About the Led Zeppelin Septalogue

Led Zeppelin shows us often in their music, examples of people who come to know joy by renouncing desires that had led them to suffering. First, though Led Zeppelin shows us what can happen when we do not renounce destructive desires. Led Zeppelin started as a blues band, and one of the primary themes of blues music is that desire can often lead us to bad places (especially sexual desire). This was the theme of Led Zeppelin’s first album. The protagonist of this album was led to great suffering by his desire just as zeppelins have often been led to destruction by forces that guided them into obstacles. On their second album Led Zeppelin renounced a destructive desire by telling a woman who caused them suffering to “go away”, in the song heartbreaker/living loving maid, and immediately after this renounce the desire to remain in one place that would do them harm when they duty requires them to constantly journey in the song ‘ramble on.’ After this Led Zeppelin expresses the joy that comes to a person who renounces a destructive desire in the songs ‘Moby Dick’, and ‘Bring it on Home. Before Led Zeppelin renounced destructive desire they had portrayed the confusion leading to tension leading to suffering that comes from pursuing destructive desire in the first three songs of this album, and then insert the song ‘thank you’ as an interlude before ‘heartbreaker’ to remind us that in reality Led Zeppelin already knew how to find joy by renouncing destructive desires, and could renounce their desires so easily that their renunciation would not even be visible to an observer, and that because of this, joy could sometimes seem to come with no effort on their part as it does in the song ‘thank you.’ The specific example of destructive desire Led Zeppelin portrays is the destructive desire of a man for a woman who treats him badly, so in the specific situation they portray Led Zeppelin is saying on the first three songs of this album, ‘Look at how bad things can be for a man controlled by his desire for a hurtful woman, then Led Zeppelin shows a man breaking free from his desire for the woman who hurts him, and finally they show how much better life can be for a man after He does this. Because the example of a man controlled by a woman who hurts him is predominant in blues music, it is also predominant in Led Zeppelin’s music, but Led Zeppelin makes it clear that this is just one form of destructive desire from which need to be liberated, by also showing other destructive desires. Many people have failed to see this and have felt that Led Zeppelin’s music bore a particular animus toward women. This is wholly untrue. Women are sometimes hurtful in led Zeppelin’s songs, but they are also sometimes very helpful in other songs. It all depends on the individual woman, just as the qualities of hurtfulness or helpfulness always reside in individuals and never in groups. Later in their career Led Zeppelin also portrayed the destructive desire of false Christianity for illusory rewards false Christians hoped to obtain without living as Jesus teaches us to live. This desire is even more dangerous because it will lead to even greater suffering, and for this reason Led Zeppelin provides its listeners an even greater service by showing the dangers of this desire and the need to break free from it in the songs ‘In my time of Dying’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven.’

Led Zeppelin also helps us follow Jesus’ command to think of things of God, instead of thinking of things of men, by helping us develop the greatest thing of God we know: our intellects. Any time we listen to music based on complex patterns and produced by using many different sounds, such as Led Zeppelin’s music, we develop our brains by stimulating electrons in our brains to travel by new neural pathways, and by thus making it easier for us to use those neural pathways in the future.

It is easiest to see Led Zeppelin’s illustration of the message that joy can only come from sacrifice if we arrange Led Zeppelin’s songs to form seven musical journeys that show us how the pain of sacrifice will lead us to joy. These seven musical journeys form Led Zeppelin’s septalogue. Led Zeppelin, of course produced many more than seven musical journeys. (they recorded 72 songs in all, though most of these songs were parts of album sides that were musical journeys, rather than being musical journeys by themselves.), but each album they released usually illustrated many different themes in different sections, with songs on each album expressing the recurring themes of sacrifice pain and joy in different musical styles. Putting songs expressing the same theme from different albums next to each other shows the theme they are expressing even more clearly than each song does individually and often listening to songs that express joy immediately after songs that show great tribulation shows more powerfully the connection between the two which one sees most clearly by viewing Led Zeppelin’s career as one great journey in which early albums focus more on tribulation and later albums focus more on joy. Putting songs from different albums next to each other also allows us to experience individual parts of this journey more powerfully when we hear songs that express the same theme in different musical styles immediately before and after each other. While a septalogue of seven Led Zeppelin musical journeys often puts these songs together, it also maintains Led Zeppelin’s aim of producing a first album that focuses almost wholly on the suffering harmful desires can lead us to (in which Led Zeppelin restated the theme of traditional blues music), and also maintains Led Zeppelin’s tendency to focus more on joy and less on tribulation in their later albums. The fact that Led Zeppelin’s music produces the material for seven journeys illustrates their awareness that joy cannot be maintained by rejecting a harmful desire once, but can only be maintained by rejecting harmful desires again and again, throughout ones life. For this reason Led Zeppelin’s career as a whole evokes the image of a Sisyphus who rolls a stone up a hill every morning, but who experiences intense joy throughout the rest of every day. Each of the seven logues in Led Zeppelin’s septalogue is named for the image most strongly evoked by that logue. The seven logues correlate to the seven days of the week. The first logue should be listened to on the first day of the week, the second logue on the second day, and so on until the week ends and this cycle starts over again at the beginning of the next week just as Sisyphus starts over again every morning. If you print the septalogue presented below (or if you view a print preview screen) you will notice that the seven logues in order form a near circle that represents the counterclockwise reflection of Jimmy Page’s arm traveling a near circle every time he strikes one of the power chords in the heart of ‘The Song Remains the Same’ This image should be superimposed over each week so we think of each week as one circle of this chord with a pause after that chord as there is a pause after each of these power chords in this song., and then another chord for every week we live, just as the chords in ‘the Song Remains the Same’ follow one another to reproduce the rhythm on which all life rides and is sustained.

I believe that the Led Zeppelin Septalogue start on tuesday because Tiw was the Norse God of war and because the first logue in Led Zeppelin’s septalogue shows great suffering as there is great suffering in war, because the beginning of the second logue shows a person still ensnared by destructive desire as a fly in a spiders web, because this man is like a man who is dead and who will soon be brought to life when he cuts himself loose, and because wednesday is named for The Norse God of Death, because the power of the renunciation of the third logue reminds us of the power of Thor’s hammer, and for this reason is best listened to on thursday, because the fourth logue is even more evocative of a violent escape from death, and thus reminds us of the suffering Jesus knew on a friday, because the fifth logue is the logue in which our minds catch up with our emotions in the renunciation we must perform, and because saturday is the day on which our minds must comprehend the meaning of Jesus’ life if we hope to be able to celebrate on sunday, because the sixth logue is the most celebratory of all logues in the septalogue, and because on the seventh day we must ride the wave of life that has been created throughout the six preceding days for one day before we start to recreate this wave with the new week because doing this requires humor and perspective, and remembering the strength of our previous renunciation, because these qualities are the hallmarks of the seventh logue with ‘Black Country Woman’ showing the use of humor and perspective in the place of the more powerful renunciations we experienced on previous days just as the moon is like a memory of the sun that had preceded if, and with ‘In The Light’ reminding us of our earlier renunciations by showing a renunciation that is like our earlier ones but less powerful, and then we end our week with more celebration at the end of this logue, until we feel fully sated after ‘in the evening’, and night flight’ and feel ready to collapse into a deep sleep knowing we will start our journey again when we awake. There is some room for variation in song order in the Ld Zeppelin Septalogue. I indicate this at many points by showing alternative songs that could be used but because I believe these replacements would diminish the septalogue I label these alternatives with the abbreviation vpn for ‘Very Probably Not.’ There is also one alternative presented for the circumstance in which a person is recording each logue on a cassette tape, and one of those tapes has too little space (abbreviated TL space).

The reason Led Zeppelin is important to people who want to follow Jesus, is that Led Zeppelin, through their music, illustrates Jesus’ teaching that great joy can only come from great sacrifice, and shows us through the medium of high art how it will feel to make difficult sacrifices and to experience the joy this will allow us to know. Jesus teaches that great joy can only come from great sacrifice when He says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it lives alone. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit. (Jn 12:24).

Led Zeppelin Septalogue

The music of Led Zeppelin shows us that we must accept loss to know joy and shows us how we can come through the pain of loss to find joy.

Logue I Caught in the Web (?55:19)

1 Good Times Bad Times 2:43 /vpn Black Dog

2 Sick Again 4:38 / vpn For Your Life

3 Dyer Maker 4:17

4 No Quarter 7:03 / vpn GT,BT/ vpn Black Dog

5 Black Dog 4:50 / vpn Sick Again 4:38

6 Tea for One - 9:20

7 Your Time is Gonna Come - 4:40

8 Black Mountain Side - 2:03 (+ q :07)

9 Communication Breakdown - 2:26

10 I Can’t Quit You Baby - 4:39

11 How Many More Times - 8:22

Logue II Cutting Loose (?53:00)

1 Whole Lotta Love - 5:29

2 What is and What Should Never Be - 4:42

3 Friends - q 3:54

4 Misty Mountain Hop - q 4:38 / vpn 4 Sticks

5 Royal Orleans - q 2:58

6 The Lemon Song - 6:17

7 Heartbreaker - 4:13

8 Livin Lovin Maid - 2:39

9 Ramble On - 4:34

10 Moby Dick - 4:20

11 Hots On For Nowhere - 4:42

12 The Ocean - 4:19

Logue III Renouncing (54:11)

1 The Immigrant Song - 2:25

2 For Your Life – q 6:26 / vpn No Quarter

3 Since I’ve Been Loving You - 7:29

4 Tangerine - 3:10

5 Kashmir - 8:40

6 Babe I’m Gonna Leave You - 6: 43 / vpn YSM

7 Dazed and Confused - 6:29

8 That’s the Way - 5:39

9 When The Levee Breaks - 7:10

Logue IV Getting Up (?53:40)

1 Celebration Song - 3:32

2 Nobody’s Fault But Mine - 6:22

3 Out on the Tiles - 4:10

4 Rock and Roll q - 3:40

5 You Shook Me q - 6:28 / vpn BIGLY

6 Goin To California - 3:38

7 In My Time of Dying - 11:17

8 The Song Remains the Same - 5:29

9 The Wanton Song - 4:13

10 Bring it on Home - 4:21

Logue V Letting Go (?55:25)

1 Four Sticks - q 4:45 / vpn MMH

2 Gallows Pole - q 4:56

3 Achilles Last Stand - q 10:22

4 Hats off to Harper - q 3:42

5 The Battle of Evermore - q 5:52

6 Stairway to Heaven - q 8:03

7 Ten Years Gone - q 6:33

four seconds

8 Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp q - 4:16

9 Bron-Yr-Aur - q 2:06

10 Over the Hills and Far Away - q 4:50

Logue VI Avalon (?57:11 w HoHoly)

1 Southbound Suarez - 4:12

2 Houses of the Holy - q 4:02 /? Dancin Days

If TL space

3 Fool in the Rain - 6:11

4 Hot Dog - 3:28

5 The Rain Song - 7:37

6 Carouselambra - 10:32

7 Custard Pie - 5:12

8 Trampled Underfoot - q 5:34/

9 All Of My Love - 5:50/

10 I’m Gonna Crawl - 5:28

Logue VII Riding the Wave (?54:27)

1 Dancin Days Q 3:43 / ?The Rover

If TL sp on 6

2 The Rover Q 5:37 / ?HoHoly

If Tl sp on 6

3 Candy Store Rock - Q 4:07

4 The Crunge - Q 3:17

5 Black Country Woman - Q 4:32

6 Down by the Seaside - Q 5:16

7 Thank You - Q 4:49

8 In The Light - Q 8:46

9 Boogie With Stu - Q 3:53

10 In The Evening - Q 6:50

11 Night Flight - Q 3:37