Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (19 page)

Memphis Minnie sits on top of the icebox at the 230 Club in Chicago and beats out blues on an electric guitar … The electric guitar is very loud, science having magnified all its softness away. Memphis Minnie sings through a microphone and her voice—hard and strong anyhow for a little woman’s—is made harder and stronger by scientific sound. The singing, the electric guitar, and the drums are so hard and so loud, amplified as they are by General Electric on top of the icebox, that sometimes the voice, the words, and melody get lost under sheer noise, leaving only the rhythm to come through clear. The rhythm fills the 230 Club with a deep and dusky heartbeat that overrides all modern amplification. The rhythm is as old as Minnie’s most remote ancestor.
⁷⁹

Despite this invocation of the old ones, Hughes winds up emphasizing the industrial scale of Minnie’s sound—“a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill.” His description helps us hear what Big Bill Broonzy meant when he said that Minnie “played like a man,” but it’s probably more accurate to say that she played like an ancestor. Evoking rural moods with
modern machines, Minnie birthed a new ghostworld of electric sound.

I don’t know what Robert Plant or Jimmy Page felt about Memphis Minnie, but I still hear their version of “When the Levee Breaks,” with its deliriously processed guitar and vocals, as an homage to a blues musician whose own ferocious electric spirit was never interred on wax. But Minnie was more than an honored musician—she was an honored
female
musician, one as powerful and important to
as Joni Mitchell or Sandy Denny, albeit from an ancestral remove. The presence of these three women should hardly be considered accidental on an album devoted to the search for the Lady, especially in an oeuvre as basically hairy as Zeppelin’s. They are all figures of power as well: Denny commands soldiers with her extraordinary voice; Mitchell eludes the grasp of Kings and Percy alike; Minnie co-authors the heaviest song on the disc. Rather than serve as avatars for some nebulous feminine current, these women, these peers, are a de facto rejoinder to Percy’s goofy idealism, which by this point has led him to the brink.

Some have heard this Zeppelin performance as an expression of sexual anxiety. Claiming that the broken dam is one of the central symbolic fears of the “proto-fascist imagination,” Joy Press and Simon Reynolds ask if this “tour-de-force of Doomsday boogie” is not in
fact an “an allegory of [the] fear of feminine engulfment, elevated to a histrionic pitch of cosmic dread?”
⁸⁰
Certainly we can hear the engulfment Press and Reynolds describe. “Levee” features one of the most ceaseless riffs of any Zeppelin song, a grinding dirge interrupted only by the cycling guitar figure of the bridge, which serves as Percy’s last stab at pop transcendence. But each time we return to the core twelve bars, the relentless undertow gets thicker and weirder and darker. Guitars, vocals, and harmonica are subjected to heavy phase, creating a swirling whirlpool of sound that Page and Johns intensify with stereo pans, backwards guitar, backwards echo, and other tricks whose destabilizing effects can only truly be appreciated with headphones and a brain full of smoke.

The effect of all this “scientific sound” is indeed to engulf the listener, as the boundaries defining and separating instruments and voice begin to dissolve into a vortex, an experience that Page once described, in a discussion of related echo effects, as “sucking you into the source.”
⁸¹
But is this
feminine
engulfment? The idea, I suppose, is that the well-bounded masculine ego that Zeppelin supposedly represents can be threatened or smothered by female Eros. But Percy has spent the whole album looking for transcendence through the Lady; he
wants
to be obliterated in Her. And it doesn’t make much psychological sense to sing a song written
by a woman to express your fear of woman’s power. Zeppelin doesn’t have that kind of irony. So while I do hear the waters surging and sucking through this Doomsday boogie, that’s what I think they are:
waters
. Sometimes a jellyroll is just a jellyroll, and a broken levee is just a broken levee.
ends in the element of water, in a flood of analog waves.

Besides, while brownshirts may quake at the notion of a broken dam, a broken
levee
has a far more concentrated meaning, especially to blues hounds like Zeppelin. Minnie and McCoy’s song is only one of a number of classic blues songs—Charley Patton, Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Lonnie Johnson wrote others—that reflect the havoc wreaked by the 1927 flood of the Mississippi Delta, a nightmare that marks blues consciousness the way the sinking of the Titanic marks American consciousness. The 1927 flood is often described as one of the worst natural disasters in US history, although, as is often the case, the word “natural” cloaks human hubris—in this case, the longstanding attempt to control the Big Muddy’s periodic flooding. To achieve this lofty goal, engineers corralled the river into a single channel defined by thousands of miles of earthen ridges—some the height of four-story houses. Sheltered by these levees, the rich alluvial lowlands of the Delta came to host black tenant farmers as well as levee camps, rough and licentious tent villages perfect
for brutalized laborers, whores, and the occasional traveling bluesman. In early 1927, heavy rains swelled the river to towering heights before the waters burst through, ultimately flooding an area the size of Connecticut. Hundreds died, and a couple hundred thousand were displaced, many of whom pulled up their nonexistent stakes and headed north, especially to Chicago.

As with the Titanic, the Delta flood took on Biblical proportions in its retelling. Even today, as the historical memory fades to a dew, the event carries the force of judgment, making its most powerful recent appearance in Bob Dylan’s “High Water,” a flooded Desolation Row that appears on 2001’s
Love and Theft
. Dylan wrote the song for Charley Patton, a Delta resident who recorded the most powerful of the original broken-levee blues, and the one most relevant to Percy’s plight here at the close. Over both sides of a 78 recorded in 1929, the growling singer abandons his flooded home for other towns in Mississippi and Alabama, only to discover that the waters have already reached his destination: Rosedale, Greenville, Vicksburg, Blytheville, Marion City. As the flood waters spread, the singer’s attempt to escape grows ever more pointless. Though Patton never loses his documentary grit, the monstrosity of the event opens up a universal dimension to the story, a space of homelessness and loss that none of us can hope
to flee although we must make the attempt. The final line is as desolate as anything in Kafka or Beckett, and much less funny: “I couldn’t see nobody’s home, wasn’t no one to be found.”

Even the famous and hedonistic millionaires in Led Zeppelin came to know such desolation in their lives, although I suspect they encountered scant hints of it in the early 1970s. For his part, though, Percy has reached the end of the groove. The waters that will engulf him are the apotheosis of the ecological disturbance that has been growing throughout the record, from the red seas to the quaking mountains, the rotten apples to the crying pines. Mother Nature is disturbed: she weeps and bleeds: the balance is not coming back. But the levees are not holding either, because no tool of Mephisto modernity, from jet planes to electric guitars, is going to keep back the flood. We are all just apprentices of this sorcerer Civilization. Just listen to the scientific sounds that swamp Percy’s voice at the close of the song: technology drowns us all.

Percy knows he is a “mountain man,” a spiritual being, and he still wants to climb those paths straight and high. But now he is sinking, and the hill country is barred, and the mountains have washed away. At last, he realizes what a fool he has been: Throughout all his fruitless searching and cruel dissatisfaction, he has had a good woman and a happy home. He has failed the
Joseph Campbell monomyth. He is not a hero; he is a cad. But it’s “too fucking late,” as Chuck Eddy has it. “You should’ve thought about that before we left home.”
⁸²
Percy makes a final bid for Chicago, but we don’t believe it, and neither does he. The waters are rising, and he’s going down. Like Don Giovanni at the close of the show, like the glaciers melting in the land of the ice and snow, like poor Bonzo dying on spooky Jimmy’s bed, Percy is going down. We hear a strange little guitar flourish at the very end, like the bark of a shaggy dog or the rare green flash of sunset. Then silence swallows the winding road, and the spirit leaves, and lifts into the air.

The likes of Led Zeppelin will never again lumber across the landscape of pop consciousness. They were true rock dinosaurs: huge, vaguely malevolent wonders, possessing more force than forebrain, and yet feathered with the avian grace of the songbirds that are the distant genetic descendents of T. Rex and crew. Their likes will never come again, not just because Led Zeppelin was a unique fusion of unique talents, but because the environment they ruled is gone, leveled by any number of incoming asteroids: punk rock, MTV, AIDS, skinny ties. Their environment was the early 1970s, an era marked by the slow fade of the counterculture’s utopian hopes and expectations. The children of the sun became the wayward teens of sunset, as a revolutionary generation
woke up to find itself a mass market and a ship of fools, as John Sinclair’s guitar army became Jimmy Page’s. The reason most revivals of the 1970s focus on kitsch—smiley faces, bell bottoms, the great Billy Jack—is because we still cannot take on this malaise, cannot breathe the air of dissipated dreams, of paranoia and retreat, of silent running. The surface of the decade was gaudy and groovy, but the depths were heavy, a heaviness you can hear in metal guitars, in the inky grooves of funk, and in the almost morbid introspection of singer-songwriters. Even the Carpenters can sound like a dirge.

This sinking feeling lies behind much of the “pop occulture” that exploded during the early 1970s: the flowering of sects and gurus, the publishing boom in occult fantasy and “metaphysical” titles, and the diffusion of a vaguely pagan, vaguely druggy mysticism through the minds, arts, and lifestyles of a generation. This mythic turn partly represented a retreat from the real. But it also reflected the degree to which the 1960s had torn the lid off the unconscious and loosed its delirious contents into the popular mind and its commercial twin: popular media. Led Zeppelin, with their air of mastery and mystery, made records that fed this yen for power and enchantment, for hedonistic mystique. Their commercial success, like their savage reputation, was intrinsic to their glamour, in a way it was not for
the Beatles or the Stones; they had raided the top of the mountain, and were engorging themselves like crowned and conquering kids. But this vulgar command was offset by the restlessness in their music, by Plant’s rambling and Page’s fretwork, by the band’s genre-hopping and epic touring. Led Zeppelin were rock gods who staged their own
Götterdammerung
, idols who painted themselves with twilight, and this pagan melancholy resolved their brute power into a more lasting and resonant chord. Like
Beowulf
or
Moby Dick
,
sounds the tragic note of its times, and of others: the cry for passage that echoes through all sagas of the unredeemed.