Led Zeppelin Gets Into Your Soul

[Zorro]

The musicians were diabolically bad as people, and satanically good as performers.

How on earth did my mother know that Led Zeppelin was composed of satanists? Specifically, how did she know that Jimmy Page had “a great interest in the occult,” and owned a bookshop “somewhere down in London” dedicated to these pursuits? Presumably, some furtive Christian network or back channel had provided the information. It was more than I or my elder brother knew, and gave her a sinister advantage over us. In my memory, she looms as a column of judgment in the doorway of the sitting room, as Angus and I watch the closing frames of the concert 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 eighteen. He may have lost his soul already; mine was still in the balance.

Our evangelical parents always managed to materialize while something awkward was on the TV, but our mother, who could find inappropriately suggestive moments in “Doctor Who,” had surpassed herself this time. On the screen, the stage at Madison Square Garden had become a diabolical altar: half naked, Led Zeppelin’s lead singer, Robert Plant, was screaming and writhing like a downed angel, and its drummer, John Bonham, was stolidly abusing what appeared to be a flaming gong. And surely Jimmy Page was a bit suspect? We had watched him during “Stairway to Heaven,” grimacing in bliss, dazed in ecstasy, leaning back as he throttled his dark, double-necked guitar, like a man wrestling with some giant shrieking bird of the night. My brother was involved in his own spiritual struggle. A school friend of his had tickets to a Led Zeppelin summer show, at Knebworth; he was desperate to go. Stairway to Heaven? Chute to Hell, more like. Our parents had told him that if he went to Knebworth he would cease to be a Christian. Watching from the wings, learning how to deceive, I was mainly impressed 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 messengers 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 independence of taste. “Listen to this”—said as he flipped the LP onto the turntable—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 uncelebrated Led Zeppelin at an early gig in Los Angeles, in January, 1969, voiced the essential rebellion with perfect 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.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/31/led-zeppelin-gets-into-your-soul-jimmy-page-robert-plant-and-bob-spitz-biography

[DEbluedude]

1. Yes they do!

They've been in mine since my first "Columbia House" purchase in 1970. I was 13. Thats where most of the earnings from the paper route went.

[IbogaProject]

2. I love that movie & album

I love that movie & album.