Even by the time of Led Zeppelin IV‘s^[1]Yes, I’m aware its technically an untitled album–and also known informally as the Rune album–but we are not indulging in Boomer lore today. release in 1971, there was already a veritable glut of pop-songs romanticizing California–The Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin,'” Joni Mitchell’s “California,” The Door’s “L.A. Women,” Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco,” Dionne Warwick’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” etc., etc.–with the dread assurance of many, many more to follow in the decades to come. Something about the state’s expansive size, year-round perfect weather, and position at the western most end of the continental U.S. and therefore the end of all Western civilization, has made it easy to imbue it with a sort of Edenic allure, as though if one could just make it to California, one would at last re-enter Paradise.

But then, as no less than the Eagles declared only six years later at the very end of the Hotel California album, “You call someplace paradise/to say goodbye.”^[2]Track 9, “The Last Resort.” That is, to call California edenic is to also call it fallen. It is by now a cliche of long standing^[3]I mean, Sunset Boulevard came out clear back in 1950, for pete’s sake. to note that, for the vast majority of aspiring actors, screenwriters, directors, models, artists and musicians who chase after the siren song of California—not to mention the innumerable tech workers, entrepreneurs, and even migrants just hoping to work the fields and send some remittances home to Mexico—the Golden State has been a treacherous set of shoals indeed.

Compounding that Fallen feeling are all the endless earthquakes, mega-droughts, and wildfires that regularly afflict the state. Activist and researcher Mark Davis, in his 1995 essay “The Case For Letting Malibu Burn,” noted that the various Native American groups of the region actually never settled the Malibu hills—they were observant enough to note that the area was regularly burned over with raging wildfires—that in fact those fires were part of the ecology and circle of life in the region, and hence needed to be respected and left alone. It was the white settlers who insisted on making the area a status object, and who refused to acknowledge the necessity of the wildfires and suppressed them at all points—which of course only made them burn the hotter when they did break out. That is, if California is a place of Eden, it is also a place of Judgment.

Yet in spite of the one eternal round of natural disasters, broken dreams, and the outrageous cost of living, folks keep on moving to California: because like all divine judgments, the place is also a revelation. The mountains, beaches, fields, cities, year-round sunshine and Pacific Ocean that has no memory are all of such surpassing beauty that one intuits that the natural disasters alone are simply the price one must pay to live there. Just as we must pass through tribulation to return unto Heaven—and just as the earth itself must reel to and fro like a drunkard and all the elements must burn with a fervent heat before it can be renewed and receive its paradisaical glory—so to must we suffer just to experience California. That is, there is something apocalyptic about California: both in being at the end of the world (in every sense of that word, too), but also in the original Greek sense of being a revelation.

This dual nature of California has only occasionally been acknowledged by the endless Pop songs composed about it, the vast majority of which are content to settle for simple romanticism. Only a couple big-name bands like the Eagles and the Red Hot Chili Peppers—and even then only rarely^[4]It’s basically “Hotel California,” “Californication,” and that’s it.—have tried to explore it.

Yet before either of those SoCal bands came into existence, there was Led Zeppelin, flying clear out from England, to sing about how California has always been an apocalypse.^[5]It is also a truism to the point of cliche that a true Led Zep fan never, ever cite “Stairway to Heaven”–or even any of the other overplayed-to-death-on-Classic-Rock-radio tracks … Continue reading

The song starts out sentimental enough: Robert Plant narrates how he has “spent [his] days with a women unkind,” so he flies to California “with an aching in my heart,” because “someone told [him] there’s a woman out there/with love in her heart and flowers in her hair.” Thus far, the song is playing firmly with the then-recent flower-child stereotypes of late-‘60s California.^[6]And yes, we know the woman in this song is a subtle allusion to the aforementioned Joni Mitchell, whom both Page and Plant were fans of at the time. We’re music nerds, too.

But already he acknowledges the cynicism surrounding the state: “Took my chances on a big jet plane/never let them tell you that they’re all the same”—which statement, while hopeful, still can’t help but gesture to his suppressed anxiety that all these planes really are the same, that in fact all these places are the same, and that he will be just as frustrated and lonely in California as he was in Britain, because he will still be himself in either place.

Now, the song doesn’t disillusion his fantasies, but nor does it exactly endorse them, either; rather than find the girl with flowers in her hair, he instead encounters straightway the earthquakes that are, again, the price of reentering paradise: “The mountains and the canyons start to tremble and shake/As the children of the sun began to awake.” Again, as in Isaiah, California is where the earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard. The narrator, quickly overawed by the divine fury of the state such that his own personal problems swiftly melt away, belts out: “Seems that the wrath of the gods/Got a punch on the nose, and it started to flow/I think I might be sinking.” As we all must, he calls out for divine grace to save himself from destructive forces far beyond his mortal strength to resist. We are all Peter sinking beneath the waves.

He finishes the verses by acknowledging the impossibility of the Californian dream—how he’s “Trying to find a woman who’s never, never, never been born,” and perhaps never will. He is “Standing on a hill in my mountain of dreams/Telling myself it’s not as hard, hard, hard as it seems.” Many a dreamer has felt the same way upon arriving in California–as I deeply suspect the vast majority of us felt once we’d arrived on Earth itself for our mortal probations.

Not that these feelings are unique to California; only that once you make it all the way to the Pacific coast, you become aware that you can go no further, and most acknowledge your mortal shortcomings here, if nowhere else. We all fall far short of divine grace; we all require something far beyond our mortal powers to attain it. We all require an Atonement, to access a Paradisaical glory that is as impossible as it is essential.