The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Led Zeppelin · produced by Jimmy Page · engineered by Andy Johns · Atlantic · about 42 minutes
Mode
Hard rock joined to English folk and pre-war blues; acoustic and electric on one side and, in one song, in one argument
Mythos
Ascent and deluge: a pilgrimage climbed in the form, an old flood made the oldest one, with Tolkien’s war of light and dark worn as costume
Phase
Eight tracks on two sides; each side opens hard and ends on its longest track, a climb closing the first and a flood closing the second
Presentation
Album with no title and no band name on the sleeve; an old man bent under sticks on a papered wall, a hermit with a lantern inside, four symbols, one song’s words printed
Register
Riff and voice in call and response, mandolin and acoustic guitar, recorders, electric twelve-string, piano, harmonica through a delay, drums in a stairwell
Scale
Emblems, not persons: a lady, a piper, a queen, a man with nowhere to stay
Governing Proposition
A band at its commercial height issues a record with no title and no name on the sleeve, joins the heavy electric blues of its first records to the English folk song of its third, and ends one side on a song that climbs from recorders to a storm and the other on a blues of 1929 about a flood, slowed until it becomes the flood. Two forms of the sublime, ascent and deluge, are built in the sound and answer each other; around them the myth is costume and the meaning mostly mood.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on a voice and a riff answering each other. Black Dog is built as call and response: Robert Plant sings a line, the riff crashes in to answer it, stops, and waits for the next. It is a boast of desire set as a man calling after what he wants, and its stop-start form is its meaning. The terms of the record are set in its first minute: power held back and released, and an old blues manner made loud enough to be elemental.
Atlantic released the album on 8 November 1971, with no title and no band name on the sleeve. It is known by the four symbols printed on its inner sleeve and label, one for each player, or as Led Zeppelin IV. Jimmy Page produced it and Andy Johns engineered it. The band is Plant, Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham, with Sandy Denny as the second voice on The Battle of Evermore and Ian Stewart at the piano on Rock and Roll. The sleeve shows an old man bent under a load of sticks, framed on a papered wall; inside, a painting of a hermit holding a lantern. Only one song’s words were printed.
Eight tracks fall on two sides of about twenty-two and twenty minutes, and the two sides are built alike. Side one runs Black Dog, Rock and Roll, The Battle of Evermore and Stairway to Heaven; side two runs Misty Mountain Hop, Four Sticks, Going to California and When the Levee Breaks. Each side opens hard and ends on its longest track. The eight-track sequence has not varied, and later remasters and the expanded edition of 2014 are evidence of the record’s life, not the record.
Movement II
The hinge of side one is two voices over a mandolin. After Black Dog and Rock and Roll, an exhilarating homage to the rock and roll of the 1950s, The Battle of Evermore turns the record from electric to acoustic, and Sandy Denny’s voice answers Plant’s with a cold, ancient height. It is the place where the myth first speaks. The war it sings is Tolkien’s, the war of light and dark, and its “Queen of Light” comes from the same books that Misty Mountain Hop names on the other side.
The inheritance the record joins is the band’s own. Its first two albums were heavy electric blues; its third, in 1970, had turned to acoustic and folk music, and critics had mocked it for the turn. Behind that turn stood the English folk revival of Fairport Convention and Bert Jansch, and behind everything the Delta and Chicago blues. What this record does is put the heavy and the acoustic, the folk and the blues, on one side and, in Stairway to Heaven, into one song. Its stake was the sleeve: a band at its height putting out a record with no name on it.
Much of the myth on the record is of this borrowed kind. The old man with sticks and the hermit with the lantern make the sleeve a myth of age and the land; the songs bring in a piper, a lady, a queen, misty mountains. They are emblems, not persons, and some of them are costume taken from fantasy rather than made. The costume dates two songs to their moment. The myth the record builds for itself is elsewhere, at the end of each side, and it is made of sound.
Movement III
Side one ends on a climb. Stairway to Heaven begins on recorders and acoustic guitar, adds electric twelve-string, admits the drums late, rises into Page’s solo, built as a composition, and ends with Plant’s last and highest section, a cry at the summit. It takes eight minutes and each step is earned. The form is an ascent, and the song is about an ascent: a pilgrimage from pastoral beginnings, a piper and a lady, to a storm of the full band. The archetype is load-bearing in the structure, not merely named.
Change that form and the song stops knowing what it knows. The climb from acoustic to electric is the argument of a song about turning from illusion toward some higher road; played at one tempo, the same words would say nothing. They are vague by design. A woman believes “all that glitters” is gold, and a sermon tells the listener that there is still time to change the road. It holds as a moral, and the last section turns from the moral toward a feeling of release. The song invites interpretation by declining to settle, and listeners have filled it with what they brought.
The making is staged with care. Each layer enters as the climb requires it, and Jones’s recorders and the twelve-string guitars carry the pastoral before the drums take the song into hard rock without a break in its argument. That form, a folk song that becomes a storm, was the record’s largest formal turn and its widest gift: hard rock’s long anthem, the model of the power ballad and the epic closer. Much had been prepared on the band’s earlier records, but here the preparation became a form others could take.
Movement IV
Side two opens hard and slackens. Misty Mountain Hop is a good riff on a slight song, and Four Sticks, in its shifting metres, is laboured, the track the record could most easily lose. Then comes the plainest wish on the record. Going to California is an acoustic ballad on guitar and mandolin, a man leaving disappointment for a myth of the coast, small and exact in its beauty and true in its glimpse. It is a quiet height between two large ones, and it is the record’s one moment of a private life.
It is also the test of the record’s law. One law can be stated: old powers, of the blues, of the English land and of myth, brought into an electric music that makes them elemental. The closers obey it fully. Going to California and When the Levee Breaks, the two most distant tracks, meet in idiom and in two men without a place to stay more than in one condition, and Rock and Roll obeys no law but energy. The four symbols on the sleeve, one for each player, are the record’s own admission that its law is partly plural.
What binds the plurality is the making. Bonham’s command of weight and time carries the heavy tracks; Jones’s mandolin, recorders and bass are the arranging intelligence of the record; Plant’s voice has range and power, and Page’s production gives every mode its own room. The faults fall on a share of the whole: Plant’s mannerism in places, Four Sticks laboured, Misty Mountain Hop plain, Rock and Roll a skilled homage. The making is load-bearing nearly throughout, and the record is held together by its sound more than by any single thought.
Movement V
The record ends in a flood. When the Levee Breaks takes a song that Memphis Minnie recorded with Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929, about the flood of 1927, and slows it until it becomes the flood. Bonham’s drums, recorded at a distance in a stairwell so that the room is the instrument, fall huge and echoing; a harmonica sounds through a delay; the riff descends as the water rises. It is the record’s terrible summit, transport and dread at once, and the answer to the climb that closed side one: ascent against deluge.
It is also where the record discloses most, and it does so through sound. A lost people’s disaster becomes a weight the listener stands under, a man with nowhere to stay, an old flood become the oldest one, and the dread is the memory of displacement rather than a mood alone. History enters the record here and nowhere else. The rest of what the record brings into the open is thinner: the vague moral of Stairway, the plain wish of Going to California, desire and a hippie bust as attitude.
The reach has been very large. The record was a primary source for hard rock and heavy metal through the 1970s and 1980s, and Levee’s sound of drums in a large room set a standard for heaviness. It has been in print continuously, two of its songs are in continuous broadcast, and its symbols and its hermit are known beyond its listeners; the room recordings carry little period gloss. What it holds is storm, flood, mountain and land, a question of ascent, desire, the road and one remembered disaster, named in separate songs and joined by sound. The family, labour, the state and the city stay outside, and the figures stay emblems.
Act III · The Twelve
Eight tracks in about forty-two minutes, and the record stands on two required pillars. Stairway to Heaven must end side one: the riff, the rock and roll and the folk duet before it are gathered into its climb. When the Levee Breaks must end side two, the record’s heaviest weight placed last. The Battle of Evermore is required as the bridge from electric to acoustic and the place the myth first speaks, and Black Dog earns its opening, voice and riff in call and response setting the band’s terms. Inside the long tracks little is idle: each section of Stairway turns, and Levee’s length is its weight. The test bites on Four Sticks and Misty Mountain Hop, and on Rock and Roll, an homage.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure comes chiefly through sound, and sound is credited in full. When the Levee Breaks discloses most: Memphis Minnie’s song of the 1927 flood, slowed and made immense, turns a lost people’s disaster into a weight the listener stands under, and the dread is the memory of displacement, not a mood alone. Stairway to Heaven gives the nearest statement, a woman who believes “all that glitters” is gold and a sermon that one may yet change the road one is on. Going to California gives a plain, true glimpse of a man leaving disappointment for a myth of the coast. What holds the axis below the others: Stairway is vague by design, and much of the rest is attitude.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation is frequent and twice reaches grandeur. Stairway to Heaven climbs from recorders and acoustic guitar through electric twelve-string to the entry of the drums and Jimmy Page’s solo, and then Robert Plant’s last, highest section: a rise built over eight minutes and earned at each step. When the Levee Breaks is the terrible summit: John Bonham’s drums, huge in a stairwell’s echo, harmonica through a delay, the slowed riff descending as the water rises, transport and dread at once. The Battle of Evermore has a cold, ancient height in Sandy Denny’s voice answering Plant’s over mandolin, and Going to California is small, exact beauty. Black Dog and Rock and Roll have force rather than height, and two tracks stay level.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth is built in two places and evoked around them. Stairway to Heaven builds an ascent: its form is a climb, from pastoral beginnings, a piper and a lady, to the full band and the cry at the summit, and the pilgrimage is load-bearing in the structure, not only named. When the Levee Breaks builds the deluge in sound: water that keeps rising, a man with nowhere to stay, an old flood become the oldest one. The two closers answer each other, ascent against flood. Around them the myth is evoked: the old man with sticks and the hermit make the sleeve a myth of age and the land, and The Battle of Evermore borrows Tolkien’s war (“Queen of Light”). What holds it: the figures are emblems, not persons.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own, the heavy electric blues of its first two albums and the acoustic and folk turn of the third (1970), with the English folk revival of Fairport Convention and Bert Jansch behind it and the Delta and Chicago blues behind all. The record joins these on one side and, in Stairway, in one song. Two departures carry consequence: Stairway’s form, a folk song that becomes hard rock without a break in its argument, and Levee’s slowed, massive treatment of a pre-war blues, an old song made into a new kind of weight. The stake was the sleeve: a band at its height issued a record with no name on it, after critics had mocked the third. What holds it: the path was largely the band’s own.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The sequence is counted here, once. Each side runs from hard rock to its longest track, and the two closers answer each other, ascent against flood, the record’s two forms of the sublime. Change the form of Stairway and it stops knowing what it knows: the climb from acoustic to electric is the argument of a song about turning from illusion to a higher road, and played at one tempo it would say nothing. Levee knows its weight through its slowness and its room sound; Black Dog’s stop-start call and response is the form of a man calling after desire. What holds it: elsewhere the record lays its modes side by side, and three tracks are containers for riffs.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over fifty-five years, though its particulars are reported here rather than verified. Bonham’s drum sound on When the Levee Breaks has been studied by engineers. Stairway to Heaven’s construction is still taught and taken apart by guitarists, and the attention around the song has not stopped. Black Dog’s shifting rhythmic accent still trips the players who learn it. The depth is formal and in the sound: the staging of Stairway, layer by layer, and the room of Levee reward a return that a first hearing does not exhaust. What holds the figure: the words of Stairway invite interpretation by being vague, and much of what listeners find there is projection the fantasy invites.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the rock album of its decade, above all hard rock. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that the heavy electric band and the English folk song could be one music, gave hard rock its long anthem form in Stairway, a ballad that becomes a storm, and in Levee a sound of drums in a large room that set a standard for heaviness. Much had been prepared on the band’s earlier records, and the folk and blues sources were others’. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Stairway became the model of the power ballad and the epic closer, and the record a primary source for hard rock and heavy metal through the 1970s and 1980s, a reach that runs ahead of the reorganisation it began.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Survival is weighed over nearly fifty-five years. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has never been re-sequenced. Presence is among the widest of any album of its age: continuously in print, Stairway to Heaven and Black Dog continuously in broadcast, the symbols and the hermit known beyond the record’s listeners; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric is sound: the room recordings at Headley Grange carry little period gloss. What holds the figure a tenth below the widest: the ubiquity of Stairway has turned to parody in some quarters, and the Tolkien costume of two songs is fixed to its moment.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing throughout. Page’s production is the signature: Levee’s drums recorded at a distance in a stairwell so that the room is the instrument, the harmonica through a delay, the riff slowed and phased. Stairway is orchestrated in stages, recorders, acoustic and twelve-string guitars and the late entry of the drums, each layer timed to the climb, with a solo built as a composition. Bonham’s command of weight and time carries Levee and Black Dog; John Paul Jones’s mandolin, recorders and bass are the arranging intelligence of the record; Plant’s voice has range and power. The faults fall on a share: Plant’s mannerism in places, Four Sticks laboured, Misty Mountain Hop plain.
Score: 9.1 / 10
One law can be stated: old powers, of the blues, of the English land and of myth, brought into an electric music that makes them elemental. The record governs a wide range by it, from a mandolin duet to a flood of drums, and the two closers obey it fully, a pilgrimage and an inherited catastrophe made elemental in sound. Take the two most distant elements, Going to California, an acoustic wish for a new coast, and When the Levee Breaks: they meet in idiom, and in two men without a place to stay, more than in one condition. Rock and Roll, a 1950s homage, obeys no law but energy, and the four symbols on the sleeve, one for each player, admit a law partly plural.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The natural order is present as storm, flood, mountain and land; the sacred as Stairway’s question of ascent and a sermon on what can be bought; desire as the blues boast; the road and the wish for a new life in Going to California. History enters once, through sound: the 1927 flood and the people it displaced, carried by Memphis Minnie’s song. War is present as fantasy. What holds the figure lowest: consciousness is thinly held, the figures are emblems, the family, labour, the state and the city are absent, and the orders are named in separate songs and joined by sound rather than held in one structure.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.4, then The Sublime at 9.3 and The Made at 9.1. A record that joined the heavy band to the English folk song, gave hard rock its anthem form and set a standard for heaviness; elevation that twice reaches grandeur, in an ascent and a deluge, with a cold height and a small exact beauty between; and a production in which the room is the instrument and a long song is orchestrated in stages to its climb.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: the natural order, a question of ascent, desire, the road and one remembered flood, named in separate songs and joined by sound, with consciousness thin and the family, labour, the state and the city absent. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 8.2, a disclosure carried chiefly by the sound of one song, around a moral vague by design; then The Swerve at 8.4, a synthesis on a path the band had largely opened itself.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.4 and The Imperishable at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 and The Unconcealment at 8.2 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.7, stands below it as well.
Basis · the LP as released by Atlantic on 8 November 1971, untitled, eight tracks in their unvaried sequence on two sides, about forty-two minutes; produced by Jimmy Page and engineered by Andy Johns; judged from knowledge of the recording, its arrangements, its words in outline and its reception. No recording, lyric sheet or credits were in hand, and running times are approximate. The remasters and the expanded edition of 2014 are evidence, not the object. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words. Facts that could not be verified, among them the studios and the mobile unit used beyond Headley Grange, where and how the record was first mixed and remixed, the record’s sales and its standing on radio, the later uses of its drum sound in other kinds of music, and the court case over Stairway to Heaven, are not given.