performance we consume and the sage behind the curtain, who remains concealed, literally
occult
. This mystique makes Page far creepier than Ozzy, who is hiding nothing, except maybe his debt to
The Munsters
. Though rooted in Page’s personal reserve and esoteric interests, the guitarist’s mystique is also structurally reflected in his musical practice. Page’s live virtuosity was leavened by the fact that he was notoriously sloppy, constantly picking up and discarding ideas with an air of carelessness, even distraction. In the heat of performance, it often seemed like a part of him was somewhere else, at a wise or possibly addled remove. Yet this sloppiness suggested that he had even mastered chance, and could“make it work.” This element of hidden mastery is the key, for behind the scenes, Page was an architect of control: a hands-on producer, a sometimes martinet in the studio, and a tight-fisted investor who, along with Peter Grant, helped wrest unprecedented financial and artistic control away from his record company. 39 This air of cunning underlies his mystique. Onstage, he would occasionally direct the other members like a conductor, a performance that Jones has insisted was largely for show.
Those souls disturbed by Zeppelin’s power seem most threatened by this quality of hidden control. For Tom Friend, Zeppelin’s spell is concentrated in occult technology. In his chapter “Misty Mountain Hop: Satan Takes Possession of Jimmy Page,” the author expends copious prose on the violin bow and the Echoplex; the following chapter is devoted entirely to the theremin. To Friend’s credit, it must be said that Page liked to play the great and terrible Oz. Onstage, he sapped the theremin for all the sorcerous drama he could muster; the guitarist often deployed his bow like a ceremonial magician’s wand, sometimes even seeming to ritually “call the quarters.” To reporters Page dropped cryptic comments about the hypnotic power of riff music; in
Sounds
, he discussed the “science of vibration,” floating the paranoid chestnut that certain frequencies of infrasound can liquefy your guts or even kill you. Ofcourse, the band heartily denied what Friend and others describe as Zeppelin’s ultimate secret weapon of diabolism: the “backwards-masked” satanic messages supposedly woven into “Stairway to Heaven.”
We will deal with these garbled hymns to “My Sweet Satan” in a later chapter. What’s important to note here is that these accusations of occult control mirror secular critiques of the band and their “fascist” manipulation of consciousness through media. When a Montreal Star reporter attacked Led Zeppelin for generating “false meaning” through volume, he was not criticizing the group for playing lame songs but for taking technological advantage of listeners. Indeed, with the exception of Susan Fast and Donna Gaines, commentators who address Zep’s core fans tend to characterize them as dupes, teenage zombies with little will or taste of their own. Sometimes drugs take the blame as well.
Rolling Stone
famously dismissed Zep’s followers as “heavy dope fiends,” while the
Los Angeles Times
went so far as to attribute the band’s success to the teenage embrace of barbiturates and amphetamines, drugs which seemingly rendered the human nervous system more susceptible to the band’s dirty tricks.
At the same time, it would be stupid to dismiss the questions of seduction and trance raised by Zeppelin’s live performances and recordings. Such matters are thorny topics in criticism, as they touch upon fundamentalissues of autonomy, of who we are when we give ourselves to music. The dissolution of boundaries most of us have experienced dissolves the boundaries of discourse as well, melting aesthetic categories into sacred intuitions and the febrile flashbacks of tribal exotica. It is difficult enough to explain, in anthropological terms, how the phenomenon of possession occurs in
occult
. This mystique makes Page far creepier than Ozzy, who is hiding nothing, except maybe his debt to
The Munsters
. Though rooted in Page’s personal reserve and esoteric interests, the guitarist’s mystique is also structurally reflected in his musical practice. Page’s live virtuosity was leavened by the fact that he was notoriously sloppy, constantly picking up and discarding ideas with an air of carelessness, even distraction. In the heat of performance, it often seemed like a part of him was somewhere else, at a wise or possibly addled remove. Yet this sloppiness suggested that he had even mastered chance, and could“make it work.” This element of hidden mastery is the key, for behind the scenes, Page was an architect of control: a hands-on producer, a sometimes martinet in the studio, and a tight-fisted investor who, along with Peter Grant, helped wrest unprecedented financial and artistic control away from his record company. 39 This air of cunning underlies his mystique. Onstage, he would occasionally direct the other members like a conductor, a performance that Jones has insisted was largely for show.
Those souls disturbed by Zeppelin’s power seem most threatened by this quality of hidden control. For Tom Friend, Zeppelin’s spell is concentrated in occult technology. In his chapter “Misty Mountain Hop: Satan Takes Possession of Jimmy Page,” the author expends copious prose on the violin bow and the Echoplex; the following chapter is devoted entirely to the theremin. To Friend’s credit, it must be said that Page liked to play the great and terrible Oz. Onstage, he sapped the theremin for all the sorcerous drama he could muster; the guitarist often deployed his bow like a ceremonial magician’s wand, sometimes even seeming to ritually “call the quarters.” To reporters Page dropped cryptic comments about the hypnotic power of riff music; in
Sounds
, he discussed the “science of vibration,” floating the paranoid chestnut that certain frequencies of infrasound can liquefy your guts or even kill you. Ofcourse, the band heartily denied what Friend and others describe as Zeppelin’s ultimate secret weapon of diabolism: the “backwards-masked” satanic messages supposedly woven into “Stairway to Heaven.”
We will deal with these garbled hymns to “My Sweet Satan” in a later chapter. What’s important to note here is that these accusations of occult control mirror secular critiques of the band and their “fascist” manipulation of consciousness through media. When a Montreal Star reporter attacked Led Zeppelin for generating “false meaning” through volume, he was not criticizing the group for playing lame songs but for taking technological advantage of listeners. Indeed, with the exception of Susan Fast and Donna Gaines, commentators who address Zep’s core fans tend to characterize them as dupes, teenage zombies with little will or taste of their own. Sometimes drugs take the blame as well.
Rolling Stone
famously dismissed Zep’s followers as “heavy dope fiends,” while the
Los Angeles Times
went so far as to attribute the band’s success to the teenage embrace of barbiturates and amphetamines, drugs which seemingly rendered the human nervous system more susceptible to the band’s dirty tricks.
At the same time, it would be stupid to dismiss the questions of seduction and trance raised by Zeppelin’s live performances and recordings. Such matters are thorny topics in criticism, as they touch upon fundamentalissues of autonomy, of who we are when we give ourselves to music. The dissolution of boundaries most of us have experienced dissolves the boundaries of discourse as well, melting aesthetic categories into sacred intuitions and the febrile flashbacks of tribal exotica. It is difficult enough to explain, in anthropological terms, how the phenomenon of possession occurs in
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