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Authors: Erik Davis
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pictures with sound.” 42
The desire to make pictures with sound accords with Led Zeppelin’s deep romantic leanings. After Beethoven’s symphonic revolution, many nineteenth century composers explored “programme music,” self-consciously linking narrative imagery and events to instrumental themes and developments. Not surprisingly, such symphonies often veered toward the dramatic: large masses of sounds, dynamic and sudden contrasts, expressive and even violent explosions of energy. Composers like Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss knew that
sturm und drang
makes especially vivid pictures in the mind; Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique
, with its opium dreams and witches’ sabbath, is “visionary” in more than one sense of the term. Though Zeppelin have much less of a fetish for classical music than other heavy metal artists, the band also rooted their rich dramatics in what Page has called their “inner dynamics.” These dynamics derive from the variety of contrasts Zeppelin employ: elven folk and muddy blues, lightning attacks and molasses riffs, holy majesty and pelvic sleaze, technological effects and pastoral romance. These polarities, often masterfully arranged by John Paul Jones, clasp and crash throughout the course of an album or even a song,carving out a landscape that the electronic media theorist Marshall McLuhan would call an “acoustic space.”
Consider the exquisite ending of “Thank You,” which closes side one of
Led Zeppelin II
. Around 3:30 into the song, as Plant and his lover “walk the miles,” we hear the dewy plaints of Jones’s keyboards, rooted in the church organ playing of his youth, gradually fade into the distance. But what does this mean, to describe Jones’s sounds as fading “into the distance”? Though fade-outs resemble the physical experience of a sound source moving away from our bodies, they are so common in recorded music that we rarely read them as a change in proximity. At first, “Thank You” proceeds normally: Jones’s holy flutters simply dwindle away, along with the bell-like toll of Page’s resonating D. At this point, first-time listeners are ready for the next track. But then, unexpectedly, the instruments return, increasing in volume until they resolve into a sustained, quietly triumphant chord. And that slight return opens up an infinite sense of place, of going and coming, a space of both potential and finality, like the sea. It is one of Zeppelin’s most sublime and subtle moments.
Zeppelin albums do not just lead listeners through the hills and dales of individual tunes, but draw them through the passageways
between
songs. Zeppelin albums are Albums, remember, as consciously sequenced as any records not condemned to the unnerving categoryof “concept album.” Consider how “Your Time Is Gonna Come” bleeds into “Black Mountain Side” on the first record: though a jarring juxtaposition, especially rhythmically, it adds another “spice” to the stylistic masala of Page’s acoustic fantasy, with its Celtic and Indian flavors, and prepares our palette, through contrast, for the quarter second of silence that precedes the bangers-and-mash riff of “Communication Breakdown.” Such powerful juxtapositions, which also operate inside songs like “Bring It On Home,” “Ramble On,” and “What Is and What Should Never Be,” not only create dynamics, but make the metaphor of the
journey
inevitable. Listening to Zep Albums is like a cruise through shifting landscapes; in the classic vinyl platform, a one-way spiral jaunt. When Plant yells for the confounded bridge in “The Crunge” from
Houses of the Holy
, he’s not just asking to get out of the groove, but to get his ass over to the other side … of the LP.
The rich sense of acoustic space that pervades Led Zeppelin records derives not only from the music’s inner dynamics, but from Jimmy Page’s mightiest technical spell: his engineering of
ambience
. As Robert Palmer noted in a
The desire to make pictures with sound accords with Led Zeppelin’s deep romantic leanings. After Beethoven’s symphonic revolution, many nineteenth century composers explored “programme music,” self-consciously linking narrative imagery and events to instrumental themes and developments. Not surprisingly, such symphonies often veered toward the dramatic: large masses of sounds, dynamic and sudden contrasts, expressive and even violent explosions of energy. Composers like Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss knew that
sturm und drang
makes especially vivid pictures in the mind; Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique
, with its opium dreams and witches’ sabbath, is “visionary” in more than one sense of the term. Though Zeppelin have much less of a fetish for classical music than other heavy metal artists, the band also rooted their rich dramatics in what Page has called their “inner dynamics.” These dynamics derive from the variety of contrasts Zeppelin employ: elven folk and muddy blues, lightning attacks and molasses riffs, holy majesty and pelvic sleaze, technological effects and pastoral romance. These polarities, often masterfully arranged by John Paul Jones, clasp and crash throughout the course of an album or even a song,carving out a landscape that the electronic media theorist Marshall McLuhan would call an “acoustic space.”
Consider the exquisite ending of “Thank You,” which closes side one of
Led Zeppelin II
. Around 3:30 into the song, as Plant and his lover “walk the miles,” we hear the dewy plaints of Jones’s keyboards, rooted in the church organ playing of his youth, gradually fade into the distance. But what does this mean, to describe Jones’s sounds as fading “into the distance”? Though fade-outs resemble the physical experience of a sound source moving away from our bodies, they are so common in recorded music that we rarely read them as a change in proximity. At first, “Thank You” proceeds normally: Jones’s holy flutters simply dwindle away, along with the bell-like toll of Page’s resonating D. At this point, first-time listeners are ready for the next track. But then, unexpectedly, the instruments return, increasing in volume until they resolve into a sustained, quietly triumphant chord. And that slight return opens up an infinite sense of place, of going and coming, a space of both potential and finality, like the sea. It is one of Zeppelin’s most sublime and subtle moments.
Zeppelin albums do not just lead listeners through the hills and dales of individual tunes, but draw them through the passageways
between
songs. Zeppelin albums are Albums, remember, as consciously sequenced as any records not condemned to the unnerving categoryof “concept album.” Consider how “Your Time Is Gonna Come” bleeds into “Black Mountain Side” on the first record: though a jarring juxtaposition, especially rhythmically, it adds another “spice” to the stylistic masala of Page’s acoustic fantasy, with its Celtic and Indian flavors, and prepares our palette, through contrast, for the quarter second of silence that precedes the bangers-and-mash riff of “Communication Breakdown.” Such powerful juxtapositions, which also operate inside songs like “Bring It On Home,” “Ramble On,” and “What Is and What Should Never Be,” not only create dynamics, but make the metaphor of the
journey
inevitable. Listening to Zep Albums is like a cruise through shifting landscapes; in the classic vinyl platform, a one-way spiral jaunt. When Plant yells for the confounded bridge in “The Crunge” from
Houses of the Holy
, he’s not just asking to get out of the groove, but to get his ass over to the other side … of the LP.
The rich sense of acoustic space that pervades Led Zeppelin records derives not only from the music’s inner dynamics, but from Jimmy Page’s mightiest technical spell: his engineering of
ambience
. As Robert Palmer noted in a
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