Led Zeppelin FAQ_All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time

by George Case

  George Hardie’s rendering of the Hindenburg disaster became a Zeppelin trademark.

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  detailing of the flames, the rupturing framework of the airship, and the looming dark of its underside can still be seen as they were initially illustrated. Stretched across the cover in a neat diagonal pointing straight at the band name in the upper left corner, with a phallic suggestiveness few punters could miss, the new record by the English heavy blues group would catch many an eye in the record bins of 1969. In a moment when most pop record jackets were splotched with a rainbow of colors and cliché psychedelic surrealism, Led Zeppelin was almost unique in its monochrome reproduction of an instantly recognizable press photo. The gambit paid off. Years later, comparably historic images were used for hard rockers Mr. Big’s 1991 Lean Into It (a nineteenth-century Parisian train wreck) and Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut in 1992 (a Vietnamese monk’s self-immolation), but the Zeppelin artwork remains definitive.

  On the back of Led Zeppelin, Page commissioned ex-Yardbird Chris Dreja—who had very nearly stayed on with the reformed act in 1968—to take the photo of the four band members. Unsmiling, posed in a circle around the song titles and (not completely truthful) author credits, the quartet stared out in serious black and white. All of them were barely into their twenties, wearing expressions of grim arrogance that would be borne out in the run of hit records they were to enjoy from this premier disc on. Though the soft-focus frame of Dreja’s portrait is unexceptional, it looks like the photographer did (or was asked to do) a few touch-ups on Page’s hair, where the waves in the guitarist-producer’s tresses appear to have been given some doctored luster. Other info on the sleeve lists Glyn Johns as “Director of Engineering,” a title given again only on the next Led Zeppelin album, and Peter Grant as “Executive Producer,” a title to be used on all the rest. Interestingly, a Zeppelin “logo,” based on George Hardie’s first submissions and reused in various promotional releases and even the next album, was placed at the bottom of the back cover, an early example of rock

  The back-sleeve photograph of Led Zeppelin was taken by ex-Yardbird Chris Dreja.

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  branding that predated or was contemporaneous with the Rolling Stones’ tongue, Aerosmith’s wings, the Grateful Dead’s “Steal Your Face” skull, and Zeppelin’s own Swan Song angel.

  Led Zeppelin II

  The “Brown Bomber” was Zeppelin’s breakthrough album. Though its cover is no match for the unforgettable symbolism of its predecessor, it did extend the Gothic, martial implications of Led Zeppelin with another zeppelin shape spread over both sides over both the inner and outer gatefold, and with the curious use of another often reproduced photograph, in this case a group portrait of flyers from Germany’s Jasta 11 squadron, taken during World War I in March 1917. There were no doubt some listeners who would have vaguely understood the picture to be of some kind of military unit. With its white zeppelin outline splayed across the Germanic brown of the sleeve, Led Zeppelin II gave a first impression of more hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners music, which, containing as it did “Whole Lotta Love,” “Heartbreaker,” “Moby Dick,” and “Bring It On Home,” was a fair assessment.

  Another young Londoner, art director David Juniper, illustrated the cover. Juniper was from Epsom, Surrey, along with Jimmy Page, and studied at art school around the same time as the future Zeppelin leader. “The music of Led Zeppelin had blown me away,” he told Rockpopgallery.com in 2007, “and so, on spec, I mocked up a fold-out design for the second album and took it to Peter Grant and Mickey [sic] Most at RAK Records…. The combination of photography and airbrush illustration was very tricky, especially compared to today’s digital equivalents. The cover imagery was completely experimental and I liked the combination of the abstract ghostly zeppelin shape along with a faded World War I photo of German aviators.” Juniper took a publicity shot of the four Zeppelin members and fit their faces over those of the pilots, adding an odd, almost random collage of other heads (or just sunglasses, moustaches, and beards) to alter those of the Jasta fliers.

  From left to right, the standing figures on the Zeppelin album are:

  • Unknown Jasta pilot, with shades and facial hair added (not Richard Cole or Peter Grant)

  • Miles Davis, with eyes altered and beard, over Jasta Leutnant Hintsch

  • Vizefeldwebel Festner, with facial hair (resemblance to Charles Manson is accidental)

  • Leutnant Emil Schaefer, with shades and facial hair (not Cole or Grant)

  This photo of Manfred von Richthofen’s World War I fighter squadron was altered by artist David Juniper for the cover of Led Zeppelin II.

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  • Andy Warhol “Superstar” Ultra Violet, over Oberleutnant Kurt Wolff (not actress Glynis Johns as a joke on former engineer Glyn Johns)

  • Astronaut Neil Armstrong, over Leutnant Georg Simon

  • John Bonham, over Leutnant Otto Brauneck

  Seated figures:

  • Jimmy Page, over Leutnant Esser

  • Robert Plant, over Leutnant Krefft

  • John Paul Jones, over Leutnant Lothar von Richtofen (brother of “Red Baron” Manfred, who was omitted from the original photo)

  It’s possible some early viewers assumed the group to be a ten-piece Led Zeppelin band, including black and female personnel, making the portrait more puzzling than it already was. Inside, the more straightforward panorama of a spotlighted zeppelin cruising over a towering classical structure, with the album credits printed as if on marble, emphasized the oversize nature of the songs and the quartet itself. These too evoked a Wagnerian, Sturm und Drang aesthetic, like something out of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, that was perfectly appropriate for the bluesy bombast of Led Zeppelin. Though the conceit would seem cheesy when other acts took it on (see Deep Purple’s In Rock, Boston’s Boston, and countless heavy metal covers), it was in October 1969 an effective visualization of the group’s sonic scale and ambition. Juniper’s Led Zeppelin II was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Album Cover in 1970 but lost to Gary McFarland’s America the Beautiful.

  Led Zeppelin III

  “A disappointment,” Jimmy Page called the cover of the third Zeppelin album in a 1998 interview. “I’ll take responsibility for that…. I knew the artist and described what we wanted with this wheel that made things disappear and change. But he got very personal with his artwork and disappeared with it…. I thought it looked teeny-bopperish.” With its rotating volvelle that utilized the principle of crop rotation calendars, Led Zeppelin III was the most elaborate of the band’s album jackets to date, but graphically it was less successful: busy, cluttered, and, as Page complained, too “personal” for the message Led Zeppelin wanted to project. For what it’s worth, John Paul Jones has volunteered that his own favorite Zeppelin cover is “the one with the wheel.” The artist of the sleeve went by the name Zacron, but Page and others knew him as Richard Drew.

  The strange cover of III was nevertheless congruent with the unexpectedly acoustic tones of its music. Prominent were birds, butterflies, and insects; geometrical shapes; Victorian-era illustrations of mechanical objects; old cars (one with the initials “JP”); and a variety of flying machines, including British airships that were cousin to the German zeppelins, a flight of Hawker Fury biplanes from the 1930s, a twin-boomed Luftwaffe Focke-Wulf Fw 189; and the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloon of 1783. A castle with the numeral 4 and the word Private superimposed may refer to Page’s address of 4 Shooters Hill in Pangbourne, Berkshire. The entire hodgepodge of found imagery was strongly reminiscent of the pop art of Peter Blake (famous for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper) and other British designers working in the same fashionable style of the period. In addition to the riotous colors and pictures from the rest of the jacket, the circular volvelle featured photos of the band members (lined up so the same player appeared in two or three cutouts at once), and even shots of what may b
e Robert Plant’s dog Strider (subject of “Bron-y-Aur Stomp”) and a young child, possibly one of John Paul Jones’s daughters, or John Bonham’s son Jason or Plant’s daughter Carmen. The comparatively understated back cover showed only the quartet plotted in a geometric layout (for some reason, only Plant’s picture is tinted), with the singer’s necklace doctored to bear another of Zacron’s ornamental shapes.

  The most significant detail on the inside cover of Led Zeppelin III was not any of the artist’s eccentric clippings, or even the bulbous font of the group name, but the acknowledgment of the location where Plant and Jimmy Page had first composed some of its material. Misspelled as “Bron-y-Aur,” the Welsh retreat is given a very hippie credit—what exactly is “a somewhat forgotten picture of true completeness”?—that established its centrality in the Zeppelin legend. Though unmentioned there, it would be in the following album’s “musical statements” that the greatest impact of the “small derelict cottage in Snowdonia” would be heard.

  Untitled (Led Zeppelin IV)

  As well as being one of the most popular records of all time, the fourth Led Zeppelin album came in the most enigmatic sleeve ever to contain an album of commercial pop music. The words Led Zeppelin were seen nowhere on the disc’s packaging—not even on the record label itself—and to this day the mysteriously opaque cover’s outer and inner designs are some of the key ones in the group’s mythology.

  It is true that the album was not as anonymous as has been claimed. By the year of its release in 1971 many progressive rock record jackets were stylized works that eschewed bold banner texts in favor of some or other talismanic visual: Blind Faith’s self-titled debut of 1969 (bare-chested adolescent girl), King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King the same year (grotesque facial close-up) John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band from 1970 (Lennon and Yoko Ono reclining under a tree), Dylan’s 1970 Self-Portrait (self-portrait), and others, were all practically barren of titles or artist names on their front covers. Led Zeppelin took this approach a step farther by putting no identity on either side of their album, yet in a sense they were only catching up to other star acts who were so big that they literally needed no introduction. Jimmy Page’s reasons for the move were not just pride, though, but also resentment. “[T]he cover wasn’t meant to antagonize the record company,” he told Brad Tolinski in 2001. “It was designed as a response to the music critics who maintained that the success of our first three albums was driven by hype and not talent…. So we stripped everything away, and let the music do the talking.” When the promotional department at Atlantic Records objected to the band’s idea of an untitled release, “We said they couldn’t have the master tape until they got the cover right,” avowed Robert Plant. After some insistence by Peter Grant and the rest of the band, Atlantic gave in, but in any case, the LP arrived in stores shrink-wrapped with some wording on disposable stickers, and shipped in large quantities

  Since 1971, the four symbols from Led Zeppelin IV have been an enduring source of speculation for fans.

  Courtesy of Len Ward / The Rad Zone

  and with attendant promotion (posters, review copies, etc.) that clearly tied the product to the famous rock’n’ roll group.

  The cover of what most fans have come to call Led Zeppelin IV (a logical assumption after the numeric titles of its predecessors) was another gatefold edition, with both exterior and interior wraparound images. At first glance, the picture is of some sort of dilapidated wall with a battered painting of an old man carrying a bundle of sticks hanging askew—open the fold, and the wall is revealed to be a ruin, with a modern apartment tower looming over soulless low-income housing in the background. The photo was taken by rock lensman Keith Morris in the Eve Hill area of the West Midlands town of Dudley, near Robert Plant’s home of Wolverton in the suburbs of Birmingham; the John Bonham family had only recently vacated the high-rise, known as Butterfield Court. Jimmy Page explained that the surprise juxtaposition of preindustrial decay with grim technocracy was intentional: “[W]e decided to contrast the modern skyscraper on the back with the old man with the sticks—you see the destruction of the old and the new coming forward.”

  Page has also said that the painting itself was a chance discovery he made while antiquing in the Berkshire municipality of Reading with Robert Plant. “Robert found the picture of the old man with the sticks and suggested we work it into our cover somehow.” The guitarist was an enthusiastic collector of Art Nouveau artifacts and other pieces from the nineteenth century, and the unattributed painting fitted in with his personal tastes, but it has been speculated that the portrait was not the accidental find he made it out to be. Some have said that it depicts a George Pickingill, the so-called Wizard of Essex, who reportedly held a malefic sway over the farmers and townsfolk around the village of Canewdon in the late 1800s. According to rural hearsay, the notorious Pickingill practiced witchcraft in his district, had somehow resided there for over one hundred years, and cast terrible ancient spells against anyone who dared to

  Pamela Colman Smith’s tarot illustration of the Hermit was adapted by artist Barrington Colby for Led Zeppelin IV.

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  cross him—with the aid of a carved wooden stick he always carried. If the “old man with sticks” is indeed a representation of Pickingill, Page has either deliberately misled interviewers on the subject, or by an amazing coincidence it has turned up on a work by artists long linked to the occult. It may be, in the end, just an unknown painter’s picture of an elderly farmer, resuscitated for use on a rock album.

  Inside was another old man with a stick, albeit a more recognizable one. Officially known as View in Half or Varying Light but better remembered as “The Hermit,” the inner gatefold was a variation on Pamela Colman Smith’s design for that card in a familiar 1910 edition of the tarot deck. “It’s basically an illustration of a seeker aspiring to the light of truth,” Page said, noting the young aspirant climbing the rocky crag toward the elderly robed figure with the lamp, as a medieval walled town stands in the distance. Nowadays any flip through a pack of Arthur Edward Waite tarot cards will soon trigger a flashback to Led Zeppelin wall hangings, T-shirts, and incense sticks. In 2007 Page clarified that “The Hermit” originated from an 1854 Pre-Raphaelite painting of Christ by William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World, where the subject holds a lamp at nighttime.

  This picture was credited to a Barrington Colby (sometimes spelled Coleby), whom Page described as “a friend.” The “MoM” after Colby’s name may stand for Man of Mystery, since his works have rarely been seen elsewhere, and it’s even been speculated that he was no more than an alias of the former art student Jimmy Page himself. View in Half or Varying Light is not an especially well-executed drawing—it’s really a straight copy of the tarot card—although some have strained to see a scary face hidden in the rocks upon which the Hermit is perched. Colby is said to currently reside in Switzerland. The 1996 album Shaman, by British New Age guitarist Phil Thornton, has presented Colby paintings, and, coincidentally or not, Thornton has collaborated with Egyptian musician Hossam Ramzy, who directed the Arabic backing players for the 1994 Jimmy Page and Robert Plant No Quarter project. Ultimately Barrington Colby might have been just another art school connection of Jimmy Page’s, like George Hardie, David Juniper, and Richard Drew/Zacron, who unlike those men has since staked out a more idiosyncratic career apart from the field of commercial art.

  With this record, Led Zeppelin for the first time personalized even the inner dust jacket of the vinyl disc. Here things became very mysterious. On one side the lyrics for the album’s undisputed highlight, “Stairway to Heaven,” were printed in a font Page had seen and appreciated from an old edition of the English Studio, a journal of the Arts and Crafts movement of the nineteenth century; the lavish, almost calligraphic lettering made the words appear as if out of an antiquated past rather than the sterile 1970s, which (as with the contrasting architectures of the exterior cover) was exactly the point. Yet anot
her unknowable image from a previous century, a small black-and-white engraving reproduced in one corner showed a Renaissance-era bearded man studying a book with a few runes inscribed on a background rock and what looks like the word “London.” Like the scattering of clips that had turned up across Led Zeppelin III, this may have been just a copyright-free thumbnail appropriated for its ambiguity, although present-day English occultist Dave Dickson told Zeppelin biographer Mick Wall it could be a representation of Dr. John Dee. Dee, an authenticated astrologer and magician in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, had himself sometimes transcribed cryptic signs and symbols for his own rituals; these sigils are today still visible in his preserved works such as the Tuba Veneris and the tablet Sigillum Dei Aemeth. The odd marks visible in the Led Zeppelin IV etching of him (or whoever it is) corresponded with those printed across the top of the sleeve’s obverse.

  Magic Runes Are Writ in Gold: The Led Zeppelin IVSymbols

  For many years after the release of the album in November 1971, the quartet of designs from IV were the subjects of fans’ wild guesswork and elaborate attempts at decoding. They were displayed on the band members’ equipment in concert, as well as in their personal jewelry and clothing, but while it was soon possible to tell which symbol was whose, the riddle of what they stood for remained unsolved. In later years, though, the surviving players in Led Zeppelin have come forward with limited explications of their origins and intention—the runes have still been employed by the performers in the course of their solo careers—and independent research has to a large extent settled the matter. However, in forty years the four symbols have lost little of their graphic impact, and they continue to be among the most unique and readily identified corporate signatures in the world. Not bad for a gimmick Jimmy Page once called “just another ruse to throw the media into chaos.”