The Long Shadow of Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin III sold well initially, but quickly lost ground. Neither fans nor critics knew what to make of a record with such sharp electric and acoustic contrasts. But the next record—an album with no title, generally referred to as Led Zeppelin IV—did a stronger job of melding sounds and interests. There isn't a missed step anywhere—indeed, it is an extraordinary statement of prowess and dreams, unbelievably complex yet straightforward at one extreme ("Black Dog," with its staggering range of time-signature changes) and an alluring tale of scorn turned to transcendence at the other ("Stairway to Heaven").

Something else, though, happened with Led Zeppelin IV. There was an invocation of history and horror (and a bit of Lord of the Rings) in "The Battle of Evermore," and the suggestion of a shared mission of spiritual hope in "Stairway to Heaven." Just as important, though, was what was not on the album: any discernible title. The four runic symbols that function as both the record's real name and as representations of the personalities in the band had no clear meaning, but that made them more evocative, more a possibility than a meaning. (Page designed his own zoso-looking symbol and would never explain its significance—he told Plant only, but Plant forgot what it meant—while Bonham's pattern of intersecting circles resembled the logo of a beer he liked.)

In the case of Jimmy Page, the use of symbolism had a special edge. As far back as his time in the Yardbirds, Page had an interest in the occult. By this point in Led Zeppelin's history, that interest had transformed into an obsession with the British mystic and rogue Aleister Crowley, who messed in some pretty heavy juju, including an interest in satanism, in the early 1900s. Page himself was never a satanist, but he was attracted to Crowley's philosophy. "His whole thing," Page once said, "was total liberation and really getting down to what part you played. What you want to do, do it." Page had Crowley's primary law, "Do what thou wilt," inscribed in the run-off groove of the original LP releases of Led Zeppelin III. Years later, Page admitted that his concentration on Crowley was unfortunate, but in the band's lifetime, occultism proved a source of both silly speculation and painful rumors. The most wearying—and trite—of these was that Page and the other members of Led Zeppelin (except for John Paul Jones, the quiet one) had sold their souls to the devil in exchange for fame and success.

Tales like this may hold a dark appeal for some—the soul-selling legend certainly didn't hurt Robert Johnson's stature over the years—but in the end it's all romantic know-nothingism. Johnson never met any devils at midnight crossroads for the same reason that Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin could never have made a supernatural deal for fame had they wanted to: There's no devil to make deals with. Any bargains are bargains with the self—but that might be enough. Crowley's dictum of "Do what thou wilt" would have a terrible effect on the life and death of Led Zeppelin.

Houses of the Holy, the band's 1973 album, has been seen as among Led Zeppelin's lesser works, but few held doubts about the band's sixth studio collection, the expansive Physical Graffiti. When the group began sessions for the 1975 album, it realized it had stored up a worthy collection of earlier unreleased tracks that might fit alongside some of the longer and more diverse material that Page and Plant had been writing. The result—fifteen tracks spread over two LPs—created a textural and thematic breadth unlike anything else the band had ever attempted. In particular, "Kashmir"—a song that made use of Indian and Arabic scales—was the band's most ambitious recording. The track opens with a swirling drone and begins a steady mounting tension that, though the song's sections shift and evolve, never lets up. In "Kashmir," it was plain that the group's music wasn't about ideals of fulfillment or completion or satisfaction. The song itself was about a drive that Plant and Page made through southern Morocco, down a nonstop road through a never-ending desert. The music was also about a drive toward a way-off horizon that couldn't be resisted. Led Zeppelin weren't interested in endings that were endings; they were interested in never reaching an ending.