Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin
Let`s spell, `I-n the beginning was the Word and the Word was God,` (Gen: 1.1) and not Page I. There`s a bookshop, Page One, at 9 Princes Avenue, West Kingston Upon Hull, a University city in England where students go to purchase their textbooks, and whatever else they might need in the way of literary food for thought. Page One doesn`t mean Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page, is James I, although the King James Bible is the preferred text for millions of English people. The first words on the first page of the Bible in Genesis explain succinctly that God is `the Word` and not Satan, whereas the rock group, Led Zeppelin (1969-), based around the blues` guitar of Jimmy Page, allow themselves to be declared Satanists in the sleeve notes for the release of the 27 May, 2003, Atlantic Records` `live` triple album, How The West Was Won,1 which consists of two concerts from the band's 1972 concert tour of the United States, recorded at the L.A. Forum on 25 June, 1972, and Long Beach Arena on 27 June, 1972.
How The West Was Won contains the tracks `L.A. Drone`, which is what it suggests, a long droning guitar intro, followed by tracks from the first five albums, `Immigrant Song`, `Heartbreaker`, `Black Dog`, `Over the Hills and Far Away` `Since I've Been Loving You`, `Stairway to Heaven`, `Going to California`, `That's the Way`, `Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp`, `Dazed and Confused`, `Walter's Walk`, `The Crunge`, `What Is and What Should Never Be`, `Dancing Days`, `Moby Dick`, `Whole Lotta Love`, `Boogie Chillun`, `Let's Have a Party`, `Hello Marylou`, `Going Down Slow`, `Rock and Roll`, `The Ocean`, `Bring It On Home`, and `Bring It On Back`. `Walter`s Walk` appeared on the tribute album to drummer, John Bonham, Coda (1982), a collection of previously unreleased material constituting the group`s last real output after John was found dead in bed following a heavy drinking session on 25 September, 1980, during rehearsals for a proposed US tour, while John Lee Hooker`s `Boogie Chillun` (1948), `Let`s Have A Party`, recorded by Elvis Presley for the film, Loving You (1957), `Hello Marylou` popularized by singer and actor, Ricky Nelson, star of the seminal `Wild West` movie, Rio Bravo (1959), and St Louis Jimmy Olden`s `Going Down Slow` (1941) were blues` standards, which Led Zeppelin often performed as an encore, while `Bring It On Back` was the middle section of Sonny Boy Williamson`s `Bring It On Home` (1966). Written by Willie Dixon, `Bring It On Home` was a tribute to Sonny, but poverty often persuaded writers to accuse Led Zeppelin of plagiarism and Dixon is credited on `Whole Lotta Love` because of the similarity in lyrics. The band were sued by Dixon and others but paid up charitably while subsequently, as with `Bring It On Back` from How The West Was Won, they felt it necessary to indicate parts of recordings that were theirs while giving full credit to the original artist.
The title How The West Was Won derives from the Ricky Nelson song, `Hello Marylou`, because Nelson was the singer acting opposite John Wayne in the movie, Rio Bravo, as Colorado, a young `gunslinger`, that is, someone able to work as a killer. Wayne is the Sheriff of the town, Chance, who deputizes the town drunk, Dude, played by singer and actor, Dean Martin, because he was a good gunslinger. The stage is set for a typical film of how the west was won from lawlessness, which is the same scenario facing Moses and the Jews after their exodus from slavery in Egypt as the journey to Palestine and God gives Moses the law to guide them:
`You had a chance to get in this and you didn't want it.`2
Chance`s friend Pat Wheeler is gunned down by a killer and Chance upbraids Colorado for refusing to accept deputization. Dude tracks the killer to the saloon and kills him. Nathan Burdette arrives with his men to see his brother Joe who`s in prison for killing an unarmed bystander while fighting with Dude in the saloon. Colorado learns that Nathan is paying for a song to be played there indicating that `no quarter` will be given to one's enemy, that is, no mercy. Because `No Quarter` is the title of a track from Led Zeppelin`s fifth recorded studio album, Houses Of The Holy (1973), How The West Was Won is clearly about Rio Bravo:
`Walking side by side with death. The devil mocks their every step.`3
Dude is held hostage, but during the exchange for Joe he overpowers the murderer and Chance, Colorado, and deputy `Stumpy` force the criminals to surrender. The final scene is of saloon girl Feathers` skimpy outfit drifting down into the street from the room she`s sharing with Chance. `Stumpy` picks it up delightedly while Dude advises caution. `Stumpy` is played by actor, Walter Brennan, who has a bad leg in the film, and so corresponds to Walter in Led Zeppelin`s `Walter`s Walk` (1972):
`As you stand alone do you wonder how? Can you step aside, does it matter now?`4
The background for Rio Bravo is Sophocles` Oedipus Rex (c. 429 B.C.), in which Oedipus means `swollen foot` or `lame`, because Oedipus` fate is a `lame excuse` for a man. Psychologically, he has `Walter`s Walk`, that is, he`s a `Wild West` gunman hysterically blind through fear. Unwittingly, Oedipus kills his own father, Laius, in a fit of hysterical blind anger, and marries his mother, Jocasta, without knowing who she is. When he discovers he`s broken the incest taboo he blinds himself and his daughter, Antigone, has to act as his guide, that is, as in Led Zeppelin`s `No Quarter` lyric, Antigone is being mocked by the devil:
`What goes on four in the morning, two in the afternoon and three in the evening?`5
The `riddle of the Sphinx`, who is the `Terrible Mother` figure with the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and the face of a woman discerned by developmental psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) as among the archetypes existing within the dreams, art and imagination that emerge from within the collective unconscious of humankind to drive the species on to growth and progress, was referred to as a track, `In The Evening`, from Led Zeppelin`s last studio recorded album with John Bonham, In Through The Out Door, because a man doesn`t walk with a rifle as an aid to progress, nor does he walk with a stick because he`s an old man. Oedipus` answer to the riddle is `a man`, because that`s what he`s told by the seer of Thebes, Cassandra, and the Sphinx`s acceptance precedes Oedipus` marriage with his mother, Jocasta, before his inability to perceive the meaning of the incest `riddle` leads him to suffer the consequences of his acceptance of men`s taboo and he self-blinds himself:
`I hear you crying in the darkness, Don't ask nobody's help.`6
Because women have their own penis` semen and host wombs as `futanarian`, God tells Eve in Eden her `seed` will `crush the head of the serpent with her foot as she leaves.` (Gen: 3. 15) Led Zeppelin`s `In The Evening` is, `Let`s spell `in the evening`,` because the meaning of Oedipus` fate needs to be spelled out for humankind, which is that women are the third `foot` of the race. Eve and the first man, Adam, were expelled from Eden by God for accepting the `fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil` from the serpent, who was Satan, the angel who`d been expelled by God from heaven and turned into a low thing for rejecting humanity, `You will be as gods,` (Gen: 3. 5) Led Zeppelin were féted as gods whenever they went to the United States and How The West Was Won is hubris from an English rock group who weren`t Americans. God`s story after Eden is of Jesus` birth uncontaminated by male semen as a sign of what humankind must do to have Redemption. God tells Eve after her expulsion for rejecting the `fruit of the tree of life`, which is immortality, that she and her descendants will die, and Adam must labor while she`ll experience labor in childbirth, which Jesus` birth as the redeemer of `woman`s seed` fulfils. Jesus represents the host womb of the human species, that is, his mother, the Virgin Mary, at the `Last Supper` where he offers `bread and wine` to his disciples as symbols of his `body and blood`, but Judas Iscariot rejects the host and betrays Jesus to the Roman Empire in Palestine which has him nailed upon a cross of wood and tortures him until he dies. Jesus` Resurrection and Ascension to heaven prefigures the Resurrection of women`s own `futanarian` penis` semen with her own host wombs for the sexual reproduction of her own brains` powers for liberation, which is the future story of how the west was won.
Often described as a `virgin land`, America was the place that the European settlers arriving subsequent to Christopher Columbus` discovery of the continent for his sponsor, Queen Isabella of Spain, in 1492, saw as a new Eden, but the absence of women from the world`s stage suggests the human race`s host womb was invaded by a parasite that stole her penis and made it into a gun to kill her with. God tells Eve her `seed` will have `perpetual enmity` with the `serpent`s seed` because of male braining in which all humanity has men`s semen, although Jesus` birth uncontaminated by male semen is Redemption for womankind, who is the host womb of the human race with her own penis` semen awaiting Resurrection. The Edenic land of America was lost, rather than won, because it was Oedipal. Oedipus` tragedy was that he wasn`t able to see that the incest taboo was constructed to keep women from knowing that sexual reproduction with women like their mothers was possible for their daughters, and that it covers up men`s `original` sin of killing and culling `woman`s seed` born after Eden as the `futanarian` human race to establish womb slavery in death and war, as God warned Eve and Adam would occur, but which Jesus` redemptive teaching, `love your neighbor as you love yourself,` (Matt: 22. 39) attempted to ameliorate, as women can see themselves in the mirror.
Rio Bravo is the story of what men have done since Eden, which is steal the woman`s penis and turn it into a gun to shoot John Wayne with because he`s too big to punch and the cowards want to be able to kill him without getting hurt. `Stumpy` is Oedipus because he`s told not to bother Chance and Feather by Dude, that is, he`s `stumped` in the sense that he can`t answer the `riddle`, while he`s `lame` because he represents men`s excuse for guns, which is that the man defending the woman has to be hit if the woman is to be killed and the cowards are afraid he`ll hit back. Oedipus` name means `swollen foot`, because blind men can`t walk alone; as Oedipus` fate indicates. His daughter, Antigone, guides his steps as the `third foot` of the `evening` of mankind, which is the genuine solution to the Sphinx`s `riddle`. A man walks alone in the evening with a rifle, because he`s killed the woman`s penis and so she can`t walk beside him even if she`d wanted to. `Stumpy` is Hollywood Babylon`s `devil` in the movie, Rio Bravo, because men`s penis is just a stump of what it would have been if they hadn`t killed and culled `woman`s seed` for womb slavery to the gun and death. The woman, Feathers, doesn`t have even the stump of an idea about her own penis` semen, because Hollywood banned women from raising her `foot` from the floor in bedroom scenes as long ago as the `Hays code` of 1930. Feathers, the saloon gal of Rio Bravo, corresponds to Oedipus` daughter, Antigone, of Greek antiquity, because her role is to lead the blind. The blind Led Zeppelin of How The West Was Won are the `blind leading the blind` (Matt: 15. 13-14) to hell: because that`s what gods do.
1 Disk 1; L.A. Drone (John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page) 0:14, Immigrant Song (Page, Robert Plant) 3:42 , Heartbreaker (John Bonham, Jones, Page, Plant) 7:25 , Black Dog (Page, Plant, Jones) 5:41 , Over the Hills and Far Away (Page, Plant) 5:08 , Since I've Been Loving You (Page, Plant, Jones) 8:02 , Stairway to Heaven (Page, Plant) 9:38 , Going to California (Page, Plant) 5:37 , That's the Way (Page, Plant) 5:54 , Bron-Y-Aur Stomp (Page, Plant, Jones) 4:55 , Disk 2; Dazed and Confused (Jake Holmes, Page) 25:25 , Walter's Walk (Page, Plant), The Crunge (Bonham, Jones, Page, Plant), What is and What Should Never Be (Page, Plant) 4:41 , Dancing Days (Page, Plant) 3:42 , Moby Dick (Bonham, Jones, Page) 19:20 , Disk 3; Whole Lotta Love (Bonham, Willie Dixon, Jones, Page, Plant) 23:08 , Boogie Chillun (John Lee Hooker) 3:10, Let's Have a Party (Jessie Mae Robinson) 1:56, Hello Mary Lou (Gene Pitney) 2:08, Going Down Slow (St. Louis Jimmy Oden) 8:29, Rock and Roll (Page, Plant, Jones, Bonham) 3:56 , The Ocean (Page, Plant, Jones, Bonham) 4:21 , Bring It on Home (Willie Dixon, Page, Plant), 9:30 , Bring It on Back (Bonham, Jones, Page, Plant).
2 Wayne, John as John T. Chance in Rio Bravo, Warner Bros., March 15, 1959.
3 Jones, John Paul, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Led Zeppelin `No Quarter`, Houses Of The Holy, Atlantic Records, 1973.
4 Page, Plant Led Zeppelin `Walter`s Walk`, Coda, Swan Song, 1982.
5 Apollodorus, Library Apollud, 3. 5. 8.
6 Jones, Page, Plant Led Zeppelin `In The Evening` In Through The Out Door, Swan Song Records, 15 August, 1979.