Free Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

Bonham didn’t like the place, and engineer Andy Johns reportedly thought it was haunted. Page, who lodged beneath the peaked roof in the top floor, dug it. “It was a pretty austere place, but I loved the atmosphere.” 46
    In order to capture some of this atmosphere, Page and Johns invaded every nook and cranny of the Grange with their mics and amplifiers. “We had amps in toilets, mics hanging down chimneys,” John Paul Jones later told Palmer. “Very often the sound would suggest a tune, and we’d write or arrange with that in mind.” Theexample Jones cites is also the most celebrated moment of Zeppelin’s conquest of ambient sound: the recording of John Bonham’s monumental drums for “When the Levee Breaks.” For the session, Bonham placed his new kit on the floor of a large open stone stairwell known by the family who owns the Grange as the “Minstrel’s Gallery.” Two ambient Beyer M160 stereo mics were then strung up on the two landings above, ten and twenty feet overhead, and then run through a guitar echo unit. There is some controversy about whether Page or Johns came up with this peculiar arrangement. Either way, the set-up was heresy: room mics were never used to record drums, and the team didn’t even mic the bass drum. But when you are working with an Orc like Bonham, sometimes heresy is the only way to go: “When the Levee Breaks” opens like a volcanic vent splitting the floor of the sea. As Andy Fyfe puts it, what you hear is not just the drums, but the drums reacting to the acoustic space of the room. But you are also hearing something more uncanny than this: you are hearing
the room respond to the drums.
The Grange itself awakens, just like the guitar army, and gives up its ghost to the magic circle of the reel-to-reel.

III .

GOTTA ROLL
    Black Dog
Rock and Roll
     
    The star who struts across the stage ofis one Robert Anthony Plant, the most restless of rock gods. From the very beginning of Led Zeppelin, Plant fashioned himself a wanderer, already rambling his way through “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” on their first record. By
Led Zeppelin III
, he was invading like a Viking and hitching like a dharma bum, “lookin’ for what I knew.” But Plant’s pedal doesn’t really hit the metal until, where his wanderings become a bona fide quest, like
The Odyssey
or
The Hobbit
or
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
. Every song features movement.First he rolls, then he strolls, then he winds on down the road; he heads for the Misty Mountains, for the rainbow’s end, for California, for Chicago. It is ultimately a spiritual journey, of course. But like most of us, Plant doesn’t really know where he’s going or what he’s looking for. Most of the time, women will do: a lady, or another lady, or The Lady. But larger historical and cosmic forces loom and intrude: war and law and the wreck of the earth. He tastes gnosis but doesn’t learn much. And it ends rather badly.
    That, in any case, is how I read this record: as a single journey through a changing landscape of moonlight, hedgerows, and trembling mountains; a movement unified, at the very least, by Plant’s anxious need to move. Whether or not Zeppelin consciously intended their record to tell the story of one man’s restless quest is beside the point; after literally hundreds of millions of repetitions in the collective ear holes of humanity, this particular sequence of recordings has fused into a single tale. Nonetheless, we need to mark the distinction between the character who makes this journey and the howlin’ hippie-boy from Birmingham who sings about it. So let’s call thecharacter
Percy
, which was Plant’s nickname, and an appropriate one. For one thing, Percy recalls Parsifal, the errant Arthurian knight who stumbles across the Holy Grail early in his careerbut is too dumb to recognize the mystic relic for what it is, and so continues to wander. Percy is also British slang for penis. And so we have our hero: the