Led Zeppelin

‘We started out soft but I was hoarse by the end, trying to keep up with him’ (Sandy Denny to Steve Moore on recording ‘The Battle of Evermore’, Rolling Stone, 1973).

‘Having someone out-sing you is a horrible feeling, wanting to be strongest herself’ (Sandy Denny to student journalist Barb Charone, 1973, quoted in Mojo, p50).

‘You see, here I am, the lead singer with Led Zeppelin, and underneath I still enjoy people like Fairport Convention and Buffalo Springfield. Some people may find that surprising. To tell the truth, I’ve always wanted to go into the realm of that sort of music to a certain degree, without losing the original Zeppelin thing’ (Robert Plant, in Led Zeppelin Talking, p39).

Part of me shrinks from Led Zeppelin, in the way that I shudder before the fascist aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl’s films, fearful that I’m yielding to the call of phallocracy, of ‘cock rock’ at its elemental best. Yet I cannot deny the raw musical inventiveness of Jimmy Page’s riffs, the mesmerising banshee wail of Robert Plant’s vocals, the motor energy of John Bonham’s drumming. And then there’s that other Zeppelin, so much closer to things I understand, spreading its wispy acoustic tendrils all over Led Zeppelin III, suffusing that very special duet on the album with no name…

Led Zeppelin IV (let us call it that, as we must call it something) is the fifth best-selling album in recording history. It’s also the only album the band ever made to feature, on one track, a guest vocalist – Sandy Denny. Worldwide sales are estimated at around 40 million, sales in the US alone at over 20 million. Liege and Lief – Denny’s most successful recording as a lead artist – recently crept up to 1 million (Gold Disc status). That’s a massive disparity which you might expect to lead to a massive distortion in her career profile. Surely, after collaborating with the most successful band of the 1970s, she’d always be typecast as the ‘Led Zeppelin girl’? Well, no. Because for every hard rock fan who remembers Led Zep IV as their first, life-changing encounter with Denny’s voice, there seem to be others – perhaps impatient to practise their air guitar on the next track, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ – who didn’t even notice a female singer and assumed that Plant was duetting with himself. Listening again to ‘The Battle of Evermore’, I can almost hear why. Both voices are mixed to the centre. Although a call-and-response effect was intended – implying antiphony – this isn’t reflected in the channel separation, and the production leaves us in no doubt who is top dog. But whether underdog or overdog, how come Sandy was in the mix anyway?

Little point in looking to the Zeppelin industry for answers. Although the band has spawned a vast bibliography, Zeppelin scholars have scant interest in Sandy Denny. Even the specialist studies barely refer to her, or if they do get their facts wrong; in a recent one-hour DVD documentary on the fourth album she goes unmentioned. Here is Zeppelin expert Chris Welch:

‘Led Zeppelin had once appeared on stage at the LA Troubadour in 1970 with Fairport Convention… Fairport were recording a live album there and the Zep men cheerfully joined in, playing under the pseudonym of the Birmingham Water Buffalo Society. Hence the call to Sandy Denny to sing on the track’ (Dazed and Confused, p63).

This is playing fast and loose with the facts. Denny wasn’t a member of Fairport in September 1970, being fully occupied at the time with her own project, Fotheringay, so this implied chain of events cannot be accurate. Later that month, the ‘Zep men’ were back in blighty, having been voted Top Group in both British and International sections of the Melody Maker annual readers’ poll. According to Rolling Stone magazine, it was at this awards ceremony, where Sandy was crowned top British Female Singer, that Denny and Plant first met.

I’m still not clear just how close these people were to each other, personally or musically. Page and Plant’s interest in English folk music is well documented – apparent right from the off on the first Zeppelin album – but, as Susan Fast shows in her study of the band’s work, it was part of a larger interest in what we would now call ‘world music’. Significant here is that when the duo revived ‘The Battle of Evermore’ during their reunion tour in 1994, Denny’s part was assigned to Indian vocalist Najma Akhtar. Asked about ‘The Battle of Evermore’, Page restricts his comments to the distinctive accompaniment. As a novice on mandolin, he has always said that the song’s shape was governed by the limitations of the instrument, and of his technique at the time:

‘Possibly, afterwards, it sounded like a dance-around-the-maypole number I must admit, but it wasn’t purposely like that – "Let’s do a folksy number"’(LZ Talking, p46).

Some writers imply that Denny was present at Headley Grange, where the basic tracks were laid down. In fact, her part was overdubbed at the later sessions at Island Studios in February 1971. There are also suggestions that the song was written with Denny’s voice in mind. Plant’s testimony appears to contradict this:

‘The number is really more of a playlet than a song. After I wrote the lyrics, I realised that I needed another completely different voice as well as my own to give the song its full impact. So I asked Sandy Denny to come along and sing on the track. I must say I found it very satisfying to sing with someone who has a completely different style to my own. So while I sing about the events in the song, Sandy answered back as if she was the pulse of the people on the battlements. Sandy was playing the role of the town crier, urging people to throw down their weapons’ (LZ Talking, p46).

‘For me to sing with Sandy Denny was great. We were always good friends with that period of Fairport Convention… Sandy and I were friends and it was the most obvious thing to ask her to sing on "The Battle of Evermore". If it suffered from a naivete and tweeness – I was only 23 – it makes up for it in the cohesion of the voices and the playing’ (Uncut, p57).

‘I didn’t realise until I’d nearly finished all the lyrics that it needed to be a call-and-response thing, so I approached Sandy, my favourite singer out of all the British girls that ever were, and she was up for it. I don’t think it took more than 45 minutes. I showed her how to do the long "Oooooh, dance in the dark" so there’d be a vocal tail-in. It was perfect against my bluesy thing.’ (Mojo, p49).

Call another witness. Call Linda Thompson. On second thoughts, should we? Linda, I sense, remembers a different Sandy from other people. Where other friends choose to recall the performer, the writer, the loyal confidante, Linda’s anecdotes centre on the Wild Child who wouldn’t grow up. Her Sandy is drawn to wild men, men like Keith Moon. One story (in Heylin’s biography) places Denny at the Colony Room in Soho, hanging out with the serious drinkers like Lucien Freud, Peter O’Toole and Jeffrey Bernard. In another tale she’s consorting with the Devil himself:

STEVE LAFRENIERE: Sandy Denny was such a great singer. Did you know her when she was in Fairport Convention with Richard Thompson?
LINDA THOMPSON: Indeed, I knew her before that. I knew her when she was a nurse. She used to come down to London to sing. She was brilliant. She was my best friend.
SL: I first heard her on Led Zeppelin’s ‘The Battle of Evermore’. I think she’s the only female vocalist they ever used.
LT: Well, it didn't matter to Jimmy and Robert what genre she was, they just heard her sing and thought, ‘holy shit!’ And she was a real hellraiser. She was like Ozzy, but with a better voice. There were mad nights with Sandy and John Bonham at Jimmy Page’s house, which had once been owned by Aleister Crowley, the Satanist. Oh my god. Drinking, drugs, debauchery! [laughs]
SL: Pentangles?
LT: Pentangles!
(Index magazine interview)

Wow! Page, of course, was and is seriously obsessed with Crowley. In 1970 he acquired the ultimate piece of Crowley memorabilia, the Great Beast’s country seat, Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness. So these drunken, drug-fuelled debauches with a side-serving of satanism, several hundred miles from Denny’s London base – when was all this exactly? Why hasn’t the Zeppelin industry unleashed its investigative powers on this problem? We know all about the groupie and the shark – or was it a red snapper? – but here’s material for another hastily-concocted, ill-researched money-spinner.

Then there’s ‘Sandy’s sigil’, those three inverted, abutting triangles printed against the track title on the cover. When I first saw the album, in all innocence I read this as a typographical device, like an asterisk or a dagger, placed there to guide the reader down to a footnote, a legal disclaimer telling me that Sandy Denny was under exclusive contract to another record company (which of course I knew already). Well, yes, but it’s so much more. Isn’t it? Here is Zeppelinologist Erik Davis:

‘When she calls us to dance in the dark and sing to the light, she is, I believe, outside the immediate frame of the battle, speaking not as the town crier but as a wise woman, a mystic juggler of pagan polarities, a witch. She is the Lady returned in the guise of the High Priestess.’

Each of the four band members was represented on the album by a symbol of the musician’s choosing. Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones selected theirs from one of the occult tomes in Page’s library, Rudolph Koch’s Book of Signs. Denny’s glyph seems to have derived from the same source, where it is glossed as ‘an old symbol for the Godhead’. After noting this, Davis continues:

‘In occult iconography, the downward pointing triangle also frequently represents the yoni, the female generative organs. Taking these two together, I’d read Denny’s glyph as a sign of the Triple Goddess.’ (p103).

Ah, back to Robert Graves, then. But did she choose her sigil? Was it chosen for her? Or were the kings of ‘cock rock’ engaged in a giant ‘cock tease’, baiting posterity with a trail of false clues?

Two final snapshots:

There’s a photo of Jimmy Page collecting his Grammy in 2005, neatly turned out in suit and tie, tidily barbered, looking for all the world like the CEO of some global corporation – which, in a sense, is what he is, as prime custodian of the multi-million dollar Zeppelin legacy.

My fellow blogger Michael Collins Morton recalls meeting Denny after a concert at the Berkeley Community Theater in the early ’70s. When he ventured to ask whether she would be making any further recordings with Led Zeppelin, she laughed and said, ‘They never paid me for the song I've already done!’ I’m sure she got paid eventually – but a session fee, presumably, not a percentage.

Sources (in order of citation)
Rolling Stone, interview with Sandy Denny, 21 June 1973
Mojo, ‘Angel of Avalon’, June 1998
Dave Lewis, Led Zeppelin Talking (2004)
Andy Fyfe, When the Levee Breaks: The Making of Led Zeppelin IV (2003)
DVD, Rock Milestones: Led Zeppelin’s IV (2005)
Chris Welch, Dazed and Confused (1998)
Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (2001)
Uncut, interviews with Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, May 2005
Clinton Heylin, No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny (2000)
Index magazine, interview with Linda Thompson, 2004, http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/linda_thompson.shtml
Erik Davis, Led Zeppelin IV (2005)
Duncan Watts’s webpages on Led Zeppelin symbolism, http://www.inthelight.co.nz/lzboot.htm
Michael Collins Morton’s blog, http://vagrantviews.blogspot.com/2007/03/joe-boyd.html