When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  And so it was. Largely an American conceit, the onset of the so-called counter-culture may have led to the young political left in Britain attending protest meetings about the war in Vietnam or marching in London’s Grosvenor Square – a protest that appeared to be as much against the capitalist stooges of the Labour Party than American involvement in a war Britain was not directly involved in – but it certainly hadn’t lead to the much vaunted ‘long-haired revolution’ routinely ranted about by everyone from Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary to John Peel and Donovan. Young, largely middle-class British students may have been happy to turn out in their thousands for rock concerts and even poetry events, but when in 1967, a genuine French revolutionary named Guy Debord arrived in London to rally round ‘the people’ to the idea of actually seizing power for themselves, of twenty hardcore British revolutionaries who had agreed to meet him at a flat in Notting Hill Gate, only three actually turned up – and they had spent the evening getting drunk on beer and watching Match of the Day on TV.

  While Debord returned home to Paris shortly afterwards, forming a student-based group named ‘Les Enragés’ (the same stridently political group behind the great Paris and Nanterre student riots of 1968, in which nearly six hundred students were arrested in fights with police in a single day, while almost ten million French workers went on strike in support), the so-called revolutionaries of London merely looked on from afar, more at ease smoking dope and debating the merits of Dylan’s ‘comeback’ than actually taking to the streets in any meaningful way. The only fight they appeared to have any real stomach for was for free rock festivals; a spurious ‘cause’ that would lead to the unwelcome chaos of the 1970 Bath Festival, where ticketless Hell’s Angels and French student ‘radicals’ demanded to be allowed in and start as many fights as they liked.

  Ultimately, the only real confrontation of note between the British ‘establishment’ and its so-called hippy ‘alternative’ focused on whether a particularly priapic Oz magazine cartoon depiction of Rupert Bear was ‘obscene’ or not, a ridiculous situation that eventually led to the infamous Old Bailey trial in the summer of 1971, which culminated in all three Oz editors receiving suspended prison sentences, along with an unprecedented level of national fame from which two of the three – future Private Eye editor Richard Neville and multi-millionaire publishing magnate Felix Dennis – would benefit immeasurably in the years to come. As the astute political commentator Andrew Marr later put it: ‘A teddy bear with a stiffy: it rather sums up Britain’s answer to revolution.’

  In Britain, 1968 was the first year that album sales outstripped those of singles, another fact that didn’t register with Jimmy Page, who was far too wrapped up in the excitement of leading his own band at last to care about anything else that might be happening out there in the pretend real world. However, the healthy state of album sales would have an unmistakable impact on the fortunes of his New Yardbirds. Right now, however, Page was too busy putting together a set list bolted together from old Yardbirds numbers and blues covers – stuff that would, as he put it, ‘allow us to stretch out within that framework’ the kind of musical ‘freak-outs’ he’d only occasionally come close to exploring fully in the Yardbirds but which he hoped the new line-up would allow him at last to develop. ‘There were lots of areas which they used to call freeform but was just straight improvisation, so by the time Zeppelin was getting together I’d already come up with such a mountain of riffs and ideas because every night we went on there were new things happening.’

  The others were certainly ready. ‘Bonzo and I were already in the freak-out zone after the Band of Joy,’ Plant told me, ‘so it was quite natural for us to go into long solos and pauses and crescendos. I mean, I listen to things like ‘How Many More Times’ and it swings, and it’s got all those Sixties’ bits and pieces that could have come off a Nuggets album. For Jimmy, it was an extension of what he did, and for us, it was an extension of what we did.’

  Page remained secretly unsure about how well his new singer would work out eventually (‘It was obvious he could sing but I wasn’t sure about his potential as a frontman’), but he became more convinced of his worth with every performance. So powerful was Plant’s voice that when the amplifiers inexplicably shutdown during a show in Stockholm on 12 September, ‘you could still hear his voice at the back of the auditorium over the entire group’. Besides, things were suddenly moving too fast to stop now. The same day, the US trade magazine Amusement Business reported that ‘London session bassist John Paul Jones and vocalist Robert Plante [sic] have been asked by Jimmy Page to join his New Yardbirds.’

  One person who was paying attention at that first-ever show was Danish photographer Jorgen Angel, then a seventeen-year-old student, who later admitted: ‘I didn’t expect much. Not long before the concert actually began, there was still a lot of talking on whether they were going to play under the name of “The Yardbirds” or under the name of “The New Yardbirds”, and how people would react. Because in the club magazine, they were billed as “The Yardbirds”, with a photo of the Yardbirds, not of Bonham, Plant, Page and John Paul Jones. Plus, in those days, when you saw a band turning up with the word “New” in its name, you knew that something was murky, that it wasn’t the same group anymore. Can you imagine a group called The New Beatles? Of course not, you would be disappointed even before hearing a single note. So before these New Yardbirds even went on stage, I remember I was annoyed. I wanted “the real thing”. But, as soon as they began to play, I was hooked…’

  Their second appearance later that same night at the Pop Club in nearby Bronby was reviewed by local newspaper Glostrup Handelsblat, which noted that while Robert Planto [sic] ‘sang well’ his ‘dancing needed work’. At both shows, the band performed a forty-minute set including ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’, ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’, ‘You Shook Me’, ‘How Many More Years’ and just one would-be ‘original’, ‘Dazed and Confused’, and even that, in fact, was a better disguised, less well-known cover that Page had been performing for over a year previously with the Yardbirds.

  The final Scandinavian date was at the Stjarscenen club in Gothenburg on 15 September. Twelve days later, in London, they began recording their debut album, moving into Olympic 1, a popular eight-track studio in Barnes, housed in the town’s old music hall – the same studio the Stones had made Beggars Banquet in and that a few months later Fairport Convention, featuring a young Sandy Denny, would record their third album in.

  Page instructed the band to begin by simply laying down the live set they’d been hammering into shape over the past few weeks – including a couple of days rehearsing together at Page’s Pangbourne boathouse – plus a couple of extra tracks, starting with ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, and ‘You Shook Me’, both recorded virtually live that same day. All recording expenses were paid for by Page. Grant and Jones might have been expected to pick up some of the tab, too. They could both certainly afford it. But Jimmy didn’t want that. This was his baby and he intended to keep it that way. Let the others leave the worrying and forking out to him. As long as they did what they were told and kept playing the way they had been, the guitarist was satisfied he’d get it all back later. As he said, ‘I wanted artistic control in a vice grip because I knew exactly what I wanted to do with these fellows…I knew exactly what I wanted to do in every respect.’

  Nine days later, despite a total of just thirty hours in the studio, the album had been fully recorded, mixed and was ready to be cut onto a mastered disc. Total cost, including artwork: £1,782. This was extremely fast work, even taking into account how experienced and versatile session-vets like Page and Jones were – or the fact that all four had proved how remarkably well they gelled in the studio when they performed as backing band (with Plant on harmonica) on a P.J. Proby session in London arranged for them by Jones, just prior to leaving for Denmark (the track ‘Jim’s Blues’, later released on the 1969 Proby album, Three Week Hero, consequently became the first studio track to fea
ture all four members of the future Led Zeppelin).

  They were also beginning to bond as people. Jimmy already knew Jonesy, of course, and he was already forming the basis of a friendship with Robert through their shared efforts at creating new material for the live set. As for Bonzo, that was trickier. As Jimmy said, ‘The thing is, I don’t drive a car. I didn’t drive a car then and I don’t now. So the fact that John lived in the Midlands, we didn’t get to see each other as much as if he’d lived closer.’ However, there was one incident in the early days that seemed to cement their friendship, when one night Bonham turned up unexpectedly on Page’s doorstep. ‘It was about two in the morning and he was just standing there with Pat and Jason, asking if they could stay the night. He had been kicked out of Pat’s mum’s house after a row and had nowhere else to go.’ He laughed as he recalled how Jason – then just a two-year-old toddler – threw a record that happened to be an early Plant solo single called ‘Our Song’, off the balcony and into the river. ‘I don’t think Robert ever forgave him for it!’ Jimmy laughed; then added: ‘I was pleased that Bonzo came to me, actually. Obviously, he trusted me. And he came down and we had a laugh and we hung out, and that was really good.’

  The other thing that really pleased Page was how astonishingly well the recording sessions had gone. With the emphasis on speed as much as quality, nine tracks had been recorded: a patchwork of originals, former Yardbirds material, covers and what most charitably might be described as ‘disguised’ covers – the latter of which continue to cause ripples of discontent, not least amongst the real authors of said songs, to this day.

  3

  Light and Shade

  Opening with the rhythmic battering-ram that is ‘Good Times Bad Times’ – one of just three originals, and credited to Page, Jones and Bonham – the immediate impression one got from hearing the Led Zeppelin album for the first time was one of pure shocking power, its opening salvo summing up everything the name Led Zeppelin would quickly come to embody. A pop song built on a zinging, catchy chorus, explosive drums and, at exactly the right moment, a flurry of spitting guitar notes that don’t stick around long enough to be called a solo. ‘It’s got quite a complicated rhythm, which Jonesy came up with,’ said Page. ‘But the most stunning thing about it, musically, is Bonzo’s amazing kick drum. He’s playing brilliantly on everything else but that is right out of the norm – playing with one kick drum and making it sound like two. People that know music, when they heard that they started to realise what he was capable of, and what it meant the band was capable of.’

  If ‘Good Times Bad Times’ pointed the way forward for rock music in the Seventies, towards heavy-duty riffage and mallet-swinging drums, its counterpart on side two, ‘Communication Breakdown’, with its spiky, downstroke guitar riff and grafting of the ostinato from Eddie Cochran’s ‘Nervous Breakdown’ – again credited to Page, Jones and Bonham – was proto-punk; the sort of speeded up, one-chord gunshot the Ramones would turn into a career a decade later. ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’, the third of the three originals on the album, this time credited simply to Page and Jones, is something else again: a wonderfully understated pop song built in the fashion of the time around a Bach fugue, played by Jones on what sounds like a church organ, then swept into a completely different musical zone by Page’s pedal steel guitar – an instrument he had literally picked up in the studio that day and begun to play.

  The rest of the album, however, was a very different kettle of fish: equally impressive in the scope of its sonic architecture, but quite shamelessly unoriginal in its choice of material, as exemplified by its final track, ‘How Many More Times’. It is credited to Page, Jones and Bonham but is a composition clearly based on several older tunes, primarily ‘How Many More Years’ by Howlin’ Wolf, a number which Plant and Bonham had performed their own version of in the Band of Joy, inserting snatches of Albert King’s ‘The Hunter’. The ‘new’ Zeppelin version opened with a bass riff snatched from the Yardbirds’ earlier reworking of ‘Smokestack Lightning’, plus more than a passing nod to a mid-Sixties version of the same tune by Gary Farr and the T-Bones also re-titled ‘How Many More Times’ (and produced by original Yardbirds manager Giorgio Gomelsky). There was even a lick or two appropriated from Jimmy Rodgers’ ‘Kisses Sweeter Than Wine’ as well as, bizarrely, a slowed-to-a-crawl take on Jeff Beck’s solo from the Yardbirds’ ‘Shapes of Things’. All of which the band might have gotten away with if so much else on the album didn’t also take its cue from the work of others, largely without acknowledgement, then or now.

  Indeed, of the other tracks on the album credited to various band members, all have subsequently had that contention challenged, with varying degrees of success. Beginning with ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, Page’s dramatic reworking of the traditional song was first heard outside contemporary folk circles on a Joan Baez album. Although not unjustly credited on the original Zeppelin album as a ‘Traditional’ song, ‘arranged by Jimmy Page’, by the time of the 1990 release of the Zeppelin Remastered CD box-set the credit had been amended to include one A. Bredon, aka American folk singer Anne Bredon, who had recorded her own version in the Fifties. It is now generally acknowledged that the ‘new arrangement’ Page had first played for Plant on the acoustic guitar was, in fact, at least partly influenced by Bredon’s earlier treatment.

  Similarly, the track ‘Black Mountain Side’, an acoustic guitar instrumental in the exotic, modal style of Page’s earlier Yardbirds-era showcase, ‘White Summer’, even down to the percussive accompaniment of the Indian hand drums known as tablas, provided in this instance by Viram Jasani. Where ‘White Summer’ had been Page’s ‘interpretation’ of Davy Graham’s famous version of ‘She Moved Through the Fair’, ‘Black Mountain Side’ was in fact Page’s instrumental version of fellow Graham disciple Bert Jansch’s 1966 recording of another traditional Gaelic folk tune titled ‘Black Water Side’ – one, coincidentally, almost certainly shown to Jansch by Anne Briggs, another Page favourite from the Sixties, who had herself been shown the tune by a characterful old folklorist named Bert Lloyd.

  As a result, although Jansch’s record company sought legal advice in consultation with two eminent musicologists and John Mummery QC (one of the most prominent copyright barristers in the UK at the time), it was decided not to pursue an action for royalties against Page and/or Led Zeppelin. As Nat Joseph, then head of Jansch’s record company, Transatlantic, later explained: ‘It had been reasonably established that there was every chance that Jimmy Page had heard Bert play the piece at a club or concert…or that he’d heard Bert’s recording. However, what could not be proved was that Bert’s recording in itself constituted Bert’s own copyright, because the basic melody, of course, was traditional.’

  Nevertheless, crediting ‘Black Mountain Side’ merely to Jimmy Page led Jansch to treat me to one of his famously wan smiles, as he says, ‘The thing I’ve noticed about Jimmy whenever we meet now is that he can never look me in the eye. Well, he ripped me off, didn’t he? Or let’s just say he learned from me. I wouldn’t want to sound impolite.’ His dark, wrinkled eyes fix me with a beady glare, as if daring me to disagree. But then, as Page himself later admitted, ‘At one point, I was absolutely obsessed with Bert Jansch. When I first heard [his 1965 début] album I couldn’t believe it. It was so far ahead of what anyone else was doing. No-one in America could touch that.’ Clearly, he was even more taken with Jansch’s third album, Jack Orion, which contained not only ‘Black Water Side’ (also later recorded by Sandy Denny) but was full of the sort of sinister drones and fierce, stabbing guitar that Page would incorporate into his work throughout his subsequent career in both the Yardbirds and particularly Led Zeppelin.

  Even the two acknowledged covers on the Zeppelin album – ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ and ‘You Shook Me’ – would bring charges from the critics of a form of plagiarism. Not through lack of credit this time – both tracks were originally by Willie Dixon and are credited as such on the sleeve – b
ut, in the case of the latter, that it was a rip-off of the version recently released on Jeff Beck’s Truth. Some critics went further, pointing out the obvious similarities between Truth and the first Zeppelin album, from the line-up (two extrovert lead guitarists in Beck and Page in harness with two powerhouse vocalists in Rod Stewart and Robert Plant) to the concentration on light and shade, the reworking of Yardbirds material, even the inclusion of traditional folk ‘interludes’ (‘Greensleeves’ on Truth and ‘Black Mountain Side’ on Led Zeppelin). Most glaring of all, the respective covers of ‘You Shook Me’. An irksome comparison, from Jimmy’s point of view, that would continue to cast a shadow over Zeppelin’s credibility, right up to the present day.

  Taken from the same Muddy Waters EP that both guitarists had loved as kids (the same EP, coincidentally, that contained the track ‘You Need Love’, which would provide Page with yet more ‘inspiration’ when it came to the next Zeppelin album), Jimmy has always claimed that it was simply ‘a coincidence’ that the same song should end up on both albums; that he hadn’t realised Beck had already recorded a version for his album, even though Peter Grant had given him an advance copy of Truth weeks before its release. Even if it were possible that Page had somehow neglected to afford the album even a cursory spin, it seems inconceivable that John Paul Jones would not have mentioned at some point that he had actually played Hammond organ on the Truth version.

  In reality, Jeff Beck was the one who didn’t know what was going on. The first he knew of his friend Jimmy’s decision to record the same track with his new group was when he played it to him. According to Beck, ‘He said, “Listen to this. Listen to Bonzo, this guy called John Bonham that I’ve got.” And so I said I would, and my heart just sank when I heard “You Shook Me”. I looked at him and said “Jim, what?” and the tears were coming out with anger. I thought, “This is a piss-take, it’s got to be.” I mean, there’s Truth still spinning on everybody’s turntable, and this turkey’s come out with another version. Oh boy…then I realised it was serious, and he did have this heavyweight drummer, and I thought “Here we go again” – pipped at the post kind of thing.’