Led Zeppelin

"In my time of dying

want nobody to mourn

all I want for you to do

is take my body home."

In My Time of Dying - Led Zeppelin

About a year ago I went to see the Rolling Stones perform to a sold out crowd at Met Life Stadium. When I mentioned this to a friend of mine he said “Gross! Does anyone really need to see a bunch of eighty-year-old men tottering around on a stage trying to relive their glory days?” My answer? “Yes. Of course they do.”

I enjoyed the concert, especially when Mick and Keith sang Wild Horses together while strumming on two simple acoustic guitars. That was a beautiful moment. But of course the bunch of feeble eighty-year-old men I REALLY want to see tottering around a stage, if given the chance, are the three still living members of Led Zeppelin. 

This past weekend I went to see the film Becoming Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin is one of my all time favorite bands (and has been since high school) so I expected to be entertained, but I didn't expect to be blown away. And I was. By the story, by the music, and especially by the eloquence of Jimmy Page (lead guitarist and I would say “visionary” behind the band), John Paul Jones (bass and keyboards), and Robert Plant (lead vocals). All three spoke intimately about their creative process and the otherworldly energy that the four members (John Bonham was the original drummer) were able to harness in the first few years that the band was together. John Paul Jones is quoted in the film as saying that there was a very strong creative synergy pulsing between the members from the start. Each member was pushing the others to their absolute limits musically. “Everyone was just giving everything they had, laying it all out there,” he says in the film. “I was too. We inspired each other to be the best we could be.” He went on to say that he feels that Led Zeppelin was not so much a “band” as a powerful energy that swirled between the members. “It was in that highly charged space that existed between the four us that all the magic happened.”

The film is full of old footage and news reels. There are photographs and newspaper reviews of the first three albums (positive and negative) and some never before heard interviews with John Bonham. Bonham is considered by many to be the best rock drummer of all time. That is, of course, until he drank himself to death at 32 years of age. According to the autopsy report he drank a bottle and a half of vodka and then choked to death on his own vomit.

I’m actually surprised that out of the four men who comprised the original Led Zepplin, 75 percent of them did not destroy themselves with drugs and alcohol. It seems like a high survival percentage in a world where self-destruction seems to be the norm. 

Watching the movie was a spiritual experience, because that is what I always feel when I see one of my favorite artists play. I am convinced that the members of Led Zeppelin, and maybe all musicians, when playing “in the zone” are communing with something divine. Something otherworldly and inexplicable. In one scene from the film Jimmy Page is so completely lost in a solo performance and it is impossible to tell where he ends and his guitar starts. Man and instrument are absolutely melded together and it is in that melding where the miraculous happens. There was no Jimmy and no guitar in that moment - there was just music and magic.

On the car ride home my husband and I were quiet, lost in the beauty of what we had just witnessed. Finally I broke the silence. “Poor John Bonham,” I said with a heavy sigh. “Maybe that is just the price you have to pay for touching God.” Because, whether you believe in God or not, I think that musicians of the Led Zeppelin caliber are doing just that. Harnessing some celestial force, dragging it out of the cosmos and wrestling it down to earth for us mere mortals to marvel at and worship. They give themselves over. They become channels of and to the divine. 

“That's so dark,” my husband grumbled. “Why does there have to be a “price to pay”? Why can't they just be extremely talented?”

“There's extremely talented,” I told him, “and then there’s greatness. Maybe once these artists get so close to, I don't know, the divine…through their music, they can't handle that energy, and so they self destruct.”

“Thats a terrible thing to say,” my husband told me in his best “why’ya always gotta be so damn dark” tone. As we drove on he blasted Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song while I compiled a list of some of my other favorite artists who offed themselves with drugs, alcohol or suicide. Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Bon Scott, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell,, Sinead O’Connor, Prince, Tom Petty, the list goes on and on. And on. 

In the movie Kissed by God about pro surfer Andy Irons (who died in a hotel room at age 32 from a drug overdose) he says that being in the middle of the wave is like being kissed by God. And once you have been kissed by God for even a second it is very difficult to exist in the real world. Maybe that’s what happens to these musicians and artists. They are kissed by God while playing, but then have to come back down to earth and exist with us ordinary mortals. I imagine that must suck. And so they have to numb out. Sometimes they numb themselves into death. 

There is another side to all this and that is ego. Years ago an acquaintance of mine toured with the band REM at the height of their fame. Her band opened for them at sold-out arenas around the world, especially in Japan where REM drew massive crowds night after night.

When the tour ended I asked her how it was. “Quite an experience,” she told me. “Now I understand why rock stars do drugs.” I was surprised by her answer; this young women was as far from an addict as one can be. When I asked what had made her come to that dire conclusion she elaborated. “It’s just so weird,” she said. “Fame will mess you up. You get on stage and you have thousands of strangers screaming and acting like you are some sort of idol. Then, from one minute to the next, the show is over and you're just back in your hotel room, alone, trying to find your toothbrush and packing up to head to another gig. It's terrible for the ego,” she told me. “It destroys people.”

That reminded me of something Billy Joel once said after selling out Madison Square Garden for weeks on end. “Sure, you have hordes chanting your name for a few hours but then at the end of the night you're just the same old schmuck, who has to pee, sitting in traffic on the Long Island Expressway trying to get home after the show.”

Possibly it’s that extreme shift between being worshiped on stage to being human in traffic that causes the disconnect. Maybe it’s the sensitivity of the artist living in a non-sensitive world that causes the downfall of so many musical geniuses. Whatever it was that hastened their deaths, I mourn the loss of all of these wonderful artists. There are a few on the horizon now who are treading the razor’s edge. Those of whom, when we read the headlines: “So and so found dead in a hotel room” we will, like I did when Amy Winehouse died at age 27, say with real sadness, “I'm surprised she lived as long as she did.”

There are several musicians who almost died but then got sober and are still able to channel something mysterious and divine. Something not of this realm. Eric Clapton, Eminem, Elton John, Slash, and many more. So there is hope. 

I'm still holding my breath for the Led Zeppelin reunion tour that will most likely never happen. But in the meantime I have learned through reading about the stars that did wrest their lives back from the precipice that maybe the price to pay for channeling the divine through music does not necessarily have to be death.

I just wish the ones we lost too soon had figured that out before they left us.