Rating My CD's: The Universal White-Boy Unconscious

36. Led Zeppelin -- IV/Zoso/Runes/Old Fart With a Bunch of Sticks/The One With "Stairway"/Whatever


I chose to open this Rating My CD's death-march series with a one word review of Back in Black because coming up with something to say about Back in Black that hadn't been said a thousand times already proved insurmountable. Basically, I owned Back in Black because it was a well-loved hard-rock record by a well-loved hard-rock band, and suburban doughboys like myself like them some hard-rock. It may as well have come in the mail with the Pennysaver.

I'm rather tempted to kick the same punt right now. I mean, this is freakin' Zeppelin IV we're talking about here. What the hell am I gonna do, make stupid guesses about what "bustle in your hedgerow" actually means? Thunderously declaim that I will never tire of "Rock and Roll"no matter how many car commercials it appears in? Issue the "One of us! One of us!" chant at Robert Plant on behalf of anyone that's ever played Dungeons & Dragons, for "The Battle for Evermore"? How do you write about something ubiquitous?



Simple. I'm going to write about myself (you know, the other kind of punt).

I first must cop to a lie. I didn't first hear Zeppelin in college, as I said I did. My first experience with the Zep coincided with my first experience of Metallica. In 1987, I took a long bus ride to middle school, a place I hated, with a bus driver who played the same songs on a daily basis. I don't know how many times I heard "Master of Puppets" in 6th-7th grade. He also liked the Billy Idol version of "Mony, Mony." He also liked "Black Dog."

At the time, however, I didn't know "Black Dog" was Led Zeppelin. I didn't even know that the song was named "Black Dog." If I had been pressed, I would have thought it was named "Hey Hey, Mama." I didn't put the two together until I actually bought my copy of this record, sometime in 1999-2000. I remember feeling as though a piece of my past had clicked into place, as though those awful mornings staring out the window yearning to bust out had not been utterly wasted. It was a fine feeling.

And then I heard "Rock and Roll", and I was pogoing and air guitaring and rocking the hell out in my tiny tiny bedroom, making up for a hundred summer afternoons spent reading instead. It remains my favorite song of the Zeppelin catalogue, perfect driving music. But few things a man can do with his clothes on feel as good as passing some putz on the highway while the bridge climaxes. It's better than liquor.

"Battle for Evermore," whatever. It's haunting and it cools everything down a notch, which was absolutely necessary after the first two barn-burners. As a song, it's decent to good. As a cohesive piece of the overall album, it's perfect.

There are a lot of rules.

"Stairway to Heaven" is "Stairway to Heaven." I like it. I don't love it, I don't think it's the most amazing, mind-hurricanating thing ever recorded by the human eardrum. I don't even think it's the best thing on the album. But I like it. I listen to it with pleasure on every trip through the tracks: settling comfortably to the opening chords, feeling it build and swell, bobbing my head along as hedgerows are bustled and rocks learn not to roll or whatever's going on. Stuff like this:

OMG I'm Totally LOL!

...has always seemed way overwrought to me. Granted, I've never supplemented my dreams of becoming a rock star by hawking over-priced electronics and lessons to teenagers, but it seems to me that  wanting to learn how to play "Stairway" is the next logical step after wanting to learn to play "Johnny B. Goode" and "Hard Day's Night" (Besides, everyone knows you should never use any Gibson guitar as a weapon: you'll snap the neck faster than you can say "glued together." Use a Fender; they're like baseball bats).

On any other record, "Misty Mountain Hop" and "Four Sticks" would be singles. Here, they get things going again after the Stairway Monster rumbles back to sleep, "Misty" with its horny, harmonized slither, and "Sticks" with it's slightly nauseated weirdness (and an ironic foreshadowing about "rivers running dry"). And then we have to take one more light breath before the end, so we settle into a hopeful, otherworldly gypsy melancholy and Go to California. I lived in California for three years, and I didn't much like it. But this song almost makes me feel as though I remember what California used to mean to those who'd lost their stuff and their wine: the Promised Land, where gold flowed in the rivers.

And after this heavenly vision vanishes, we fall face-first into the Apocalypse, into what Rivers really are, and how we live among them at their sufferance. The Blues is usually the stuff of personal nightmares, personal hells traversed with pained but proud steps. Rarely do they offer such crushing visions of Total Judgement, as punches the listener right in the gut in the first beat of "When the Levee Breaks."The "if" in the line is a pathetic wish: it's going to keep raining, the levee is going to break, and even the mountain men will not be safe. The waters will wash over all, your cries and prayers will fall on deaf ears. If this song had been named "The Children of Cain," no one would ever have blinked an eye.

That's the thing that keeps people from dismissing this record, and this band, no matter how much they want to. There's a rock-solid Something underneath all the hysteria and commercialism, something bigger and older than the songs themselves, a line tapped into the pure vein of Rock'n'Roll as a musical art that people don't weary of. I remember sluffing off my early new-convert passion for Led Zeppelin with the studied irony of claiming them as The Universal White Boy Unconscious. Whenever I trotted it out, people seemed to nod their heads and say "Yeah, that's about right." It's big and loud, overwhelming, also sensitive and a little geeky, and harder to put together than it seems. It's Rock as Sacred Monster.



Grade: DI