When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  What you didn’t mention was how, as a kid, you’d dreamed of being a film star. Six foot six by the time you were old enough for the army, already well on your way to putting on the weight you would later be remembered for – not skinny, no, but bloody tall and not bad looking actually, you cheeky cunt. But it was all a dream. Instead, after the holiday camp and the hotel you’d found yourself working back in London as a doorman – a polite word for ‘bouncer’ – at the 2Is Coffee Bar in Old Compton Street. How even though the 2Is would later become famous as the sordid little dive where Tommy Steele started off – Tommy, Wally Whyton, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Wee Willie Harris and all those other cunts – it didn’t bring you any closer to making any dreams come true. Later, though, you realised the 2Is had been useful in other ways. Where you first met faces like Andrew Loog Oldham, the smart-arse kid who later worked for the Beatles and Stones, who’d started out sweeping the floor at the 2Is for pin money. Then there was Lionel Bart, funny little shit who used to paint murals on the basement wall there and would later strike it lucky in the West End with Oliver, then fuck it all up by selling his copyright for a quick bit of cash, missing out on millions when it later got tuned into the film. What a fucking caper! But a lesson you were quick to learn – always get – and bloody well keep – a slice of the pie. And of course Michael Hayes, who would later change his name to Mickie Most but was working as the waiter at the 2Is when you first met. Mickie, who you would one day go into partnership with: him as the brains, you as the brawn, looking after the acts out on the road while Mickie took care of them in the studio, producing hit after hit.

  ‘Mickie poured the coffee while I sold the tickets at the top of the stairs,’ you’d tell ’em when they came to ask you about it years later. That had been 1957. The pay: eighteen shillings a night (90p) and a hot meal. Not all that but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. You became known as ‘a character’ the guy the girls had to charm to squeeze their way down to the small 25 x 16-foot basement; Mickie the clown at the counter who would leap out from behind it sometimes and also sing a few numbers. You the henchman who would grab their daft boyfriends and throw ’em out onto the street first sign of trouble.

  Then one day you finally got your own chance to show what you could do – though not as a singer. The 2Is was owned by two Aussie wrestlers, Paul Lincoln and Ray Hunter. It was Paul who looked you up and down and suggested you might like to earn ‘a few extra bob’ by teaming up to ‘fight’ him in a few bouts. Willing to try anything, you turned up for your first wrestling match billed as His Highness Count Bruno Alassio of Milan, don’t you dare fucking laugh. Paul went on as Doctor Death. And guess what? The punters loved it! Lapped it right up they did. This was the old days, before they’d cottoned on to the fact it was all a fix, so shut it. It went over so well, in fact, that Paul arranged a few more bouts between Dr Death and the Count. Sometimes you’d be billed as Count Bruno, sometimes Count Massimo. One time you put on a Lone Ranger mask and called yourself The Masked Marauder, offering to take on all-comers, while Paul, the plant, jumped up and down in the audience waving his fucking arms. ‘Me! Pick me!’ You’d fucking pick him one of these days all right…

  Don Arden – who gave Peter Grant his break in the biz when he hired him in the early Sixties as his ‘driver’, an all-purpose job title that involved ‘hand-holding’ some of Arden’s most notorious clients, including Gene Vincent, a crippled American ex-pat alcoholic fond of brandishing knives and guns, and Little Richard, a religious-guilt freak who always carried a bible with descriptions of his orgiastic exploits scribbled in the margins – shakes his head with disgust. ‘Peter Grant was never a fucking wrestler. He couldn’t punch his way out of a paper bag!’ I remind Don that being a wrestler is not the same as being a boxer and that Grant wouldn’t have needed to punch his way out of anything. An ability to growl and look threatening – well within his range – and a nicely stage-managed forearm smash – also well within his scope – would surely have sufficed. ‘All I’m saying is he traded on that reputation: the hard guy; the heavy. Well, let me tell you, Peter Grant was nothing but a big fat bully. He was so fucking fat he could barely stand up. That’s why he always used to take the car everywhere. He couldn’t walk more than ten feet without getting out of breath. His legs were gone.’

  Even allowing for Arden’s famously dark sense of humour, there’s clearly some truth in what he says. As Mickie Most later told writer Chris Welch, he and Grant ‘used to put up the wrestling rings for Dale Martin Promotions. Sometimes if a wrestler didn’t show up for the first bout, Peter used to do a bit…that was the basis of Peter’s wrestling career.’ He added: ‘When Peter butted someone with his stomach, that was just using a wrestling technique. Nobody ever got hurt. If they did get hurt it was an accident. It wasn’t meant to happen. There was no physical damage because it was all showbiz.’

  That said, there was far more to Peter Grant than mere bulk. Shrewd enough to know a reputation as a former ring-pro only added to the air of intimidation he liked to wield over those he was determined would come off worse in their dealings with him, he was also sensitive enough to be repelled by a 1971 Daily Mirror article that purported to ‘expose’ his past life in ‘the grapple game’. Wrestling was something he’d done ‘for about eighteen months when I needed the money,’ he said, not something he was proud of. But by then his reputation was firmly established, and not just amongst British tabloid journalists. Three years into his reign as Led Zeppelin manager he was routinely referred to in the press as the ‘brute’, the ‘giant’ the old-school music biz hustler who looked ‘like a bodyguard in a Turkish harem’ as one paper unkindly but not inaccurately described him. Jibes that hurt all the more for carrying the ring of truth. For like a lot of exceptionally large men, Peter Grant was highly sensitive, particularly about his size and misleading general demeanour. While he no longer saw a potential leading man in the movies when he looked in the mirror, he didn’t see an ogre, either. In fact, by the time he was in his late thirties and overseeing the affairs of the most financially successful act in the music business, he liked to see himself as a man of wealth and taste, a cultured figure who could just as easily sit and have tea with the upper crust as he could dish the dirt with the shysters of Tin Pan Alley.

  According to the former promoter Freddy Bannister, who worked with Grant at the beginning and end of his career with Zeppelin, ‘Peter has this reputation now as this almost gangster-like figure, and yes, he was fairly awful and intimidating in his latter days of managing Led Zeppelin. But in the early days he could be quite the gentleman, quietly spoken and very well-mannered. He was interested in antiques, and we both had a passion for vintage cars. I would often bump into him at car auctions and we would have a very jolly time together. Of course, you were always aware of this other side to him, too. When it came to negotiating deals for Zeppelin, he could be very forthright indeed. But not like later on when he really did become very nasty. But that was the drugs, too, of course.’

  It also has to be borne in mind that Peter Grant came from the era before accountants and lawyers took over the music business. What his former mentor Don Arden, the ultimate poacher-turned-gamekeeper, calls ‘the wild west days of the music biz’. Or in the words of someone Grant befriended later in life, Dire Straits’ manager, Ed Bicknell: ‘In Peter’s day, you put the money in the Hammond organ and made a dash for the border.’ As Mickie Most once said, ‘[Peter] was a dreamer and he hustled.’ He was also intelligent and could spout you facts and figures from a contract at random. If that didn’t work, he would take a leaf from Don Arden’s book and back you up against a wall and threaten you. Unlike Don, however, who had spent his war years faking illness in an army barracks many hundreds of miles from the frontline, Peter wouldn’t pull a gun on you – not in the early days anyway. But he wasn’t in the least bit fazed when he saw one, and certainly not in America, where you would see them all the time. What made his manner more frightening was
his unexpectedly soft voice, surprisingly high, even when shouting at you; and the beautiful, long-lashed cow eyes that would narrow into unreadable slits when angered. Word had already gone out across America long before the arrival there of Led Zeppelin: Peter Grant didn’t argue. He merely told you how it was. And if that didn’t work, he showed you – personally.

  He also, practically unheard of then, regarded his artists as friends, members of his extended family, particularly Jimmy Page, who he treated as almost a second son. ‘I always had the most respect and admiration for Jimmy,’ Grant said. ‘I felt that I was closer to Jimmy than any of the other members of the Yardbirds. I had immense faith in his talent and ability. I just wanted him to do whatever he felt was best for him at the time.’ A man who had grown up without a large family circle for support thus went out of his way to create his own, now he was a father – manager – himself. As such, he had no precedent. In later years, people liked to compare him to Col. Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager. But the Colonel would – and did – sell Elvis’s name to the highest bidder, both before and especially after his death. G would rather have cut off his own arm than sell his artist down the river of commercial shit the Colonel routinely sent Elvis blithely skittering down. Similarly, Brian Epstein had been intensely supportive of the Beatles, but he was a novice, weak on the small print, who would eventually throw in the towel in the most dramatic fashion possible, leaving his artists high and dry and at the mercy of much larger, more vicious predators. By comparison, Peter Grant had been around the block so many times before Zeppelin came his way he felt like he owned it. So much so, unlike the ruinous penny-ha’penny record deal Epstein negotiated for the Beatles – then failed to renegotiate after their career had lifted off into the stratosphere – Grant was able to land his act the biggest deal in music biz history. In fact, Grant had more in common with the man who eventually replaced Epstein, the pugnacious Allen Klein, who, when asked by Playboy magazine if he would lie or steal for his clients had replied respectively, ‘Oh, sure,’ and ‘Probably.’ Peter Grant was looking for love from his artists; to give and receive.

  Even Don Arden, who was so fiercely protective of his artists he would physically go to war on their behalf – breaking bones, smashing furniture, brandishing shotguns – only did it to protect his own interests, primarily money. G was different. He was after the lolly too. But it wasn’t his prime motivator. He wanted respect, he wanted loyalty, he wanted family. Most of all, he craved ultimate control of that family. Hence the surprisingly small but loyal staff Led Zeppelin would employ throughout their career, on the road and off, always the same trusted officers and infantrymen. The minute you proved yourself untrustworthy or disloyal, you were expelled – forever. It was a zero-tolerance approach that extended to record company execs, promoters, agents, merchandisers, journalists, anyone who had anything to do with the band. You were either for Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin or you were against them. And if you were against them, Peter Grant was against you – big time.

  As John Paul Jones would later recall, ‘[Peter] trusted us to get the music together, and then just kept everybody else away, making sure we had the space to do whatever we wanted without interference from anybody – press, record company, promoters. He only had us [as clients] and reckoned that if we were going to do good, then he would do good. He always believed that we would be hugely successful and people became afraid not to go along with his terms in case they missed out. But all that stuff about renegotiating contracts through intimidation is rubbish. He wasn’t hanging people out of windows and all that crap.’

  Well, no. Not out of windows, perhaps. But intimidation, threats, ultra-violence, all would be used regularly by Grant at various points throughout Zeppelin’s career. ‘If somebody had to be trod on,’ he would say, ‘they got trod on. Too true!’ That wasn’t all there was to his style of management, nor was it even the biggest part of it. But, yes, it was always there, bubbling like a sea monster just beneath the blackest, most oily part of the surface; one that would certainly bare its teeth with ever more scary frequency as the years rolled by and the band became more and more successful and, ironically, less in need of such ferociously over the top tactics.

  Back in 1968, though, Grant had found himself at a crossroads. The imminent dissolution of the Yardbirds was hardly a surprise. The group had been at each other’s throats since he and Most had taken them off previous manager Simon Napier-Bell’s hands two years before. What really bugged Peter, though, was the thought of going back to square one with some other group. That is, some other group controlled by Mickie. Sooner or later that, too, would come to an end and what then? It was all right for guys like Don Arden and Mickie Most with their big houses and flash cars; they had seen enough of the back end in their careers to view the whole thing as simply another business deal that had gone down before moving straight onto the next one. Peter Grant was tired of roaming around on the road to no discernible purpose, other than paying the rent. He was married, with a small son, Warren, and a baby daughter on the way and he wanted his stake in the dream to come true too. Like Jimmy, it was time for him to strike out on his own. No Mickie or Don this time, no lurking in the background this time; no more second banana. It was time for Peter – G – to show what he could do too.

  When sitting in the car, passing time, Page had said he wanted to do his own thing, dreaming of the future, Grant had been pleased and surprised but not entirely sure what that would entail. All through that final Yardbirds show in Luton he had thought about it, watching Jimmy from the wings, wondering. And the more he thought about it, the more sure he became that it could – would – work. However, he was taken aback when Jimmy had mentioned Terry Reid – Terry, who Peter knew had just signed to Mickie, who he still shared an office with, their desks facing each other. Peter knew there was no chance with Terry now that Mickie had gotten his claws into him but he didn’t want to discourage Jimmy. So he went along with it, knowing they’d have to look elsewhere. Sure enough, Jimmy was disappointed. If Peter knew there was no chance why hadn’t he said something, tried to stop Jimmy? When Terry himself suggested someone else, it was almost too good to be true. Peter breathed a quiet sigh of relief and made himself busy trying to track the kid down…

  Terry said they called him ‘the Wild Man of the Black Country’. You didn’t know if that sounded promising or not, but you wrote down the bloke’s name and gave it to G. It was an easy one to remember anyway – Robert Plant. Made you think of flower power sort of thing, which might have been good a couple of years ago. Things had changed since then, though. The main thing was, could the bloke sing? And did he look the part? Terry seemed to think so and Terry would know, wouldn’t he? So you asked G to look into it and that’s when you found out that Tony Secunda, The Move’s manager, was also sniffing around; had already had the bloke down to London for an audition. G suggested they move fast, before Secunda did a Mickie and got in there first. It still seemed a bit much though, having to drive all the way to Birmingham, or wherever it was, when there were so many good singers already in London: Chris Farlowe, Rod Stewart, Stevie Marriott, lots of others like Terry that didn’t have names yet. The boy in Free, he was good, too. But G said all the good ones were taken, reminding you that Stevie Winwood came from up there somewhere too, didn’t he, so you never knew.

  It was a Saturday night. G drove, you and Chris, who was still making up his mind, sitting in the back, smoking cigarettes and fearing the worst, that it would all be a big waste of time. Then you got there – another college gig. Small room at the back of the building, band called Hobbstweedle. Like something out of Lord of the Rings. Then they came on and you really feared the worst. Bunch of dope-smoking yokels, doing covers, American hippy, old flower power stuff. Waste of time. But the singer, he was quite good, actually. Big bugger in a University of Toronto sweatshirt. Did a version of the Airplane’s ‘Somebody to Love’ and really turned it on. A bit too good, perhaps. How come no-one had heard of h
im apart from Terry? And bloody Secunda?

  You were suspicious, didn’t believe in gift horses. Either there was something wrong with him personality-wise or he was impossible to work with. It was the only explanation you could think of. But G, who hadn’t come all this way for nothing, was more gung-ho. ‘Invite him down for an audition, then decide,’ he said. So you did and a few days later this big kid with big curly hair was standing at the door of the pad in Pangbourne, grinning. You had taken him in and made him a cup of tea, offered him a fag. Told him to skin one up if he wanted, offered him your stash. At first it had been awkward, you could tell the kid was nervous. A few years younger, he’d done a couple of things, made a couple of records, but no hits to speak of. The only people you had in common were Terry, who the kid didn’t actually seem to know that well; Secunda, who was always too busy with The Move to make up his mind one way or the other, and Alexis Korner. But then every young kid you ever heard of had once sung or played in a band with Alexis.

  Things warmed up when you started playing records. You told him about your idea for taking the Yardbirds and building on it, going in a whole new direction. The kid nodded along, ‘Yeah, great’, though it was fairly clear he didn’t know any of the Yardbirds’ songs – not from your time with them anyway. But you sat there on the floor together, letting him flick through your LPs, pulling out stuff by Larry Williams, Don and Dewey, the Incredible String Band, Buddy Guy and early Elvis. A mixture of stuff the kid – Robert – claimed to know well or admitted he’d never really heard before. When you put on ‘You Shook Me’ by Muddy Waters, then ‘She Said Yeah’ by Larry Williams, his face lit up. When you put on ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ by Joan Baez he looked puzzled. He was still nodding, still sitting there pulling on a joint and going, ‘Yeah, man, groovy,’ but you could tell he didn’t really know what on earth you were on about half the time. He’d heard of Joan Baez, all Dylan fans had heard of Joan Baez, but what did she have to do with the New Yardbirds? He was just a big curly-haired kid with a big curly-haired voice from somewhere up there in the Midlands.