginative depth to Led Zeppelin that highbrow rock critics of the 70's frequently overlooked precisely because the band was so annoyingly popular (nothing bothers highbrow critics -- this one included -- like commercial success). Of course, Led Zeppelin's depth is not primarily a lyrical depth -- one does not find much sophisticated verbal wit in Zeppelin -- but neither is the strange, mystical allure of early American blues and folk recordings -- an allure codified by the likes of Harry Smith -- based on intellectual verbal sophistication. Indeed, the best of American rhythm and blues is decidedly a folk phenomenon, exuding a carnivalesque melange of coarse sexual innuendo, earthy imagery, and common-man idioms that intellectualists of all periods seem irresistibly drawn toward. Led Zeppelin, like the American folk-blues tradition as a whole, appeals to the thinking man by offering a non-verbal poetry that is based on an energy -- primarily of the earth, of the body -- that points to the same pre-linguistic mystery that, paradoxically, language both arises from and reaches toward. Pushed to the limit, thinking turns into poetry, which turns into music, which, if expressing both the roots and wings of human yearning, rocks.

Pre-linguistic mystery is of course the traditional concern of religion, and, interestingly enough, a common characteristic of the musical strand I am here outlining is its reliance upon spiritual traditions of anti-tradition. If Christianity is after all based on the Word, in other words, on the attempt to spiritualize linguistic appropriation of mystery, the marginal, heterodox spiritual influences at work in the blues-folk-rock tradition tend to the hermetic, the alchemical, the gnostic -- the attempt to use the raw materials of the imagination and the world itself to reveal the hidden spiritual depths that transcend language (including the generative language of the Master Linguist, the All-Good Creator God). Lest you think this far-fetched, as if I'm here artificially importing a scholar's interest in the occult into rock history, consider the fact that, in the early 70's, Jimmy Page, the mastermind behind Led Zeppelin, owned an occult bookshop and publishing house in London -- Equinox Booksellers and Publishers -- that specialized in alchemical lore and the Kabbalah. Furthermore, according to Wikipedia, "Page owned the Boleskine House, the former residence of occultist Aleister Crowley." In other words, Page, whose guitar mastery has frequently been associated with black magic, demonstrated during the peak of Led Zeppelin a more than passing interest in the occult.

All of these facets of Page, Plant and company tend to get obscured and even perverted by Zeppelin's massive popularity: the blues tradition of graphic sexual innuendo becomes a crude expression of adolescent, misogynistic machismo; a legitimate interest in the occult becomes easily-parodied airy (empty) mysticism; the energizing depth of the music is flattened out because of excessive airplay. Page and Plant themselves seem aware of this. Indeed, check out the various interviews of Page and Plant available on YouTube (e.g., Plant on Charlie Rose). If anything can dispel the tendency to reduce Zeppelin to the challenged mental capacities of many of their stoner, head-banging fans, it's the shocking articulateness of the two men at the center of the band: these are wise men who would make fascinating dinner companions. So, would a massive world tour further pervert what is special about Led Zeppelin, or somehow clarify it? I suspect the former, and it would seem so does Robert Plant. When asked shortly before the big reunion concert about the prospects of cashing-in with a world tour, Plant remarked: "The whole idea of being on a cavalcade of merciless repetition is not what it's all about."

One thing is certain: If Led Zeppelin's mass popularity remains a misunderstanding and perversion of the band's actual complexity, the group's enduring appeal after all these years results because there is more to Zeppelin than proto-heavy-metal screeching.

On an internet forum that I happened upon, a voice of caution spoke up to calm the frenzy of enthusiasm being expressed in the wake of the Zeppelin reunion concert. "Sorry, people, but it's not possible to go back home," the voice soberly warned. "I used to like Led Zeppelin, but then I grew up. You should too." This warning is to the point, though it misses something. It of course isn't possible to make it back home, and part of one's maturity is to recognize this hard existential fact. Nevertheless, if the recent return of Led Zeppelin proves anything, it's that home, even if forever unreachable, is still there -- an English castle shimmering in the mist, full of "fairy-goddess devil women" (to quote the recent LA Times piece about Zeppelin), wailing blues guitar, and the primal energy of sexual and spiritual mysteries. If you squint really hard, and remain open to the occasional "bustle in your hedgerow," you can see it.