When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  When, on Christmas Day, Bonzo used the self-catering facilities in the bungalows to cook them all Christmas dinner, nobody was really in the mood to enjoy it. Besides, it was a blisteringly sunny day outside, too hot to be eating turkey and roast spuds. It just didn’t feel like Christmas. Plant, barely able to keep his food down, simply gave up. ‘I hate to dwell on it,’ he sighed, ‘but it’s really shitty being this far away from my wife at Christmas.’ Bonzo grunted his agreement but waited to see what Jimmy would say. He merely nodded. ‘It’s a sacrifice,’ he agreed, ‘but there’s going to be a pay-off. This band has a lot going for it. Let’s make the best of it.’ He raised his glass in a toast which the others joined him in, but nobody was smiling.

  After another sleepless night in the Plant and Bonham bungalow, the following morning Cole got them up early and drove them back to LAX, where they boarded a TWA flight to Denver. From there he rented a car and drove them straight to the Auditorium Arena, where Jones was already backstage waiting for them. It wasn’t just Robert who was nervous now. They always were before shows but this was the worst they had ever been: Plant pacing up and down the tiny dressing room chain-smoking and compulsively running his long fingers through his tight blonde curls, Bonzo obsessively rat-tat-tatting with his drumsticks on some cardboard boxes he’d found, while Page and Jones, more experienced but no less anxious, stood around avoiding eye-contact with each other, smoking and quivering in silence together.

  The first time they had opened the show for another, ostensibly more famous group, going on before Vanilla Fudge would see Zeppelin thrown in at the deep end. The Fudge were big time, famous for what the International Times had admiringly described as the ‘molten lead on vinyl’ of their slowed-down, heavy-laden recordings of pop hits like the Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ and the Beatles’ ‘Ticket To Ride’. Known for taking no prisoners, they had built their live reputation in America by opening shows for Hendrix, The Who, Cream and The Doors, often stealing the headliner’s thunder, said reviewers. Zeppelin shared the same label, Atlantic, even the same New York attorney, Steve Weiss. And they had toured with the Jeff Beck Group, where Grant and Cole had treated them well. But that didn’t mean the Fudge boys were going to give these British newcomers an easy ride. They had come up the hard way, just like Zeppelin were doing now. Now they were headliners they weren’t about to cede ground to anybody, friend or foe. All this ran through Jimmy’s mind as he stood there backstage, smoking and trying not to look the least bit concerned.

  Finally, after what seemed like forever, the third act on the bill, Zephyr, finished their set and walked slowly off the stage. The four Zeppelin boys wondered how much longer they would have to wait for their turn. The answer was: not long. Barely fifteen minutes later, a booming American voice announced over the PA: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, for their first American appearance, from London, England, please welcome…Led Zeppelin!’ There was a steady trickle of polite applause as they made their way in single file down the concrete stairs towards the stage. To add to their anxiety, they were forced to perform on a revolving platform, something Jimmy had done before in America where the idea of playing in-the-round was popular, but not something he had ever enjoyed. Robert, barefoot, still nervous, repeatedly introducing the band by name through the opening numbers, became confused over where to address himself. He’d start a sentence and by the time he’d finished it be looking out at a completely different set of faces. It was easier for the others, who didn’t rely on eye-contact with the audience. Jonesy stuck close by the drum riser, where Bonham was busy pummelling his kit into the ground. In the end, Robert merely closed his eyes and hoped for the best.

  The opening numbers all went by in a blur…‘Good Times Bad Times’…‘Dazed and Confused’…‘Communication Breakdown’…Jimmy’s violin showcase on ‘Dazed…’ went down particularly well, as it always had on previous Yardbirds tours. But by the end of the set there was something else going on too. The band had conquered its nerves and was working its way into a solid groove, Robert throwing his arms around like Joe Cocker, Jimmy swinging the flashy 1958 Fender Telecaster that Jeff Beck had given him around his knees, the notes tumbling out like sparks from a campfire. On through ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’…‘You Shook Me’…‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’…contracted to perform for forty minutes, in the end they played for just over an hour, the excitement amongst the crowd gradually building towards an unexpectedly deafening crescendo of applause when they finally took their bows and skipped off, trying not to stumble on the still revolving floor.

  In the dressing room afterwards they were all delighted. Not least Plant, who was overjoyed. ‘I loved it!’ he kept saying over and over. ‘I loved it!’ Then turning to whoever was standing next to him and demanding: ‘It was good, wasn’t it? It was good!’ It was. So much so, in fact, that in the headliner’s dressing room down the corridor there was now consternation. According to Fudge drummer Carmine Appice, once they had become headliners, ‘we always wondered who the band was that was going to come up and kick our butt – and it was Zeppelin.’

  If it was Peter Grant’s business acumen that ensured Led Zeppelin’s debut US tour would take the band to all the right places, it was Jimmy Page’s expertise as a live performer that ensured they would be remembered by everyone fortunate enough to catch them in those places. Although they only had one album – unreleased until three weeks into the tour – from which to draw material, the guitarist was happy to pad the set out with any number of crowd-pleasing cover versions. The giddy ascent of Dylan and the Beatles to the twin thrones of a newly established and highly elite rock aristocracy may have reinforced the idea that the most gifted artists performed only their own material, but this was still a time when international stars like Hendrix, the Stones, The Who, Joe Cocker and, yes, Jeff Beck, routinely covered songs, especially in a live setting. Certainly in the case of the Stones and The Who, both of whom had aspirations to emulate the Beatles as songwriters of serious repute, the covers would be carefully selected – Chuck Berry and Robert Johnson for the former; Eddie Cochran for the latter – in order to both reflect the impeccable tastes of the performers and to suggest a certain credibility-by-association genealogy.

  Led Zeppelin had more in common with the Jimi Hendrix approach: capable of originating their own material but equally at ease appropriating the work of others, with or without giving credit. Or put another way, they would play anything and everything they could think of to get the audience off, from revved-up versions of their own stuff to equally over the top versions of old Yardbirds hits (‘For Your Love’ was still trotted out to huge applause) and other guaranteed crowd-pleasers like ‘Tobacco Road’ (originally by the Nashville Teens), ‘Something Else’ (by Eddie Cochran), ‘As Long As I Have You’ (Garnett Mimms), ‘No Money Down’ (Chuck Berry), ‘Flames’ (Elmore Gantry)…whatever worked, even if it included old chestnuts like Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ or unexpected excursions like the Beatles’ ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. ‘There was the stuff that I had outlined in my mind,’ said Page. ‘Then there was stuff that was written, amongst all of us or some of us. Then there were numbers to make a full set. A few sort of dodgy versions of old Yardbirds things like “Over Under Sideways Down”, to songs which the band would go off into all these other areas on, just making frameworks for jamming, really.’

  Some of the covers – like ‘As Long As I Have You’, which Plant and Bonham had performed a more faithful version of in Band of Joy – would be so drawn-out and convoluted they would be stretched almost beyond recognition as the band used them as ‘frameworks’ to improvise around. Some, like ‘The Hunter’ (already a stand-out in the regular set of a new young London-based band called Free, who Jimmy admired but no-one in America had heard of yet) were more straightforward, if delivered at twice the normal speed as a moment of ‘spontaneity’ at the climax of ‘How Many More Times’. Others, like ‘Something Else’, would be ‘super hooligan’, the brutal sound o
f the Sex Pistols ten years ahead of their time. It didn’t matter where the songs came from, it was all ‘just an excuse to let rip and show what we could do’.

  Sometimes they would even purloin material from one of the other bands on the bill, as when Spirit joined the Vanilla Fudge tour for a few dates and Zeppelin took to incorporating into their set snatches of ‘Fresh Garbage’ from the debut, eponymously titled Spirit album. Page was also taken with Spirit singer-guitarist Randy California’s use of a theremin, which he had mounted atop his amplifier or sometimes down by his foot pedals. A device invented in 1920 by a Russian physics professor named Lev Termen (aka Leon Theremin), the theremin’s strange tone and single-note pitch would be achieved by moving one hand across an extra-sensitive antenna as the other hand adjusted the volume control. The result would be a series of ghostly wails and piercing sonic waves that became popular as tremble-tremble music in countless sci-fi epics of the post-war era. More recently, it had been used by the Beach Boys on ‘Good Vibrations’, no. 1 in the UK around the time Page was switching from bass to guitar in the Yardbirds. It wasn’t until he saw Randy California using one that he decided he wanted one too, buying his first theremin in New York at the start of the band’s second US tour later that year and initially using it to enhance the extended jam-section finale of ‘Dazed and Confused’, and later a more famous effect on the recording of ‘Whole Lotta Love’. (Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice would later claim that Page also ‘adapted’ a section of another, less well-known Spirit number, ‘Taurus’, from their first album, for the first five trademark chords of ‘Stairway To Heaven’, an allegation we will return to in due course.)

  Certainly, originality was low on the list of priorities, while at the top of it lay doing what Plant would later only half-jokingly describe as ‘what we knew got more people back to the hotel after the gig’, including another feature Beck would claim to have pioneered on previous tours with his own group: the call-and-response routine between guitar and vocal that Beck characterised as ‘the Harold Pinter-like question-and-answer with Rod, which hadn’t really been done before’. It was ‘one of the things we got noticed for in America,’ he insisted, and yet another trick Zeppelin would also put to good use when they arrived there a year later. Struggling some nights to keep up with Page’s rococo improvisations, Plant, whose multi-octave spread allowed him to push his untutored vocal style in all sorts of unlikely directions, would often simply discard words altogether, yelping and screaming, using his voice as ‘a fifth instrument’. It was an unfettered approach that worked incredibly well on long, showpiece numbers like ‘Dazed and Confused’ and later ‘Whole Lotta Love’, itself the end-product of extensive improvisatory onstage jams. ‘Right from the very first live performances there were these stretched-out improvisations,’ said Page. ‘There was always that energy, which just seemed to grow and grow.’ As time went on, and the shows got longer as the tours got bigger, ‘It could be almost trance-like some nights.’

  The aim: to shock American audiences that were then in thrall to the post-psychedelic, more ‘lateral’ sounds of the West Coast scene and groups like Love, Moby Grape, the Grateful Dead and even The Doors, whose pursuit of the intellectualisation of rock was then in full meandering force. Along with the less commercial emergence of the new ‘country rock’ scene in LA, Zeppelin’s music appeared to offer the antidote: a heady brew of ferocious hard rock and steamy blues, awash in lengthy improvisations built on snatches of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’, scraps of ‘Fought My Way Out Of Darkness’, and the soon to be famous line about squeezing lemons ‘until the juice runs down my leg’ from Robert Johnson’s ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’, made all the more remarkable, claims John Paul Jones, as ‘Bonzo and I weren’t into the blues at all. I’d never heard of Robert Johnson or Willie Dixon before I joined Zeppelin, but it became an easy thing to jam around on. Jimmy and Robert used to come in with licks and words; they’d start things and we’d follow on.’

  These were moments which would soon coalesce into the songs that became the second Led Zeppelin album, but were still then, on that first catch-as-catch-can tour, as yet unnamed, unplanned, just thrown out there with the sort of wild improvisatory abandon familiar to freeform jazz aficionados but still largely unknown to most mainstream rock fans. Far from merely following in the musical footsteps of the, in reality, much more conservative Beck Group, the nearest equivalent would have been the freeform excursions of Hendrix at his best – though even Jimi felt constrained by a need to do the hits, an idea he was already rebelling against but would not live long enough to fully abandon – or the sort of stretched-out, heavy-handed jamming Vanilla Fudge indulged in, where again it was a case of taking an established hit song and turning it inside out. For Led Zeppelin, the preoccupation when they played live was not nearly so contrived. With no hits of their own to speak of as yet, the idea was simply to lift an audience previously oblivious to their music as high and as fast as possible, leaving them utterly drained and spent by the end, giving whoever followed the band onto the stage an almost impossible task. And it worked. As a result, said Page, ‘our word-of-mouth reputation spread like a wildfire’.

  5

  High in the Sky

  There was far more, of course, to the appeal of a Led Zeppelin show than mere music. There was theatre, too. Jimmy Page’s violin bow showpiece, in particular, now began to take on a life of its own. Standing there alone on the stage, the bow held aloft like a baton, or perhaps a magic wand, what had begun in the psychedelic heyday of San Francisco as a mildly diverting moment in the Yardbirds show (an effect achieved by rubbing rosin onto the bow so that the guitar strings vibrated loudly as it sawed across them, then conducting the ensuing squall with skilful use of wah-wah pedals and echo units) now evolved into one of the most captivating and hallucinatory highlights of the live Led Zeppelin experience; the sort of trippy set-piece the new farout hippy kids adored, eventually stretching the song to more than half an hour in duration as Plant also began adding ad-libs, dropping in verses of ‘San Francisco’, ‘Walter’s Walk’ and anything else that came into his fevered mind. Everybody else always left the stage once Jimmy pulled out the violin bow, though. This was always his magical, moon-bathed moment, stopping the audience in its tracks by flicking the bow in their faces like an angry cat swishing its tail.

  In the Yardbirds the violin had been used during ‘Glimpses’. ‘I had tapes panning across the stage on this high-fidelity stereo sampler. It was quite avant-garde stuff for the time,’ Page recalled. However, it was replaced by ‘Dazed and Confused’ long before the formation of Led Zeppelin. ‘Some of the sounds that came out of it were just incredible, sometimes it would sound like that “Hiroshima” piece by Penderecki, and other times, it would have the depth of a cello.’

  The opportunities for Jimmy to fine-tune his performance were coming thick and fast now. This was still entry-level touring though; the soon-to-be legendary days of private planes and luxury hotel suites were still some way off. On that first US tour in 1969, they flew Coach Class on commercial airlines and used TWA’s ‘Discover America’ frequent-flyers plan to gain discounts wherever possible on planes and rental cars, travelling through the night wherever possible to save on hotels. Only when absolutely necessary would they check into Holiday Inns or airport motels. All four band members and their personal luggage would squeeze into the same car with Richard Cole at the wheel. Kenny Pickett would follow behind with all the equipment loaded into a three-ton, U-Haul truck. It’s under such make-or-break circumstances that most bands either forge unbreakable bonds or go swiftly to the wall. Fortunately for Jimmy Page, who had staked so much – personally and professionally – on the success of the venture, in Zeppelin’s case it was the former. Because of the uniformly excellent reactions they were getting to their shows each night, even when things went horribly wrong, they still, somehow, seemed to turn out right, although there were some close shaves.

  In Cole’s 1992 mem
oir, Stairway to Heaven, for example, he tells of a harrowing drive from Spokane to Seattle, where they were due to catch a flight to Los Angeles. An arctic blizzard meant that Spokane Airport was temporarily closed. It was New Year’s Eve and the band was keen to celebrate it: not under eight inches of snow, but in the warmth of LA. They also had an important show to do at the Whisky A Go Go on 2 January. So Cole took the enormously risky decision to drive the band through the snowstorm to Seattle Airport, where he had been told planes were still being allowed to take-off: a two-hundred-mile journey through knee-high slush and towering snow-banks that ‘started out bad’ and quickly got worse. ‘As we slipped and slid, the visibility became worse,’ he wrote. ‘And I was becoming more anxious. To try to calm myself, I reached into the backseat and grabbed a bottle of whisky. I handed it to Bonzo and said, “Open it! Quick! I need something to relax me!” We passed the bottle around, and everyone had a few swigs.’

  Brimful of Dutch courage and his own bloody-mindedness, when they came across a roadblock patrolled by state police who ordered them to turn back, Cole simply ignored them, driving back onto the highway at the next turn-off and continuing unabated to Seattle. ‘I felt victorious,’ he declared. ‘But after just a few minutes, I realised that maybe the cops had been right. Sheets of snow alternated with torrents of rain and hail. The winds were ferocious. We were the only car on the highway. Parts of the road were caked with ice, and the car was skidding from lane to lane. If conditions got any worse, I could have turned off the ignition and just let the car slide all the way to Seattle.’