Led Zeppelin FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time (Faq Series)

by George Case

  There may be other factors here. “I contributed to the lyrics on the first three albums,” Page recalled, “but I was always hoping that Robert would eventually take care of that aspect of the band.” Most accounts claim that “Thank You” from Led Zeppelin II was the first song for which Plant actually sat down and wrote words, suggesting he had no part of any earlier work. On the debut record, only “Good Times Bad Times,” “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” and “Communication Breakdown” were really new material; Page’s “Dazed and Confused” had evolved out of the Yardbirds’ “I’m Confused” and, before that, Jake Holmes’s “Dazed and Confused,” while the remainder of the songs were Willie Dixon numbers, the instrumental “Black Mountain Side,” and the obvious blues adaptation “How Many More Times.” Aside from singing these, Plant’s input must have been negligible. Of the three recruits to Page’s New Yardbirds, Plant was the one most on probation, whereas the producer was more confident of John Bonham and John Paul Jones’s talents. In Hammer of the Gods, road manager Richard Cole even asserted that Plant might have even been fired by Page after Led Zeppelin’s first US tour, a charge Page evaded in a 1988 interview in Musician magazine. Between his inexperience, his legal obligations to a rival record label and his shaky status in the band’s first few months, Plant’s songwriting, such as it was, had to go unacknowledged.

  Kinda Makes Life a Drag: The 1973 Led Zeppelin Robbery

  Following their three-night engagement at New York’s Madison Square Garden in July 1973, the band was robbed of some $200,000 in private cash holdings while staying at the Drake Hotel. This supplied the unexpected twist in The Song Remains the Same, which documented the concerts and the following press coverage of the crime, but no arrests have ever been made.

  Led Zeppelin on tour in the 1970s was awash in money. The ’73 American shows alone were estimated to gross $4 million for the band, based on ticket sales multiplied by an average price of $7, so the problem of handling and securing all that revenue (kept mostly in hundred-dollar bills) was a real one. In 1973 such sums were kept on hand to pay for amenities like the Starship airliner, the Song Remains the Same film crew, and assorted purchases by band members of instruments, cars, records, antiques, or drugs. The theft was discovered by Richard Cole on July 29, just before the last show, when he looked into the safety deposit box of the Drake Hotel where Zeppelin were staying. “I gazed blankly at the box for a few seconds and could feel an uncomfortable chill sweeping through my body,” Cole recalled in his overheated memoir, Stairway to Heaven. Responsible for the only key to the deposit, Cole was the prime suspect and questioned by police, but was released without charges. Local headlines put the missing figure at a cool $203,000. According to Cole, the band eventually won a settlement with the Drake for the lost money.

  So where did it go? It’s fair to assume Cole was not the culprit, having reliably handled Led Zeppelin’s personal safety and concert takes for four years of almost nonstop performing. In his When Giants Walked the Earth Mick Wall raises the possibility that someone in the group’s inner circle smuggled it out of the US himself to avoid tax burdens (while crying robbery as a distraction), although again the question is why such a ruse would be played then and only then. A hotel employee or someone in cahoots with one or more of the hotel’s staff may have secretly had access to the money;

  “Led Zeppelin was a very strange, four-quadrant marriage,” recalled Robert Plant.

  Courtesy of Robert Rodriguez

  Wall also notes the organized crime element that was then entering many areas of the music business, where tempting piles of loot were left lying around by stoned guitarists and their friends. The publicity surrounding Zeppelin’s record-breaking 1973 shows may have been enough to entice some sharp New York B&E artists to make a quick and easy score off of some long-haired limeys naïve enough to carry two hundred grand with them. A 2009 comic novel by Jason Buhrmester, Black Dogs: The Possibly True Story of Classic Rock’s Greatest Robbery, speculates that the steal was achieved by a youthful gang of rock-loving misfits—a far-fetched but entertaining prospect. For now, the Drake robbery remains in the cold case files.

  Good Times Bad Times: Swan Song

  Zeppelin’s private record label was born with great hopes in 1974 and died a sad death in 1983. Not only did the company put out Physical Graffiti, Presence, In Through the Out Door, and Coda but it also released also some respectable work by other artists, including Bad Company’s Bad Company and Straight Shooter, the Pretty Things’ Silk Torpedo, and eventually Jimmy Page’s Death Wish II and Robert Plant’s Pictures at Eleven. Rocker Dave Edmunds and blues mistress Maggie Bell were also signed to Swan Song. Like other such enterprises in the lavish rock scene of the 1970s, Swan Song was begun as an exercise in hubris, on rock stars’ vague ideals of subverting corporate capitalism from within: to get as big and as rich as Led Zeppelin (or the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, or Earth, Wind & Fire, who also founded their own labels) seemed to mark some sort of vindication for the youth counterculture, so the next logical step was from the boards to the boardroom. “It’s a lube job for the ego,” Swan Song president Peter Grant admitted to the New York Times in 1992.

  Artist-owned labels also had the added satisfaction of freeing the principals from the oversights and second guesses of older, straighter executives—even though Zeppelin’s real bosses at Atlantic Records had given them almost complete artistic control from the beginning of their contract, and even though the suits at other labels such as Casablanca and Asylum were as profligate with employee perks as any of their guitar-playing, coke-snorting clients. Swan Song’s chief advantage for Led Zeppelin was as a tax shelter, a means to reinvest some of the massive amounts of money coming to the band rather than merely hand most of it over to Britain’s Inland Revenue. Some of the band’s collective earnings had gone into the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Zeppelin were fans of the Flying Circus and partied with some of the Pythons in LA), and the Sussex mansion Hammerwood Park was purchased in their name in 1973 as a possible recording room, but was never used. Finding and producing rock ’n’ roll talent, then, seemed to be the best business for Swan Song to pursue. It didn’t work out that way.

  As president of Swan Song, Peter Grant afterward reflected to Dave Lewis, “What I regret is not getting someone in to run it properly. We kept getting it wrong, or I did.” Grant and his staff had one huge asset—Led Zeppelin—and several considerably smaller ones, and as Zeppelin declined and fell, so did the company. Grant’s own drug problems from the mid-1970s on hastened the end of an already untenable situation. Had the organization been able to take on a wider range of successful artists it might have diversified to its benefit, but, as Grant said, “There were just not enough hours in the day…. [E]ven to do Zep justice was a twenty-four-hour job.” He also admitted to turning down an offer to manage Queen in 1975, and the defunct Swan Song offices were cluttered with ignored demo tapes from future prospects Iron Maiden and Paul Young.

  A rundown of Swan Song’s executive, legal, and administrative staff would name:

  • Peter Grant, president 1974–83

  • Phil Carson, liaison to Atlantic Records

  • Danny Goldberg, US vice-president 1974–76

  • Abe Hoch, UK vice-president 1974–76

  • Alan Callan, vice-president 1976–83

  • Steven Weiss, US attorney

  • Shelley Kaye, legal assistant

  • Joan Hudson, UK accountant

  • Mark London, security

  • Sam Aizer, Lauren Siciliano, Janine Safer, US publicists

  • Nancy Gurskik, Mitchell Fox, US assistants

  • Fiya Hunt, Carole Brown, Unity MacLean, Sian Meredith, Daniel Treacey, UK assistants

  A Little Silver, a Little Gold: Superhype, Joaneline, and Flames of Albion

  Led Zeppelin’s original songs were published by companies registered in these names. Superhype covered the material from Led Zeppe
lin to Houses of the Holy; Joaneline covered Physical Graffiti; and Presence, In Through the Out Door, and Coda were published by Flames of Albion.

  Music publishing—the license to transcribe, notate, or otherwise disseminate the words and music of copyrighted tunes—has been a hidden driver of the music business for decades. Before recorded sound was the dominant musical medium, sheet music sales were the most lucrative aspects of the industry, as upright pianos and sight reading skills were common in middle-class households. While performances and record sales can net the artists considerable sums, the long-term investment represented by a songwriting credit can be far more remunerative in the long run; this is why (say) composers Paul McCartney or Keith Richards have bigger personal fortunes than their bandmates Ringo Starr or Charlie Watts. Because authorship of Led Zeppelin’s music was often shared among three or four members of the band, all the players, and the inheritors of John Bonham, have done very well by their association with the group. The dominant partnership of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant (they alone are named as the writers of “Thank You,” “Ramble On,” “Immigrant Song,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Going to California,” “The Rain Song,” “Houses of the Holy” and “Achilles Last Stand”) has given them the edge in annual royalty income; both men have made the 2009 London Times annual Rich List with holdings valued at £75 million (Plant) and £70 million (Page), while John Paul Jones ekes out a living with his meager £35 million.

  Superhype Publishing Incorporated was registered by Peter Grant and Jimmy Page as Led Zeppelin was getting off the ground in 1968, as part of Grant’s everything-to-the-artist managerial strategy. It guaranteed from the outset that any popular songs to be composed by one or all of the group’s members would earn money for them and not some Svengali (the Lennon-McCartney songbook originally got the two Beatles twenty percent each, their manager Brian Epstein ten percent, and the remaining half went to publisher Dick James). According to Grant, Superhype was the production company through which the act was signed to Atlantic Records, rather than as the four individual musicians and their manager. The offhand joke of a name likely became an embarrassment to Grant and his clients as the money started rolling in, along with charges that Zeppelin was a “hype band,” so the Joaneline title was tried before the classier-sounding Flames of Albion Music Incorporated was launched. “We sold off the publishing company some years later,” Grant revealed of Superhype to Dave Lewis. “The whole deal with Atlantic gave us various clauses that we were able to use in our favor.” Each company, part of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) organization, was simply the vehicle through which Led Zeppelin’s creators collected their royalties from reproductions of their songs, whether broadcast on radio or written down in whole or in part. Actual sales of Zeppelin albums, as well as fees for live appearances, were a different revenue stream. Today Joaneline does not exist, but both Superhype and Flames of Albion are administered through Led Zeppelin’s parent company of Warner Music.

  24

  These Things Are Clear to All

  Led Zeppelin and Their Peers

  In the Eyes of Other Men: Before, During, and After Zeppelin

  Regarded now as one of the all-time best rock ’n’ roll artists, it’s instructive to consider how Zeppelin has been compared and contrasted with a gallery of other performers who’ve been subject at different times to as much or more acclaim. Many of these acts have a fan base that overlaps with Led Zeppelin’s, but others are usually categorized well apart from the Zeppelin league, and our understanding of the band expands after it’s placed alongside various predecessors, competitors, and inheritors.

  Elvis Presley

  Calculating the influence of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll on an entire generation of musicians is impossible—the music might not even exist today if not for the success of Tupelo, Mississippi’s most famous son. Presley was not the first white artist to make black sounds palatable to a white audience, but he was the one whose persona and performing style conveyed a smoldering sexuality and youthful insolence that were to pervade all of Western culture from his time onward. Elvis could never have foreseen descendants like Led Zeppelin, but descendants they nonetheless were.

  Jimmy Page has said that his first inclinations to seriously play guitar arose after hearing a 1955 Presley B side, “Baby Let’s Play House.” “I heard that record and I wanted to be a part of it; I knew something was going on,” he reflected. Robert Plant, likewise, cited Elvis as the central figure in his teenage explorations of the blues and its offshoots: the good-looking, honey-voiced American white boy who made the raw performances of Sonny Boy, Muddy, Big Boy, Sleepy John, and Howlin’ comprehensible to a good-looking, honey-voiced English white boy. The Led Zeppelin lineup—singer, guitarist, bassist, and drummer—was prefigured by Presley’s 1950s band of himself, guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black, and drummer D. J. Fontana.

  Led Zeppelin performed, or at least vamped through, many songs popularized by Elvis in concert, usually in a long medley in the middle of “Whole Lotta Love.” Among them were “That’s All Right, Mama,” “I Need Your Love Tonight,” “I’m Moving On,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Mystery Train,” and “A Mess o’ Blues.” In 1969 Jimmy Page took his girlfriend Pamela Miller to see an Elvis show in Las Vegas, although he declined an offer to meet the King that time; Page was already friendly with Presley’s guitarist James Burton, a rockabilly ace who’d also played on classics by Ricky Nelson. “We sat around with acoustic guitars and just played whenever we could fit a jam in between recording sessions,” Burton recalled. From 1973 on, Zeppelin and Elvis also had concert promoter Jerry Weintraub in common. Houses of the Holy took the number one album spot away from Presley’s Aloha from Hawaii in early ’73.

  Led Zeppelin actually did meet Elvis Presley on two memorable occasions, a summit of rock heavies awesome to imagine today but relatively low-key at the time. Presley had heard Zeppelin’s music and, through Weintraub, knew of the English act’s popularity and, through a stepbrother, of “Stairway to Heaven” and their musical chops. “We’re gonna do that again,” he told an LA audience in May 1974 after cutting one number short, “because we’ve got Led Zeppelin in the audience and we want to look like we know what we’re doing up here.” Later that night, the band and Peter Grant were taken to Elvis’s hotel room and held a friendly get-together that ran two hours over the planned twenty minutes. “We went up to his suite and his girlfriend Ginger was there with just a few other people,” said Jimmy Page. “I can tell you, we were really nervous. When he came in the door, he started doing his famous twitch. You know, he didn’t put that on—that was something he really did.” Presley and John Bonham broke the ice to discuss a mutual love of hot rod cars, while Robert Plant remembered, “We all stood in a circle and discussed this whole phenomenon, this lunacy…. [Elvis] was very focused, very different to what you now read.” “Is it true, those stories about you boys on the road?” Elvis asked, to innocent denial. The literal heavyweight Peter Grant accidentally sat on Elvis’s father, Vernon. As the musicians parted, Plant and Elvis harmonized on Presley’s “Love Me.” The next year John Paul Jones and Zeppelin tour manager Richard Cole dropped in on Presley’s Los Angeles home and hung out. By then Presley, with only a couple of more years to live, was clearly becoming divorced from reality as he insisted on trading wristwatches with the men of Zeppelin. “The evening continued like this for the next half hour,” Cole recalled, “with an orgy of gift-giving that Elvis seemed to find exciting.” Afterward, Presley’s chief bodyguard Jerry Schilling informed Cole, “We haven’t seen the Boss have such a good time in years.”

  The Beatles

  They were at the epicenter of popular music in the last half of the twentieth century, and every rock ’n’ roll group that came afterward was in their debt and in their shadow. Led Zeppelin have sold hundreds of millions of records and influenced countless numbers of musicians and ordinary listeners, but their achievement is still less th
an the Beatles’.

  Zeppelin’s foursome certainly bettered the professional landmarks established by the earlier quartet. They had a tougher manager who made sure his “boys” got every bit of earnings that were owed them, wealth the earnest Brian Epstein could never win for his own clients. Zep’s live gigs were marked by non-shrieking audiences and a more than adequate sound system, two things which the Beatles sorely missed after they became an international sensation in 1963–64 and whose absence drove them from the touring circuit after 1966. Measured by straight chops if not intuitive flair, the Zeppelin personnel could outplay the Beatles: John Lennon and George Harrison never attempted twenty-minute guitar solos, and Ringo Starr would have been swallowed alive by “Moby Dick.” On their 1973 American outing Zeppelin broke attendance records set by the Beatles in 1965—Zeppelin’s appearance in Tampa, Florida, on May 5 drew more fans than the Beatles’ legendary Shea Stadium show—and it was Led Zeppelin II that displaced Abbey Road from the pinnacle of the album charts in late 1969. There was also a symbolism in Led Zeppelin’s finally wresting the title of “Best Group” from the Beatles in the British Melody Maker readers’ poll in September 1970, the first time in eight years the Fab Four had not won the vote.