Free Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis Page A

cock as holy fool.
    “Black Dog” reflects the initial motivation for Percy’s quest, which, as you might expect, is sexual obsession, here expressed as a mutant blues. For Zeppelin, blues is the language of lust, not just because it suggests the tantalizing frisson of black sex but because blues heroes like Robert Johnson, Elmore James, and Howlin’ Wolf present sexual desire as a haunting, a
possession
. All the usual complaints about Zeppelin’s domineering cock rock are mitigated by the fact that, in his words and his cries, Plant is not an erotic overlord but a masochistic slave to romantic desire; as the
Village Voice
writer Emily XYZ put it, he is “PUSSY-WHIPPED.” 47 The Percy whose a cappella cries open “Black Dog” is slain in the spirit by the lady in his sights: a sweating, burning, stinging thing whose dripping honey more than matches the obscenity of the gushing juice in “The Lemon Song.” Faced with this voluptuous theophany, Percy can initially only “watch,” like a kid with a
Hustler
, like so many online. That’s why the riff is gnarled and weirdly timed, in contrast to the clear-cut “phallic” drive of “Whole Lotta Love” or “Immigrant Song”: it’s the sound of frustrated lust bending the singer out of shape.That’s also why there is no personal pronoun in the whole first verse: Percy is overwhelmed to the point of obliteration.
    Of course, the devouring female presence is a stock character in the sexist imagination, and the song’s later verses will shape this sorceress, perhaps parodistically, into a more traditional blues bitch. But here I am interested in the spectral, even “tantric” dimension of Percy’s desire. Of all the polarities that drive Zeppelin’s music, the tension between sex and spirit is perhaps the most essential—and the most overlooked. Sex and magic are the two horns of Zeppelin’s mystique, the cock and the devil, and yet the occult dimension of sexual energies rarely enters into critical discussions of the band’s erotic politics. But as Susan Fast points out in her discussion of Zeppelin fandom, the link between sex and spirit is of vital importance to many Zepheads.
    If practitioners of BDSM are to be believed, the ritualized submission to dark and aggressive sexual energy can provoke an egolessness that may, if you are lucky and the cosmos kind, bloom into spiritual ecstasy. This is one aspect of the Hindu goddess Kali, at least to Western tantrists: with her fangs and tongue and dark nude body, Ma devours attachments. But such submission is also terrifying, and in “Black Dog,” Percy passes up this infernal grail by doing what most restlessand red-blooded men would do when the erotics gets rough: he hits the road. The first time he says “I,” at the beginning of the second verse, it’s to say “I gotta roll, can’t stand still.” With this blues cliché, Percy recovers himself by shifting the object of his desire toward its underlying lack, by recognizing that he “can’t get my fill.” He imagines a kinder, steadier woman, a woman who will hold his hand and tell him no lies. Asprogresses, this woman will grow more idealized and more impossible, until finally she is totally supernatural, a Queen of Light, without a king, beyond birth and death. And Percy’s failure to either achieve or abandon that ideal will destroy him.
    Desire, then, is spectral; it is a haunting. The spookiest lines in “Black Dog” lie in the pivotal second verse: “Eyes that shine burnin’ red,” Percy moans. “Dreams of you all through my head.” The question here is simple:
Whose
eyes are burning red? Given Plant’s tendency to swallow personal pronouns, which may have something to do with the drive for engulfment, it’s impossible to know. I suspect, though, that the eyes don’t belong to the woman but to Percy himself. In this the song anticipates Jimmy Page’s flashing red eyes while he plays the hurdy-gurdy in
The Song Remains the Same
;