The New Yorker - USA (2022-01-31)

(Antfer) #1

56 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022


THE CRITICS


ACRITICAT LARGE


GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES


The making and unmaking of Led Zeppelin.

BY JAMESWOOD

H


ow on earth did my mother
know that Led Zeppelin was
composed of satanists? Spe-
cifically, how did she know that Jimmy
Page had “a great interest in the oc-
cult,” and owned a bookshop “some-
where down in London” dedicated to
these pursuits? Presumably, some fur-
tive Christian network or back chan-
nel had provided the information. It
was more than I or my elder brother
knew, and gave her a sinister advan-
tage over us. In my memory, she looms
as a column of judgment in the door-
way of the sitting room, as Angus and
I watch the closing frames of the con-
cert film “The Song Remains the Same”
on television. It was 1979, I think. Angus,
five years older than me and provider
of all musical contraband, was eigh-
teen. He may have lost his soul already;
mine was still in the balance.
Our evangelical parents always
managed to materialize while some-
thing awkward was on the TV, but
our mother, who could find inappro-
priately suggestive moments in “Doc-
tor Who,” had surpassed herself this
time. On the screen, the stage at Mad-
ison Square Garden had become a di-
abolical altar: half naked, Led Zep-
pelin’s lead singer, Robert Plant, was
screaming and writhing like a downed
angel, and its drummer, John Bon-
ham, was stolidly abusing what ap-
peared to be a f laming gong. And
surely Jimmy Page was a bit suspect?
We had watched him during “Stair-
way to Heaven,” grimacing in bliss,
dazed in ecstasy, leaning back as he
throttled his dark, double-necked gui-
tar, like a man wrestling with some

giant shrieking bird of the night. My
brother was involved in his own spir-
itual struggle. A school friend of his
had tickets to a Led Zeppelin sum-
mer show, at Knebworth; he was des-
perate to go. Stairway to Heaven? Chute
to Hell, more like. Our parents had
told him that if he went to Kneb-
worth he would cease to be a Chris-
tian. Watching from the wings, learn-
ing how to deceive, I was mainly im-
pressed by his honesty—why hadn’t
he just told them he was going to see
Peter, Paul and Mary?
In those days, stuck in provincial
northern England as we were, musical
information seemed to reach us years
late, like news from panting messen-
gers of wars that had already fizzled
out. New to Led Zeppelin’s music, I
had no idea that the group had become
a ponderous joke, that Knebworth was
to be its last gasp. Having an older
brother was a mixed blessing in this
regard. He both curated and retarded
my education. The thirteen-year-old
pupil was not expected to show any in-
dependence of taste. “Listen to this”—
said as he flipped the LP onto the turn-
table—was a command more than an
invitation. The stylus lay down in the
groove, and wrote the law.
And, as my mother intuited, this
law was a potent rival dominion, a law
of negation, out to invert everything
held sacred and respectable by parents,
churches, principalities. Alice Cooper,
who played alongside an equally un-
celebrated Led Zeppelin at an early
gig in Los Angeles, in January, 1969,
voiced the essential rebellion with per-
fect ingenuousness in “I’m Eighteen”:

“I’m eighteen/And I don’t know what
I want/Eighteen/I just don’t know
what I want/Eighteen/I gotta get
away/I gotta get out of this place/I’ll
go runnin’ in outer space.”
The Sex Pistols turned the screw
more precisely six years later: “Don’t
know what I want/But I know how
to get it.” Not knowing what to want
but knowing how to get it: rock music
is this pure enablement, this conduit
of the how over the what. I wasn’t eigh-
teen, but I didn’t have to be, because I
saw how it went for eighteen-year-olds:
Go to Knebworth and lose your soul. Car-
dinal Newman had called Christian-
ity “a great remedy for a great evil”;
thus, in my mind, the size of the ne-
gation would have to match the size
of that which had to be negated. Great
forces of repression demanded great
forces of rebellion.
But I didn’t need punk’s rebellious-
ness, since I had at hand the punk en-
ergies of two almost opposed but
strangely overlapping English bands,
the Who and Led Zeppelin, mods
and rockers, respectively. The Who
was English to the core, and the songs
were hard, quick fights—struggles
with class, inheritance, sex, the hy-
pocrisies of power. Driven by Pete
Townshend’s scything chords and
Keith Moon’s boyishly linear drum-
ming, the band offered Cockney
swagger and music-hall one-liners: “I
was born with a plastic spoon in my
mouth”; “My mum got drunk on
stout./My dad couldn’t stand on two
feet/As he lectured about morality”;
“Meet the new boss/Same as the old
boss.” The songs were tuneful and the
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