When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Page, who was huddled in the backseat suffering with Hong Kong ’flu ‘didn’t have much energy to complain about anything’. Everyone else in the car, however, including Cole, ‘was absolutely terrified’. Crossing a narrow suspension bridge they found themselves swaying sickeningly in the wind. ‘We were so close to the edge – and to a drop of about 100 feet – that Bonzo and Robert became absolutely frantic. “Richard, you fuckin’ asshole, you’re about to get us killed!” Robert shrieked, grabbing the bottle of whisky from John Paul’s hands. “Oh, my God!” screamed Bonzo. “Can’t you pull over until this storm ends?” I shouted back, “Shut up, you fuckers, just drink some more whisky”. In fear and frustration, I pressed the accelerator to the floor and the car bolted ahead. Within another minute, we were safely on the other side of the bridge.’

  But the nightmare wasn’t over yet. When Cole made a piss stop a mile or so further up the road, the car slowly began to slide backwards off the road towards a precipice. Diving back into the car, Cole turned the steering wheel in the nick of time, bringing it to a halt as the occupants all screamed at him at once. They eventually made it to the airport all in one piece, followed a little later by Kenny Pickett, who had also ignored the police warning, but had not been so lucky keeping his vehicle on the road, crashing through a perimeter fence into someone’s front yard, before righting himself and continuing on. Page, whose ’flu made him largely oblivious, told ‘Ricardo’ he was a hero. Jones, who had been abject with rage, was so drained he could no longer speak. Bonham was laughing hysterically. Plant, who had dived headfirst into the driver’s seat at one point to try and hit the brakes with his hands, felt Cole should have been fired for his outrageous actions. He would never entirely trust his road manager again.

  Mum and Dad always wanted what was best for you. A nice respectable job sat behind a desk, the sort of thing that would provide the kind of security they themselves had dreamed of during the war years. You understood all that but it was different for you, why couldn’t they see that? They just didn’t understand. Even when you tried talking to them properly without losing your head and giving up halfway through, they just didn’t listen. Dad said one thing, Mum said another. You said something else again. The arguments just went round and round. Going on and on about your hair. It wasn’t even that long. No one had short-back-and-sides anymore, why should you? And when you weren’t arguing you were barely speaking to each other, sitting at the table eating, hardly saying a word, Dad not even looking at you.

  Years later, you would romanticise this bleak period of your life. ‘I only dared go home at night because my hair was so long,’ you’d smile. ‘So I left home and started my real education, moving from group to group, furthering my knowledge of the blues and other music which had weight.’ But it was never going to be that simple. By the time you’d left grammar school, you had a regular spot at the Seven Stars Blues Club, getting up and singing a couple of tunes if and when the regular turn, the Delta Blues Band, let you. Dad did at least agree to drive you there and back once a week. You dreamed he might hang around one night to hear you do your stuff – see you belting out ‘I’ve Got My Mojo Working’ or ‘Route 66’ – and change his mind, but no chance, mate. Even when you teamed up now and again with an acoustic guitar player in order to land a spot at a folk club, doing ‘Corinna Corinna’ or ‘In My Time Of Dying’ from the first two Dylan albums, stuff that had nothing to do with the Beatles or pop music, your dad still looked on it all as a complete waste of time.

  Anyway, you didn’t care what your dad thought, not really. By the end of 1964 the Mod cut had gone. In its place you now allowed a sort of bouffant to grow, constantly standing in front of the mirror combing it with one of those special barber’s combs with the razor in it. If your mates had seen you they’d have called you a poof but you didn’t care. It looked good and the birds loved it. By now your curly blond hair was creeping down to your shoulders. You would try disguising its length by slapping it down with Dippety-Do gel but you still got it in the ear from the old man. It wasn’t just at home that you heard about it now, either. You’d get it out in the street now too, in the pub, on the bus. ‘Get yer ’air cut!’ was the most common. ‘Bloody poof!’ Or ‘Fucking queer!’ But instead of putting you off it just made you more and more defiant, playing up the effeminacy on stage, sashaying around, grinning whenever you caught the eye of one of the girls who would crowd down the front. Their boyfriends further back, with their work and school haircuts, would look on with disgust. Sometimes they’d even come up to you afterwards. Luckily you were tall and a good talker or there might have been even more disgruntled boyfriends coming up afterwards.

  But you had to bite the bullet when Mum and Dad finally cornered you into going for an interview for ‘a proper job’ as a trainee chartered accountant: something to aim for, they said, for when you’d finished college. Sure enough, when you left college in 1965, you turned up and began work in that horrible, disgusting, boring bloody office. You weren’t getting your hair cut, though. They could stuff that. You’d just slap the Dippety-Do on even heavier, hide the rest of it under your collar and tie. And you were still out most nights, singing or watching other singers, turning up for work the next day knackered, the adding machine figures swimming before your poor red eyes. You lasted in the job just two weeks before they took you to one side and told you they didn’t think you were really suitable.

  Good. Who cared what some old fool in a shiny suit thought about anything anyway? You only cared what the audience thought, them and the other musicians and singers you were now meeting and mingling with at night, lying about your age, your lack of experience, trying to fit in with a crowd that was hard to get to know unless you were somehow already one of them, and you desperately wanted to be. So you concentrated on your singing. Started to sound less like a nervous schoolboy and more like what you thought you should. Less mannered, more earthy and real; started to open your shoulders and really have a go at it. The more you did it, the more your confidence grew. You knew you weren’t technically all that great, wouldn’t have even known how to be without someone to show you, to teach you. But what you wanted to do you knew no-one could teach you, to growl like Howlin’ Wolf, to wheeze like Bukka White, to croon like Elvis and holler like Little Richard. Your voice wasn’t pure like theirs, you knew that; knew you couldn’t hold a silver note the way Roy Orbison could – who could? But you knew what you were after and you were getting closer to it, you felt, every time you held your heart in your mouth and climbed up on a stage. Learning how to hold the mike, pushing it away from your mouth like so on the big choruses, pulling it back closer on the verses, seeing how a moan or a sigh could be as effective as a strangulated scream. How a strangulated scream could sometimes work better than anything…

  ‘I had a long way to go with my voice then,’ Robert Plant would say of his early days in Zeppelin. ‘But at the same time the enthusiasm and spark of working with Jimmy’s guitar shows through quite well. It was all very raunchy then. Everything was fitting together into a trademark for us. We were learning what got us off most and what got people off most.’ By the time he and Zeppelin had returned to LA to play the Whisky A Go Go, word was out on the band even though the album still hadn’t been released. FM radio was beginning to play advance copies of it, crowds were starting to form outside their dressing room each night, the pretty girls suddenly just as interested as the serious-faced boys who were now going into record stores and ordering their own copies of the album.

  Although Los Angeles was not yet America’s foremost record industry city – still ranked then a poor third behind New York and San Francisco – the Whisky was the first prestige venue of the tour. The band was booked for a five-night co-headline residency with Alice Cooper, during which the cream of the city’s music biz insiders were expected to show up. Ironically, then, it was the first time on the tour when the band did not approach their task in an unusually nervous mental state. Aware of how important
the run would be, they were nevertheless so charmed by LA itself – the glorious weather, the gorgeous girls, the generally laid-back ambience of the people and the place – playing the Whisky for five nights was seen almost as a mini-break; a warm-up for the even more arduous task of appearing in San Francisco that would immediately follow.

  The venue itself only cheered them further. It was situated in a building on Sunset Boulevard that had once been a branch of the Bank of America – hence its industrial green paintwork – with alcoves where the safes and desks had once been refurbished to home a small stage flanked by outlandishly large speakers. The scene was topped off by a series of glass-enclosed cages into which gaggles of miniskirted girls would take it in shifts to dance the night away; the sort of place Zeppelin would have enjoyed going to even if they hadn’t been performing there. As it was they would have five nights to enjoy themselves. Jimmy, in particular, who had played the venue before and always enjoyed himself in LA, was in his element, despite still suffering from the ravages of ’flu.

  With the week stretching out before them, the band settled into the Chateau Marmont and began to take in their surrounds. Not yet into the full-on, town-owning, party-head mode they would occupy in years to come, the band indulged in less careworn offstage activities. Drugs were not yet an issue. According to Richard Cole, there was ‘plenty of marijuana’ and ‘occasionally a snort or two of cocaine’. But alcohol was still the only ‘everyday indulgence’ at this stage. ‘John Paul liked gin and tonic. Robert would drink mostly wine and sometimes Scotch. Jimmy was attached to Jack Daniel’s. But Bonzo and I weren’t as fussy. From Drambuie to beer to champagne, we’d drink just about anything…’ As a result, all four members, all so different in their various ways, were now becoming close in a way that would not have been possible under any other circumstances. This became most evident on stage when Plant, relieved at not having to be compared to anyone else on the bill anymore, began coming out of his shell at last. Walking on stage each night in bare feet, he may have appeared to have ‘gone native’ in fact, he was simply doing what he could to try to relax himself and remember that he was, as he puts it now, ‘still just a hippy from the Black Country’, however much he felt out of his comfort zone elsewhere on the trip. ‘As a performer I might have remained huddled, clutching the mike stand with a large “Excuse me” written over my head,’ he said. But it was in LA, where they would be headliners in their own right for the first time in America, that ‘things finally started coming together’.

  Offstage, Plant and Bonham still huddled together. Both, in their own way, couldn’t wait to get home: missing wives and children; freaked out by their first in-at-the-deep-end tour of America; holed-up together in what they were told was Burl Ives’s usual bungalow, while Ricardo doubled-up in a bungalow with Page and Jones shared space with Kenny Pickett. ‘It was a bit like being on a space shuttle, in a way,’ Plant later told me. ‘So we did grow together, although we were never really particularly similar. But we had common ground which we began to share and we realised as time went on that we had to make this thing work.’

  The more experienced Page and Jones handled things better: both men adept at always keeping a little back for themselves, going their separate ways as soon as the band checked into a hotel; the unofficial senior partners of the foursome. ‘There was also the North-South divide and a lot of friendly teasing going on,’ remembered Jones. ‘I think Robert was still slightly in awe of us. To him, session men were pipe-smoking, Angling Times-reading, shadowy figures. He never knew what to make of me and to an extent still doesn’t.’ But if some members appeared more equal than others early on, there was clearly only one member in charge. Usually, ‘Jimmy used to have one room and all three of us would be in another!’ Jones laughingly recalled. ‘But we soon changed all that.’ As the only one who’d toured America before, however, Page tended to cut a solitary figure, although he and Peter Grant spent quite a bit of time together, going out searching for antiques.

  As such, though the Whisky shows all went well, the band’s main memories now are of ‘offstage looning around,’ as Plant puts it. When asked later what his main memories of that trip to LA were, he simply laughed. ‘Nineteen years old and never been kissed!’ It was, quite simply, ‘the first time I ever saw a cop with a gun, the first time I ever saw a twenty-foot-long car…there were a lot of fun-loving people to crash into. People were genuinely welcoming us to the country and we started out on a path of positive enjoyment, throwing eggs from floor to floor and really silly water battles and all the good fun that a boy should have.’ It was, he accurately surmised, ‘just the first steps of learning how to be crazy’.

  From LA, the band flew to San Francisco for the first of three nights at the Fillmore West. Already waiting for them was Peter Grant – and Maureen Plant, who lovesick Robert had been allowed to fly in. Grant had been tipped off about Plant’s insecurities and he needed him happy and at his best for these shows – San Francisco was the big kahuna. Plant was a typical Leo, preening in front of the mirror, sauntering around in that unself-conscious ‘Black Country hippy’ way. But when Leos are insecure they begin to fall apart and G was worried that Robert, who had repeatedly been told how important the San Francisco dates were, might blow it. Plant told me: ‘Peter Grant had said if we don’t make it in San Francisco, at the Fillmore West, up against the cream of American music, if you can’t kick arse there, the band won’t be able to tour again,’ He chuckled somewhat sheepishly at the memory. ‘[Robert] did lack a bit of confidence,’ said Grant, who admitted he used to ‘hide all the negative reviews we had’ from the singer.

  The Fillmore West was also where they got to know the already legendary promoter Bill Graham: a man who would figure prominently throughout the Led Zeppelin story in America. Born Wolfgang Grajonka in Berlin in 1931, the only surviving son of a persecuted Jewish family, Graham had escaped from the Nazis when he was just ten years old, fleeing an orphanage in Paris to walk all the way to Marseille, from where he stowed away on a ship to New York. Accepted as a homeless European refugee who spoke little or no English, he was given the more ‘American’ sounding name of William Graham and left to fend for himself. A tough upbringing on the streets of Queens and Brooklyn led to him finding work as a waiter in the Catskills when he was still barely a teenager. He later recalled, however, that it was here he learned the value of good service. An insight that would much endear him to the concert-going public after he’d saved up for a Greyhound ticket to the northern Californian coast where he began holding his own ‘evening entertainments’(although the musicians he often rode rough-shod over didn’t always see it that way).

  In 1966, he began to preside over two of the most legendary live music venues of the era: the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco – dubbed the Fillmore West – and its similarly named East Coast equivalent in New York. It was as boss of the two Fillmores that Graham almost single-handedly revolutionised the rock concert industry in America. Before Graham, promoters were fly-by-nights, used-car salesmen in disguise who would book a hall, however unsuitable, and stock it with as many acts as possible, using low-rent sound systems and herding the kids in and out again like cabbages; the ringleaders of a cash-rich business that soon moved on. The first promoter to identify the emerging rock culture for what it was, seeing beyond its potential merely as a cash cow, Graham began producing the first of several benefits for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He had a simple idea – high-end production values and top-quality entertainment – and it caught on quickly with the new anti-materialistic generation of concert-goers. Along with his similar-minded rival, Chet Helms of the Family Dog, Graham’s venues were the first to popularise light shows and produce bespoke concert posters; the first to manufacture specifically tailored merchandising that could be sold inside his venues; and the first to attempt State-wide tours and large-scale events such as the soon-to-be-famous New Year’s Eve extravaganzas with his favourite San Francisco band, the Grateful Dead.
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br />   Anyone, however, who misread these ventures and assumed him to be a proto-hippy, was in for a rude awakening. Like Peter Grant, Graham had come up in the ‘wild west’ days of the music biz and had the brawling, street-wise style to match. Most often seen either yelling into a phone or someone’s face, he both terrified and repulsed many of his would-be clients. Not because he was a bully but because he was, as he said, ‘a stickler for principles’. In fact, like Grant, this apparently thick-skinned hustler was a deeply insecure individual who took every perceived slight to heart and above all feared being found wanting, of being a failure.

  Mac Poole recalled Bonzo telling him how some nights on the US tour he’d become accustomed to playing without proper amplification. He had even come to see it as a badge of honour: the drummer who hit so hard he didn’t need to be miked up. Poole recalled Bonham telling how he had boasted to Graham: ‘That’s why I’ve got a twenty-six-inch bass drum, I don’t need a mike!’ To which Graham had replied sternly: ‘Listen, son, if you don’t get miked you ain’t gonna be heard past the first three rows no matter how hard you hit the kit. Now go get a fucking mike.’ Bonham did as he was told. The result, as Jones later recalled, is that the Fillmore became ‘the first milestone. I remember when we started the show there were just a lot of people standing there thinking, “Who the hell are you?” We turned a very indifferent crowd into a lot of warm and receptive people.’