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Lori Mattix. “He was the rock-god
prince to me,” she recalled, “a magical,
mystical person.... It was no secret he
liked young girls.” Page phoned Mat-
tix’s mother to get the O.K., in what
he seems to have imagined was an act
of gallantry, whereupon Betty Iannaci,
a receptionist at Atlantic Records, was
tasked with collecting Mattix from a
Westwood motel room. Iannaci re-
counts, “It was clear that her mother
was grooming her for a night out with
Jimmy Page. And I knew he was mix-
ing it up with heroin.”
It all went properly rancid during
the tours of 1975 and 1977. Page was
lost to drugs; Bonham was uncontrol-
lable. The shows were hazardous, gi-
gantic, brilliant, careless. Page seemed
not to notice or care that his guitar was
out of tune. In 1975, Bonham played
the drums with a bag of coke between
his legs; in 1977, he fell asleep over his
kit. Crowds became riotous. The De-
troit Free Press called the fans “the most
violent, unruly crowds ever to inflict
themselves upon a concert hall.” In
Oakland, in July, 1977, Bonham, Cole,
and Grant seriously assaulted a col-
league of the promoter Bill Graham,
and were arrested. Led Zeppelin never
played in America again.
Meanwhile, the recorded music was
in decline. Listen to “Custard Pie,” or
“The Wanton Song,” from the band’s
1975 album, “Physical Graffiti.” Com-
pared with the nervous heavy swing,
the brutish dance of the early music,
these are monotonous, grounded
stomps. “Kashmir,” from the same rec-
ord, has an interesting enough chord
progression, but no one ever wished it
longer. The starship had crashed to
earth. The band’s last proper album,
“In Through the Out Door,” was re-
leased in 1979, and, although it was an
immense commercial success, offered
little of musical value. “In the Evening,”
apparently intended to announce the
return of the group’s “hardness,” achieves
the distinction of sounding like any-
one but Led Zeppelin. Bonham had
been the crucial reagent; as had been
the case with Keith Moon’s spiralling
alcoholism, the increasing unreliabil-
ity of the drummer closely tracked the
decline of the band. Spitz reminds us
that 1979 was a richly transitional year.
“In Through the Out Door” had to
compete, musically, with the Clash’s
“London Calling,” the Police’s “Reg-
gatta de Blanc,” Talking Heads’ “Fear
of Music,” Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,”
and Joy Division’s “Unknown Plea-
sures.” Of Led Zeppelin’s effort, the
British publication Sounds declared,
“The dinosaur is finally extinct.” It is
painful to read about how, as the Au-
gust concerts that year at Knebworth
approached, Page and Grant bandied
the names of people they wanted as
supporting acts—Dire Straits, Joni
Mitchell, Van Morrison, Aerosmith,
Roxy Music. Everyone turned them
down. Dire Straits’ manager told them
that his band wasn’t ready for such a
major show, “but in truth he didn’t want
them sharing a stage with Led Zep-
pelin.” A year later, John Bonham died
in his sleep, after drinking forty shots
of vodka, and Led Zeppelin promptly
died with him.S
till, listen again to the opening of
“Black Dog,” or to Plant’s forlorn
wail at the start of “I Can’t Quit You
Baby,” or Page’s fingers in full flow in
“No Quarter,” or the violent precision
of Bonham’s beat in “When the Levee
Breaks.” It’s like listening to atheism:
the charge is still there, ready to be
picked up, ready to release lives. The
anti-religious religious power of rock
was exactly what my mother feared. I
don’t think it was the obvious mimicry
of religious worship—the sweaty con-
gregants, the stairways to Heaven, and
all the rest of it—that worried her. I
think she feared rock’s inversion of re-
ligious power: the insidious power to
enter one’s soul. There were many post-
war households where a confession of
interest in rock and roll was received
rather as a young Victorian’s crisis of
faith had been in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Spitz tells us that listening to pop
music in the Plant home was “akin to
a declaration of war,” producing an “ir-
reparable” rift between Plant and his
parents. In my own adolescence, I can’t
clearly separate atheism’s power from
rock and roll’s. My mother was right
to be fearful. There was something a
little “satanic” about Led Zeppelin. You
can feel it, perhaps, in the music’s deep
uncanniness; in Plant’s unsexed keen-
ing; in the band’s weird addiction to
downward or upward chromatic pro-gressions—the sound of horror-film
scores—in songs like “Dazed and Con-
fused,” “Kashmir,” “Babe I’m Gonna
Leave You,” and even “Stairway to
Heaven.” It’s in the terrifying, spectral,
semi-tonal shriek of “Immigrant Song,”
the creepy scratching chords that open
“Dancing Days,” the dirgelike liturgies
of “Friends” and “Black Dog.”
That’s the good satanism. What
about the actual diabolical activity—
the violence, the rape, the pillage, the
sheer wastage of lives? Jimmy Page was
a devoted follower of the satanic
“magick” of Aleister Crowley, whose
Sadean permissions can be reduced to
one decree: “There is no law beyond do
what thou wilt.” If the predetermined
task of rock gods and goddesses is to
sacrifice themselves on the Dionysian
altar of excess so that gentle teen-agers
the world over don’t have to do it them-
selves—which seems to be the basic
rock-and-roll contract—then the lives
of these deities are never exactly wasted,
especially when they are foreshortened.
Their atrocious human deeds are, to
paraphrase a famous fictional atheist,
the manure for our future harmony. In
the nineteen-sixties and seventies, they
died young (or otherwise ruined their
health), so that we could persist in the
fantasy that there’s nothing worse than
growing old.
In this sense, it would seem as if the
music can’t easily be separated from its
darkest energies. But it would be nice
if the sacrifice were limited only to
self-sacrifice and didn’t involve less will-
ing partners. And surely all kinds of
demonic and powerful art, including
many varieties of music, both classical
and popular, have been created by peo-
ple who didn’t live demonically. What
about Flaubert’s mantra about living
like a bourgeois in order to create wild
art? In Led Zeppelin’s case, the great
music, the stuff that is still violently
radical, was made early in the band’s
career, when its members were most
sober. The closer the band got to ac-
tual violence, the tamer the music be-
came. So perhaps the music can be sep-
arated from its darker energies.
I don’t know what to think. I can
say only that my brother didn’t, in the
end, go to Knebworth. Did he save his
soul? Perhaps. I’m pretty sure Led Zep-
pelin saved mine.