by Rees, Paul
Before Plant left he played Page his old Band of Joy demos. Page had not yet found a drummer and Plant suggested he check out John Bonham. On the evening of July 31, 1968 Page and Grant trooped along to a club in Hampstead, north London, to see Bonham drum with Tim Rose. Bonham’s playing was ridiculously loud but also fast and dextrous, so one might miss the great skill behind the thunder. Page, however, had a keen ear and was sold.
Bonham was less taken with the idea of throwing in his lot with Page. He and his wife Pat were still living in a caravan behind his parents’ house. The couple now had a two-year-old son, Jason, and Bonham was indebted to his father. He was getting a steady income from Rose, not to mention the fact that Pat was of a mind that anything involving her husband’s big, daft mate Robert Plant was bound to end in financial ruin.
Plant was nonetheless dispatched to work on his friend, although Bonham was finally swung by a visit from Page and Grant, and their offer of more money than Rose was paying. Plant now had a familiar face along for the ride, someone to hold on to should the going get rough. He opened a bank account, depositing £35, his first rewards from this latest band.
A week before his twentieth birthday he and Bonham returned to London for rehearsals. That summer there were portents in the air for them. Both of the other mercurial guitarists who had been Yardbirds, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, had put out new records. Clapton’s Cream released Wheels of Fire, their third, a sprawling double album that was shot through with fiery blues but also burdened by excess and over-indulgence. Beck debuted his Jeff Beck Group on Truth, with Rod Stewart on vocals, coming up with a sound that was also steeped in the blues, but heavy and portentous. Yet Cream would not survive the year and Beck’s group were no more built to last. As a result there would be a clear run for what Page had in mind.
Arriving at a poky rehearsal room beneath a record shop on Gerard Street in London’s Soho, Plant and Bonham met their other new band mate. Like Page, John Paul Jones was an only child. Born in 1946 into a musical family in Sidcup, Kent, he was also in a touring band by the time he was a teenager, playing bass guitar for the ex-Shadows duo, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan. He, too, had gone on to do sessions, which is where he and Page had first crossed paths.
Jones was accomplished on both bass and keyboards but gifted as an arranger as well. He had scored the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow” single and “Sunshine Superman” for the Scottish folk singer Donovan, a U.S. Number One in 1966. Again like Page, Jones was an introvert, although there was something still more enigmatic about him, as though he kept a part of himself locked away at all times.
This, then, was the band. Two diffident southern Englanders with experience beyond their years, two garrulous lads from the Midlands as green as they were driven. To begin with, Page called them the New Yardbirds, since it afforded them both instant recognition and the opportunity to take on some bookings left over from his old group.
The reaction in Britain to them was lukewarm at best. The weekly music paper NME named their singer “Bob Plante,” and in Plant’s own neck of the woods John Ogden at the Express & Star newspaper was even less engaged.
“I don’t think I even wrote about it,” he says. “I thought the Yardbirds were old hat. It seemed to me like another bloody lost cause for him.”
The four of them knew differently. This much had been clear from that initial rehearsal. They had thrown themselves into “Train Kept A-Rollin’,” a staple of the Yardbirds’ live sets, and the force of their collective sound had shocked them. It became more apparent still during the first gigs they did together that September. These were club dates in Denmark and Sweden, 40-minute sets a night, the songs hand-picked by Page: blues covers, tracks he had done with the Yardbirds, and an ominous-sounding dirge called “Dazed and Confused” he had begun messing around with during the end days of that band.
Each of them understood, no words needing to be spoken, that this was a band apart. It was as if they had captured lightning in a bottle.
“Straight away, we could see the power of it,” Page told me, years later. “It was a very intense thing. Was it extreme for the time? Good God, yes. The use and employment of electric and acoustic guitars—that hadn’t been done by anyone—or the shaping of the songs. There was something alchemical between the four of us that was totally unique.”
Plant nodded, adding his own rejoinder: “We were really good and we didn’t fuck about.”
Still buzzing from their short Scandinavian excursion and having been together for just a few weeks, the band trooped into London’s Olympic Studios on September 27 to record their debut album. Based in Barnes, on the south-west edge of the capital, Olympic was a small, eight-track studio housed in an old music hall. The Rolling Stones had used it that same summer to record Beggars Banquet.
As he would do on all their albums Page was producing the sessions, assisted by the in-house engineer Glyn Johns. Plant’s studio experience, like Bonham’s, was limited, so much so that he had to be told to use headphones. Despite this he gave off his usual aura of self-confidence.
Phill Brown was then a teenage apprentice at Olympic. “Glyn Johns was using down-time at the studio for them,” he recalls. “He’d bring them in at weekends, when no one else was using the place, and that’s how they made the record. I met Robert and Jimmy. Robert was very striking. He seemed sort of god-like. As a band they definitely had a vibe to them. They were very focused and full-on. Arrogant isn’t the word but they were self-contained and sure of themselves.”
Page, however, was the band’s undisputed leader. Since there was no record deal at this point he was funding the sessions out of his own pocket and kept a forensic eye on costs. Plant moaned to Kevyn Gammond, his friend back home, about Page charging him for a plate of beans on toast he had ordered for lunch one day.
Page did not ease up on this control in the studio, where he took the major role in creating and molding the songs, although he often tapped into Jones’s arranging skills (Plant, still under contract to CBS, was not permitted writing credits). In his soft-spoken manner Page directed the others, Plant and Bonham in particular. The pair were both then on wages, no more than hired hands. The singer seemed carefree but he feared being replaced at any moment and so was compliant. Bonham was more bullish. It was left to Grant to step in and set the drummer right. “Do what this man says,” he instructed him, “or fuck off,” as Charles Cross reports in Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller than Our Souls.
“I wanted artistic control in a viselike grip,” Page told the writer Brad Tolinski, “because I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the band. That first record sounded so good because I had gotten so much experience in the recording studio. I knew precisely what I was after and how to get it.”
Such was Page’s attention to detail and the work ethic he instilled, recording was completed in just thirty hours’ studio time. The sessions had cost a mere £1,782, the shrewdest investment Page would make. Long before the album came out the band that made it had become Led Zeppelin. This dated back to when Page first proposed forming a group to the Who’s rhythm section, Keith Moon telling him it would go down like a “lead balloon.”
For the record’s cover Page chose a screenprint of a burning airship. The stark, explosive nature of the image was fitting. Led Zeppelin was a trailblazing album. Perfect it was not—the material was too much of a mess for it to be that, and not all of it flew. Yet when it took to the air its power seemed almost elemental, Page’s guitar strafing the grunge of “Dazed and Confused,” Bonham filling pockets of space on “Good Times, Bad Times” with dazzling flourishes, the revved-up rush of “Communication Breakdown” and the rousing “Your Time Is Gonna Come.” In moments such as these, Zeppelin soared.
Plant shone on “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” the song that first bonded him to Page. Here it embodied the sense of light and shade that Page intended to be at the band’s core—winsome acoustic passages giving way to full-bore rock, Plant riding the currents of both. Less convinci
ng were two Willie Dixon covers, “You Shook Me” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” Plant as overwrought in his reading of the old bluesman as the band were leaden. He was otherwise somewhat constrained, suggesting little of the wild abandon he had shown with Alexis Korner just months earlier.
Grant began shopping the album to record labels in the U.K. The offices of Island Records were on a floor below his own on London’s Oxford Street, and he pressed a copy upon the label’s founder, Chris Blackwell. Birmingham-born drummer Mike Kellie was then a member of blues-rockers Spooky Tooth and signed to Island.
“We went in to see Chris one day and he handed me this record, telling me there were a couple of guys on it that I knew,” Kellie recalls. “I had no idea who they might be but I took it with me. Those were the days of getting it together in the country and we were living on a farm out in Berkshire. We went back there and put the record straight on.
“Our singer, Mike Harrison, and I had the same reaction to it. We wanted to be in that band. It was the best of everything we’d heard and all we aspired to be. It was only later that I found out it was Robert and Bonzo. To me, Robert sounded just like Steve Marriott on that first record, when Marriott was at his very best.”
The general reaction to the band continued to be more muted. Grant could not negotiate a deal for them in the U.K., and they often met with unresponsive audiences during their first gigs around the country that October and November. If this put Page’s nose out of joint, it was nothing Plant was unused to.
“When I opened up shows for Gene Vincent and the Walker Brothers in the town halls, I was playing to thirty-five people,” he told me. “And that was the zenith of all opportunity. Bonzo and I couldn’t even get in to some of the first gigs we did because we didn’t have a tie on. The fact that we kicked up a gear and got bigger audiences, that was just an act of God.”
More specifically, it was the act of Grant turning his attentions toward the U.S. that did it for Zeppelin. The Yardbirds still had enough currency there to open doors for him, and when he flew out to New York he was also blessed with good fortune and opportune timing.
Atlantic Records was at this time being run by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, a pair of passionate music fans who between them had signed Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett to the label. The Turkish-born Ertegun was then the more ascendant of the two, having picked up both Cream and an American rock band, Iron Butterfly, each of which had taken off.
Although Wexler was more of a soul man and had little interest in rock music, he nonetheless had a point to prove and took the meeting with Grant. When it concluded, and despite leaving Zeppelin to Ertegun thereafter, Wexler handed Grant a $200,000 deal for his band. It was an unprecedented sum for a new act and one that soon enough led to accusations of their being over-hyped.
On his return Grant handed the salaried Plant and Bonham each a check for £3,000, more money than either had ever seen. They went out and bought matching cars, gold S-Type Jaguars. Back home in the Midlands, Plant paraded his first flush of success, rolling up at Stringers, the department store on Stourbridge High Street where he had been a stock boy, showing off his flash new motor to the girls on the shop floor.
He had, however, the promise of an even greater prize. Zeppelin’s first U.S. tour was scheduled to begin that Christmas. He was headed west, to the source of all the music that had lifted and then propelled him out of his parents’ home and on through two-bit bands and dead-end jobs. The anticipation of it kept him awake at night, but so did a cold, hard fact. Going there, he would come face to face with an audience that had seen it all before. Looking into the whites of their eyes he would know whether he had what it took or not.
On November 9, the month before he left, Plant married Maureen at a church in West Bromwich. She was eight months’ pregnant at the time, their daughter Carmen arriving less than two weeks later. After the wedding the couple hosted a reception for friends and family at Queen Mary’s Ballroom on the site of Dudley Zoo. Zeppelin had a gig at the Roundhouse in London that night and the groom had to duck out early, taking Bonham with him.
As their families gathered for Christmas, three-quarters of Led Zeppelin flew out to Los Angeles. Jones, their man apart, went instead to New York with his wife to visit friends. He would make his own way to Denver for the band’s first show on American soil. Grant had also absented himself, choosing to spend the holiday at home with his wife and two children.
Landing in L.A., Plant, Page and Bonham were met by their new road manager, Richard Cole, a twenty-two-year-old who’d paid his dues with Grant on the last Yardbirds tour. Cole drove his charges to the Chateau Marmont Hotel, where Bonham cooked them a Christmas dinner. The mood was quiet, reflective.
“Robert and Bonzo seemed nervous,” says Cole. “Jimmy had played big places with the Yardbirds and Jonesy did theaters during his time with Jet Harris, but those two hadn’t experienced anything like this. They were apprehensive about everything.
“You have to remember, going to America then wasn’t like it is today. Everywhere you go in the world now is Americanized. The first time I went there in 1967 I couldn’t wait to get out. I was petrified—the way things were done was on a different scale.”
In 1968 the U.S. was divided along social, political and racial lines. The resulting collisions were ugly and brutal. That year Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis and Senator Robert Kennedy shot dead in Los Angeles, wiped out in his prime, like his elder brother Jack before him. The wave of hope the Kennedys had ushered in was extinguished the month before Zeppelin’s arrival. Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, had won the presidential election of that November, driving the fractures further apart, rushing the ’60s to a violent and venal conclusion.
This tour of the States was like no other Zeppelin would do. They were ferried around in rental cars, flew commercial airlines and crashed out in budget-price hotels. And for the first—and last—time they were often as not the warm-up act, beginning with the opening night at Denver’s Auditorium Arena on December 26, at which they did the honors for American rockers Vanilla Fudge.
The impression Zeppelin made was instant, indelible. American audiences of the time had been fed a staple diet of stoned-sounding bands but there was nothing mellow or rolling about Zeppelin’s groove. They hit hard and loud, and in doing so seemed new and impossibly exciting.
By the time they made it out to California at the beginning of 1969 they had got into their stride. They were there for three shows with Alice Cooper at the Whiskey a Go Go in Los Angeles and a four-night stand at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Out West they laid foundations and made connections that would endure to the end.
One such connection was with Bill Graham, a thirty-eight-year-old impresario born Wolodia Grajonca in Berlin in 1931, the son of Jewish émigrés from Russia. Both his parents and elder sister had died during the war and he had fled Nazi Germany, first to France and then New York, where he was adopted by an American family and changed his name to William Graham. In the early ’60s he moved to San Francisco, working first as a theatrical manager and coming to preside over the Fillmore, the venue that provided a launch pad for bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.
Straight-talking and obdurate, Graham was instrumental in revolutionising the rock-concert business in the US, bringing to it high-quality PA and lighting systems, and later establishing the practice of building large-scale events around superstar acts. For the next eight years, right up to its sordid and senseless end in Oakland in 1977, he and Zeppelin enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship.
Yet if there was a center of the empire Zeppelin created it would be Los Angeles, specifically Sunset Strip, a neon-lit, two-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard that runs through West Hollywood. Since the 1940s the Strip had been the city’s nocturnal playground—a subterranean world of jazz clubs and opium dens, where movie stars and starlets rubbed shoulders with gangsters. Glamor and glitz on its surfaces—and decadenc
e just underneath.
Once the ’60s got going, sparked by the Beatles and the British Invasion bands trailing them, the Strip gave itself over to new sounds and a different kind of hedonism, the Byrds emerging at the head of this coming aristocracy. When drugs and egos took the Byrds down, the Doors occupied their throne. Not that Jim Morrison and his cronies were any longer able to breathe such rarefied air, so by the time Led Zeppelin came to town the Strip was waiting to be taken once more.
Soon enough Zeppelin would conquer it, setting up court beneath the shadow of the Hollywood sign and gorging themselves on the fruits and flesh on offer. That, however, was to come. On this initial sortie Zeppelin had it all to prove—not least their singer, for whom California was the land of promise.
“I started hanging out with Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, people like that,” he told me. “They were crazy days. You couldn’t say that any of us had any idea of continuity. But all the time I was meeting these little starbursts and around me galaxies were going Boom! Boom! Boom! I absorbed it all, like moondust.”
The Flower Power children were rather less prepared for Led Zeppelin. During those eight shows on the West Coast the band did not so much entertain as attack.
“They were so fucking blasé on the West Coast,” says Cole. “Not just the musicians but the audiences, too. Because they’d been spoiled rotten, having all these fantastic bands out there. They were so much more laid back than everywhere else in the States. When Zeppelin got there it was like a rocket going up their fucking arses.
“Once the band fired up they were off. They were incredible, they really were. After the second show in San Francisco I was driving back to the hotel with Peter and I told him I didn’t want to work with any of his other bands. I said, ‘Just give me this one—they’re going to be good for you.’ ”
Looking out into dumbstruck faces night after night, Plant got his answer—he was where he was meant to be. Once more, he strutted. Or, as he put it to Q magazine in 1988, “I must have been pretty insecure to want to run around, pushing my chest out, pursing my lips and throwing my hair back like some West Midlands giraffe.”
