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

it also recalls the creature hidden in the Colby drawing reproduced in the inner gatefold of, which some identify as a black dog. The message again? The beast is within; it looks out of your eyes.
    So “Black Dog” does not demonize woman’s sexual power but rather the male’s own lust, experienced as a possession from within. This experience of desire as occult possession finds us all at some point in our lives but can seem particularly acute in the minds of young males riding their first flush of adolescent hormones. Indeed, one function of the violent fantasy worlds that bewitch so many boys at that age, from computer games to heavy metal to the tentacle monsters in Japanese
hentai
, is to imaginatively exteriorize and contain desires that threaten the boundaries of the self. The fantasy world becomes a masturbatory magic circle where desire can take shape but remain in sublimated bounds. But though Percy’s shrieks resonate with adolescent angst, they also express spiritual fear: that intense desire unleashes a terrifying
infinity
. I could cite any number of decadent romantic writers here—Huysmans, or Baudelaire, or Clark Ashton Smith. But a bit of Crowley’s corny “Hymn to Satan” should do the trick:
    By its thirst, the cruel craving
    For things infinite, unheard-of,
    Dreams devouring and depraving,
    Songs no God may guess a word of,
    Songs of crime and songs of craving—
    Despite its basis in quotidian blues images, “Black Dog” and its song of craving marks the point where sexual obsession goes supernatural. Dreams devour Percy, but they also push him onwards, into song, into a world where he knows from the beginning he “can’t get no fill.”
    The 24-year-old Berlioz was similarly bewitched by an actress when he wrote his
Symphonie Fantastique
in the 1820s. But how did our boys, of similar age, body forth this supernatural craving in “Black Dog”? For one thing, the timbre of the tune’s massed guitars is gloriously nasty. For all three guitar parts, Andy Johns ran Page’s Gibson through a microphone amp and two UA 1176 compressors, creating a sound that recalls Zappa’s assertion that, while saxophones can be sleazy, only the electric guitar can be obscene. But “Black Dog,” like so much Zeppelin, really belongs to the rhythm section. John Paul Jones composed the odd and justly celebrated riff and arranged the tune, while John Bonham’s rock-solid beats create enormous tension by resisting the complexities of the riff. Though I cannot break down these complexities with the sophistication or clarity that Susan Fast achieves in
In the Houses of the
Holy
, I can at least cite her conclusions: the song’s metric displacement “takes the listener off guard, destroying expectations.” The riff’s frequent return to the tonic also unbalances us, despite the fact that, as the “home-base” note, the tonic is characteristically associated with a sense of resolution and relief. Here, though, the rhythmic displacement ensures that the root note of the riff keeps returning to different points in the measure, making the sense of resolution arrive “either too early or too late.” 48 Only at the open chord at the end of the riff, before Plant’s a cappella vocals return, do we confidently land. Reynolds and Press say that the song’s “turgid, grueling riff incarnates sex as agony and toil,” but that’s not what I hear. “Black Dog” incarnates sexual energy as a serpent fire, twisting and turning in a dark internal dance that suggests progressive stages of sinuous virtuosity rather than the rut of toil. Though sometimes resting, the energy never resolves, and ordinary climax is suspended. “Black Dog,” then, is a bit of sonic tantra, teaching the body—which is strongly pushed and pulled by the metrical weirdness—to embrace and even enjoy the state of tension, to sublimate frustration into surprise. Inflamed, yes, but hardly agonized.
    The song’s tension, again, emerges from