by Rees, Paul
Fairport Convention had formed in London and, like Plant, been captivated by the sounds coming from America’s West Coast. They had found their feet on the same club circuit as the Band of Joy but by 1969 had cast their net further back, to traditional English and Celtic folk songs. Decamping to a 17th-century house in rural Hampshire, they there assembled Liege & Lief, the album that set the benchmark for British folk-rock.
Plant also had a mind to get away from it all. He remembered an old stone cottage in North Wales his parents had taken him to one summer. It was named Bron-Yr-Aur, Welsh for “golden hill.” Close by was the mountain Cadair Idris, legendary seat of King Arthur’s kingdom, and also Valle Crucis Abbey, where the Holy Grail was reputed to have been hidden. Folklore and remoteness—if ever there was a place to light Plant’s creative fires, this was it.
He sold Page on the idea, too. The first warmth of spring was in the air when they set off, Plant bringing along his family and dog, Page his new girlfriend, a French model named Charlotte Martin. To take care of their domestic needs, a couple of Zeppelin’s roadies, Clive Coulson and Sandy Macgregor, were commandeered for the trip.
To get to Bron-Yr-Aur, one must first head out from the town of Machynlleth on the road to Pennal village. A mile down and just off this road a steep track winds up the hillside. Walking along it, the only sounds to be heard are those of birdsong and the babble of a brook. Soon the track levels out, following the line of the brook through an avenue of trees, fields and moor to each side, the crest of Snowdonia’s peaks on the horizon. At its furthest point is the cottage, quaint but hardy, set in the “V” between two looming hills and with the broad sweep of the Dyfi Valley ahead of it.
Then, as now, the cottage had no running water. For warmth there were a couple of gas heaters and a wood fire. There was a chemical toilet but the luxury of a bath required a trek down to a pub in the town. Plant, Page and their small band holed up here for a month. A restorative but also a productive spell, it was at Bron-Yr-Aur that the two principals first began to write together, the songs pouring from them as they roamed the hills or pulled up around the fire each night.
Plant hit upon the chords to a trippy ballad, “That’s the Way,” one afternoon as the pair of them sat out by the brook with their acoustic guitars. Recalling a series of scales he had picked up in India during his days in the Yardbirds, Page used them as the basis for another new song, a mystic-sounding drone called “Friends.” Both these songs would appear on the next record. Others originating from this time, such as “Down by the Seaside” and “Over the Hills and Far Away,” would be stored up and find their way onto later albums.
Reflecting on this sojourn, Plant told me: “It created such a dynamic, coming off tour and going up to Wales. It was this thing about trading excess for nothingness, having these great pastoral moments.”
Leaving their idyllic retreat, he and Page gathered up the others and followed in the footsteps of Fairport Convention, making for the Hampshire countryside and a crumbling old mansion house, Headley Grange. Built in 1795, it had once served as a workhouse and shelter for the local poor and destitute before falling into disrepair. The band hired the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio, parked it on the overgrown lawn out front and set to work on their third album.
“It was a horrible place—cold and freezing,” says Cole of Headley Grange. “That first time, they were all staying there, though later on it’d just be Jimmy and some of the crew that kept rooms. It was too miserable for the rest of us.
“They’d all wander downstairs at different times. Jimmy would be messing around with something. Jonesy would listen in and add a little bit to it. Robert would sit there writing his lyrics. It was as informal as that.”
The record that came out of these laid-back sessions, Led Zeppelin III, remains their most undervalued. There is an intimacy to it lacking on the first two albums, the sense of a moment having been captured, one in which the band were playing for themselves and no one else. The span of material is greater still than on their début but there is none of that record’s desperate urgency. Here Zeppelin sound assured, stretching themselves and enjoying the act of doing so.
The work begun by Plant and Page at Bron-Yr-Aur, and completed at Headley Grange, opened the band’s frontiers. Not just to blues and rock ’n’ roll now, but to sounds that ranged far and wide, from the heat-haze of California and the east of India, on down through the roots of the British folk tradition.
Half these new songs were acoustic. There was a second ballad, “Tangerine,” and a skiffle shuffle misspelled as “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” (later corrected for the instrumental “Bron-Yr-Aur” on Physical Graffiti); this last was Plant’s tribute to his dog, a collie named Strider, with Bonham on castanets and spoons. “Gallows Pole,” an old English folk song, was stoked by the band into a heady whirl.
Of the electric tracks, “Celebration Day” and “Out on the Tiles” have the feel of songs coming together on the spot, one as carefree as the other. Best of all, the stately “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” debuted toward the end of the last North American tour was their first great blues, Page’s fluid, weeping guitar offsetting Plant’s bruised howls.
The song that launched the album, “Immigrant Song,” came together at the end of the sessions, Plant inspired to write the lyrics upon returning from a gig in Iceland that June. To the gallop of guitar and drums, he sent out Zeppelin’s battle cry: “The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, to fight the horde, singing and crying, Valhalla, I am coming!”
On June 28 Zeppelin made their second appearance at the Bath Festival in England’s West Country. Like the Albert Hall show, this would be a further symbolic gig for them in the U.K. That weekend, a hot one, 150,000 people crowded the Shepton Mallet Showgrounds, Zeppelin headlining the closing night. This offered them the perfect platform on which to seal their victory at home.
They went on directly after Jefferson Airplane and just as the sun fell behind the stage. Such a dramatic backdrop was no accident. Aware of the significance of this one gig, Grant had checked the precise time of sunset and determined his band would go on to meet it. When a group called the Flock began to overrun their set earlier in the evening, threatening his master plan, Grant had them hauled off. Nothing and no one would be allowed to stand in the way of his boys.
Roy Williams, then running a popular Black Country rock club, Dudley JB’s, traveled down to the festival.
“I’d seen some of the very early Zeppelin gigs and couldn’t make top nor tail of them,” he says. “It was loud, but I just didn’t get it. That weekend, a group of us had rented a van to drive to the gig. We did all head off with this attitude of, “Aw, Planty, let’s see what you can do.” By the third number we were up on our feet like everybody else.
“It was a revelation for all of us. They were magnificent. Robert had become more aware of how to handle an audience, more confident. We went home with a degree of pride. You know the crap that comes out: ‘Good old Planty.’ ”
“It was astounding, because I’d never heard anything like that before and I don’t think the audience had either,” adds the folk singer Roy Harper, also on the bill that weekend. “After the initial shock had passed, I realized who the singer was—the guy with the girls on his arm I’d met in Birmingham just eighteen months before. There he stood, with a freak of a voice, conducting this great force.
“More and more people stood up. I became aware of the fact that tears were streaming down most of the women’s faces. It was a moment of ecstasy. By the time they’d finished it was obvious that the world was at their feet.”
For Zeppelin the respect was mutual. Watching Harper’s set that afternoon gave them the missing title for the discordant blues track intended to close their forthcoming album. It became “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper.”
On they rolled. Into the U.S., then descending deeper into the abyss, National Guardsmen shooting dead four students at an anti-war protest at Kent State University
on May 4. Not that much would now be allowed to permeate through to Zeppelin, since Grant and his emissary Cole had begun to throw a protective shield around the band, sealing them off and allowing them to run wild.
Those late summer months Zeppelin tore through the country, the shows getting looser and rowdier. They were back in L.A. at the start of September, the Continental Hyatt House now rechristened the Riot House such was the carnage Zeppelin had begun to trail about them. After an incendiary show at the Forum on September 4, the band headed out to blow off steam. Their friends Fairport Convention were in town and playing the Troubadour club. By now an order had been established: Bonham would blow harder than anyone else.
“It was incredible what went on,” says Dave Pegg, bassist with Fairport Convention. “If I’d been in Zeppelin I’m sure I wouldn’t be alive now. I don’t know how anyone can have gone through what they did and still be sane.
“We drank all night. I opened my eyes and it was 10 am the next morning, the sun shining through the window of the club. The place was deserted but for Bonzo and me. He said, ‘Come on, I’ll drop you off, the limo driver will be waiting.’ Sure enough, there he was—he had sat outside all night.
“Bonzo was supposed to be on a plane to Hawaii that evening. He never made it. I was with him and Janis Joplin at Barney’s Beanery, a well-known drinking establishment. We went back to my hotel and bumped into two overexcited ladies from Texas, who’d got a big bag of grass that we started smoking. John ended up running around the pool in just his Y-fronts. He phoned me the next day to ask me if I knew where his clothes were. We had to lend him some clobber and buy him an airline ticket.”
For now these were still high jinks. They were entitled to celebrate, after all. The tour ended with an afternoon and evening show at New York’s Madison Square Garden, their gross from this single engagement running to $200,000. Back home they were crowned “Most Popular Group” in the music paper Melody Maker’s annual poll, the first time in eight years an act other than the Beatles had won the award.
Plant retreated to the Midlands. He looked up his old schoolmate, John Dudley, for whose band he had first sung just seven years back but a lifetime ago.
“Robert came into my granddad’s pub, the Bull’s Head, where we’d done our first gig together,” recalls Dudley. “Of course, he was famous now, so everyone was staring and pointing at him. My band was up there playing when he walked in, so we immediately started up the riff to ‘Whole Lotta Love.’ He smiled and said, ‘You bastards.’ ”
He and Maureen took up residence at Jennings Farm. He had restored the barn, turning it into a music room with a drum kit and guitars, and bought himself an old Jeep in which to charge about the property. The couple threw open the doors, entertaining friends old and new.
Mike Kellie, drummer with Spooky Tooth, was one visitor. “Robert was very generous with his friendship, though I was always quite intimidated by him. I didn’t have the self-confidence he had. I remember walking around the fields with him—he’d got some goats and some of them had escaped. I didn’t get to know Maureen well but she liked to party. Our wives had a lot to put up with.”
“I ran into Robert in a gun shop in Dudley and he was giving me all this blather about him becoming a gentleman farmer,” recalls Perry Foster, who had taken the teenage Plant on as singer for his Delta Blues Band. “He was a bit patronising. He affected this posh voice: ‘You must come down to the farm and we’ll do a tape for posterity.’
“Now, I’d never had anything to do with drugs, but around this time he’d got certain people around him. One of them he’d named his estate manager. I told him if he got rid of all the scum hanging about I’d be happy to see him. He didn’t like being spoken to like that.”
Released that October, Led Zeppelin III came wrapped in an expensive spinning-wheel cover modelled on an old crop-rotation chart. Etched onto the inner vinyl groove of the record were two quotations: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” and “So mote be it.” Both were attributed to Aleister Crowley, an occultist and conman born in the British spa town of Leamington in 1875 who was once dubbed “the wickedest man in the world.” Such was Page’s growing fascination with Crowley he had just then bought his old home, Boleskine House, a gothic pile on the banks of Loch Ness in Scotland. For now, the reference to Crowley passed unnoticed. Soon enough it would be blamed for all the ills that beset the band.
The album repeated the path of its immediate predecessor, going to Number One in both the U.S. and U.K. Good as it was, however, this was a less immediate and obvious record, and its success would not be as enduring. It soon slipped out of the charts, having sold five times less than Led Zeppelin II had done.
For Zeppelin this was a first bump in the road. Grant’s response to it was immediate, sending them off to make another record. They already had a stockpile of material, much of it dating from Plant and Page’s stay at Bron-Yr-Aur. In particular, Page was struck by the bare bones of a song he had begun working up while they were there. Although it was just a guitar melody at this point, he sensed in it something special. Such were the beginnings of “Stairway to Heaven.”
8
BLOND ELVIS
He was this preening peacock.
A flood of great music gushed out in 1971. Running through the best of it was a seam of pure, naked inspiration that was white hot and crackling with magic. It was as though the survivors of the ’60s had gathered themselves to launch one last, heroic upsurge, their fires not yet dimmed and the drugs still then working. Once done, few of them ever aspired—or reached—as high again.
The Rolling Stones, at the pinnacle of their decadent pomp, came up with Sticky Fingers; the Who, never better, made Who’s Next; Jim Morrison roused himself to a powerful valediction on the Doors’ L.A. Woman. From the debris of the Beatles, John Lennon continued to touch at greatness with his second solo record, Imagine, although it would be the last time he would do so.
Still it poured out, into the delicate beauty of Joni Mitchell’s Blue and through the pulsating funk and narcoleptic jazz of Isaac Hayes’s Shaft soundtrack; or, as other, very different songwriters flexed their muscles—Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Elton John and Roy Harper, whose beguiling Stormcock included a guest appearance from Page. Then, too, a contrasting pair of visionary soul albums: Marvin Gaye’s bittersweet song cycle, What’s Going On, and in brilliant answer to that, Sly Stone’s nightmarish state of the nation address, There’s a Riot Goin’ On.
As a creative statement Zeppelin’s fourth album sat shoulder to shoulder with the best the year gave up. It was timeless and boundless, and the sum of all their parts. It housed some of their hardest rock and mightiest blues but also songs that are among their most pastoral—these again stretching back through the ages of Britain’s folk tradition. Soon enough it would stand unopposed as a commercial behemoth, a looming colossus that was bigger and more enduring than all the rest.
Not that it was begun in splendor. At the start of 1971 Zeppelin went back to Headley Grange. There had been no improvement in conditions at the old house, it being still damp and frigid, and the winter nights were deathly cold. In the background the band’s record label, Atlantic, was panicked by the relative failure of their last album. Yet that record had freed Zeppelin and they were now arriving at the peak they would sustain for the next four years.
The Rolling Stones’ mobile studio was again parked out on the lawn and the laid-back vibe of the previous summer also returned. The prevailing sound among the band was of laughter. Bonham, a habitual late riser, often as not came down to find his drums had been hidden, the day’s work developing to his ranting and raving about the place. This playful mood filtered through to the sessions. There was an instinctive spontaneity to them—the best of things happening on the hoof and seized from out of the ether.
This was the case with “Black Dog” and “Rock and Roll,” the songs that would open the album with such a gleeful flurry. These morphed out of impromptu s
tudio jams, the jumping-off point for both being a couple of Little Richard tunes the band kicked around to let off steam, “Good Golly Miss Molly” and “Keep A-Knockin’.” Each of these informed Page’s propulsive riffs, the latter song giving up the drumbeat with which Bonham cracked open “Rock and Roll.” Ian Stewart, the Stones’ road manager and sometime pianist, sat in as that song unfolded, his boogie-woogie piano winding through the track like a vein. Plant scat the lyrics to “Black Dog” on the spot, leering and lecherous and unapologetic for it.
One night Bonham arrived back at the Grange from a jaunt into London worse for wear and of a mind to set about his drums. He did so armed with a pair of sticks in each hand, summoning up both the dense rhythmic grumble upon which “Four Sticks” was built and the song’s title. It was Bonham again who was the key ingredient of “When the Levee Breaks.” Written by Memphis Minnie to document the Mississippi River flood of 1927 that left 600,000 people destitute, the original song was a sparse acoustic lament. Zeppelin transformed it into a thrilling, monstrous surge. It was swung into being by Bonham’s resounding volleys, Page recording his cavernous drum track in the Grange’s high-ceilinged entrance hall.
On this song, and elsewhere on the record, Plant sang with as much assurance and conviction as he ever would with Zeppelin. The escape to Bron-Yr-Aur with Page had energised him and now he was further emboldened by the newly rich variety of the band’s palette. For the first time there was as much evidence of him in the material as there was of the guitarist. He fed into the record his hippy ideals and passions for ancient history and mythology. “Going to California” was shaped by his appreciation for the gentler musings of Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and, most pointedly, Joni Mitchell—the “girl with the flower in her hair” in Plant’s love letter to both the sunshine state and a state of mind. To the band’s rolling gait on “Misty Mountain Hop” he recounted the tale of London police busting up a love-in, burnishing it with the sense of a mystic quest.
