When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Country Joe and the Fish were the headliners, Taj Mahal the opener. Not that anybody remembered much the next day about either after Zeppelin had finished mangling the audience’s minds. It would remain a cherished memory for them all. ‘In some ways the earlier American shows we did at places like the Fillmore were more real for me,’ Plant told me in 2003, ‘because they were easier for me to understand. There the audiences were getting three nights a week where every group in town would get up and play, everyone from the Steve Miller Band to the Rascals and Roland Kirk. There was enormous flexibility and choice and you really had to stand up and be counted for what you were.’ As Page observes: ‘The early interest was partly caused by the fact that I’d been in the Yardbirds and a lot of Americans had liked that group and wanted to see what Jimmy Page had moved on to. But then when they saw what we had to offer…I mean, Led Zeppelin was frightening stuff! The concept of psychedelic music was about roaming and roving but never actually coming together. That’s why Zeppelin succeeded: there was a real urgency about how we played. Everyone would be getting laid-back and we’d come on and hit ’em like an express train.’ The Fillmore West was the moment ‘when I knew we’d broken through. There were other gigs, like the Boston Tea Party and the Kinetic Circus in Chicago, which have unfortunately disappeared as venues, where the response was so incredible we knew we’d made our impression. But after the San Francisco gig it was just – bang!’

  When you looked back, it was like you’d known Jeff forever. Which wasn’t true, you didn’t even live near each other as kids. But he was the first other guitarist you ever really knew who was the same age as you and into the same sort of things, like Gene Vincent’s guitarist, Cliff Gallup, who was big and fat and must have been at least forty but was about the only one playing the really sharp, fast stuff back then. You and Jeff liked him a lot – him and Scotty Moore and James Burton. It was like no-one else had even heard of them until suddenly Jeff was there. Talking about them, the two of you trading licks together, showing each other how it was done.

  It was Jeff’s sister, Annette, who’d got you together. It was her who told you about her brother who’d made his own guitar. You’d say, yeah? Tell him to come round one day. Then suddenly one day he did, standing there at the front door with his homemade guitar. You thought perhaps he was a bit funny but once he started playing it he was actually quite good, knocking out the James Burton solo from Ricky Nelson’s ‘My Babe’. You joined in, playing along on the orange-coloured Gretsch, but not making a big thing of it, wanting to make him feel at home. It was a good laugh.

  Jeff – Geoffrey Arnold Beck – was from Wallington, only a bus ride away from Epsom. Another softly spoken Surrey boy who’d sung in the local church choir. Then one day he’d borrowed a guitar from a school friend. When he finally gave it back the strings were all broken. He didn’t have the ten bob to buy a new set so he restrung it with some old piano wire which he’d been using for flying his model aeroplanes. You laughed when he told you that. You’d never have dared do such a thing! Then when he told you he’d actually done some shows, playing at a fairground when he was fourteen, doing ‘Be Bop-A-Lula’, you looked at him differently. He wasn’t in your league, obviously, but you could see him getting up there, giving it a bloody good go. Now he was at Wimbledon Art College, which is how you first heard of him. You were at the Art College in Sutton, where Jeff’s sister went too. ‘You gotta see Jimmy, this weird thin guy playing a weird-shaped guitar like yours,’ she’d kept telling him.

  When you told Jeff you’d already been in a working band, touring the country, he didn’t know what to say. Asked you how…when…? You told him how when you were fourteen you’d been on the telly, on the talent show, All Your Own, you and some mates from school, playing a skiffle tune you’d come up with called – don’t laugh – ‘Mama Don’t Allow No Skiffle Around Here’, followed by a proper tune from Leadbelly: ‘Cotton Fields’. How Huw Wheldon, the stuffy host, had asked you afterwards if you played any other styles. ‘Yes,’ you’d told him, looking at him like he must be deaf or something. ‘Spanish guitar.’ It wasn’t the right answer and the old boy asked if you’d be playing skiffle when you left school. ‘No,’ you’d told him, silly old duffer. What then? ‘I could do biological research,’ you’d said. Jeff laughed out loud at that. But it was true and you told him how when you left school at fifteen you did so with five ‘O’ levels, enough to apply for a job as a trainee lab technician.

  Music was more just a hobby then. After school, though, things began to change. You began to change. You lost your virginity ‘one particular day in the summer’ when ‘this girl and I wandered hand in hand through the countryside. It was the first time I felt truly in love.’ Now Jeff didn’t know where to look, went back to noodling on his guitar. So you changed the subject and you talked about how you had both just missed doing National Service, abolished just a few days before your seventeenth birthday. Phew! Imagine that! How your first real group after school had been the Redcats, backing combo to Red E. Lewis, an older chap who did a regular weekly spot at Epsom’s Ebisham Hall, which was the real start of everything, really. Until then you’d just been jumping up and playing with whoever would let you. You and groups like Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds, whose guitarist, Bobby Taylor, was the only English player you’d ever seen – apart from Hank Marvin on the telly – with a Stratocaster. The Dave Clark Five had also played there, but this was before ‘Glad All Over’ and you’d been in the support band. That was the night Chris Tidmarsh saw you. Chris was the leader of the Redcats – Red E. Lewis himself! Like Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps only not as good, obviously, but still really good. You were still waiting to hear back about the lab tech job when Chris offered to audition you in a function room above that pub in Shoreditch. You were still playing the Futurama but Chris said you were all right and actually offered you the job. Blimey, you said. The Redcats didn’t just play in Epsom, they played in London! There was even talk of them making records, though Chris had made it clear you wouldn’t be needed for any of that, just the shows. You didn’t mind. He even said he’d talk to your mum and dad first, which was terrific, telling them he’d keep an eye on you and not to worry about the lab job, you’d soon be making much more money playing in the group.

  Then it all changed again when Chris decided the Gene Vincent thing wasn’t working anymore and changed his stage name to Neil Christian, renaming the band the Crusaders. He said you should have a flash new name too so you became Nelson Storm. That was the first time you really began to feel it, what it might be like to really be a pop star. When the girls firststartedreallypayingattentionandyoufeltthejingle-jangleofrealmoney in your pocket for the first time. That was when it really began to feel really, really good. But reality soon started to sink in when you found yourself going up and down the country doing one-nighters, playing all over the gaff, doing Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley numbers, old blues things. Jeff looked at you with envy in his eyes as you told him about it but he didn’t know what it was like. No M1 in those days, just a load of winding roads going nowhere, a load of flat tyres, flat batteries and flat beer. Playing to punters that just wanted dance tunes, who didn’t know what the blues was. Getting changed in the bogs, sleeping in the back of the horrible old van, puking up pale ale as the others looked on and laughed. You were just ‘the boy’, the baby of the group, and though they knew you could play they would all take the mickey, bloody bastards. ‘Then what?’ said Jeff, still all goo-goo eyed. Then you’d had enough, you told him. Kept getting ill and just couldn’t stand it anymore. Which is when you’d packed it in and went to art college instead. You still liked to play but you kept schtum about it at college in case they went on at you to whip the guitar out and play for them at lunchtimes. Sod that! But then you met Jeff, who became more like a brother than a best mate; a brotherhood for two boys who had no real brothers of their own. And your interest in the guitar began to soar again.

  Now you’d met Jeff, suddenly
it wasn’t just about Scotty Moore or James Burton or Cliff Gallup or even Elvis, it was about all sorts of things, from classical to folk to blues. Especially blues. Otis Rush and ‘So Many Roads’: the sort of thing that would send shivers up your spine. LPs like American Folk Festival of the Blues with Buddy Guy – unbelievable! Or B.B. King’s fantastic Live At The Regal. Or anything by Freddie King and Elmore James, just knockout! Not forgetting Hubert Sumlin, who you especially loved. Hubert Sumlin, whose guitar was the equal of Howlin’ Wolf’s voice, always the right phrase at the right time…‘Killing Floor’, ‘How Many More Years’…Blues was the connection to another world, different people, more like you and Jeff. The first time you met Mick and Keith was at a blues festival, somewhere up north. This was years before the Stones. Sending off to America for records you couldn’t buy in the shops, writing off mail order to labels like Excello, Aladdin, Imperial and Atlantic. Long before British labels like Pye would stick out a bit of Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters as part of their so-called International R&B series.

  It was the blues that brought you back into the music business. Art college was all right but you’d only been there a few weeks before you found yourself getting up and having a blow one night at the Marquee, sitting in with Cyril Davies’ new band, the All Stars. You’d first met Cyril after he and Alexis Korner had been sacked from Chris Barber’s jazz outfit. Together they’d formed Blues Incorporated, which was basically Cyril on mouth organ, Alexis on guitar and anyone else who fancied getting up and having a blow. This was at that funny little club in Ealing between a jeweller’s and the ABC teashop. You got all sorts there, Charlie Watts, Brian Jones, Ray Davies, Paul Jones, Dick Taylor…

  Cyril had asked you to join his band after he’d broken away from Alexis and that whole scene had started up again with a Tuesday night residency at the Marquee. You fancied a bit of that but you were still with Neil Christian at the time and, besides, the thought of leaving Neil to join Cyril then getting ill again and letting him down was too much to bear. Cyril was an older bloke and not the sort you wanted to let down. When Mick Jagger went to him for harmonica lessons, Cyril had just glared at him: ‘You put it in your mouth and fucking blow!’ It wasn’t until you were down the Marquee one night and Cyril told you to get up and have a go with what they called the interval band – a load of Cyril’s mates, basically – that you finally ended up playing with him. Only for fifteen minutes here and there – sometimes Jeff and Nicky Hopkins would get up too – but it was after one of those that somebody came up and asked you if you’d like to play on a record. Of course you did! And before you knew it you were doing all these studio dates at night, while still going to college in the day. Which is when the crossroads appeared and you were left with a choice.

  The day after the final show in San Francisco, the Led Zeppelin album was released. None of the band could resist the opportunity to visit record stores whenever they could just to see what it looked liked racked up on the shelves in the ‘New Releases’ section. Its arty sleeve featured a Warholian facsimile of a photograph taken of the Hindenburg airship that caught fire during a flight in 1937, resulting in the death of thirty-five of its ninety-seven passengers, the name ‘Led Zeppelin’ tucked unobtrusively into the left-hand corner, the Atlantic logo directly opposite bottom-right. An image that has been most often described since as ‘phallic’, a cynical reference to the band’s non-intellectual status amongst culturally snobbish rock critics, for the people that actually bought the album, it was simply an action-packed image that reflected the ‘explosive’ nature of its contents, which was of course the intention.

  George Hardie, who created the image from the original black-and-white photo, certainly interpreted it that way. A student at the Royal Academy of Art who had previously worked with the photographer Stephen Goldblatt on the Truth sleeve – ‘I’d helped him out with some typography’ – Hardie had originally suggested a ‘multiple sequential image’ of a zeppelin partly submerged in clouds ‘based on a club design I had seen in San Francisco.’ But Page didn’t like it. He already had the image he wanted, showing Hardie the photo of the burning zeppelin from a library book and telling him to ‘recreate it.’ Hardie ‘did it dot for dot’ using a Rapidograph. (Hardie’s rejected artwork eventually turned up, uncredited, as a motif of clouds and suns on the second Zeppelin album.) Hardie received a flat fee of £60 for his work: a pittance, in retrospect, for an album that would eventually sell millions. But it got him started in the business and he went on to work with Hipgnosis, the company that would become famous in the Seventies for the sleeves of albums by Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and several others. He now works as an illustrator and lectures at the University of Brighton. (Interestingly, as if to show they didn’t bear a grudge, the clock-face photo of the band on the back of the sleeve was taken by Chris Dreja.)

  With the album not due out in Britain until March, the band was eager to discover what America would make of their music now it was finally something they could take home and listen to at their leisure. The answer was a fairly even split between the general public, who loved the work, and the US music press, who most assuredly did not. The review that really got the bandwagon rolling was the one written by John Mendelssohn in Rolling Stone, which described Led Zeppelin as the poor relation to Truth, with the band offering ‘little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn’t say as well or better three months ago.’ Going on to describe Page as ‘a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs,’ it characterised Plant’s vocals as ‘strained and unconvincing shouting’, damned ‘Good Times Bad Times’ as ‘a Yardbirds’ B-side’ and called ‘How Many More Times’ ‘monotonous’. It concluded: ‘In their willingness to waste their considerable talent on unworthy material the Zeppelin has produced an album which is sadly reminiscent of Truth. Like the Beck Group they are also perfectly willing to make themselves a two (or, more accurately, one-a-half) man show.’

  Sentiments echoed by several early reviewers, if not quite as vehemently expressed, it was the accusation of following in Beck’s footsteps that once again most stung Page, who had not anticipated their ability to pick up so readily on the ‘shared influences’ of the two albums, or to express such enmity towards the idea. As such, it was the beginning of a mutually acrimonious relationship between Led Zeppelin and the music press – and Jimmy Page and certain writers, in particular – that would last for the entire lifetime of the band, and beyond, to the present day. ‘It really pissed me off when people compared our first album to the Jeff Beck Group and said it was very close conceptually,’ Page was still complaining in an interview with the American magazine, Trouser Press, nearly ten years later. ‘It was nonsense, utter nonsense. The only similarity was that we’d both come out of the Yardbirds and we both had acquired certain riffs individually from the Yardbirds.’ But then, as John Paul Jones pointed out, it seemed as though most critics had made up their minds about Led Zeppelin before they’d even heard the album. They were all ‘hype’ and there was no more serious crime in the late Sixties. ‘We got to America and read the Rolling Stone review of the very first album, which was going on about us as another hyped British band. We couldn’t believe it. In our naïvety we thought we’d done a good album and were doing all right, and then all this venom comes flying out. We couldn’t understand why or what we’d done to them. After that we were very wary of the press, which became a chicken-and-egg situation. We avoided them and so they started to avoid us. It was only because we did a lot of shows that our reputation got around as a good live band.’

  As Jones suggests, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of the band’s live reputation at this stage, or the fact that Peter Grant had seen fit to put them out on tour in America so early on, before they even had a record out. Had he held back and waited for the critical verdict to come in first, it’s feasible that Zeppelin might not have toured America at all that first year, or certainly with much less wilful abandon. Instead, the Rolling Stone review and oth
ers arrived just as the Zeppelin was already in its ascendancy. Concerts were going so well that other ostensibly better-known bands were now refusing to follow Zeppelin on stage, and a second headlining tour of the US was already in the offing for the spring, when Atlantic aimed to drive home the message by releasing the band’s first single.

  On 28 January they returned for their second date at the Boston Tea Party, a 400-seater club constructed from a converted synagogue. The big local FM radio station in Boston, WBCN, was now playing the album round the clock and the show was a sell-out with hundreds more squeezing in than should have. When the band walked offstage for the first time that night, having played for their usual hour-plus, the crowd was in such frenzy they were swiftly brought back out to play for another fifty-five minutes, twelve encores in all that induced several standing ovations, many in the middle of songs. But when the band did their bows and walked off for the second time, fans began clambering onto the stage and yelling even more furiously for them to come back. The band, standing shattered mere feet away, could only comply. Finally, having performed their usual set, plus improvisations, nearly two dozen encores and covers all the way through twice, they actually ran out of songs to play. A laughing, sweating Page could only cough into his cigarette and beg the others: ‘What songs do you know?’ He was greeted with shell-shocked faces and shaking heads. But the crowd simply wouldn’t let them go. They stumbled back out and performed rough approximations of ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’, ‘Long Tall Sally’, segued into barely remembered old blues riffs they simply busked into something else. By the fourth hour they had given up trying to do anything original at all and were exhaustingly blasting out old hits by the Beatles, the Stones and The Who, and still the crowd stamped their feet and hollered for more, more, more. When they came off finally, after four-and-a-half hours, they found Grant, the big guy who had already seen it all fuck you very much, weeping with joy in the dressing room. ‘Peter was absolutely ecstatic,’ said Jones. ‘He was crying, if you can imagine that, and hugging us all. [He] picked all four of us up at once.’