Domestic Left #19: “I think this is a song of hope”
The Song Remains the Same, Led Zeppelin’s 1976 concert film, opens not with concert footage, but with a heavyset, balding man in black slacks, a pressed white shirt and a black vest getting picked up in a black car outside his estate. He and his long-haired assistant carry Tommy guns, the iconic black “gangster” submachine guns of the 30s with a round magazine mounted perpendicular to the barrel. They drive down winding two-lane English country roads, often veering into the right (incorrect) lane. They arrive at another estate, enter, and spray bullets at a group of well-dressed men playing cards, whose faces are obscured by creepy white masks and who wear Nazi insignia on their arms.
The heavyset man is Zeppelin’s legendary manager Peter Grant, whose aggressive and at times thuggish style of representation helped shift the balance of power in the music industry away from record labels and concert promoters and towards the artists themselves. The scene is the first of five “dream sequences” that break up the concert footage of the over-two-hour film — in addition to Grant, each of the four band members gets their own, shown over audio of extended musical sequences that feature their instrument (or, in the case of singer Robert Plant, his extended lyrical musings on dreams of world travel and “the seasons of emotion”).
The dream sequences don’t really add much to the film beyond, I guess, a visual break from looking at Jimmy Page’s guitar and Plant’s bare-chested swagger. A product of 70s rock-god pomposity, they mostly invite mockery when you watch them today — it’s hard not to imagine the film being narrated by Beavis and Butthead, MST3K-style: “Who’s that chick giving Robert Plant a sword? Dude, the sword’s, like, engulfed by fire. Coooool. Where’d Robert go? Now he’s back on the beach. Wait, he’s still got the sword. Now he’s making a fire. Now he’s on a horse in the water. Where’d that castle come from? Huh-huh, huh-huh, I bet these guys have done it more than once.”
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I was prompted to (re-)watch The Song Remains the Same because I have been listening a lot recently to the Sun Kil Moon song “I Watched the Film The Song Remains the Same,” a 10-minute half-spoken meditation on singer and songwriter Mark Kozelek’s life, framed by his memories of watching the movie while young and then again as a middle-aged man.
After recounting how he saw the film at the midnight movies in Canton, Ohio as a kid and was “mesmerized by everything,” Kozelek reveals that what spoke to him most about the movie were the quieter parts: “Rain Song” and “Bron-Yr-Aur” and “‘No Quarter’s Fender Rhodes’ hum.”
He then goes on to recount how “from my earliest memories I was a very melancholy kid,” and that, despite finding music in adolescence and then making a successful career of it, he “discovered I cannot shake melancholy.”
When he watches the film now, he relates, “the same things speak to me that spoke to me then,” but it it also makes him think of the deaths of Grant (in 1995) and drummer John Bonham (in 1980) — the latter of which effectively ended the band.
The most affecting part of the song for me is his description of being “baited” into clocking another boy on the playground in elementary school, and how the memory of that bit of violence has eaten at him his whole life. “Wherever you are, that poor kid, I’m so sorry.”
I also first saw The Song Remains the Same as a kid, but unlike Kozelek, I rented it on VHS and watched it, I imagine alone, on the family television. It would have been at least half a decade after Bonham’s death. (Kozelek, being six years older than I am, could conceivably have seen it before Bonham died.) I don’t recall the film making much of an impression on me, but, like Kozelek, I have also always been drawn more to the more ruminative, melancholic side of Led Zeppelin’s music.
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Most of us probably don’t really think of Led Zeppelin as masters of the recording studio (like, say, Pink Floyd or Prince — or the Beatles and Beach Boys, who were largely credited for popularizing the idea of the recording studio as an instrument in its own right), but the opening performance of The Song Remains the Same, “Rock and Roll,” is a reminder of how important Page’s multi-tracked guitars were to Led Zeppelin’s recorded sound.
But they were also a fantastic live band. Although we think of them as “arena rock,” and these performances were filmed at Madison Square Garden, they play remarkably close to each other on stage, like a bar band. The live version of “Rock and Roll” replaces the wall of guitars of the studio version with a looser, rawer sound, Page’s Les Paul full of electric aggression that he keeps just barely under control during the verses and choruses, and then unleashes during the solo.
The slow blues “Since I’ve Been Loving You” and the gothic fantasia “No Quarter,” on which bassist John Paul Jones switches to organ and Fender Rhodes electric piano respectively, are a reminder that Led Zeppelin were as much of an organ trio (plus a singer) as they were a blues-rock guitar band.
The organ trio format (organ, electric guitar, drums) emerged in urban areas of the U.S. in the late 40s and early 50s, as jazz musicians (and bar owners, to whom paying a smaller number of musicians was financially attractive) realized that the Hammond electric organ could, on its own, create as full of a sound as a larger ensemble of horn players. It was also, curiously, the jazz format most likely to feature an electric guitar — perhaps because early electric guitars could not, in fact, be amplified very much, and the wide tonal range of both instruments allowed guitars and organs to play in different, complementary registers as they traded solos (organ trios also tended to play a style of jazz based on lengthy improvisation over steady grooves).
It was the invention of the solid-body electric guitar, which allowed for much greater volume, that gave birth to rock and roll guitar playing as we know it today. Jimmy Page, more than any of the other guitar gods of the 60s and 70s, used this new technology not just to be loud, but to be full, recording ensembles of guitars on records and, when playing live, just drenching the room with relentless waves of amplification.
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Like most concert films, The Song Remains the Same features footage of various backstage goings-on interspersed between the performances. These include Grant threatening a promoter and a group of security guards chasing down and then beating a young, long-haired man who had attempted to get in without a ticket.
Most of them are reminders of the degree to which the modern rock-and-roll industry depends upon violence or the threat of it.
While none of the band members’ dream sequences are as directly violent as the opening “Mob Rubout” scene featuring Grant, all of them take on personas that evoke the social domination (and implicit or explicit violence) of the ruling class through the ages, from the modern playboy back to ancient druids. Bonham’s genial country squire calls to mind the early-20th-century height of the British empire, when the sun never set on the millions toiling to keep English country homes grand. Jones is a creepy Victorian gentleman in a top hat and cape who rides through the night with several companions for some dark, unknown purpose. Plant engages in a sword fight in a medieval castle, at one point pushing his antagonists into a fire.
In the creepiest part of the film, Page appears to free-climb a rock cliff at night to confront a druidic sorcerer at the top. The psychedelic, ego-boundary-dissolving visions depicted are reminiscent not of a benevolent melding with the universe but of a dark magic of will and mastery, in line with Page’s real-life interest in the occult writings of Aleister Crowley.
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The guitar is, by its nature, a fairly quiet instrument. A plucked or strummed string doesn’t make much of a sound, and an acoustic guitar requires a fairly large resonating chamber (the body) to amplify that sound enough to be heard at all.
When people began adding electric pickups to guitars in the twentieth century, they found that the two amplification methods worked against each other — or, rather, worked with each other too well. The amplified sound of the guitar from the speakers would be picked up by its resonating chamber and then, well, fed back into the pickups, producing the painful squeal known as “feedback.”
In the 1950s, two men — Leo Fender and Les Paul — worked independently to develop a solid-body electric guitar. Fender, whose goal was to provide mass-produced instruments to working country-and-western musicians and who founded his own company, came to dominate the market by the mid-60s. The smaller but heavier (and more expensive) guitar that Paul designed for the Gibson company, primarily to satisfy his own desire for a pure bell-like tone and to stroke his own ego, fell into disfavor until Eric Clapton found one in a pawn shop in London. Clapton, then playing with John Mayall and his Bluesbreakers, discovered that if plugged into an overcharged amp the Les Paul could, ironically, produce a much thicker, dirtier, grittier tone than any other guitar.
That grittier tone is on display throughout Page’s playing in the film, as is another feature of the highly-amplified solid-body electric guitar. The history of all previous musical performance had been a history of physical endeavor. Not one requiring great strength, necessarily, but one where the production of sound was clearly related to the expulsion of breath, or the motion of hands and arms, and sometimes feet and legs. The solid-body electric guitar, with enough amplification, is almost like an oil gusher: one barely needs to touch it to release an eruption of sound; the art is not in producing the sound but in controlling it.
Feedback, too, becomes not the unpredictable nuisance it was in the era of Western swing, but an elemental sound and fury to be wielded.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the almost-30-minute rendition of “Dazed and Confused,” a song that Page basically stole from American folk singer Jake Holmes. But there is nothing of Holmes’ composition left in the middle 20-some-odd minutes of this performance, where Page alternately leads and abandons his bandmates in an extended improvisation of electricity and feedback, creating an abrasive soundscape that owes as much to John Cage as to the blues.
This is not the collaborative chaos of the Grateful Dead’s collective improvisations, nor the everyone-for-themselves chaos of Pink Floyd’s psychedelic jams. Page is clearly in control — indeed, at one point, Jones and Bonham look positively confused, one of the most solid rhythm sections in the history of music not sure how to follow their leader’s zigs and zags through tempos, registers and musical genres. Plant’s attempts to echo Page’s guitar lines with his voice are wordless shrieks, as if he’s been reduced to some pre-verbal state.
At what may be the dramatic peak of the film, we see Page engaging in his famous stunt of playing an electric guitar with a violin bow. The violin and its bow are perhaps one of the greatest achievements of a pre-industrial craft that respects the natural origins of its materials — the finest violins made of specific woods from around the world and the best bows made from the strong horsehair of stallions raised in cold climates.
In Page’s hands, the bow is simply a tool to extract new constellations of sound from the dynamo of his electric guitar. He bangs it on the strings then holds it out towards the various corners of the audience, as if dispensing manna to his acolytes. With that kind of power, who wouldn’t think he was a god?
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Kozelek ends his song by describing his plans to go visit an old friend he hasn’t seen for 15 years, “the man who signed me back in 1992,” and to thank him, face-to-face, “for helping me along in this beautiful musical world I was meant to be in.”
It’s sobering to reflect upon the fact that even Kozelek, who clearly knew what he wanted to do with his life from a young age and has been successful, has never been able to shake his melancholy.
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In what is, I believe, the only bit of stage patter in the entire film, Plant introduces “Stairway to Heaven” with “I think this is a song of hope.”
OK, I guess.
It’s kind of hard to know what to make of this, in the middle of a film that, underneath its woozy self-indulgence, is mostly just about raw power. Perhaps it’s a calculated bit of artifice. Perhaps it’s unironic hippy utopianism, left over from the 60s. Perhaps underneath all of Led Zeppelin’s overdriven appropriation of the blues, supercharged with masculinity and technology, there’s some core of genuine feeling, an appreciation of the melancholy of existing in a world filled with violence and the need for some kind of hope in the face of it.
I had initially intended to title this newsletter “In the heaviness of everything I drowned,” a line from Kozelek’s song, which I thought was a nice play on the “heaviness” of Zeppelin’s music (and snappier than “I Listened to the Song I Watched the Film The Song Remains the Same and Then I Watched It Too”). That probably would have been more true to the art, but sometimes you need to reframe the whole story, whether from artifice, utopianism, or genuine feeling.
Led Zeppelin are such a hegemonic part of Anglo-American music culture at this point that there’s probably no reason to provide any Led Zeppelin-related links here, but if you read this newsletter and still want to watch The Song Remains the Same yourself, it can be rented for a few bucks on YouTube. You can also find bits of it to watch for free on the band’s YouTube channel.
If you’re in need of a Spotify playlist of Zeppelin songs that tends melancholic but still includes a decent number of rockers, here’s an unimaginatively titled playlist of my favorites.
I learned about the song “I Watched the Film The Song Remains the Same” from this New York Times list from 2016, which I came across while I was idly googling the Wilco song “One Sunday Morning.” Both of those songs are on this playlist, which is still a work in progress, and is distinctly more melancholy than the Led Zeppelin playlist.
If you are interested in the history of the electric guitar, I highly recommend The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ’n’ Roll, by Ian Port. It doesn’t really live up to the dramatic promise of its title, in that the “rivalry” is somewhat overblown, and certain bits, like the discussion of the Beatles’ use of Rickenbacker guitars, don’t really advance the book’s attempt at a plot, but it’s still a fascinating history of the instrument.
Before I started this newsletter, I had a blog, and in 2017 I wrote a piece about the Canadian band the Tragically Hip, whose music — unlike Led Zeppelin’s — “manages to be muscular without being masculinist.” I thought about that piece quite a lot as I was writing this one.