by Rees, Paul
Drawing the inspiration for “The Battle of Evermore” from a book he had been reading about border wars between the armies of Albion and the ancient Celts, Plant peppered the narrative with references to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—from here came the song’s “Dark Lord,” Sauron, and its Ringwraiths riding in black. Just as they had done so often at Bron-Yr-Aur, he and Page sketched out the song one night while sitting in front of an open fire, Page picking at a mandolin that Jones had left lying about, the first time he had played the instrument. For all their differences as people, at times such as these the two of them were joined at the hip.
“I think Jimmy and Robert now are far more opposite to each other than they ever were back then,” considers Cole, an observer of these sessions. “They’ve gone in such different directions. You wouldn’t have thought of them as that if you’d seen them in Zeppelin, at least not when it came to the music. They were a unit when they were working.”
To sing the song’s ethereal countermelody they brought in Sandy Denny, who had known Page since his art-school days and had not long left Fairport Convention. Set against the keening of Plant, Denny’s enchantments evoked an arcane atmosphere alive with mystery and wonder—one that suggested tendrils of mist snaking around towering battlements at morning’s first light.
Later that year Denny would produce a solo record almost as evocative, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. It was to be her artistic swansong. Soon, a ruined marriage and the ravages of alcoholism would consume her, and she died on April 21, 1978, aged thirty-one, from injuries sustained in a fall.
Yet it was the song that came to define Zeppelin’s fourth album, and to a great extent the band itself, that most conflicted Plant. Filling in the outline he had first set down at Bron-Yr-Aur, Page determined that “Stairway to Heaven” would be an epic, the ultimate welding of Zeppelin’s acoustic–electric dynamic. From the lilting melody Page had hit upon in North Wales, it rose up through a series of escalating movements, concluding with a roaring finale. As Page worked through the arrangement with Jones and Bonham, Plant began to improvise the lyrics.
“We were channelling a lot of energy,” Page told the writer Brad Tolinski. “My sharpest memory of ‘Stairway’ is of Robert writing the lyrics while we were hammering away. It was really intense. By the time we had the fanfare at the end and could play it all the way through, Robert had 80 percent of the words down.
“I’d contributed to the lyrics on the first three albums but I was always hoping that Robert would take care of that aspect of the band. By the fourth album he was coming up with fantastic stuff. I remember asking him about the phrase ‘bustle in your hedgerow’ and him saying, ‘Well, that’ll get people thinking.’ ”
“Bonzo and Jonesy had gone off to the Speakeasy Club in London—to relax, I think that’s a good term for it,” Plant told Rolling Stone writer David Fricke. “Jimmy and I stayed in, and we got the theme and the thread of it there and then. It was some cynical aside about a woman getting everything she wanted all the time without giving back any thought or consideration. And then it softened up. I think it was the Moroccan dope. It’s a nice, pleasant, well-meaning and naïve little song, very English.”
As proud as Page was of their new creation, Plant was ambivalent about it. Later, when he came to crave distance from Zeppelin and also critical approbation, his attitude toward the song hardened. Its overwhelming presence made it his millstone. He was self-conscious about its hippy-dippy lyrics and made to flinch as it spawned one portentous rock ballad after the next.
Yet for all that it has been overexposed, “Stairway to Heaven” has retained its power. Neither Zeppelin’s finest song nor perhaps even the best on their fourth album, it is a great one nonetheless.
However good the feeling within the camp at Headley Grange, little of it translated to outsiders once Zeppelin moved on. Finishing off “Stairway to Heaven” was foremost in Page’s mind, since he had still to cut his guitar solo. For a couple of weeks he and the band retired to the Island Records studios on London’s Basing Street, intending to complete the final mixes of both it and “Four Sticks.”
It was a cramped, windowless room, oppressive enough before Zeppelin, Grant and a couple of their crew crowded into it. Engineering the session was Phill Brown, who had first encountered the band at Olympic Studios during the making of their début album. From then to now Brown sensed about them something darker and more menacing, and this emanating from Page and Grant.
“It was really rough,” Brown says. “Peter Grant was there pretty much all the time. He used to sit either with me at the mixing desk or on this big settee behind. He unnerved me. He was like an East End hood. He was about 350 pounds then—big, sweaty and aggressive. Having him sat there with a couple of 220-pound minders, it wasn’t the usual way we did things at Island.
“At that point Jimmy Page seemed really messed up. There were obviously a lot of drugs around but he was also into this Aleister Crowley thing. It just put an edge to the session. There was something unpleasant about the whole thing.
“The rest of the band was OK. Robert seemed very polite. He’d make the odd comment but more to Page than anyone else. John Paul Jones was a bit of a sweetheart, very clever musically. Bonham could be full-on and aggressive, though I didn’t see him that much because he wasn’t needed.”
Unlike at the Grange the pace of work was slow and laborious. Time and again Page took a pass at his “Stairway to Heaven” solo.
“The track was still in something of a skeletal state,” recalls Brown. “We did take after take with Page and for days on end. Robert later told me that Jimmy does a lot of experimenting, and out of all the best bits he molds a solo. Nothing was explained to me at the time, though. I was just left to wonder what the hell was going on.
“Page was all over the shop, too. Out of tune a lot of the time. He didn’t communicate with me at all. A lot of it was done in the control room, through an amp in the studio and with him sat right next to me. He would just go: ‘Again . . . Again . . . Again.’ It was all very aggressive. He seemed a dark character, that’s the only way I can explain it.”
To test out the new material the band undertook a series of low-key dates around the U.K. that March. Dubbed “Back to the Clubs,” the tour found Zeppelin as energised as at any time since their first charge through the U.S., performing stripped-down and hellishly loud sets, often up to three hours in length. They previewed “Black Dog,” “Going to California” and also “Stairway to Heaven.” On the opening night at Belfast’s Ulster Hall on March 5 Plant introduced their new epic as “A thing off the fourth album—I hope you like it.” He later claimed that people had nodded off the first few times it was played.
On April 1 they recorded a session for the DJ John Peel’s BBC radio show in front of 400 people at the Paris Theater in London. Peel, who had been instrumental in introducing Plant to America’s psychedelic music and was then one of the few representatives of the British media to champion the band, broadcast their set to the nation three nights later.
“The atmosphere at the Paris Theater was quite formal, very austere,” recalls Bob Harris, a colleague of Peel’s. “Everyone was sitting down. It wasn’t a show where you’d got a band whipping the audience to a wild frenzy, quite the opposite. Yet the music was sensational and Robert had become the definitive cock-rock god.
“By that time Peter Grant had got this idea of trying to make Zeppelin untouchable, of removing them from access so that a mystique began to build up around the band. I think his template was Tom Parker with Elvis, but it meant there began to be this fist of iron thing in terms of the environment in which they operated.”
Life went on outside of the Zeppelin bubble. That March Page had become a father for the first time, Charlotte Martin having born him a daughter, Scarlet. There was, though, never much time afforded for such things. Come the summer, Zeppelin were back on the road, first in the U.S., where the lack of a new album did not stop them from
selling out twenty-one arena shows, and on then to Japan for the first time.
It was a relentless schedule and one through which cracks were beginning to show. Bonham’s drinking was getting heavier, and with it his behavior became more erratic and unpredictable. Yet it also let Plant satisfy the wanderlust that had grown inside him since childhood, when his parents had first whisked him off to the Welsh mountains. Its pull was as great as that of his family. Rather than head home direct from Tokyo, he and Page wound their way back via Thailand and India, accompanied by Cole. They visited the great Buddhist temples in Bangkok and stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, shopping for trinkets and antiques.
“They took me along because they needed someone to look after them and pay for everything,” Cole says. “We had a fantastic time. I managed to get a couple of good local drivers who took us everywhere we wanted to go and even to places we didn’t know about. We didn’t want to go to the same spots as everyone else. In those days that mostly involved heading out to shops where you could buy old artifacts.
“Robert loves traveling. He likes eating different foods, meeting different people, and hearing all kinds of music. How would I describe being with him? Um . . . It depends on the mood I was in. He was quite sweet, actually. He’s harmless, certainly not malicious.
“You worked in a field where anything could happen. I mean, Bonzo . . . Sometimes you’d go to his house and he’d be dressed up as a country squire, then he’d come on tour and be decked out in a white suit. He was a real chameleon, always changing. Robert basically stayed the same. He was always a hippy. A golden god.”
Plant and Page continued to explore, absorbing the music they heard on their travels and filtering it back into Zeppelin. Early the next year they returned to Bombay. Here, through a contact of Page’s, they set up a recording date with the city’s symphony orchestra. At this, they reworked “Four Sticks” and “Friends” with the local musicians, setting a precedent that Plant, in particular, would follow time and again.
A second trip the pair took together in 1972 left an even more marked impression on Plant. This was to Morocco, sitting on the northwest tip of Africa, just across the sea from Europe but a world away. In Marrakech, a centuries-old city of low, red-brick buildings to the south of the country, Plant first heard the music of the indigenous peoples, the Berber and the Gnaoua—these were enticing and trancelike drones, rhythmic and hypnotic.
He and Page took a tape recorder and drove up into the Atlas Mountains, the great range that runs east to west across the country for 1,600 miles, recording this music in villages and farmers’ markets. Back in Marrakech and wandering its teeming network of souks, Plant also came across Oum Kalsoum, an Egyptian by birth and then the greatest living Arab singer. Her remarkable, soaring voice haunted the city’s radios, an instrument in itself.
“I think my thing with North Africa actually began in North Wales,” he told me. “That whole thing about the mountains and remoteness was a great alternative to my days as a grammar-school kid. I went to Morocco in 1972 looking for clues and they were all around me.
“Marrakech then was a far different place to what it is now. We stayed in a hotel that was surrounded by barbed wire and these guys with Royal Enfield rifles—they looked as if they were guarding us from an impending attack. But basically, it was another world. I remember going into town the next day. It was almost as if I’d just got over a huge loss in my life and found everything again. Yet I’d never been there before. I could speak enough French to get by but up until the last ten years or so I was always a tourist there.
“Above all the sounds I heard this voice—Oum Kalsoum singing. Her voice was everywhere, coming out of one doorway after another, shimmering through all the fuss and the chaos, the car horns and the braying donkeys. I just went, ‘Wow! How do you take that into what I do?’ And I bought into the whole thing.”
The fourth Led Zeppelin album did not emerge until November 1971. The record had been delayed by a battle Page fought with Atlantic Records over the sleeve artwork. He had grown sensitive to the critical attacks on his band and especially to the persistent charges that their label had hyped them. In response he intended the new album’s sleeve to have no information on it: neither the band’s name nor a title. The standoff between him and Atlantic lasted months, but Page won.
In the end all that graced the front cover was a framed picture of an old hermit—this Plant had picked up in a junk shop. The photograph on the back of the gatefold encapsulated the conflicting moods of the album itself: a withered tree in the foreground, a background of ruined terraced houses and a block of flats—a pastoral idyll encroached upon by looming hulks.
Page also had the idea that each member of the band should choose his own symbol. Pictured on the inner sleeve, these gave the record one of its default titles—Four Symbols, the other being Led Zeppelin IV. Page’s Zoso emblem has long been presumed to possess occult connotations, although he has refused to be drawn on its derivation. Jones and Bonham each picked something out of a book, neither giving the matter much regard.
Plant, however, had his symbol designed for him, a circle around a feather. He explained that the feather represented courage to Native American tribes and the circle was meant to depict the truth. “Though you might also say it’s about a French maid tickling someone’s bum,” Page quipped to the writer Mick Wall.
Whatever ground Zeppelin had lost with their third record, the fourth reclaimed it and then kept on going. It went to Number One in the U.K. and, although it was held off the top spot in the U.S. by Carole King’s mellow blockbuster Tapestry, it would remain on the charts there for three years, selling twenty-five million copies.
That November they headlined two nights at London’s vast Empire Pool, billing the shows “Electric Magic” and populating the arena with jugglers, acrobats and—but of course—pigs dressed with ruffs. Still there was no pause. The following year began with dates in Japan and Australia. And then the band started work on their next record, moving houses in Hampshire from Headley Grange to Mick Jagger’s country home, Stargroves.
There was no letup either in the torrent of material coming out from them. Page and Plant especially were filled with all the music they had taken in on their travels during the past year. At Stargroves the songs seemed to drip from their fingertips, so much so that they would spend the next months obsessing over which ones to use.
“The band was in great shape,” Eddie Kramer, engineer on the sessions, told the writer Barney Hoskyns. “They were focused, they were together and the music was incredible. They were fun to work with—and they wound me up something horrible. I’d brought this chick over from the U.S. and Robert banged her right away.”
Plant took a break from the ribald atmosphere of the Stargroves sessions toward the end of April, as he and Maureen celebrated the birth of their second child, a son they christened Karac Pendragon Plant. Pendragon was his father’s choice, it being the name of one of King Arthur’s uncles and also Welsh for “head dragon.” Just as he did with Carmen, Plant doted on the boy. At home, at least, he was the picture of a proud family man.
Yet he was gone again two months later. In the summer of 1972 Zeppelin took off on a sixteen-date rampage through North America. However much success they had had at home, it was in the States that they still reigned supreme. The Rolling Stones were heading out to America at the very same time but Zeppelin would outsell the self-styled “world’s greatest rock band” by a ratio of two to one. Before the trek began, Grant had used the full force of their power to demand for the band—and receive from the promoters—an unprecedented 90 percent of the tour’s profits.
They arrived in the States as news was emerging of a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. Eventually, this act would engulf President Richard Nixon in scandal and bring him down. Yet for now he appeared able to act with impunity. It would be as good a parallel as any for the route Zeppelin were emba
rked upon and to where it would lead them.
On this tour they seemed unstoppable but also untouchable. Out in L.A., Page was widely reported to be consorting with a petite, dark-haired groupie named Lori Maddox, who bore a striking resemblance to him. Whatever went on, and whatever it took, Grant and Cole were there to clean up the mess and keep the rest of the world at a strong-arm’s length.
The band flew in to New York during the second week of June. They had booked a session at Electric Lady Studios to continue work on the new record. Mike Kellie, Plant and Bonham’s friend from back home, was also in town for a recording date of his own and joined the Zeppelin entourage for a couple of days.
“There were always limos parked outside the hotel for them; that’s the way they operated,” he recalls. “The entourage—Peter Grant, Richard Cole, the band—they’d all go out together. With the exception of John Paul Jones. He never joined us. Jonesy was a lovely, sweet guy and he’d fly his wife in whenever they had a day off. He suffered a lot of abuse from Bonzo, and some from Robert, too, for not being a party animal, but he was the real glue in the band.
“You didn’t mess with Richard Cole. He took the punches and gave them out. Him and Peter Grant—they were definitely intimidating. Of course, all that went too far but they made me hugely welcome. They showed me a different side of the world, however dark, through the parties and the debauchery that went on.”
One afternoon in the city Zeppelin trooped along to Madison Square Garden to see Elvis Presley give a matinée performance. Elvis was then on his first tour of America’s arenas, encouraged to do so by the example of bands like Zeppelin.
