When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  ATLANTIC RECORDS SIGNS ENGLAND’S HOT NEW GROUP, LED ZEPPELIN, IN ONE OF THE BIGGEST DEALS OF THE YEAR!

  It went on, ‘Top English and American rock musicians who have heard the tracks have compared the LP to the best of Cream and Jimi Hendrix.’ Accusations of hype swiftly followed, not least when it emerged that Atlantic had signed the band without even seeing them play live: sacrilege in those musicianship-as-end-in-itself times. From there on in, even after the album was released and people could decide for themselves whether the music contained enough merit to warrant ‘one of the biggest deals of the year’, the American media embarked on a love them or hate them relationship with Led Zeppelin, with nothing in between; a situation which would endure long after the band itself had ceased to exist.

  Nevertheless, with the disinclination of the music business in Britain to see the new band’s commercial potential, it was now America that Grant and Page were counting on to provide the leg-up they badly needed if Led Zeppelin really was to become the new Cream. There was only one way to do that: to tour, not stopping until people forgot about the accusations of hype and had a chance to make up their own minds. That was the key, said Grant. Page agreed. The sooner the better, too, he said. And so G went to work. With the aid of Frank Barsalona, an old and trusted contact at Premier Talent, then one of America’s biggest booking agents, plus the five years he already had behind him working the American concert circuit, Grant knew exactly where to start. The Fillmores in New York and San Francisco; the Boston Tea Party; the Grande Ballroom in Detroit; the Kinetic Circus in Chicago; the Whisky A Go Go in LA…within days Grant had put together an itinerary that included more than twenty US cities. And though in the future he would become legendary for driving an impossibly hard bargain with American promoters, he didn’t waste time haggling about fees either. Not for this tour. While the Yardbirds at their height had been getting $2,500 a show in the US, with the first Zeppelin album as yet unreleased, Grant was happy if he could squeeze $1,500 a show out of promoters for that first US tour. Some nights, they played for as little as $200 – less than a hundred pounds. Considering how much it would cost to send the band to America, the net result would mean taking a bath financially. ‘It was worth it though,’ reasoned Page, ‘we didn’t care. We just wanted to come over to America and play our music.’ The attitude was ‘come over here, work as hard as we can, give them all we can, and if it doesn’t work we would go back to England and start again. Mind you, no-one would have had us back if we’d died. It was really up to us.’

  There was only one snag: it would mean the band flying out over Christmas. John Paul, Robert and Bonzo were married. Jimmy was living with an American girl called Lynn that he had met in Boston on the last Yardbirds tour. What the hell, reasoned Grant, they were young and there would be many more Christmases for them to spend with their birds. After they’d won the war, he told them, they could do what they bloody well liked. But for now, they would have to do what they were fucking well told. Like it or lump it back to where you came from, he said, knowing none of them would want to do that.

  Nevertheless, he hadn’t looked forward to breaking the news to them. But when, finally, he gathered them in his Oxford Street office and gave it to them straight, he was taken aback at how well they all appeared to take it. ‘Through much of it,’ he explained, ‘you’ll be opening for Vanilla Fudge. Oh, and you’ll be starting on Boxing Day…’ Just in case they didn’t get the picture, he added: ‘That’s the day after Christmas. That means you’ve got to leave England on December twenty-third.’ There were mixed reactions to Grant’s plan but nobody wanted to lose face by admitting they might be conflicted by the news. Plant, whose wife Maureen had just given birth to a daughter named Carmen Jane, was in the most difficult position. As if to hide it, though, he was the first to speak up in favour of the plan. ‘Well, let’s just do what we have to do,’ he said. ‘When does the plane leave?’

  Having got the band excited about their imminent trip to the US, he gave them the other bit of news he’d been saving: he wouldn’t actually be going with them. Not over Christmas anyway. Grant was a thirty-three-year-old family man who had already travelled around America many times; there was very little allure in the prospect of spending Christmas and New Year away from his wife Gloria and two-year-old son Warren with a bunch of still relative nobodies. Instead, for the first couple of weeks of the tour at least, the band would be in the charge of a new tour manager, a twenty-four-year-old master-at-arms from west London who already worked for Most and Grant: Richard Cole, or ‘Ricardo’ as he liked to be known. Disappointed but not unduly concerned – Page and Jones already knew of Cole – Plant and Bonham followed the others’ lead and mutely nodded their agreement. Jones had first met Cole back in 1965 when he’d been touring with the Night Timers, the first group Cole had ever driven the van and humped gear for. Since then the former unskilled labourer had worked his way up the ladder as road manager for Unit 4 + 2, The Who, the Yardbirds (where he first met Page), the Jeff Beck Group, Vanilla Fudge, the Rascals, the Searchers, the New Vaudeville Band, and, latterly, Terry Reid, who he’d just finished touring the US with. With Richard already in Los Angeles, Peter ordered him to find the band suitable hotel accommodation and to be there with a car waiting to meet them when they arrived at LAX Airport on Christmas Eve.

  There was one final show to do in England, on Friday 20 December, at the unpromisingly named Fishmonger’s Hall – a small room above the Fishmonger’s Arms pub in Wood Green High Road – where they were billed as ‘Led Zeppelin (formerly Yardbirds)’. Three days later they reconvened at London Airport where, along with another roadie, Kenny Pickett, they boarded a plane bound for New York. From there they all took a connecting flight on to LA. All, that is, except for Jones, who had decided to ignore Grant’s wishes and bring his wife Mo with him. Although Mo would not be joining the tour, Jones was loath to spend Christmas without her and had made alternative plans for them to spend the holiday in nearby New Jersey with the black American singer Madeline Bell, who Jones knew from doing sessions with her in London. He would, he casually informed them, make his own way down from New Jersey to the first show in Denver, where they would meet up again on Boxing Day.

  ‘We had a soul Christmas, and it was brilliant,’ Jones would recall years later. ‘And then we had to go and see some other relatives. Wherever we went, there was another meal waiting for us. I’ve never eaten so much food in all my life. They were really wonderful people.’ It was, however, the first clear-cut instance of John Paul Jones creating ‘my own space within the band’ as he puts it now. Never one to waste words or raise his voice unnecessarily, Jones was nevertheless quietly determined to do things his way, whenever possible. As long as he was there on time for professional engagements, what did it matter if he chose not to spend his time in the company of the others? With Page, already a hardened road veteran, more than happy to go his own way, and Plant and Bonham happy for the time being to stick together, none of the others felt any cause for complaint. If anything, they had no more desire for the company of their professorial bass player than he did for theirs. It was a pattern of behaviour that would persist throughout their years together.

  Born in Sidcup, Kent, on 3 January 1946, just like Jimmy you are a Capricorn; that is to say, a born conservative; quiet and undemonstrative on the outside, stubborn and unmovable on the inside. And, like Jimmy, you are an only child: self-contained, happy within yourself, not especially interested in pleasing others. The rest of the world, it comes and it goes. You are simply you, ‘take it or leave it’.

  Still waters run deep, they say – a phrase that might have been invented to describe your personality. This means they misjudge you, seeing only the smooth surface. You know this but are unconcerned. Let others say and do what they will, what’s it to you? Ideal material for ‘unsung hero’ status, over the years most people will see only the bass guitar you carry or the keyboards you sit behind. Even when they see you stoop to retriev
e your acoustic guitar, or note on the album credits that you also play the mandolin, koto, pedal steel guitar, autoharp, ukulele, cello, synthesiser, recorder or any number of different instruments, they still won’t quite get it. Well, that’s up to them. Or not, as the case may be. What’s it to you? Absolutely nothing.

  Your father, Joe, was the same. A professional concert pianist and arranger with the Ambrose Orchestra, it wasn’t just music he taught you. A serious face hiding a wonderfully dry sense of humour, when he wasn’t performing pieces for the BBC’s Light Programme by Rossini, Handel, Ravel and Offenbach, he was working part-time in a musical comedy duo with your mother, performing more popular hits of the day by Mario Lanza, Ronnie Hilton, Lee Laurence, Vera Lynn and Donald Peers. Sometimes they would bring in a ‘popular’ singer to front the duo, a pretty young girl named Kathy Kirby. How your father laughed when, years later, his son was hired as a session player to play on some of Kathy’s hits. You and the well-known session guitarist Little Jimmy Page…

  With your mother and father always busy, often away touring the provinces – no place for a child, even one as musically precocious as you – you were sent to board at Christ’s College in Blackheath, south-east London, where you were able to formalise your classical music studies. Even though you felt sick at the prospect of living away from home, it would be a marvellous opportunity for you, Father said. You were very lucky. It was at boarding school that you learned to play the school’s chapel pipe organ. It was also at boarding school where you learned to dislike organised games and discovered you were at your best when ‘left alone to get on with it,’ as you put it. To please your father, you also agreed to take up the saxophone, but it didn’t last. The bloody thing set your teeth on edge.

  Away from the classroom, however, it wasn’t just the classical piano of Sergei Rachmaninoff you admired. You also approved of the unruly blues of enigmatic American music titans like ‘Big’ Bill Broonzy, Fats Waller and, later on, Jimmy Smith, ‘Brother’ Jack MacDuff, and Richard ‘Groove’ Holmes. It was also through the blues that you would eventually discover jazz, particularly the head-spinning freeform style of Charles Mingus. You began to lead a sort of musical double-life: devoted to your study of piano and classical music, increasingly intrigued by more contemporary forms. At fourteen, you were good enough to be the choirmaster and organist at the local church. The same year you persuaded your parents to allow you to buy your first bass guitar – a Dallas solid body electric – after becoming obsessed with the incredibly fluid playing of Chicago bassist and band-leader Phil Upchurch, whose 1961 dance instrumental, ‘You Can’t Sit Down’, featured the first bass solo you’d ever heard. You’d tried restringing an old ukulele you’d found gathering dust on the family upright piano, but it wasn’t the same. In the end, you talked Father into acting as guarantor on an HP agreement to buy the Dallas, which you cleverly fed through the rewired amplifier of an old telly and were immediately able to use to begin thrumming along to records like ‘Freight Train’, a skiffle hit by Chas McDevitt, though not too noisily, in case it disturbed the neighbours. Mainly, you’d just play along to whatever happened to be broadcast on the Light Programme.

  Armed with your snazzy new bass, you began playing with other kids your age and older at the local church youth club that opened after Sunday evensong. A group formed without a drummer, it required you to develop an unusually percussive style focused on the lower frets. It was something you’d come up with yourself which you were quite pleased with actually. The group, nicknamed the Deltas, got quite good and started to get invitations to play at wedding receptions, street parties and summer fêtes. Father even joined in on piano at some of the engagements. Those of the group who were standing perfected the synchronised footwork of the Shadows, and you became adept at playing the hits of the day. By the time you were seventeen you were so good you even got the occasional booking at various US army bases, like the one in Dartford where a teenage Michael Jagger had a holiday job as a PE teacher. Like Michael, it was here that you got your first taste of the American records on the jukeboxes: a heady mixture of blues, country-and-western and pop. It was on one of those nights that you heard Tamla Motown for the first time and nearly flipped your lid, as they say. You simply could not believe the driving, triumphant sound of the bass. If you needed any further proof that it was the bass that really gave these records their shape, it was all there in the grooves of every single Motown recording those big old American jukeboxes pumped out at you.

  No longer playing organ in the church on Sundays and interest in your classical music studies on the wane, your perspective changed dramatically over those two years. Until then you’d imagined yourself following in Father’s footsteps and joining the orchestra; now whole new vistas of possibilities opened up in your mind. Not that you said anything to Mother and Father. You’d learned the hard way it was best to keep those sorts of ideas to yourself. When someone tipped you off that the ex-Shadows stars Tony Meehan and Jet Harris were holding auditions to find a bass player for their new group, you found yourself on the train up to London for an audition at an upstairs function room at a pub in the West End. You were bloody nervous because this was a proper group. They had just had a no. 1 with ‘Diamonds’ (which, years later, you’d discover to your mutual amusement, had featured Pagey on guitar) and now they were looking to put together a touring outfit.

  You didn’t really expect to be offered the job. Not because you didn’t think you were good enough: you knew you were. You just couldn’t picture yourself actually in a group like that, performing in proper concert venues packed with people, touring the country with them. But they did offer you the job – on condition you got rid of the Burns electric bass you were now playing (along with the enormous Truvoice amp and speakers that were nearly as tall as you were) and replace it with a Fender like the ones they played. You were never one of those people that needed to be told something twice and you went out that weekend and bought yourself a much more professional (and expensive) Fender Jazz bass – the same guitar you would use, in fact, right up until 1975…

  Jones’ absence certainly made life easier for Cole, who now had only three far-from-home young players to babysit over Christmas. Cole had booked them into separate bungalows at the Chateau Marmont, off Sunset Boulevard: Bonzo and Plant in one together, Page on his own. The Marmont was an infamous Hollywood movie star bolthole. Jean Harlow had conducted her affair with Clark Gable there. Paul Newman met future wife Joanne Woodward there. Years later, John Belushi would overdose and die there. More recently, the late Heath Ledger would be filmed there snorting a white powder. In 1969, though, the Marmont had become the latest rock’n’roll hang-out. The place had a louche atmosphere that made it perfect for the sort of antics most bands Cole had worked with liked to get up to. Earlier that year, Graham Nash had lived there for five months. Before that, a drunken Jim Morrison had spilled out of a second-storey window, injuring his back and legs. Now Alice Cooper’s roadies played football naked on the mezzanine. But apart from a couple of tame food-fights, none of this new lot seemed to get it – except for Jimmy, of course, and even he seemed unusually preoccupied. Cole was perplexed. Having road-managed the Yardbirds on their final US tour just six months before, he felt he already knew all about Jimmy Page. How between shows he liked to unwind by collecting art and searching for antiques – or better still, chasing girls. All on-the-road pleasures Ricardo was happy to help him participate in – and fully expected to do so again once the tour got underway. The others he had yet to figure out, though. His first impression of Bonzo was of ‘a congenial fellow with a rich sense of humour and a contagious laugh’. Robert, though, ‘had an aura of arrogance around him – arrogance coupled with anxiety – that created a shell that was difficult to penetrate’.

  In fact, Plant was suffering from a tremendous attack of nerves. That and the jetlag the long journey had left him with had turned him into a complete mess. The band’s first show would be opening for Vanilla F
udge, in place of the original opening act that had been booked, the Jeff Beck Group, and Plant was almost paralysed with fear at the prospect. This was America, after all, a place he had fantasised about being in, performing in, for most of his life. Now he was here he was terrified he might blow it, might let the side down and crush the dream they all shared for Zeppelin before it had even got off the ground. He could tell Jimmy still harboured doubts about him, not as a singer, but as a performer, as someone fit to share the same stage as him. And he knew that in Jimmy’s world singers came and went; that this wasn’t the bloody Beatles, or even the Stones. That there was only one star of this group – and it wasn’t him. Newly married, freshly minted from the Atlantic advance, his whole future spread out before him like never before, Robert should have been on cloud nine, he told himself. Instead, he had never felt so alone or so far from home. Never felt so downright freaked out, man.

  Even his mate Bonzo wasn’t much help. Unable to sense the turmoil going on inside his friend, Bonham had his own problems. Unlike Plant, he wasn’t worried for his place in the band. Bonzo knew he was good; he didn’t need some soft Southern ponce to tell him that. No. Bonzo just hated not being at home for Christmas. He missed Pat and Jason. The fact that the older, more worldly-wise Jonesy had somehow managed to wangle it to be with his wife over Christmas only made him feel worse. It wasn’t fucking fair. But then, he’d taken the money, hadn’t he? Bought the big flash car? Now it was time to get on with the job. And so he kept his mouth shut and did his best to get on with it. But he didn’t like it, not one bit. As a result, without really comprehending the other’s difficulties, Plant and Bonham huddled together in those first days like two shipwreck survivors clinging to the same driftwood. They not only shared a room together, they would refuse to turn out the light and go to sleep until they were both safely tucked up in bed. Page, too wrapped up in his thoughts, appeared not to notice, but Cole observed it all with a cold eye. They would learn.