“Led Zeppelin IV”: four symbols for the immortality of rock
There are records that no longer belong only to their time, but mark a moment in which music stops being just sound and transforms into a mythological language. “Led Zeppelin IV”, published onNovember 8, 1971is exactly this and becomes a ritual of birth and rebirth with which rock, through four symbols and eight songs, crosses the frontier of eternity. No title, no band name on the cover, just arcane signs and an old hermit bent over a lantern: so Led Zeppelin decided that the music should have spoken for itselfwithout mediations, without an explicit identity. From Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham it was a gesture of challenge and absolute trust in their own myth, carried out at the height of their creative power.
Led Zeppelin’s fourth album
The story of the album basically begins at Headley Grangean old manor house in Hampshire where Led Zeppelin retreated after the first sessions at Island Records in Basing Street, for record away from the studios and constraints of the industry. The house, already frequented by Fleetwood Mac, offered isolation, silence and the possibility of experiencing music twenty-four hours a day. Thanks to the mobile studio “loaned” to Page and his associates by the Rolling Stones parked in the driveway, the energy of those damp and irregular rooms was transformed into sound matter.
“The fact of all living together in the same placeto sleep there, and to be able to develop all these musical concepts and ideas in a natural way, it led to something extreme”Page said about ten years ago in a special on the making of the album for “Classic Rocks”. He concluded: “Every one of us in the band knew it instinctively: you couldn’t help but realize it. What we had created, as good musicians as we were, was a substantial work”.
Bonham’s drums in “When the Levee Breaks”, a reinterpretation of the 1929 country blues classic by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, resonates like thunder captured in the walls. “Rock and Roll” seems to be born from an improvisation, and “The Battle of Evermore” takes shape from a mandola, like a vision resurfaced from time. And then there is “stairway to Heaven“, the song that alone sums up the power of the whole project. The song dates back to 1970, when Jimmy Page and Robert Plant retreated to an isolated cottage in Wales, after their fifth American tour. It was there that Page began working on the music, developing it over time starting from fragments recorded on a cassette recorder that he always carried with him. The first ideas for the lyrics were born a few months later at Headley Grange, where Plant improvised and wrote inspired by the figure of a woman “who continually receives anything desires without ever being returned or shown any consideration.” The recording of the song came to life one step at a time at the Island Records studios in Basing Street, where the sessions began before the band moved to Hampshire to complete the recordings, before the song was finalized at Island Studios. The structure of “Stairway to Heaven” it was imagined as an ascentwith a faint acoustic guitar that opens, then the intertwining of electrics, keyboards and drums that grows until the final catharsis. Each section is a step, each instrument a breath that pushes upwards, until the final explosion, deliberately accelerated, conceived – said Page – as a musical orgasm. It is the very essence of “Led Zeppelin IV”, which on the b-side continues by intertwining earthly intensity and spirituality, between noise and revelation, between inspirations coming from Tolkien (“Misty Mountain Hop”) and the delicacy of “Going to California”, before the powerful drums by Bonham at the end with the aforementioned “When the Levee Breaks”.
The symbols of “Led Zeppelin IV”
Before the needle hits the vinyl, “Led Zeppelin IV” speaks through its markingsas symbols that had the power to transform the enigmatic nature of the band into myth. After the confused and often cold criticism received by the previous work, “Led Zeppelin III”, Page and his companions decided to let the music, and not the words, speak for them. No title, no name on the cover, so, but four mysterious symbolschosen by each member of the group as personal emblems. The idea sent Atlantic Records into a panic, which feared a commercial disaster, even though the album sold over 35 million copies over time. Led Zeppelin were adamant and refused to hand over the tapes until the choice was respected.
Initially, Jimmy Page had only thought of one symbol for the album, but then decided there could be four, one for each member of the band. Page designed his own symboloften called “ZoSo“. The guitarist has never publicly revealed a precise meaning of it and it has been hypothesized several times that his sign had already appeared in 1557 as a representation of Saturn. For his part, John Paul Jones instead chose three intertwined ovals within a circle as a symbol, which he took from Rudolf Koch’s “Book of Signs” and which represents a person who possesses both confidence and competence. Bonham’s, however, is made up of three intersecting rings to symbolize the mother-father-son triad, but also coincides with the logo of the steel and armaments manufacturer Krupp and, reversed, with that of Ballantine beer. While Plant’s symbol is a feather enclosed in a circlewhich according to what the singer himself told in “Led Zeppelin in Their Own Words” “was taken from the sacred symbols of the ancient Mu civilization, which dates back 15,000 years ago and belonged to a lost continent”. In addition to the four band signs, which later even appeared on Led Zeppelin concert stages, the album also included a fifth of themsmaller, composed of three equilateral triangles and appeared on the inside cover of the LP as a sort of asterisk. It was the symbol chosen by host Sandy Denny to represent his vocal contribution in “The Battle of Evermore”.
