Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (10 page)

That, in any case, is how I read this record: as a single journey through a changing landscape of moonlight, hedgerows, and trembling mountains; a movement unified, at the very least, by Plant’s anxious need to move. Whether or not Zeppelin consciously intended their record to tell the story of one man’s restless quest is beside the point; after literally hundreds of millions of repetitions in the collective ear holes of humanity, this particular sequence of recordings has fused into a single tale. Nonetheless, we need to mark the distinction between the character who makes this journey and the howlin’ hippie-boy from Birmingham who sings about it. So let’s call the
character
Percy
, which was Plant’s nickname, and an appropriate one. For one thing, Percy recalls Parsifal, the errant Arthurian knight who stumbles across the Holy Grail early in his career
but is too dumb to recognize the mystic relic for what it is, and so continues to wander. Percy is also British slang for penis. And so we have our hero: the cock as holy fool.

“Black Dog” reflects the initial motivation for Percy’s quest, which, as you might expect, is sexual obsession, here expressed as a mutant blues. For Zeppelin, blues is the language of lust, not just because it suggests the tantalizing frisson of black sex but because blues heroes like Robert Johnson, Elmore James, and Howlin’ Wolf present sexual desire as a haunting, a
possession
. All the usual complaints about Zeppelin’s domineering cock rock are mitigated by the fact that, in his words and his cries, Plant is not an erotic overlord but a masochistic slave to romantic desire; as the
Village Voice
writer Emily XYZ put it, he is “PUSSY-WHIPPED.”
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The Percy whose a cappella cries open “Black Dog” is slain in the spirit by the lady in his sights: a sweating, burning, stinging thing whose dripping honey more than matches the obscenity of the gushing juice in “The Lemon Song.” Faced with this voluptuous theophany, Percy can initially only “watch,” like a kid with a
Hustler
, like so many online. That’s why the riff is gnarled and weirdly timed, in contrast to the clear-cut “phallic” drive of “Whole Lotta Love” or “Immigrant Song”: it’s the sound of frustrated lust bending the singer out of shape.
That’s also why there is no personal pronoun in the whole first verse: Percy is overwhelmed to the point of obliteration.

Of course, the devouring female presence is a stock character in the sexist imagination, and the song’s later verses will shape this sorceress, perhaps parodistically, into a more traditional blues bitch. But here I am interested in the spectral, even “tantric” dimension of Percy’s desire. Of all the polarities that drive Zeppelin’s music, the tension between sex and spirit is perhaps the most essential—and the most overlooked. Sex and magic are the two horns of Zeppelin’s mystique, the cock and the devil, and yet the occult dimension of sexual energies rarely enters into critical discussions of the band’s erotic politics. But as Susan Fast points out in her discussion of Zeppelin fandom, the link between sex and spirit is of vital importance to many Zepheads.

If practitioners of BDSM are to be believed, the ritualized submission to dark and aggressive sexual energy can provoke an egolessness that may, if you are lucky and the cosmos kind, bloom into spiritual ecstasy. This is one aspect of the Hindu goddess Kali, at least to Western tantrists: with her fangs and tongue and dark nude body, Ma devours attachments. But such submission is also terrifying, and in “Black Dog,” Percy passes up this infernal grail by doing what most restless
and red-blooded men would do when the erotics gets rough: he hits the road. The first time he says “I,” at the beginning of the second verse, it’s to say “I gotta roll, can’t stand still.” With this blues cliché, Percy recovers himself by shifting the object of his desire toward its underlying lack, by recognizing that he “can’t get my fill.” He imagines a kinder, steadier woman, a woman who will hold his hand and tell him no lies. As
progresses, this woman will grow more idealized and more impossible, until finally she is totally supernatural, a Queen of Light, without a king, beyond birth and death. And Percy’s failure to either achieve or abandon that ideal will destroy him.

Desire, then, is spectral; it is a haunting. The spookiest lines in “Black Dog” lie in the pivotal second verse: “Eyes that shine burnin’ red,” Percy moans. “Dreams of you all through my head.” The question here is simple:
Whose
eyes are burning red? Given Plant’s tendency to swallow personal pronouns, which may have something to do with the drive for engulfment, it’s impossible to know. I suspect, though, that the eyes don’t belong to the woman but to Percy himself. In this the song anticipates Jimmy Page’s flashing red eyes while he plays the hurdy-gurdy in
The Song Remains the Same
; it also recalls the creature hidden in the Colby drawing reproduced in the inner gatefold of
, which some identify as a black dog. The message again? The beast is within; it looks out of your eyes.

So “Black Dog” does not demonize woman’s sexual power but rather the male’s own lust, experienced as a possession from within. This experience of desire as occult possession finds us all at some point in our lives but can seem particularly acute in the minds of young males riding their first flush of adolescent hormones. Indeed, one function of the violent fantasy worlds that bewitch so many boys at that age, from computer games to heavy metal to the tentacle monsters in Japanese
hentai
, is to imaginatively exteriorize and contain desires that threaten the boundaries of the self. The fantasy world becomes a masturbatory magic circle where desire can take shape but remain in sublimated bounds. But though Percy’s shrieks resonate with adolescent angst, they also express spiritual fear: that intense desire unleashes a terrifying
infinity
. I could cite any number of decadent romantic writers here—Huysmans, or Baudelaire, or Clark Ashton Smith. But a bit of Crowley’s corny “Hymn to Satan” should do the trick:

By its thirst, the cruel craving

For things infinite, unheard-of,

Dreams devouring and depraving,

Songs no God may guess a word of,

Songs of crime and songs of craving—

Despite its basis in quotidian blues images, “Black Dog” and its song of craving marks the point where sexual obsession goes supernatural. Dreams devour Percy, but they also push him onwards, into song, into a world where he knows from the beginning he “can’t get no fill.”

The 24-year-old Berlioz was similarly bewitched by an actress when he wrote his
Symphonie Fantastique
in the 1820s. But how did our boys, of similar age, body forth this supernatural craving in “Black Dog”? For one thing, the timbre of the tune’s massed guitars is gloriously nasty. For all three guitar parts, Andy Johns ran Page’s Gibson through a microphone amp and two UA 1176 compressors, creating a sound that recalls Zappa’s assertion that, while saxophones can be sleazy, only the electric guitar can be obscene. But “Black Dog,” like so much Zeppelin, really belongs to the rhythm section. John Paul Jones composed the odd and justly celebrated riff and arranged the tune, while John Bonham’s rock-solid beats create enormous tension by resisting the complexities of the riff. Though I cannot break down these complexities with the sophistication or clarity that Susan Fast achieves in
In the Houses of the
Holy
, I can at least cite her conclusions: the song’s metric displacement “takes the listener off guard, destroying expectations.” The riff’s frequent return to the tonic also unbalances us, despite the fact that, as the “home-base” note, the tonic is characteristically associated with a sense of resolution and relief. Here, though, the rhythmic displacement ensures that the root note of the riff keeps returning to different points in the measure, making the sense of resolution arrive “either too early or too late.”
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Only at the open chord at the end of the riff, before Plant’s a cappella vocals return, do we confidently land. Reynolds and Press say that the song’s “turgid, grueling riff incarnates sex as agony and toil,” but that’s not what I hear. “Black Dog” incarnates sexual energy as a serpent fire, twisting and turning in a dark internal dance that suggests progressive stages of sinuous virtuosity rather than the rut of toil. Though sometimes resting, the energy never resolves, and ordinary climax is suspended. “Black Dog,” then, is a bit of sonic tantra, teaching the body—which is strongly pushed and pulled by the metrical weirdness—to embrace and even enjoy the state of tension, to sublimate frustration into surprise. Inflamed, yes, but hardly agonized.

The song’s tension, again, emerges from the disjunction between the gnarly riff and Bonham’s almost defiant refusal to budge from the four. Bonzo is not just in the pocket here; he is a bear in a cave, methodically
swatting at wasps. This defiance may be rooted in the fact that Jones’s original arrangement demanded more complex time signatures than what we hear. Jones claims that nobody else could play it; Page called the tune “a hairy one.”
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One might even say that Jones, with his telltale pageboy haircut, was trying to tempt the band into prog. A bootleg recording of an early rehearsal shows Bonham playing eighth-notes and accents that fall more closely in line with the riff, as if he had not yet found his separate groove. Jones explains that the band was particularly challenged by the turnaround that leads into the bridge, until Bonham realized he could just dig in his heels and count four-four time as if there were no turnaround at all.

What results from this is a crudely appealing instance of the “apart playing” found in African music, a crosstalk where, as John Miller Chernoff notes, “there is always at least two rhythms going on.”
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Though “Black Dog” hardly sounds like a drum rite in Dahomey, it is certainly
funky
, albeit a strangely abstract and irregular funk. Unlike most of the metal acts to follow, Zeppelin birthed their own breed of funkiness, achieved not through superficial “feel,” but through strong arrangements, most likely the work of Jones.
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Besides the hairy groove of “Black Dog,” we have the James Brown parody in “The Crunge,” the jam in “Over the Hills and Far Away,” the bridges in “Kashmir,” “The Ocean,” and
the deeply stanky “Wanton Song”; live, the band would occasionally drop “Shaft” into their boogie medleys. Despite Plant’s nearly ridiculous dips into blues mimicry, Zep’s funk proves that the band—unlike many of their peers—did not keep black musical forms under glass. While Jones’s riff was inspired by the rolling bass lines in a Muddy Waters record, the Muddy Waters record in question was itself a mutant: 1968’s
Electric Mud
, where the Chicago bluesman went psychedelic, an obviously commercial move that horrified white blues fans and critics, with their purist yen for authenticity. But Muddy’s moves did not bug Zeppelin because
Zeppelin was not pure
. This love of mixture and slop gave their music and beats an almost prophetic force. In the 1970s, Zeppelin’s rhythms often sounded, well, rather leaden. But as Robert Palmer noted in 1990, after years of hip hop and crunchy drums, “the lurching beats and staggered rhythms sound a lot different: they swing like mad.”
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