Great Acid Movies #5: THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME (1976)

If there can be "J-Date" and "Christian Singles" why can't Led Zeppelin fans have their own dating site? Zepdate? Zeppelin Singles? Too drunken Viking Anglo-Nordic Imperialist swaggerific? Imperialist? The drug-addled, The tall emotionless Teutons of the North, the artistic, insane, and the mad killers never get their own religion officially, let alone a dating service, but the cult of Zep is just as valid and just as fervent and most importantly, way ballsier!

In the TOP 100 at the back of an old late 1980s High Times issue, right between "Hash!" and "Harley Davidson," was: "Becoming an instant Led Zeppelin fan by watching Song Remains the Same on acid for the first time." AWESOME, I thought: its synchronistic black magic is still winking at me, reverse engineering the miracle, like an ancient scroll that depicts your future, or the creationist angle on "pre-dated" dinosaur bones. Because I had just become a Led Zeppelin fan in that exact way, after never liking them due to my associations of their music with the imbecilic, bullying burnouts at my high school.

Every relevant story of spiritual transformation is inherently unique and my story really begins my junior year of college, my band just played and I was working through some post-performance lysergically "enhanced" paranoia so I could bust a move on this groupie with long dark, wavy hair, beautiful but with a blue-collar Pittsburgh accent that would scare off a teamster. Man I just needed some time alone to think for a second, but there were twenty people in my bedroom (post-gig party), all looking at me with needy, yearning eyes, their hands twitching and pulsing like writhing finger serpents. Seeing my predicament, Chrissy (the groupie) took me with her to see THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME at her friend's house. No goodbyes to the housemates, didn't even bring my keys.

By the movie was over I was in love, magically and forever... not with Chrissy, but with Led Zeppelin. The film itself is a dark/light fairy tale, the beauty of Plant and Page tempered by the immense industrial thuggishness of their manager Grant and the ferocity of John Bonham. It was a heavy combination: weird acid-soaked visuals and music that engaged the ears from four different directions, aiding and accelerating the evolutionary state I was in; initiatory, transformative, impossibly beautiful because it never tried to shut out its darker side even as it reached for the light.

Perhaps I use the word groupie unfairly in talking of Chrissy, though not long after that night she drove off with some friends to follow Plant's then-band, The Honeydrippers, around on tour, camped out in hotel lobbies, hoping to give Plant presents on his way to his room after the show, that sort of thing. Before seeing the film I'd have thought it all about star-fucking, like that girl with the hash brownies in STARDUST MEMORIES, but now I knew different. She was just a true believer-- when you've found that, nothing matters, even if the object of that sort of love is unworthy of it... who cares? You're already free. She was Marlene Dietrich, walking barefoot into the Sahara after Gary Cooper in MOROCCO, or Richard Burton and Jean Simmons marching towards their execution in THE ROBE.

I had no notion of god or spirituality before that night, myself. But when the movie was over, I felt whole. Chrissy took me home to her dorm room, seeing plainly I was too high to ever make it back to my house by myself. I was a new convert, adrip with lysergic fever sweat--and when she had signed me in, unlocked the door and turned on the light I felt as if I'd entered a sacred inner sanctum of Zeppelin. Her room was completely covered with holy Led Zeppelin images: pictures, postcards, posters, and paintings all over every inch of wall and ceiling. We both knew my being there was no accident of chance, but a cosmic convergence. Before I left her, she loaned me her dogeared copy of Hammer of the Gods: the Led Zeppelin Story, with the just solemnity of a missionary giving a convert his first bible.


It's over 15 years later and still one thunderous note of Led Zeppelin's music brings me back with a heady reverence to those transcendental moments; walking home as the sun comes up, still tripping and shaky, the beautiful, pungent smell of sex, patchouli and hash on you fingers as you bring your morning cigarette to your lips, a few cars roaring sleepily to life here and there, and you the Prince of Swords in the Zeppelin tarot deck, the mirror opposite of your usual panicked, self-absorbed, sexually frustrated, myopically sleepy slacker state.

Does the film live up to that promise now, 17 years later and cold stoned sober? Of course it does, though your mileage may vary on the fantasy excursions (each band member gets a vignette). Three of the band mates have young children at home, and it's a sterling example of how cooler things were in the 1970s that living on rural England estates with wives and moppets in tow actually made them even more COOL. Nowadays no one is free, the kids are in charge of the cultural stimuli and parents dutifully learn Tickle Me Elmo songs and arrange play-dates, but back then kids ran wild in the woods, grew up long haired and gonzo while their parents looked on with lordly bemusement, smoking and wife-swapping in the backyard until dawn (Think MAD MEN divided by DAZED & CONFUSED). There was none of that mawkish 1980s Spielberg child worship, nowhere the cornball CGI-repainted, "safe" sanitized azure wisps of stratus clouds from Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS adaptations. These guys lived the real deal, the 1978 Ralph Bakshi adaptation, wherein fantasy still had a dangerous, pre-AIDS sexy currency to it. This isn't dumbed-down MTV faux angst going on, but a living Edgar Burne Jones painting, with all the full mythopoetic heft that implieth.

Onstage at Madison Square Garden the band is at the same gaudy golden pinnacle, the same level of Godly perfection of, say, Muhammad Ali in 1974 at the "Rumble in the Jungle", or Elvis Presley in THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (1970) -- newly matured and beyond perfect, at the peak of their powers, able to command the full engagement of a packed theater without betraying any effort, barely breaking a sweat, chests toned but not too ripped. Persona, speed, savage precision, sexy sweetness, fire and soul, stop on a dime rock anarchy, a bundle of animal fury and godly humor.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK: Peter Grant's fantasy opener is rather dopey - a bunch of gangsters shooting Nazi werewolves in slow motion. But at least it's fairly quiet. The whole first twenty minutes have no music at all, actually, bringing to mind the hushed reverence before a benediction... which is okay if you're with a roomful of worshipful groupies for whom anything Zep does must be taken as holy writ, but otherwise beware. There's nothing in the lightshow effects one couldn't easily do with final cut pro, but it doesn't matter, because it works. It may seem a bit silly sober but one must remember it's not meant for sobriety. There's a deep kind of black magic at work in the editing, the ghost that guided Kenneth Anger's editing on Lucifer Rising works overtime here.

Then there's the unfortunate matter of John Paul Jones' Prince Valiant hair. Is that a wig? He has no visible part or scalp line, it all seems to meet at a center point at the top of his head, like a Beatles moptop.

Dwarf Factor: None, though when the fog machines come out for "No Quarter," you'll be longing to see the Stonehenge dancers from SPINAL TAP.

PEAK: The music and their posing and shredding is so rooted in a mix of swaggering sex and Darkest Depths of Mordor-related mythic imagery that without a personal connection to their music, like I described above, the film might be hard to take seriously until you notice three things:
1) The band themselves aren't taking it too seriously, nor too lightly. They are perfectly balanced between mythic resonance and playful cheek, and most of all, completely tuned to their music; the music controls their swagger, not the other way around--archetypo-magickal possession, not ego--so it never seems fake or a put-on, or pretentious. For a close example, pay particular attention to Jimmy Page's arms during his third solo in "Dazed & Confused" -- how they bend and vibrate like rubber bands, like he's a standing electric chair plugged into Chuck Berry's amp. It made me realize just how "outside of the Platonic cave" Zeppelin is. They're the original version of themselves, they created this sound from Robert Johnson records, Tolkien, and their own ESP. Everyone who comes after does it reverse-engineered, sexy swagger and drugs first, music second.

2) You can't blame Robert Plant for the hair metal 1980s, just because he's the unbleached root of that strain on the historia del rock tree. Don't laugh at Jimmy Page's double-necked guitar, because he's really using both necks--12 string and 6 string--all the time. And Plant's hair really is awesome. The telling point in that is how a boy like me can swoon when Plant casually, languidly brushes back his huge tangle of curls in between lyrics--not because I'm attracted to him, but because he is my Lord & King, or rather I see my Lord and King manifesting himself temporarily, the way a god might inhabit the body of a dancer in a voodoo ceremony. The God inhabiting Plant and Page is one I recognize, has perhaps inhabited me at odd moments here and there, though never for long... As long as I can feel that cosmic shudder, it doesn't matter who has the ball.

3) Don't laugh at their fantasy excursions, because as I said, at the time all that dungeons and dragons stuff was still dangerous and sexy--it hadn't been overrun by nerds, Spielberg/Reagan conservatism, the Disney-fication of Times Square, the re-chastening of AIDS and the rise of Harry Potter.

The Ralph Bakshi animated version of LORD OF THE RINGS movie in 1978, by way of illustration, was dark, violent; it was something older kids got high and went to see at midnight shows. Fantasy of that sort wasn't for children; it was for stoners. There were no videotapes yet, no cable, nothing to watch at home for slumber parties except what happened to be on UHF. If you wanted to see LORD OF THE RINGS you didn't wait 30 years for DVDs to be invented, you snuck out when your parents were asleep, jumped in your friends' battered Mustang, got high on the way. Dude, remember that?

In terms of rock music films, SONG REMAINS THE SAME bridges the gap between post-1980 downers like THE WALL (1982) and pre-1970 uppers like YELLOW SUBMARINE. Zeppelin's movie isn't a downer or an upper--its trip is the balance between light and dark, good and evil, eloi and morlock. Zeppelin is not afraid to screw with the vibe by showing Peter Grant belittling management or sullen cops in the soulless gray outer corridors of the stadium. In other words, they're not scared of showing the nuts and bolts of their fantasy operation, and it's somehow perfectly aligned to being young, dosed and willing to surrender to the source of swagger: they're not swaggering, they've surrendered to the source of swagger within. They simultaneously give you the great and powerful OZ light show and also expose the man behind the curtain. Zeppelin makes it okay to be a straight man swooning at the sight of another straight man strutting around in tight, flared pants. It's way past sex, way past fantasy, it's the mythic chord we vibrate to, we who first came to know God while riding in an older friend's Trans-Am, blasting the radio or some warped cassette, pretending we already know how to smoke, and then smoking.

(P.S. The black magic synchronicity continues as the sublime Kim Morgan also shares SRTS memories over at Sunset Gun)