King
: Eowyn, the Queen of Light, bids Aragorn adieu; the Prince of Peace walks the gloomy paths of the dead; the ringwraiths and the dragon Sauron are bested at the Battle of Pelennor Fields. In any case, these Middle-earth shout-outs not only reflect Plant’s hippie sensibility, but Zeppelin’s audacious and, it must be said, largely successful bid to forge twentieth century myth that resonates,and rakes in, as much as Tolkien’s novels. In America, where the rabid fandoms for both Tolkien and Zeppelin began, the two British exports both gave Anglo-Americans the opportunity to re-imagine Britain as a paradoxically exotic heritage. While Zeppelin repackaged blues Americana as much as the Stones or Clapton, they also hit the western shore packing wild Child ballads of Avalon, fantasies of deep identity whose fey excesses are pruned by the industrial buzz of the electric guitar.
Tolkien also gave Zep another way to model the dark side of the force. On
Led Zeppelin II
’s “Ramble On,” which serves as a seed crystal forwith its quest for a Queen, Plant finds himself in Mordor, where Gollum and “the evil one” steal his girl. In “The Battle of Evermore,” the Dark Lord has invaded the human realm, with black-robed ringwraiths at his side. Why does Zeppelin allude to Tolkien’s bad guys, rather than elves or ents or hobbits? Because with Led Zeppelin, you earn whatever consolations myth has to offer by embracing the gloom, by confronting the “darkest of them all.” Theirs is not your earth-mama’s paganism, with its Marin County rainbow mush of relativism. Like the Catholic Tolkien, Zeppelin sense a dark core in the cosmos, a source of evil in intent and horror in execution. “Battle” is a battle after all. Zeppelin are not going to invoke pagan lore without invoking violence, notonly the violence against the pagan world, or the violence within the pagan world, but the violence in the spiritual imagination itself: the
war in heaven
. This is the war St. Paul alluded to in Ephesians 6:12 when he spoke about wrestling, not against flesh and blood, but against “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
The battle stakes are high: this is “Evermore” we are talking about, when time will tell us all. But like all battles, this one is full of confused alarms of struggle and flight, of subterfuge and communication breakdown. Percy barely knows what side he’s on. Is the enemy evil or merely bad? Is darkness just the “balance” of light, or must it be sliced away with a sword? At first, the final image of “Battle” suggests the triumph of the Good: Morning arrives, the dragon is blinded by the sun, and the forces of light pour into the valley the way Gandalf and the exiled Riders of Rohan spill down the mountain-side in Peter Jackson’s version of the Battle of Helm’s Deep. But Percy’s syntax is strange, and the slight return of the
burning eyes
from “Black Dog” does not help matters. Would a flaming dragon really be so sensitive to the sun? Who exactly is blinded? The triumphant feel of this chorus, with its bright shift to major sevenths, dissolves into the woe of aftermath as the song’s droning intro music returns. Percy moans over a drawn-out arpeggiated minor chord before finally coming to rest,pensively, in a low E. Page holds the eerie minor space with some more Ren Faire plucking before renewing the verse, during which Percy, echo-drenched and increasingly hysterical, demands to “bring it back”—
it
presumably being the “balance” which he earlier claimed would be restored by the magic runes.
Musically, “Battle” suggests this balance through the vocal presence of Sandy Denny, whose feminine strength complements Percy’s confusion. Her role in this playette is hardly the waif or vixen we might expect on a cock-rock recording; as “town crier,” she commands the men to take up arms. But Denny’s performance goes deeper than this. When she calls us to dance
: Eowyn, the Queen of Light, bids Aragorn adieu; the Prince of Peace walks the gloomy paths of the dead; the ringwraiths and the dragon Sauron are bested at the Battle of Pelennor Fields. In any case, these Middle-earth shout-outs not only reflect Plant’s hippie sensibility, but Zeppelin’s audacious and, it must be said, largely successful bid to forge twentieth century myth that resonates,and rakes in, as much as Tolkien’s novels. In America, where the rabid fandoms for both Tolkien and Zeppelin began, the two British exports both gave Anglo-Americans the opportunity to re-imagine Britain as a paradoxically exotic heritage. While Zeppelin repackaged blues Americana as much as the Stones or Clapton, they also hit the western shore packing wild Child ballads of Avalon, fantasies of deep identity whose fey excesses are pruned by the industrial buzz of the electric guitar.
Tolkien also gave Zep another way to model the dark side of the force. On
Led Zeppelin II
’s “Ramble On,” which serves as a seed crystal forwith its quest for a Queen, Plant finds himself in Mordor, where Gollum and “the evil one” steal his girl. In “The Battle of Evermore,” the Dark Lord has invaded the human realm, with black-robed ringwraiths at his side. Why does Zeppelin allude to Tolkien’s bad guys, rather than elves or ents or hobbits? Because with Led Zeppelin, you earn whatever consolations myth has to offer by embracing the gloom, by confronting the “darkest of them all.” Theirs is not your earth-mama’s paganism, with its Marin County rainbow mush of relativism. Like the Catholic Tolkien, Zeppelin sense a dark core in the cosmos, a source of evil in intent and horror in execution. “Battle” is a battle after all. Zeppelin are not going to invoke pagan lore without invoking violence, notonly the violence against the pagan world, or the violence within the pagan world, but the violence in the spiritual imagination itself: the
war in heaven
. This is the war St. Paul alluded to in Ephesians 6:12 when he spoke about wrestling, not against flesh and blood, but against “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
The battle stakes are high: this is “Evermore” we are talking about, when time will tell us all. But like all battles, this one is full of confused alarms of struggle and flight, of subterfuge and communication breakdown. Percy barely knows what side he’s on. Is the enemy evil or merely bad? Is darkness just the “balance” of light, or must it be sliced away with a sword? At first, the final image of “Battle” suggests the triumph of the Good: Morning arrives, the dragon is blinded by the sun, and the forces of light pour into the valley the way Gandalf and the exiled Riders of Rohan spill down the mountain-side in Peter Jackson’s version of the Battle of Helm’s Deep. But Percy’s syntax is strange, and the slight return of the
burning eyes
from “Black Dog” does not help matters. Would a flaming dragon really be so sensitive to the sun? Who exactly is blinded? The triumphant feel of this chorus, with its bright shift to major sevenths, dissolves into the woe of aftermath as the song’s droning intro music returns. Percy moans over a drawn-out arpeggiated minor chord before finally coming to rest,pensively, in a low E. Page holds the eerie minor space with some more Ren Faire plucking before renewing the verse, during which Percy, echo-drenched and increasingly hysterical, demands to “bring it back”—
it
presumably being the “balance” which he earlier claimed would be restored by the magic runes.
Musically, “Battle” suggests this balance through the vocal presence of Sandy Denny, whose feminine strength complements Percy’s confusion. Her role in this playette is hardly the waif or vixen we might expect on a cock-rock recording; as “town crier,” she commands the men to take up arms. But Denny’s performance goes deeper than this. When she calls us to dance
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