by Rees, Paul
“Robert was then starting to find his feet,” says Cole. “But there are always two different sides to musicians—off-stage and on-stage. Off-stage he and I had our ups and downs. Stupid little niggles. I remember being in Miami on that tour, sitting out by the pool at the hotel. Robert said he was going off to the shops and, joking, I told him to bring me back a sandwich. If Peter had been going I’d have said the same to him but I don’t think Robert ever forgave me for it.”
The band’s debut album was released in the U.S. on the day of their last show at the Fillmore. Critics treated it with suspicion if not outright disdain. Writing in Rolling Stone, John Mendelsohn dismissed it as “an album of weak, unimaginative songs,” suggesting the band’s singer was “nowhere near as exciting as Rod Stewart.”
It also gave rise to the first of many plagiarism allegations that would dog the band. A young American singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, claimed “Dazed and Confused” as his own, insisting Page had heard him perform an acoustic version of the song in New York in 1967. Page and the band brushed aside both Holmes and the critics. On the road they were winning over American audiences one stop at a time. The album took up residency on the U.S. charts and would remain there deep into the following year.
The tour concluded on the East Coast. On the last of four nights at Boston’s Tea Party club a baying crowd refused to let them go and Zeppelin ended up playing a four-hour show, filling it out with Beatles covers. In New York Grant pulled a favor off Bill Graham at his Fillmore East, having his band switched from being the first on to the middle act of a three-band bill. It was a showman’s gambit, putting Zeppelin in direct competition with headliners Iron Butterfly, whose pedestrian set they pulverised.
For Plant, even his wildest expectations had been exceeded, and all too fast for him to take it in. Eight months beforehand he had been penniless and starting a job as a laborer; now he had the U.S. at his feet. It was enough to mess with anyone’s head.
“As the guy from the Black Country I felt very much out of place to begin with,” he told me. “To go from laying Tarmac in West Bromwich to playing the Fillmore in San Francisco . . . it was really disorientating. I had been twenty when Zeppelin started touring. I was marooned many times. I had to be saved here and there, and got lost, too.”
In the middle of it all, the strangest experiences must have been the most compelling, since it was through these that he was best able to gauge just how far he had come.
In Chicago, toward the end of the tour, Plant took a call at his hotel from a couple of the Plaster Casters, a group of girls who had taken it upon themselves to make casts of the erect penises of young buck rock stars. In the event he did not acquiesce.
“These two girls came into the room with a wooden case, suitably inscribed and all very ceremonious,” he told Mark Williams of the International Times. “All of a sudden one of them starts to take her clothes off. She’s rather large, no doubt about it, and there she is, standing naked as the day she’s born.
“Then she covered herself with soap, cream doughnuts and whiskey, all rubbed in together, head to toe, and she’s this moving mountain of soapy flesh. At first, she dug it. But her friend, who’d come along for the ride, began trying to disappear under the bed. Eventually, she got into the shower, grabbed her clothes and split.”
Back in the U.K. all that was familiar to the band was the antipathy with which British critics received their debut album when it was finally released there in March. At home they were returned to the club circuit and Plant found himself playing Wolverhampton’s Club Lafayette and Mothers in Birmingham, not so far from where he had begun.
A typical date was on April 8, when Zeppelin performed at the Cherry Tree pub in Welwyn Garden City, a satellite town of London. Dave Pegg, who had played with Bonham in the Way of Life and would later join folk-rockers Fairport Convention, accepted an invitation from the drummer to the gig.
“Bonzo picked me up in what must have been his mum’s car, a Ford Anglia Estate, and we tore off to the show,” Pegg remembers. “It was a fabulous gig, but it was in a pub.
“The next time I saw him we went down to London in his gold S-Type Jag. Robert was with him. The two of them had got the same car and all they did was compare noises. “You’ve got a funny rattle there, mate,” that kind of thing. On the way back, we stopped off at the Watford Gap services on the M1. There was a bit of an altercation involving Robert, because Maureen was in there. She’d gone off to see another band called Trapeze and she was with them.”
At the end of that month Plant could again put such everyday realities behind him, Zeppelin going back to the U.S. for a co-headlining tour with Vanilla Fudge. They would cross the States twice more before the year was out, the shows getting bigger, the furor around them swelling.
That summer, Zeppelin rolled through North America as Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon and members of the Manson family broke into the actress Sharon Tate’s Los Angeles home and sent her to her doom. In August Grant turned down an offer for the band to join the last hurrah of the peace and love generation at the Woodstock Festival, most likely balking at the size of the proposed fee, although he was reported to have said that he declined because Zeppelin would have been just another band on the bill. Whatever his reasoning, Zeppelin were not shackled to the era now passing.
Arriving in L.A. that April, they had begun work on their second album at A&M Studios. Recording would continue, on and off, for the next eight months, the band using nine different studios in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. However piecemeal this approach, Led Zeppelin II proved to be a tighter, more coherent record than its predecessor, the months of touring having sharpened the band into a precision-drilled unit.
The music was honed to Zeppelin’s base elements: the relentless chop and chug of Page’s electric riffs and his acoustic shadings; the elasticity of Jones’s booming bass lines; Bonham’s deafening cannon fire. Then there was Plant, his range now fully opened up, his libido seemingly unchecked.
It was an album of great songs, too, with such swaggering beasts as “Whole Lotta Love” and “Heartbreaker,” the panoramic sweep of “What Is and What Should Never Be” and the honeyed jangle of “Thank You.” Even accounting for “The Lemon Song” ’s tiresome plod or the needless indulgence of “Moby Dick,” it conveyed a singular vision and sense of purpose.
Plant was credited as co-writer on each of the nine tracks, although with mixed results. He saddled “Ramble On” with ham-fisted Lord of the Rings references. On “Thank You” he articulated a more dignified declaration to his wife. Yet it was “What Is and What Should Never Be” that would continue to prompt conjecture. There was a popular strand of gossip within the Zeppelin camp that claimed Plant had been at one time fixated on his wife’s younger sister, Shirley. This, it was said, was the “should never be” referred to in the song’s title. Subsequent events did nothing to dampen this speculation, although such rumors were unsubstantiated at the time and Plant has never commented on them.
As with their first album, Led Zeppelin II was scorned by the critics and became the butt of plagiarism claims, on this occasion regarding its abundant—and originally unaccredited—references to old blues songs. None of which halted its relentless momentum when it was released in October. It sped to Number One in the US, knocking the Beatles’ Abbey Road off the top spot, and also reached the top of the charts in the U.K., selling five million copies worldwide within six months.
By then the ’60s were over, although the spirit of the times had died at Altamont Raceway on December 6, 1969. It was there, at a free concert given by the Rolling Stones, that a Hells Angel had stabbed the black teenager Meredith Hunter to death.
As the hippy idyll went up in flames, what better soundtrack to the conflagration than Robert Plant’s banshee wail and the squall of Jimmy Page’s guitar?
7
VALHALLA
If I’d been in Zeppelin, I’m sure I wouldn’t be alive now.
The mone
y from Led Zeppelin II had not yet begun to pour in, but even still Plant was flush enough to buy a first home for his new family. He had found a rambling farmhouse a few miles up the road from his parental home but further into the countryside.
Set within acres of open fields and looking out on to the same Clent Hills he had walked as a boy, Jennings Farm was a pastoral sanctuary far removed from the world he inhabited in Led Zeppelin. This was where he could escape from that to normality, however briefly, as soon as the farm gates clanged shut behind him. It would also keep him bolted to his roots. Here he would be held fast to old friends and familiar haunts.
“I was incredibly fortunate to have the decompression chamber of that and my family,” he told me. “Because whatever was happening to me out there with Zeppelin, I couldn’t explain it when I got back. It wouldn’t have been right for anybody and I’d have lost all connection with where I came from. I had to keep quiet about everything.”
He paid £6,000 for the place but it would be months before he could move his family in since it was almost derelict. While this great ruined shell was being renovated, Plant, Maureen and their daughter Carmen continued to lodge with his wife’s family.
John Crutchley, guitarist in Plant’s old band Listen, recalls catching up with him during this lull. “We went off to Mothers in Birmingham in Robert’s Jag. He’d dressed up in a suit, with a shirt and tie. Because we were with him we didn’t have to queue to get in. The club was packed and after about half an hour Robert said he was getting hot. Being Robert, he drove five miles home to West Bromwich just to change into jeans and a T-shirt, and then drove back.
“We went out to Jennings Farm, too. It seemed massive to me. It was dark, run down. There was a big duck pond, but no electricity. We spent a few candlelit nights out there. Then it all went crazy for him and we lost contact.”
This first year of a new decade claimed some of the best and brightest stars of the ’60s, rendering several to ashes and dust. The Beatles would announce their breakup in April, and before winter had bitten, both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were dead, twenty-seven years old the pair of them, he choking on his own vomit and she overdosed on heroin. The ’70s were harsher and less innocent times than the preceding decade, and Led Zeppelin were made for them.
They were up and running again in the first week of 1970, beginning a two-month-long tour of the U.K. and Europe at Birmingham Town Hall—the very place from which the sixteen-year-old Plant had pilfered Sonny Boy Williamson’s harmonica. He was well practiced in stealing from the old blues masters.
Two nights later, on January 9, they headlined London’s Royal Albert Hall. A grand old Victorian building crowned by a glazed, wrought-iron dome, the Albert Hall conferred a sense of recognition upon all those who played it. Emphatically, their being there meant that Zeppelin had arrived in their homeland.
Their Albert Hall set is preserved on film and even now is astonishing for its raw power. As at most of their shows during the first half of that year they kicked off with a titanic reading of soul man Ben E. King’s “We’re Gonna Groove,” not so much covering the song as rolling over it like a juggernaut. Page, bearded and slight, summoned up one juddering riff after the next, the skipping gait of the original repurposed by Jones and Bonham into a mighty crunch.
Yet for all the musical fireworks, watching the show today one’s attention is drawn most to Plant as he pouts, preens and prances, basking in the spotlight. The West Midlands giraffe had gone into a cocoon and emerged as the blueprint rock god. He and Zeppelin stomped and rumbled on for more than two hours that night, and when they were done the Albert Hall stood and roared.
When compared with the theaters and city halls the band had filled in the U.K., the North American tour that began on March 21 took place on an epic scale. It comprised twenty-six shows in large sports arenas, commencing in front of a 19,000-strong crowd at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver. Billing the tour “An Evening with Led Zeppelin,” Grant dispensed with the need for an opening act. His band upped their game accordingly.
There was a well-practiced ebb and flow to Zeppelin’s set. It began with a barrage, “We’re Gonna Groove,” “Dazed and Confused” and “Heartbreaker” rushing into each other, before easing down, first into Page’s showpiece “White Summer/Black Mountainside” and then “Thank You.” After this they cranked the tension up again, releasing it like a tight-coiled spring on the last climactic surge, “Communication Breakdown” snapping at the heels of “Whole Lotta Love.”
Page had long since used a violin bow to scrape unholy sounds from his guitar during “Dazed and Confused,” and the song now became a piece of theater as he wielded his bow like an impish ringmaster, milking the moment. Yet on this tour it was Plant who was most enhanced. No longer uncertain of his place in the scheme of things, with no trace of awkwardness left, he paraded front and center, becoming at last the band’s focal point. Offstage the atmosphere had also changed and become more charged. Limousines glided the band about and they took over entire floors of plush hotels. Booze and cannabis had sustained Zeppelin on their first trips through the U.S. but by the time of their going back in 1970 cocaine had become the touring rock musician’s drug of choice. The post-show carousing no longer had a warm, fuzzy afterglow to it, but a sharp-edged rush, heightened and inflamed. Bonham, who needed little encouragement where such things were concerned, gave himself up most to whatever mayhem ensued.
“Sadly, as we got more famous, the whole precocious aspect of Zeppelin became more of an issue for the media,” Plant told me. “People backed off, not wanting to be associated with this supposed enormous quantity of hedonism. But that’s what happens. You lose people along the way.”
Arriving in Los Angeles in late March, the band took over an upper floor of the Continental Hyatt House—right on the pulse of Sunset Strip. The lobby of the hotel began to crowd with groupies and hangers-on. This was nothing new, but the numbers were growing and with it the sense of rapaciousness.
“The first white girl groupie arrived in Hollywood in 1964,” recalls Kim Fowley, an old hand on the scene. “Her name was Liz, she had red hair and looked like a miniature version of Maureen O’Hara. She showed up at the Hyatt House and demanded I take her to see Manfred Mann, because she wanted to have sex with their singer. I’d never before seen an American girl who’d gone along expressly to fuck a member of a British group.”
Writing in her memoir I’m with the Band, Pamela Des Barres, who as Miss Pamela was perhaps the most famous of the L.A. groupies, described the frenzy stirred by Zeppelin’s coming to town. “The groupie section went into the highest gear imaginable,” she stated. “You could hear garter belts sliding up young thighs all over Hollywood. Led Zeppelin was a formidable bunch. Robert Plant . . . tossing his gorgeous lion’s mane into the faces of enslaved sycophants. He walked like royalty, his shoulders thrown back, declaring his mighty status.”
Page was among the rock stars bedded by Des Barres. He would normally dispatch a minion to do his bidding, having them escort his chosen girl, the younger the better, up to his hotel room, where the blinds were drawn and a state of permanent night existed. Plant, it was said among the crew, preferred to romance his tour girlfriends with flowers and poetry. He was twenty-one years old, and within the suspended reality Zeppelin occupied home and all that went with it might as well have been on another planet.
“It would have changed anyone, all of that,” says Cole. “Because of all the money and success and everything else, you develop another way of living. The whole package is changing. But did they become a bunch of egomaniacs? Not from what I saw, no.
“After the shows, the band all went out together, all the time. They’d pretty much go to the clubs. All the things that were said about our behavior . . . Of course, a lot of it is true but some of it’s not. Basically, it was the same four blokes, having the same in-jokes.”
The heat of the tour, however, took its toll. Constant travel, lack of sleep, too many highs
both natural and artificial—all these exhausted the band. Battling a fever, one day blurring into the next, Plant struggled on. His voice finally gave out during the penultimate gig in Phoenix on April 18. The last scheduled date in Las Vegas was cancelled and Zeppelin flew home.
The comedown from the tour lasted no more than a couple of months but this was a pivotal point for the band. For it was now that the seeds were sown not just for their next album, but also the three that followed—and these were their zenith. With Plant emerging alongside Page at the head of Zeppelin’s creative power base, their inspirations were located in the rich musical stew then swirling around both men.
Specifically, this was music of a kind rooted in the past, but otherworldly, too. It was informed and brought about through escape and a sense of glorious isolation, both figurative and literal. In the U.S., Dylan’s old backing group, the Hawks, took themselves off to a rural retreat at Woodstock in upstate New York. There, as the Band, they made a brace of wonderfully evocative albums, Music from Big Pink and The Band, bathing each in a sepia-tinted aspect of Americana.
The splintering of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield gave rise to Crosby, Stills and Nash, their imperious harmonies captivating Plant in particular. The latter band also cut loose Neil Young, who mixed a more potent folk-rock brew on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Plant and Page were both as taken with Joni Mitchell who, like Stills and Young, was Canadian by birth and had taken the same route out West. Mitchell’s songs were hushed and haunting, unfolding across two spectral records, Clouds and Ladies of the Canyon.
Closer to home, a pugnacious Irishman, Van Morrison, had served up a pair of entrancing albums of his own, Astral Weeks and Moondance, their bucolic landscapes peppered with folk, jazz and blues textures. With regard to Zeppelin, there were two significant native folk bands, too. The Incredible String Band was the brainchild of a couple of itinerant eccentrics, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron. Williamson had traveled through North Africa and brought back with him exotic-sounding instruments, adding these to his band’s whimsical folk songs and stirring a singularly esoteric cocktail.
