Led Zeppelin FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time (Faq Series)

by George Case

  “I do not worship the Devil,” Page declared as far back as a 1976 Rolling Stone interview with Cameron Crowe. “But magic does intrigue me. Magic of all kinds.” In the same conversation he conceded, “I’m not about to deny any of the stories…. I’m no fool. I know how much the mystique matters. Why should I blow it now?” It’s noteworthy that the other members of Led Zeppelin neither shared Page’s interests nor appeared to regard them as excitedly as fans did. Robert Plant was always offhand about Page’s supposed persuasions. “Jimmy had his moments when he played his games,” he said in 1985, “but none of them with a great deal of seriousness, and through his own choice, he never really tried to put the story straight…. He got some kind of enjoyment out of people having the wrong impression of him.” On Page’s infatuation with Aleister Crowley, the singer shrugged, “I think Page just collected the works of an English eccentric.” “There was a lot of humor in the group, a lot of humor in the music,” corroborated John Paul Jones. “Not all this glowering, Satanic crap.” So the question is how an intelligent and mild-mannered pop musician preoccupied with his craft could have become “the Dark Lord of Hard Rock,” slandered as some sort of wizard obsessed with ritual, sorcery, and the supernatural.

  Jimmy Page later admitted to have read Aleister Crowley’s major work, Magic in Theory and Practice, at the age of eleven (Crowley wrote voluminously, and this and other of his treatises have been published individually and within other collections). Fellow session musicians have recalled Page’s workplace chats encompassing “all sorts of odd cult things,” while Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty remembered that “Jimmy seemed very interested in perversions…. Every now and then he’d start talking about instruments of perversion and the Marquis de Sade.” The Yardbirds’ Chris Dreja has told of meeting Page in the mid-1960s as a keeper of exotic aquarium fish. “He was a strange guy, even then.” None of these quirks, however, add up to anything suggesting devil worship; mostly they reveal a bright and well-read young man with esoteric interests outside the cliché rock ’n’ roller’s fixations of electric guitars, fast cars, and faster girls.

  By the end of the 1960s, having earned some money as a studio player and a Yardbird—and with substantial revenues from Led Zeppelin in the offing—the aesthete and former art student Page began to seriously collect paintings, manuscripts, and other antiques, some related to Aleister Crowley but others as innocuous as Pre-Raphaelite furniture and prints by Dutch lithographer M. C. Escher. His 1970 purchase of the Boleskine House in Scotland, a former abode of Crowley’s, and his taking ownership of London’s fantastic Tower House and the Equinox specialty bookshop in 1974, sealed his reputation as a dedicated scholar of the occult, and in interviews promoting Led Zeppelin records or tours he freely spoke of his research into the subject. Sitting for the climactic shot of his “Dazed and Confused” sequence in The Song Remains the Same (where he had to remain still while his “Hermit” makeup was altered between takes), Page revealed that he drew on yoga training to hold his position. He was even said to have been contracted to contribute articles to the British Man, Myth and Magic publication, but none of these have ever turned up. Yet again none of this connoisseurship should be equated with Satanism. Like others who have ventured into the science and history of magic and fringe religions (including Crowley), Page was perhaps guilty of playing on outsiders’ ignorance of the distinctions between out-and-out devil worship and the far more nuanced and arcane principles he was actually attending to. “[Y]ou can’t ignore evil if you study the supernatural as I do,” he hinted in 1973. “I have many books on the subject and I’ve also attended a number of séances. I want to go on studying it.” The Song Remains the Same also showed Page sitting alone on the grounds of his Sussex home as optical effects made his eyes radiate a demonic glow. It was this sort of teasing, maybe-I-am, maybe-I’m-not obfuscation that eventually came back to haunt him.

  “Satanism” itself, so far as it can be understood, is a rather confused system that can mean different things to different people. Some have described it as at bottom a psychological disorder in which its victims cannot achieve any sexual pleasure unless through transgressive or blasphemous acts. Others claim it is merely reverence for a very different being than Christian theology’s arch-villain, who they say has been unjustly blamed for human suffering. Not true, say these Satanists: Their deity is one of self-fulfillment and personal autonomy, a healthy contrast to the guilt and denial espoused by centuries of religious indoctrination. Anton LaVey (1930–1997), American founder of the Church of Satan, encapsulated his tenets as “the worship of life,” maintaining that he and his disciples were “concerned with the fullest gratification of the ego on this plane of existence.” Then why the pentagrams, black candles, and nude ceremonies of his organization? Groups like LaVey’s typified the latter-day Satanism that reveled in creepy shock effects to titillate the squares, yet still pretended to be a serious philosophy that had somehow drawn the reproaches of the intolerant. The briefly popular 1980s metal performer King Diamond likewise denied anything aberrant in his messages—“Satan, for me, is not like the guy with two horns and a long tail…. Satan stands for the powers of the unknown, and that’s what I’m writing about”—before putting on his skull makeup and going back to shriek numbers titled “The Possession” and “Black Horsemen.”

  The most extreme Satanism, whose rites and beliefs were first documented in France during the 1600s, consisted of active and often obscene parodies of the Catholic liturgy. Though authentic and objective accounts are hard to come by, covert rituals of defrocked priests, sexual desecrations of Christian figures (as statuary or human stand-ins), and animal or occasionally human sacrifice did take place from the early modern era right into the twentieth century. These seem to have arisen out of unconscious but deeply felt hostility toward an all-powerful Church, combined with a very disturbed erotomania that had no other outlet in pious society. By Jimmy Page’s lifetime the emotional need to resort to such outlandish performances had become extinct, and this kind of Satanism had become fodder for horror fiction and movies rather than something still observed among reasonable people.

  Page revealed in 1988 that he had no religious upbringing at the hands of his nonobservant parents (“They were baptized but they didn’t go to church”), though in the mid-1990s he was seen wearing a “Recovering Catholic” T-shirt on a talk show with Robert Plant. Whatever his background, as an adult Page became a wealthy man able to afford and acquire many valuable items with occult connotations, and able to privately subscribe to the code of Thelema, as transcribed by Aleister Crowley in his capacity as head of the Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of the Temple of the East). It’s been speculated that Page likely joined the OTO when a member of Led Zeppelin and is still involved, though the order is by its creed highly discreet and not open to the dilettante. Crowley’s Book of the Law puts forward the famous decree “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” going further to maintain:

  [E]ach of us stars is to move on our true orbit, as marked out by the nature of our position, the law of our growth, the impulse of our past experiences. All events are equally lawful—and every one necessary, in the long run—for all of us, in theory; but in practice, only one act is lawful for each one of us at any given moment. Therefore Duty consists in determining to experience the right event from one moment of consciousness to another.

  This is not that far from the values upheld by Anton LaVey and in some respects even resembles the objectivism of author Ayn Rand (The Virtue of Selfishness). Thelema is centered around an exaltation of the Will—the adherent’s fundamental life purpose and desire—as the most important element. As the determined leader of what became one of the most popular and profitable musical acts of the twentieth century, Jimmy Page appears to have been a devout and well-rewarded Thelemite. On the other hand, he has also been associated with a variety of charitable organizations, an altruistic gesture that would seem to contravene the “Do what thou wilt” instruct
ion.

  So how did Page’s “Satanist” rep arise? Like many who preached a new religion, Aleister Crowley was outspoken in his denunciation of old ones. Raised (and probably warped) by a rigidly and narrowly Christian mother, Crowley adopted his title as “the Great Beast” from her own epithet for him and spent his life alternating quite sober explications of Asian or ancient spiritualities with scandalous bids to overturn the priggish Victorian and Edwardian moral conventions of his day. Thus The Book of the Law, which Crowley claimed had been dictated by the spirit Aiwass through his entranced wife in 1904, contains a passage exhorting:

  I am in a secret fourfold world, the blasphemy against all gods of men. Curse them! Curse them! Curse them! With my Hawk’s head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross. I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed & blind him. With my claws I tear out the flesh of the Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol and Din. Bahlasti! Ompehda! I spit on your crapulous creeds.

  Defining and celebrating his own faith by reversing or at least realigning the biblical hierarchies of good and evil, Crowley virtually invited the condemnation of his peers—never mind his personal escapades of drug addiction, sodomy, spousal abuse and abandonment, and general irreverence. Ever since, many critics and journalists have used “Satanist” as a shorthand label for Crowley and by extension Jimmy Page, even though neither man meets the accurate description. Page, certainly, has never displayed in his art or life the cheap demonology of lesser, death metal bands, like Slayer or Lamb of God, and in interviews has sprinkled his remarks with pleasantries like “Good lord,” “Crikey,” and “My goodness gracious.” In 2000 he went so far as to take legal action against a London magazine that had run an article attesting he had cast Satanic spells over the dying form of John Bonham; he won financial damages and the publishers were forced to apologize and deny the story.

  From Aleister Crowley Page learned and applied the disciplines of intention, focus, and effort: “What I can relate to is Crowley’s system of self-liberation in which repression is the greatest work of sin,” he said in 1977. “Because his whole thing was liberation of the person, and that restriction would foul you up, lead to frustration which leads to violence, crime, mental breakdown, depending on what sort of makeup you have on underneath.” Yet there was more to this than just diligence or self-gratification. Crowley transcribed and carried out numerous magical “operations” in order to secure his goals, using complex invocations and symbols, a substitution technique Jimmy Page was to borrow many years later. “Yes, I knew what I was doing,” he responded to a query from Guitar World’s Brad Tolinski about the puzzling glyphs and sigils worn on his stage clothes and displayed on Led Zeppelin album sleeves. “But the fact is, as far as I was concerned, it was working, so I used it. But it’s really no different than people who wear ribbons around their wrists: It’s a talismanic approach to something. Well, let me amend that—it’s not exactly the same thing, but it is in the same realm.” Until he makes a candid confession to the contrary, it may be assumed that this was about as mysterious as the guitarist’s efforts in magic got. If his Thelemite values helped him to do well at his chosen profession, they did not seem to have saved him from the ordinary human setbacks of ill health or other misfortune—any more than they did Aleister Crowley, who died broke and addicted to heroin at age seventy-two. Ultimately, Page’s most lasting achievements can be attributed to the talent he displayed for the whole world rather than any hidden rituals or incantations he might have conducted out of the public eye. “I’ll leave this subject by saying the four musical elements of Led Zeppelin making a fifth is magic unto itself,” he concluded. “That’s the alchemical process.”

  And If You Listen Very Hard: The Backward Messages on “Stairway to Heaven”

  Yes, there are backward messages audible to anyone who wants to hear them, but no, they were not put there by Led Zeppelin.

  The strangest of the various myths concerning the band, and one of the most publicized, the “Stairway to Heaven” smear has actually been addressed by the surviving members who have been pained to have their masterpiece tarred in such a fashion. “We were so proud of [the song],” Robert Plant told Rolling Stone in 1990, “and its intentions are so positive, that the last thing one would do would be… I find it foul, the whole idea.” Elsewhere the vocalist stated, “You can’t find anything if you play that song backward. I know because I’ve tried. There’s nothing there.” He said to Musician magazine in 1983, “The first time I heard [the rumor] it was early in the morning when I was living at home, and I heard it on a news program. I was absolutely drained all day.” John Paul Jones was similarly dismissive: “Of course, it’s fatal, you know, because you tend to wind these people up after a while. If you go around saying, ‘Oh, yes, if you play track eight at 36 rpms, you’ll definitely hear a message,’ they’ll say, ‘All right,’ and go right home and try it…. It’s just sitting ducks, really.” Jimmy Page has refused to dignify the allegations with any comments at all. Following Plant’s dismissal, “I figure if backward masking really worked, every record in the store would have ‘Buy this album!’ hidden on it,” Page summed up: “You’ve got it, you’ve hit the nail on the head. And that’s all there is to say about it.”

  Backward masking stories are not unique to Led Zeppelin, and “Stairway to Heaven” is not the only rock song purported to contain them. At the heart of the notion is the occult fad that took hold in the youth culture of the 1960s and ’70s, along with the professional and consumer recording technology in use at the time and the almost mystical significance attached by audiences to the private lives and commercially released music of the era’s most popular performers. Led Zeppelin was caught up in the controversy through an unfortunate coincidence of factors, which, however implausible they seem separately, together made for a fascinating riddle; as with Charles Manson’s murderous interpretations of the Beatles’ lyrics on their 1968 “White Album,” the imagined backward messages on “Stairway to Heaven” have nothing to do with the intentions of the group itself but nevertheless add an intriguing dimension to the work. Only in the rock ’n’ roll heyday could anything like backward masking have been conceived, and only Led Zeppelin could be thought to have implanted Satanic adjurations in their most celebrated anthem.

  Since the beginning of mechanically reproduced sound, engineers (including pioneer Thomas Edison) noticed that recording and playback machines could be run in reverse as well as forward; speech and music played backward did have a recognizable flow or rhythm, which made for an incidental curiosity to anyone who got to hear it. It was not until the advent of multitrack recording in the 1950s, where separate takes of perfected performances could be “mixed” into a single completed composition, that the possibilities of backward sounds were opened up. Blended into otherwise conventionally recorded material, an isolated backward track could have a striking effect. (The almost unlistenable B side of a 1966 novelty hit, Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa,” was the same song entirely reversed.) Before the invention of electronic or digital phasing features and the sonic alterations made possible with computer technology, backward recordings were one of the few gimmicks available to recording professionals—and one of the simplest to achieve.

  For rock ’n’ rollers exploring the new psychedelic realm, incorporating one or more backward tracks into their cuts was a very freaky device. Jimi Hendrix used them (along with sped-up and slowed-down tapes) on “Are You Experienced,” “Third Stone from the Sun,” and other tunes, and the Beatles employed a variety of experimentations in “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” “Rain,” and elsewhere in their discography. “Rain,” the B side of 1966’s “Paperback Writer,” heard John Lennon’s voice played in reverse for an entire verse. “Before Hendrix, before the Who, before any fucker,” Lennon said proudly in 1980. “I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana and, as I usually do, I listened to what I
’d recorded that day. Somehow I got it on backward and I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on, with a big hash joint. I ran in the next day and said, ‘I know what to do with it, I know…. Listen to this!’ So I made them all play it backward.” During psychedelia’s brief flowering, backward music became one of its trademark ornaments.

  Though there are assuredly no “messages” in “Stairway to Heaven,” some Led Zeppelin songs do utilize backward tracks. Jimmy Page was as alert to the studio innovations of mid-1960s rock music as anyone, and tried out some techniques while still in the Yardbirds. Rather than simply invert a tape of live instruments or vocals, Page hit upon the concept of reversing their echo—“bouncing it down” to another track—so that the reverberation, not the original sound, is heard back to front. “You turn the tape over,” he explained later, “and then record the echo which is obviously after the signal; you turn the tape back and it precedes the signal.” Reverse echo has a surreal, disorienting quality quite different from the plainer methodology of just turning a finished performance around; the closest a player can come to it without recording is to hit a chord or note on an amplified instrument with its volume turned down, then raise the volume while the initial resonance fades away. This very subtle trick was first used on the Yardbirds’ folly “Ten Little Indians,” but is better placed in Led Zeppelin’s “You Shook Me,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “When the Levee Breaks” (backward music on Led Zeppelin IV!), and takes on a special potency in “The Wanton Song.” Page noted that Led Zeppelin’s engineer Glyn Johns doubted reverse echo would even work until the guitarist-producer overruled him. “I had to scream, ‘Push the bloody fader up!’ And lo and behold, the effect worked perfectly…. [Johns] just couldn’t accept that someone knew something that he didn’t—especially a musician…. The funny thing is, Glyn did the next Stones album, and what was on it? Backward echo!” (Page probably refers to “You Got the Silver” from Let It Bleed.)