Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV Read Online Free PDF

Mick with the MBA or the priapic Pan from Birmingham? CharmingCharlie Watts or the potentially barbaric John Bonham? Or try running this little thought experiment: You step into an elevator and there’s Keith Richards, leaning against the wall, grinning at you. You murmur something fannish and grateful, awed that this grizzled, fabulously wealthy wraith still walks the earth. Now imagine you’re in the same situation, facing Jimmy Page: silent, feline, ominously puffy. You’d probably just want to get the hell out of there.
    Taken literally, Zep’s Satanism is silly, but as a figure for their cultural power, it warrants attention, especially when brought to you by an imaginative if paranoid obsessive like Thomas Friend. One of Friend’s most audacious but intriguing claims concerns the image on the inside of thegatefold, which was conceived by Page and brought into being, in pencil and gold, by his friend Barrington Colby. Atop a mountain stands another old man, an idealized geezer based on the classic Rider–Waite Tarot image of the Hermit—a symbol of self-reliance and wisdom, according to Page. Though the Hermit is usually read as a figure of solitary illumination, here he waits for a scruffy seeker below to make his way up the mountain. This ascent is mirrored in Page’s “fantasy sequence” during the film
The Song Remains the Same
, which shows the guitarist climbing up a mountain to encounter an old man—also played by Page—whose face goes through various lysergicmorphs before the figure waves his wand, itself a psychedelic echo of Page’s own onstage use of the violin bow. Friend points out that the sequence was shot behind Boleskine House on a full moon night. He also reminds us that Crowley bought the isolated mansion in 1899 in order to attempt the arduous Operation of Abra-Melin the Mage, the successful completion of which results in “the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.” For Thelemites, this close encounter with the HGA—aka, one’s daemon or higher self—signifies the discovery of one’s True Will.
    Friend claims that Crowley contacted the HGA at Boleskine, and that Page purchased the place to perform the same operation (Stephen Davis reports that Page also hired “the Satanist Charles Pierce” to restore some of Crowley’s murals). Unfortunately, Crowley’s diaries strongly suggest that he encountered his HGA much later, down in Surrey, where he was hiding from his wife and experimenting with hashish and prayer. Nonetheless, there is a certain crazy charm to Friend’s claim. Friend notes that Zeppelin did not tour during the fall of 1970, a break that ended only when the band gathered in December to begin rehearsing and recording their fourth album. Though the time frame was rather cramped by true Solomonic standards, Friend believes that Page succeeded in contacting the HGA, who ofcourse is actually Satan, and that this triumph is mirrored in Colby’s gatefold, the later fantasy sequence, and the phenomenally popular music on. And that’s why the band didn’t put their name on the jacket. They didn’t write the music.
Satan did.
    Of course, Jimmy Page probably just spent the fall of 1970 getting stoned, playing guitar, and listening to
Band of Gypsies
and the Trees. But there are certain peculiarities about Colby’s image that should be noted. There is only one significant difference between Colby’s hermit and the Rider–Waite image, a difference Friend notes with an admirable clarity: “
THERE ARE HORNS STICKING THROUGH THE HOOD!!!
” 16 There is another surprise beside this hint of diabolical iconography: If you hold the gatefold open vertically and place the right side of the image along a mirror, a beast will shape itself out of the mountain rubble and leap into your eyes. Go ahead, try it at home. Is the beast a dragon? A hound of hell? The black dog? Friend does not discuss this simulacrum, although he does claim to find an image