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

by George Case

  Physical Graffiti was the first product from Led Zeppelin’s private record label, operated under the umbrella of Atlantic Records but run by Peter Grant and jointly owned by Grant and the four band members. The operation lasted until the early 1980s. “Swan Song,” usually defined as an artist’s final output preceding death or retirement, had begun as an instrumental song sketch from Jimmy Page, then had been floated as an album title, and was finally picked as the name of the new business venture. The Swan Song picture that went on the LPs and which was minimized to an all-purpose Led Zeppelin logo for T-shirts, posters, and other merchandise was taken directly from artist William Rimmer’s 1869 canvas Evening (The Fall of Day), with slight modifications to the position of the winged figure’s arm. Born in Liverpool in 1816 but raised in obscurity in New England, the self-taught Rimmer made sculptures and paintings and is respected by art scholars, although this piece alone has won him the attention of a far wider audience. With the Hindenburg explosion, the Hermit of the tarot, and the four Led Zeppelin IV symbols, the Swan Song image remains one of the most famous Zeppelin trademarks.

  The 1974 logo was executed by Joe Petagno, an American graphic artist who had already done work for Alice Cooper and underground publications including the LA Free Press and The Oracle. “I contacted Storm from Hipgnosis and asked him if he would be interested in collaborating,” Petagno recalls today. “He said my reputation preceded me and that I would be more than welcome.” Through the English firm, he presented some original Swan Song designs to Led Zeppelin, but the band “had some reservations…. They asked if I could do a Rimmer copy for them, as they thought it suited their label, or identity, as it were…. I thought it would be best to create something new and original, but the client is always right and in the end I did a take on the Rimmer piece for them.” Petagno’s Swan Song was done in gouache and colored pencils on illustration board. He did several versions, and the “sunset” picture was finally selected by the band. “I think it took me about nine days to complete it,” he says. “The Swan Song lettering was one hundred percent original and it’s a piece I’m very proud of…. It was very satisfying to work with the mighty Zeppelin. They are one of my favorite bands of the day, so needless to say, I was very happy and proud to be involved on this level.” Joe Petagno has continued a successful career as a rock illustrator, and is known especially for his Gothic covers for Motörhead.

  Because of the Swan Song subject’s ecstatic pose, long fair hair, and muscular build, fans at first took it as an idealized Robert Plant (minus genitalia), but deeper investigation suggested it was a representation of the mythical Icarus, or the Greek sun deity Apollo (patron of music and poetry), or even of the biblical Lucifer. The morning star, identified in Latin as “Lucifer,” was associated by ancient Israelites with the rebel archangel cast out of heaven for challenging God, as described in the Old Testament’s Isaiah 14: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! … For thou has said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God…. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.” Rimmer’s Fall of Day may therefore be a depiction of Lucifer’s ejection into hell—Jimmy Page was by 1975 working on a soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising film project. The original, done in crayon, oil, and graphite, is today housed in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; for his heroic anatomical draftsmanship Rimmer himself has been called “a Yankee Michelangelo.”

  Presence

  The cover to Presence, the second Led Zeppelin album cover to be composed by Hipgnosis, and the second to draw on the talents of George Hardie, may be the group’s eeriest visual projection of itself. Though lacking the occult overtones of Houses of the Holy or the confounding wordlessness of Led Zeppelin IV, the sleeve still creates a haunting sense of uncertainty, with the unexplained purposes of its “Object” set into an otherwise banal gallery of domestic and outdoor scenes. Only the outside covers of the gatefold were photographed by Hipgnosis’s Aubrey Powell and Peter Christopherson; the interior shots were taken from old Life and Look magazines. The family posed around the table on the front were photographed in a studio and then superimposed in front of a boat show at London’s Earl’s Court arena (scene of Zeppelin’s last great run of English concerts), while the girl student on the back was none other than Samantha Gates, late of Houses of the Holy. A broad white border around the pictures mirrors that of another memorable Hardie-Hipgnosis arrangement, Pink Floyd’s 1975 Wish You Were Here.

  “We needed something so powerful, so huge, that it made you weak just to think of it,” recalls Storm Thorgerson of the cover’s conception. The dark little obelisk that is the focus of each Presence shot became known as “the Object,” and appears to be the bearer of some kind of psycho-spiritual power—a presence. “Perhaps it was a cosmic battery, or a spiritual relic, or alien artifact, exposure to which seemed essential.” There is something faintly sinister about the way it occupies such an important place in the routine settings of a golf course, a bank, a school, and a park, like some crucial centerpiece of an unnamable ritual or a plot twist in a David Lynch movie. The Object was illustrated onto the photos by Richard Manning, looking, in Thorgerson’s words, “more a hole than a thing, an absence rather than a presence.” After a first meeting with Led Zeppelin, Peter Grant, George Hardie, and the Hipgnosis team where the premise of the cover was discussed, it was Jimmy Page’s idea to change the shape of the Object with a linear irrationality inspired by one of his own favorite artists, Dutch printmaker M. C. Escher. Physical promos of the Object were cast by Crispin Mellor and used for photo shoots and giveaways. “You can put a number of different interpretations on it,” said Page, “so it’s best to leave it as an open-book situation.” The other group members were themselves evasive or undecided about the Object’s meaning, Robert Plant comparing

  The surreal images from the Presence gatefold were taken from old Life and Look magazines.

  Courtesy of Len Ward / The Rad Zone

  it to a religious symbol or the similarly transformative Object in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. “The meaning behind it has been present throughout time, you know…. Its purpose has been there since time began.”

  Unlike Physical Graffiti or the later In Through the Out Door, the Presence cover is not bursting with pictorial trickery, but its very minimalism makes its point better than any wider array of gimmicks. Though subject to copyright, the Object has never attained the branded status of “ZoSo” or the Swan Song logo—relative to Zeppelin’s other output, the record was not a big seller—but like the music it contained, the jacket, with its quiet inscrutability, is among the quartet’s most entrancing statements.

  The Song Remains the Same

  Today remembered as a flawed and self-indulgent double-album soundtrack for a flawed and self-indulgent concert film, The Song Remains the Same was a multimedia representation of Led Zeppelin in all their imperial glory. The record cover and the movie poster used the same designs, both supplied by the art department of the releasing studio, Warner Brothers. This was a predictable collage of drawings based on scenes from the documentary; e.g., John Paul Jones on horseback, Jimmy Page with his bow, John Bonham in a drag racer, and the band’s Starship jetliner. Most notable on the two-disc record (reissued in a lavish update in 2007) was the illustration depicting a ruined movie theater, placed over a second one of the same venue, intact this time, where the name “Led Zeppelin” can be partly discerned on the marquee. Inside was a booklet offering stills from the film and a suitably flattering essay, in this case not quite deserved, from rock journalist Cameron Crowe.

  In Through the Out Door

  Again the work of Hipgnosis and with a rich well of varied effects, designs, and photographs, the series of In Through the Out Door packages were perhaps compensation for the artistic thinness of the album itself. Here the surprise was in which of six available covers would be available to buyers, an enticement heig
htened by literally presenting the record under cover of a plain brown wrapper, stamped with a matter-of-fact title and author credit. The brown-bag idea was inspired by Peter Grant’s boast that Led Zeppelin records would sell truckloads no matter what was on the cover, although the conceit had previously been demonstrated by the Beatles’ The Beatles (the “White Album”) and the Who’s Live at Leeds. Even the multiple

  Nineteen seventy-nine’s In Through the Out Door was made available in several different sleeves.

  Author’s Collection

  sleeves were not unheard of, as the Zones’ Under Influence and a three-song Damned EP were also issued with several jackets in 1979, the same year as In Through the Out Door.

  But the Zeppelin record was the most conceptualized of these: The scenario of the cover was centered around a lonely patron at closing time in a seedy bar, as seen from the differing perspectives of the bartender, a piano player, a female barfly, a seen-it-all private eye, and a pair of shady B-girls. A complete sextet would thus show an almost 360-degree view of the solitary drinker of Jim Beam as he burns his Dear John letter (in fact there are additional variants of the six covers where the models’ poses are very slightly altered). According to Storm Thorgerson, the bar was a London set based on Aubrey Powell’s “personally researched” watering holes in New Orleans, although it’s also said to be a recreation of that city’s Absinthe Bar on Bourbon Street, a hangout of the band on their later visits to the Crescent City. Jimmy Page supposedly selected the original location, a bar he knew on the Caribbean resort of Martinique, but this could not be replicated. Given a sepia-toned tint by Richard Manning that emphasized its bluesy, world-weary mood, the portrait also had a swash of brighter color across it, as if observed through a dusty window. This device also provided a clue to the possibilities of the black-and-white inner dust jacket, whose first printings (i.e., the million or so copies scooped up by fans in ’79) could be moistened to bring out their own colors. When a damp tissue was dabbed on the close-ups of the ashtray, glass, bottle. and coins—and the embers of the breakup letter that was the key to the whole scene—a rainbow of pigment would emerge, an idea suggested by Jimmy Page from a coloring book owned by his young daughter Scarlet.

  Though the In Through the Out Door cover is one of Hipgnosis’s most elaborate, there is little on it besides its track and production info that actually connects with Led Zeppelin. No single element in the picture can stand alongside the Hindenburg, the Hermit, or the Object in the foursome’s iconography. Just as the disc’s title promised a comeback of sorts for the band, it could be that the watercolor effect was meant to show that the battered Zeppelin now had been given what Thorgerson called “a lick of fresh paint across a faded surface.” The evocative cast of drinkers and other seedy characters might be listening to the album’s torch song “I’m Gonna Crawl” on the jukebox, but beyond that it would seem to be a case where the creativity of the illustrators and the musicians had diverged. In Through the Out Door was the fourth Led Zeppelin studio record in a row to be nominated for a Best Album Cover Grammy award, but neither it nor Houses of the Holy, Physical Graffiti, or Presence was a winner in the category.

  Coda

  The last complete album of unreleased music put out by Led Zeppelin, 1982’s Coda was a contractual obligation owed by the band to Atlantic Records. Jimmy Page complained that the duty of assembling the outtakes and nuggets of a band broken up over the death of their drummer was “disgusting,” but the record served as an adequate close to their career. The collage of group and individual pictures on the gatefold, a lesser Hipgnosis production, was actually one of the best things on the effort: The individual Zeppelin players had only occasionally been depicted on their records, and Coda nicely rectified the general public’s vagueness as to what Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham really looked like. So here were the four men at differing moments of the previous twelve years, showing the telescoped effects of the rock star experience. There are a few unexpectedly light snaps of Page dressed as a cricketer (using a guitar for a bat), the laughing quartet assembled behind what may be a urinal, and Led Zeppelin in rehearsal in 1977, hamming it up as a nightclub act circa 1955. Note how the shots of Bonham especially belie the late percussionist’s reputation as the ravaging “Beast” of hotel suites and dressing rooms—instead he appears a cheerful, smiling man signing an autograph, hoisting his mate and boss Page up off the boards after a show, and tenderly sitting his daughter, Zoë, on his knee. Strangely, it is Page’s daughter Scarlet who’s airbrushed out of the center shot of Bonham and Page at an awards dinner. Ditto the original Knebworth background of the 1979 portrait of the band applauding some unseen activity (reportedly a strip act), as a brighter setting was superimposed behind. The back cover of Coda showed an aerial shot of huge circular tailing ponds, standing for Led Zeppelin’s now-complete sequence of ten albums.

  Led Zeppelin (Box Set)

  This highly successful 1990 compilation, while standing apart from the original Zeppelin LPs, fit in well with the band’s history of inventive and allusive visuals. By a firm called Mission Control, each CD or cassette of the four-piece collection was packaged within one of the four Led Zeppelin IV symbols cleverly worked into a natural scene: Plant’s feather was a (winter) ice formation, Page’s “ZoSo” a (spring) sundial, Bonham’s rune an actual rune inscribed on a (summer) rock, and Jones’s on an (autumnal) shoreline. The box set cover was an ingenious reference to the group’s imposing legacy, portraying the vast shadow of an unseen zeppelin over a field inscribed with alien crop circles. A quartet of apparent printers’ marks at each corner were numbered 54, 69, 79, and ? (infinity), perhaps standing for the 54 songs in the anthology, the first of which were released in 1969 by an act whose last album as an active unit came out in 1979, but all of which will last forever.

  Led Zeppelin’s four symbols were adapted into seasonal motifs for the 1990 box set.

  Author’s Collection

  Timeline

  1977

  March 28: 574 dead in jumbo jet collision, Canary Islands.

  April–July: Led Zeppelin tour US.

  June: CB radio fad takes off, US.

  July 24: Peter Grant, Richard Cole, John Bindon, and John Bonham charged with assault after beating of Bill Graham employee Jim Matzorkis, Oakland, California.

  July 27: Led Zeppelin’s tour is cancelled following death of Robert Plant’s son.

  August 16: Elvis Presley dies, age 42.

  Movies: Star Wars; Close Encounters of the Third Kind; Saturday Night Fever; Annie Hall.

  Music: Fleetwood Mac, Rumours; the Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks; Meat Loaf, Bat out of Hell; Debbie Boone, “You Light Up My Life”; Ted Nugent, “Cat Scratch Fever”; Abba, “Dancing Queen.”

  21

  The Story Was Quite Clear

  Led Zeppelin in Literature and Film

  Inspiration’s What You Are: Literary and Artistic Figures Who Influenced Led Zeppelin

  For the most part, the ensemble was four rock ’n’ roll musicians whose main motivation was the joy of creating and performing together, but their development was also shaped by a variety of external social and cultural movements from their own and earlier times. Jimmy Page, as the founder and leader of the band, was particularly affected by his months as an art student in the early 1960s. On Led Zeppelin’s album covers and logos, and in the overall evolution of their work, the aesthetic effects of some of this training can be discerned.

  The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

  Formed in London in 1848 among a small group of British painters and students, the Pre-Raphaelites sought to make a new, more naturalistic national art that drew on scenes from biblical, medieval, or Renaissance literature for its subjects. They disdained the nineteenth century’s static and sanitized portraits of contemporary nobility—dukes on horseback, duchesses in their drawing rooms—in favor of emotionally stirring images that spoke to deeper and more spiritual matters of life; their title was
meant to assert an allegiance to the style of Italian painting that preceded the advances represented by Raphael (1483–1520). Some of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite pieces include William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, and John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott and A Mermaid. Architect William Burges’s 1881 Tower House, owned by Jimmy Page since the early 1970s, also derives from the same neo-Gothic sensibility. When Page spoke to interviewers expressing his “affinity for the ideals of the pre-Raphaelites,” he was probably referring to the painters’ inclinations toward outdoor settings, rustic characters, and an imagined Elizabethan purity. Led Zeppelin’s lovely acoustic ballads, like “That’s the Way,” “Friends,” “Tangerine,” and “Going to California,” as well as the idyllic introduction to “Stairway to Heaven,” convey something of a Pre-Raphaelite mood. Page is known to possess valuable works of art by Pre-Raphaelite figures like Edward Burne-Jones, and in the group’s 1970s prime the leonine Robert Plant was described in London’s Financial Times as “a painfully thin pre-Raphaelite heroine.”

  The Arts and Crafts Movement

  Emerging around the same epoch and within the same intellectual circles as the Pre-Raphaelites, leading Arts and Crafts figures such as William Morris rejected Victorian Britain’s growing trends of mass production and industrialism. Instead they called for a return to—and made for themselves—personal, less replicable motifs of design and ornamentation, away from the standardized products whose abundant manufacture and consumption determined a soulless, class-stratified society. The Arts and Crafts journal Studio was where Jimmy Page found the font used for the “Stairway to Heaven” lyrics printed in Led Zeppelin IV, and the bucolic and idiosyncratic sounds of “Black Mountain Side,” “Thank You,” “Down by the Seaside,” and “Bron-yr-Aur” evince the movement’s same celebration of unplugged, cottage-industry naivety. To a journalist around the time of IV’s release, Page explained the album cover: “[T]he old man carrying the wood is in harmony with nature…. His old cottage gets pulled down and they put him in these urban slums, old slums—terrible places.” The painting itself, he later said in Guitar World, was found by him and Robert Plant on an antiquing expedition. “I used to spend a lot of time going to junk shops looking for things other people might’ve missed. You know, I’d find all these great pieces of furniture, really fine Arts and Crafts things that people would just throw out.” Of course, Led Zeppelin existed in the late twentieth entury, traveled by jet aircraft, and used advanced recording and amplification equipment of which William Morris could never have dreamed, but Page’s nostalgia for a distant, pre-technocratic simplicity was similar.