by Mick Wall
Still the critics weren’t having it. Jon Landau described the Boston show as ‘loud…violent and often insane’. However, he did acknowledge that Zeppelin was attracting a generally younger generation of rock fans than the one Landau belonged to, where the cultural and political epiphanies of earlier Sixties artists like Dylan and the Beatles had been so important they couldn’t help but feel everything that came after needed to be considered in that context. Ironically, John Lennon, who unbeknownst to critics like Landau was about to leave the Beatles, was now leaning in the opposite direction, having exhausted the possibilities of the post-psychedelic rock he had once been such an advocate of in favour of a return to the ‘more honest’ evocation of good-time rock. ‘There’s nothing conceptually better than rock’n’roll,’ he would lecture Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in December 1970. ‘No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones, has ever improved on “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” for my money.’ Led Zeppelin, in many ways, would become the living embodiment of that sentiment. As Page would opine in a February 1970 Record Mirror interview, ‘I feel that some so-called progressive groups have gone too far with their personalised intellectualisation of beat music. I don’t want our music complicated by that kind of ego trip. Our music is essentially emotional like the old rock stars of the past. It’s difficult to listen to those early Presley records and not feel something. We are not going out to make any kind of moral or political statement. Our music is simply us.’
But while Landau and his fellow beard-strokers may not have approved of the unencumbered-by-political-ideal excitement this new music was causing, he was astute enough to foresee that the coming of Led Zeppelin and the bands that would inevitably follow represented a musical and cultural phenomenon that simply no longer relied on what he or his contemporaries thought. ‘Zeppelin forced a revival of the distinction between popularity and quality,’ he would later write. ‘As long as the bands most admired aesthetically were also the bands most successful commercially (Cream, for instance), the distinction was irrelevant. But Zeppelin’s enormous commercial success, in spite of critical opposition, revealed the deep division in what was once thought to be a homogeneous audience. That division has now evolved into a clearly defined mass taste and a clearly defined elitist taste.’
Where he was mistaken, of course, was in the accusation that Zeppelin’s speedily mushrooming popularity came at an artistic price: the condensing of their talent into a lowest common denominator designed to appeal to ‘mass taste’. But with only that first bludgeoning album of hardly original material to go on, it’s easy to see now how Neanderthal the screamingly libidinous Zeppelin live show of 1969 must have appeared to people like Jon Landau. At a time when both Dylan and the Beatles no longer even deigned to perform live and their closest followers were getting ready for the ‘return to the garden’ of Woodstock, the unbridled ecstasy of a Led Zeppelin performance must have seemed an irrelevance at best, an offence at worst. Still clinging to the ideals of a decade now skittering towards its bruised and battered end, they simply didn’t get it. You only had to visit the former flower-power citadel of Haight-Ashbury and note how deeply the ravages of heroin addiction had now overtaken the mind-expanding adventurism of LSD to see how poorly the message of the rock medium had actually been received, even when transmission was at its optimum with bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane on hand to deliver it. Ultimately, in an age when the threat of being sent to burn in the hell-on-earth of Vietnam was the chief concern of American record buyers under the age of twenty-five, the music of Led Zeppelin spoke to them in a way no other artist was doing at that point. The more benighted the band appeared to the ‘elitist taste’ makers of the US underground press, the more beloved they became for the kids who were now beginning to buy the album in their hundreds of thousands. The critics may not have approved of their ‘too loud’ album, but rather than quashing the possible audience for Led Zeppelin, it had the opposite effect, reclassifying them as iconic rule-breakers for a younger, more thrill-seeking generation. Certainly, the new album-oriented FM radio stations then springing up all over America had no such objections to the music. As well as WBCN in Boston and KSAN in San Francisco, other FM stations in New York, LA, Detroit and Chicago were now also playing the album round the clock, focusing on ‘Communication Breakdown’, ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ and ‘Dazed and Confused’. As quick as the critics were to put them down, their momentum was building faster than ever.
There was still one last tour highlight to come: their first appearances at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York - a two-night stint on 31 January and 1 February. They stayed at the Gorham Hotel on West 55th Street, which like the Marmont, came with kitchen-equipped suites, making it a cheap and cheerful stopover popular with visiting British bands since Who manager Chris Stamp had discovered it the year before. Arriving by car from Philadelphia early on the morning of 30 January, with three nights in New York to look forward to, the band settled in. It was important they relaxed. Like San Francisco, New York was a make-or-break date, maybe even more important. The home of the Atlantic top brass, the gigs would be full not just of other musicians, journalists, radio DJs and other scene-makers, but the first chance Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler would have to see how their investment was working out.
The openers on a bill topped the first night by Porter’s Popular Preachers and the headliners, Iron Butterfly, Grant managed to pull off a massive stroke when he took Graham aside during the soundcheck and asked him for ‘a special favour’: bumping Zeppelin up to second spot on the bill. ‘Do it for an old friend,’ Grant smiled, showing his tobacco-stained teeth. It was the band’s first major date in New York – a huge occasion for them – and Grant wanted ‘to see Zeppelin and Iron Butterfly perform back-to-back,’ to see how far his ‘boys’ had come since arriving in the States six weeks before. Graham, who had noted the powerful reaction the band had received in San Francisco and liked the idea of Grant owing him a favour, merely shrugged and said, ‘Sure, why not.’
Relieved, perhaps, at the prospect of not having to follow on to the stage a band whose reputation for leaving audiences sated was already well-known on the concert circuit, Porter’s Popular Preachers seemed unaffected by the last-minute rearrangement. However, when Iron Butterfly learnt of the news, they were outraged. Having only recently graduated to the status of headliners themselves, and having heard how hard Zeppelin had pushed Vanilla Fudge, band leader Doug Ingle was so put out he threatened not to play at all. In a face-off with Graham they were bound to lose, they insisted that Zeppelin either be reinstated as show-openers or dropped from the bill completely. Graham, however, was not a man to be held to ransom and replied that if they didn’t go on he would simply ask Zeppelin to play for longer, something he knew they were more than capable of.
It was a Mexican stand-off that was still going as Porter’s Popular Preachers were packing up their gear and Zeppelin was getting ready to go on. At which point Grant chose to up the stakes even further by telling Jimmy and the boys exactly what was going on. They are scared of you, he sneered. ‘Go out there and blow them out of this place!’ The band hardly needed any encouragement to try and steal a show, but with Grant’s voice still ringing in their ears they went out and ripped the joint apart. When they left the stage nearly ninety minutes later, the final chords of ‘How Many More Times’ still bouncing off the walls, the crowd began stamping their feet and chanting: ‘Zeppelin! Zeppelin! Zeppelin!’ In the audience that night was Paul Daniel Frehley (better known now as Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley), who told Classic Rock in 2007: ‘That show at the Fillmore East changed my life…Between [Jimmy Page] and Robert Plant they destroyed.’ The four members of Iron Butterfly were utterly distraught as they sat in their dressing room, listening to the chanting and feet-stamping. According to a gloating Richard Cole, ‘The audience was still calling for more Led Zeppelin as Iron Butterfly began their set.’
When the band flew home to England the n
ext day, they did so in the highest possible spirits. In just over a month and more than thirty almost back-to-back performances, they had been transformed from the revamped Yardbirds line-up that had departed London. They were now Led Zeppelin, a brand new entity that bore little resemblance to any of their pasts; the newest dicks on the block; hated by the critics, perhaps, but adored by the fans. In return, they would offer the best that rock music would have to offer in the coming decade. Of course, no-one was entirely sure exactly what that might be yet. No-one except perhaps for Jimmy Page, who had been convinced of the band’s potential from the very first rehearsal in Gerrard Street just six months before, and of his own destiny long before that. All they had to do now, like they said in America, was to keep on keeping on. The rest would be easy meat, he felt sure.
Even Robert Plant, still so nervous and unsure of his place in the Zeppelin scheme of things, was starting to sense his destiny unfolding around him on stage. In 1973, relaxing by the pool of his hotel in New Orleans, he told Creem’s Lisa Robinson: ‘I realised what Zeppelin was about around the end of our first US tour. We started off not even on the bill in Denver, and by the time we got to New York we were second to Iron Butterfly and they didn’t want to go on! And I started getting this little light glowing inside, and I began wiggling me hips and realising that it was all a fantastic trip. I’m still not even really sure what it is that I’ve got to do, but I’m doing it.’
The Led Zeppelin album was at no. 90 in the US Hot 100 and rising steadily when the band boarded the plane to fly home from that first US tour. As a result, while Plant, Bonham and Jones couldn’t wait to get back and tell their friends and family all about it, for Jimmy Page the arrival back in cold, wintry Britain was anticlimactic. With the album now on the schedule for a UK release, a more concerted countrywide tour had been booked, though the venues would remain modest. That wasn’t enough to sate the growing hunger of the band’s leader, though. If anything, he felt they had left America too early, just when they needed to be pushing on. However, Grant reassured him that they would be back in just a few short weeks and that this time they would be headlining. Now was the time to use the excitement of their breakthrough in the US to their best advantage at home, he argued. ‘The return of the conquering heroes and all that codswallop,’ he roared as the two of them sat sipping champagne on the flight home.
Instead of returning as heroes, however, the band’s success in America led to yet more accusations of hype, albeit in a uniquely British way. They had obviously ‘sold-out’ to America, the music press raged, before ‘paying their dues’ by slogging around their own backyard in the time-honoured style. Neither the Beatles nor the Stones nor any other domestic artist, including Jimi Hendrix, an American, had left Britain till last to make their mark. The fact that Led Zeppelin had chosen to put America first was merely proof that they were little short of a ‘manufactured’ group, built purely for commercial success: a cardinal sin even today; virtually a capital crime in 1969. Jimmy could hardly believe what he was hearing. ‘We just couldn’t seem to do anything right as far as the critics were concerned,’ he shook his head. ‘At which point I think we all just sort of gave up on the idea of ever pleasing them.’ Once again, it would be down to how well the band would be able to connect directly with their audience live on stage. Fortunately, this was a task they had already proved themselves supremely well qualified to accomplish.
Between 1 March and 17 April, they performed eighteen dates in the UK. They also did some one-off dates in Denmark again and Sweden. This time they had something to promote, although the album – released the same month – again suffered from mainly indifferent reviews. There was one major exception: the review in Oz, written by co-founder, Felix Dennis, which began prophetically: ‘Very occasionally a long-playing record is released that defies immediate classification or description, simply because it’s so obviously a turning point in rock music the only time proves capable of shifting it into eventual perspective.’ In even more hyperbolic fashion, the review went on to predict that album’s impact would be akin to that of other landmark releases such as Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, The Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday, Cream’s Disraeli Gears, Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?, even the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. ‘This Led Zeppelin album is like that,’ it concluded. Page was pleased but not overly so. Even he would acknowledge that Led Zeppelin was hardly in the same league musically or culturally as Sgt. Pepper. Plant, however, was ecstatic. An avid reader of Oz and like-minded fellow-travellers such as IT and Friends, here at last was the kind of peer-to-peer recognition he’d always dreamed of. It almost made up for the drubbing in Rolling Stone. (Almost but not quite. That was one wound that would never entirely heal.)
Unlike America, audiences were building slowly but the money stayed low: sometimes as little as £60 against sixty per cent of the gross; often only as high as a flat fee of £140. Compared to the sort of relatively glamorous venues they had just been wowing in America, the sort of venues the band found themselves playing back home were hardly inspiring: the Van Dike club in Plymouth and the Wood Tavern in Hornsey being about as far away, on every level, from the Fillmores East and West as it was possible to get. Nevertheless, confidence amongst them was running high. Mac Poole saw them play at the Farx Club – a back room of the Northcoat Arms pub in Southall, west London, on 30 March. Sitting with the band after the show ‘over a pint with the governor’ he remembers Planty saying something about having bought a house and needing some new carpets. ‘I said, “I wouldn’t worry about carpets, Rob, I think you’re gonna be moving again.” Even though I couldn’t really hear John or Planty cos Jimmy and John Paul were so loud that night it drowned out everything, there was just something about that band, they had this incredible vibe, and I just knew these guys were gonna do some incredible business. I said, “I don’t know why, I just think you’re all gonna end up in mansions with this one.” Rob said, “I hope you’re right.”’
Poole also recalled the impressive new maple-finish kit Bonham was playing on those dates. Afterwards, Bonzo showed him several extra-thick pairs of drumsticks that the Ludwig drum company had made especially for him after it became known how often he broke his sticks – sometimes two or three times a night. Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice, who Bonham had become close to during Zeppelin’s stint with them, had personally called Bill Ludwig and suggested the company offer the young Zep drummer a similar endorsement to the one Appice already enjoyed the benefits of, including a large custom-made kit. Once Bill heard the album he agreed. The kit included two 26-inch bass drums – similar to the ones Appice played – that Bonham was especially thrilled about but which Page and Jones detested. Unlike Appice, Bonzo had a ‘right-foot technique unlike any other drummer I’ve ever heard,’ says writer Chris Welch, himself a drummer and expert on the instrument. ‘He could already do with one bass drum what someone like Carmine – an excellent player in his own right but nothing on Bonham – would do using two drums.’ Former Zeppelin roadie Glen Colson recalled setting up the kit the first time, and how Bonham ‘did his nut on [it].’ As a result, he said, ‘Jimmy Page couldn’t figure out what Bonzo was doing. There was so much drumming going on that he couldn’t concentrate – he couldn’t keep time. So Jimmy ordered me never to set up the double bass drums again. They freaked everyone out.’
In fact, Bonham would use the double-bass-drum set-up on several dates on the band’s second US tour before an exasperated Page finally put a stop to it, though they would reappear sporadically. Appice insists Bonham later told him he’d used them on the recording of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, while Jones recalls Bonham sneaking them back in for sessions on the Physical Graffiti album until Page finally lost his rag and ordered the roadies to hide the second bass drum away – for good.
6
Cannons!
While the band was off the road in America, Atlantic sensibly decided the best way to keep them in the public eye was to release a single from the album,
opting for ‘Good Times Bad Times’ backed with ‘Communication Breakdown’. By the time Grant came to hear of it, several hundred promo copies (industry-only copies, not as yet distributed to general record stores) had already been pressed and mailed out to DJs all over the US, then standard practice in the run-up to a full-scale nationwide release. At the time, singles were not fashionable amongst ‘serious’ artists, although almost all were obliged to release and promote them heavily under the terms of their standard contracts. As Zeppelin’s contract with Atlantic was far from standard, Grant was within his rights to restrain the label from releasing Zeppelin singles – an option he would exercise with force in the UK and the rest of the world.
However, America was always different. Not only was it the home of Atlantic, it was where Grant shrewdly judged Zeppelin’s best chance of long-term success lay. There was also the financial side to consider. On a purely practical level, success in America would mean that, ultimately, it didn’t matter whether the band caught on anywhere else in the world. Financially at least, they would be set for life. The phenomenal reaction from audiences to their first low-profile tour had been beyond even G’s expectations. With a much higher profile second tour in the process of being finalised, it was crucial to try and keep the momentum going in any way possible. As a result, he not only approved Atlantic’s decision to release a Zeppelin single in America, he insisted the label pay for the band to film a promotional clip of them performing it in case any TV stations wanted to use it while they were out of the country. Atlantic was happy to oblige. The result: an energy-packed film of the band miming to ‘Communication Breakdown’ against a white backdrop, Bonham stick-twirling as Page pretends to sing backup vocals. Bizarrely, however, the only known broadcast of it in America wasn’t until March 1995, during the ninety-minute MuchMusic Led Zeppelin special, where a short clip was shown.
