When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Ultimately, Led Zeppelin were neither saints nor sinners, certainly not in the context of rock history where outrageous offstage high-jinks and hyper-sexual-activity had been the norm for decades. They were merely one more cast of colourful characters on an already tilted stage. A fact Pamela Des Barres herself now vouchsafes: ‘It wasn’t just them. The Who were doing that stuff, and the Hendrix boys.’ Although, as she adds: ‘Zeppelin were a little extreme, they got a little rude sometimes. The girls would do anything to get near them and they sort of took advantage of that.’

  Fucking groups, you’d known what they were like for a long time now. They’d always been the same, from the time you bought your first mini-bus when you were twenty-five and used it to drive the Shadows to gigs, to when you met Don Arden and he had you driving all these American cunts around on the package shows. The Everly Brothers, Little Richard, Brian Hyland, Chuck Berry…didn’t matter who they were, they all wanted something, expected you or someone else to provide it. When Chuck Berry complained his fee was three shillings and eleven pence short, he refused to go on until someone gave him the money. The crowd was going berserk but you only had to look at his little slit eyes to know the cunt meant it. You were only the driver but you realised that if someone didn’t do something there would be a fucking riot. So you walked over to the cigarette machine, smashed it open and counted out the change until you had three shillings and eleven pence. Then gave it to him. Didn’t even say thank you, just picked up his guitar and walked on…

  Even when you started road managing for Don in ’63, looking after Bo Diddley and Little Richard, it was the same old story. Bo was all right, give him his drink and his ‘pretty womens’ and let him get on with it. But Richard…Christ almighty! You needed eyes in the back of your arse. Except then you’d see all of them on the bed together in the morning, six or seven of ’em, that silly cunt sat there in the middle of it all reading his Bible. Punters loved him, though. You remembered how you’d had to flatten them sometimes to keep them off him. For their own good. They hadn’t seen what you’d seen.

  You learnt a lot from working with Don, though. He didn’t take any shit off anybody. He’d go in hard, wallop, don’t bother asking questions afterwards. He was smart, too, showed you how a tough reputation could be almost as effective as a good hiding. As Don used to say: ‘If you don’t like somebody, let ’em know from the first bell, baby.’ Bloody good advice, you never forgot it. The other thing Don taught you was to always have a healthy respect for cash. That wad of notes at the end of the night that would go into your back pocket and stay there. Accept no substitute, not if you knew what was good for you.

  Then came Gene Vincent. Gene and his gammy leg, standing there in the leathers Don bought him, looking at you like it was all your fault. Gene and his gammy leg and his whisky bottle and his gun and his wife and his girlfriends and all the other bloody palaver. Ladies and gentlemen – the King of Rock’n’Roll! What a cunt, made your life a fucking misery. But so good on stage, even you couldn’t help look up to him when he was on form. And the crowds, they fucking loved him, couldn’t get enough of the silly, drunken, curly-haired, miserable, moaning cunt. Screaming for bourbon on a Sunday afternoon in Doncaster. Screaming that he couldn’t go on without it. You knew what to do. Grab the cunt by the throat and push him out there. Or if he was too pissed already, stick a tripod up the back of his jacket and strap him with gaffer-tape to the mike stand, wait for him to fall over and tell everyone he’s suffering from exhaustion, poor fucking lamb. Sorry, no, no money back, he’d started the show, hadn’t he? Not the boy’s fault he’s unwell. An old Don trick and a fucking good one…

  By the beginning of May, when the album had reached no. 10 (its highest chart position), the vibe was now starting to spread back to Britain, with the NME’s US correspondent June Harris reporting: ‘The biggest happening of the 1969 heavy rock scene is Led Zeppelin.’ Reaction to the group’s latest American tour, she said, ‘has not only been incredible, it’s been nothing short of sensational’. When, on 25 May, they appeared on the same bill as the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Santa Clara Pop Festival, in San Jose, Jimi told Bonzo, ‘Boy, you’ve got a right foot like a rabbit!’ However, reviews in the US could still be sniffy. Reporting on the final shows of the tour, two nights at the Fillmore East in New York on 30 and 31 May, Variety ignored the audience who were literally banging their heads on the stage and instead wrote of the band’s ‘obsession with power, volume and melodramatic theatrics…forsaking their music sense for the sheer power that entices their predominantly juvenile audience.’ Many of the band’s peers couldn’t resist having a dig, too. Pete Townshend turned his considerable nose up at ‘solo-guitar-based groups’ that did better in America than in Britain. Keith Richards said Plant’s voice ‘started to get on my nerves’. Even Eric Clapton said he thought Zeppelin were ‘unnecessarily loud’.

  After the second show, Atlantic held a party for them at the Plaza Hotel in New York, where they were presented with their first gold record for Led Zeppelin. Page could barely contain his delight. Such sudden success, less than a year after forming the band, ‘came as a massive surprise – to be perfectly truthful, the shock didn’t hit me until a number of years later. We were touring until the day when we were presented with a gold record. I thought, “My goodness! A gold record!”’ An occasion somewhat marred by the fact that it was here they were informed they would need to pull their fingers out and get the second album finished pronto if they wanted to catch the pre-Christmas market that year. Stung into action, Jimmy ordered the band back to the studio straight after the party.

  While Page ploughed on in the studio with engineer Eddie Kramer, seemingly oblivious, the studio workaholic, the others yearned simply to go home. Bonzo was morose and homesick, Plant was loudly proclaiming to anyone who would listen how much he missed his wife, while Jonesy kept his head down as usual and said nothing. To try and keep their spirits up, Grant took the opportunity over the next few days to constantly remind them how well they were now doing. Not only were they in the US Top 10, they were making money from the tour. The first jaunt had cost them. This time around, with their nightly fees swinging from $5,000 to $15,000, they would be flying home quids in, he said. Even after all the agents, lawyers, accountants, roadies, hotels and travel expenses had been paid, they would be looking at splitting approximately $150,000 between them. And that was nothing, Grant said, compared to what they would make next time out. The third tour, already being set up, would pull in nearly half-a-million dollars, he announced – and for far fewer shows! Everything would be better soon, said G, the band nodding their heads resignedly.

  In fact, the band had already begun serious work on the second album when they arrived back in Los Angeles in April, and spent their days off recording at A&M Studios. It was a pattern that would be repeated throughout the tour, studio-hopping whenever a small break in their itinerary allowed: as well as A&M, both Mystic and Mirror Studios were utilised in LA, as were A&R, Juggy Sound and Mayfair Studios in New York, plus a one-off stop at an eight-track ‘hut in Vancouver’ where Jimmy took Robert in to lay down some vocal overdubs and harmonica – a set-up so small they didn’t even have headphones for the singer to wear.

  Back in London in June, they flitted between engagements – miming ‘Communication Breakdown’ and ‘Dazed And Confused’ in Paris for a French TV show called Tous En Scene, which Grant said Page only agreed to ‘so he could meet Brigitte Bardot’ who never showed up anyway, and a couple more sessions for BBC radio, where the chief interest lay in an improvised rendition of ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’. ‘We were so organic at the time,’ said Jimmy, ‘that we used to make stuff up [on the spot].’ Between times, sessions were booked at Morgan Studios, where they finished off ‘Ramble On’ and hurriedly recorded two additional filler tracks: ‘Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)’, a lightweight, almost country-pop song about a groupie with ‘a purple umbrella and fifty cent hat’ dashed off by
Jimmy and Robert as live in the studio, and ‘We’re Gonna Groove’, an old Ben E. King number and one of the covers they routinely played live. It was hardly ideal – in the end they would use only one of the new Morgan tracks – but by then Atlantic was pressing hard for new product. So on-the-hoof were the recording sessions, in fact, that even the always self-confident Page was given to moments of private self-doubt. Seeing this, Jerry Wexler had at one point tried to smooth him out, telling him over and over that the new album was going to be ‘a masterpiece’. Wexler wasn’t just easing his pain, either. He firmly believed it to be ‘the best white blues I have ever heard’ – and that was after only hearing three tracks.

  All of which only partially reassured the perfectionist guitarist, who worried that the second album may also be too different from the first, that they had ‘overstepped the mark’. On the other hand, he was determined to show what he could do. As he told writer Ritchie Yorke during an earlier session in New York: ‘Too many groups sit back after the first album, and the second one is a down trip. I want every album to reach out further – that’s the whole point.’ Led Zeppelin II certainly reached out further than its patchwork predecessor. Still essentially blues-, rock- and folk-based, this melded those forms into what, in retrospect, would become the foundation of a whole new genre in popular music: heavy metal; a reductionism that would eventually come to haunt the band that inadvertently did more than anyone to ultimately define its meaning.

  Comprised of material built on ideas begun in motel rooms, tinkered with at soundchecks and rehearsals, and thrown into the creative furnace of live improvisations, Led Zeppelin II, as Page had already decided it would be called, was to become the speed-of-night Seventies road album par excellence, the sheer exuberance of the band at that time captured in the grooves which, forty years later, still virtually crackle with energy. The sound, although produced in so many different places, obtained a formidable three-dimensional quality unlike any achieved on record before – a feat made all the more remarkable considering the scattershot approach to its creation. The American engineer on the sessions, Eddie Kramer, who had worked the previous year with Hendrix on Electric Ladyland, recalled ‘scrounging’ recording time in any studio he could. Some of Jimmy’s guitar solos were taped in hallways, he said. The end results of which would be mixed in just two days at A&R Studios in New York ‘on the most primitive console you could imagine’.

  And yet somehow it worked. As well as proving an invaluable ally in procuring the band studio time, Page credits Kramer with helping construct the famous psychedelic middle-section of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, in which Plant’s howling lust-maddened vocal-improvs are mixed with an other-worldly cacophony of special effects, from the backwards echo of the slide guitar to the grinding sound of a steel mill, orgasming women, even a napalm-bomb explosion, and above it all, the eerie whining of Jimmy’s recently acquired theremin, like something out of an old black-and-white horror movie. ‘We already had a lot of the sounds on tape,’ said Page, ‘but [Kramer’s] knowledge of low-frequency oscillation helped complete the effect. If he hadn’t known how to do that, I would have had to try for something else.’ For his part, Kramer compared working with Page to working with Hendrix. ‘They were both very clear about what they wanted in the studio,’ he later recalled. ‘They also had a very clear vision and laser-like concentration in the studio – absolute laser-like concentration. It was amazing.’

  As a result, while the guitarist may have had his reservations at the time about the ad-hoc way in which the second Zeppelin album came together – his famous ecstatically rendered solo, for example, on ‘Heartbreaker’, was ‘an afterthought’, recorded separately in a different studio to the rest of the song and ‘sort of slotted in the middle’ – even he now agrees the material as a whole displays a remarkable strength and consistency the band would rarely match in future recordings. This was Led Zeppelin at their most blood-and-guts elemental; rock music as bodily function. From the audible gasp with which Plant prefaces the monumental opening track, ‘Whole Lotta Love’, to the sinewy acoustic and harmonised electric guitars Page charms out of the speakers like snakes to transform otherwise straightforward rock moments like ‘Ramble On’ and ‘What Is And What Should Never Be’ into unbelievably subtle vessels of musical mayhem; to the stalking riffs of bones-into-dust headbangers like ‘Heartbreaker’ and ‘Bring It On Home’ to Robert Plant purloining Robert Johnson in ‘The Lemon Song’ in what would become one of the most infamously derided yet joyously insouciant Zeppelin mission statements: ‘I want you to squeeze my lemon…till the juice runs down my leg…’ Then pretending to aim higher in ‘Ramble On’ and its ‘days of old’ Tolkienesque references to ‘the darkest depths of Mordor’ where ‘Gollum and the evil one’ slip away with his ‘girl so fair’. Or, best of all, the unflinchingly straight face with which he addresses his wife in the almost unbearably sentimental ‘Thank You’, all chiming 12-string guitars, melodramatic drums and swirling-fog organ. ‘That was when [Robert] began to come through as a lyricist,’ Page told me. ‘I’d always hoped that he would.’

  All trademark Zeppelin moments, all destined to become cornerstones in rock history; and all rooted in the same brooding, squalling blues as white English contemporaries such as Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack and early Fleetwood Mac, but reinvigorated with its original down-and-dirty, walking-with-the-devil essence. Unlike the earnest bluesologists then frequenting London’s clubland, this was no respectful homage to the past. This was the primeval sex music of the future. What Robert Plant would later characterise as ‘a much more carnal approach to the music and quite flamboyant’.

  Even the obvious filler – and at 2 mins 39 secs, the shortest track on an album with no real need for such things – ‘Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)’, which none of the band liked, or indeed would ever perform live (although Plant would resurrect a version of it for a solo tour in 1990), came straight from the top drawer; the sort of direct hit to the body groups like T. Rex and Thin Lizzy would build whole careers around in the decade to come.

  The only real weak spot was the bone thrown to Bonham in the shape of ‘Moby Dick’ – an exercise Page concocted from various different takes in the studio in order to showcase Bonzo’s usual drum solo, known from the second US tour on, when it first began to feature prominently in the set as ‘Pat’s Delight’. Derived from a riff Jimmy had developed while playing a ‘sleepy’ John Estes song called ‘The Girl I Love She Got Long Wavy Hair’, which the band performed regularly throughout 1969, although drum solos were now becoming de rigueur at rock gigs, only Cream had ever committed what was essentially a drum solo as a track on one of their albums. A highly condensed – 2 mins 58 secs of impressive percussive nous sandwiched between some plodding riffage from Page and Jones – version of the real thing, unlike its live counterpart which was a genuinely thrilling spectacle, it’s hardly a must-have moment. It’s soon forgotten, though, as it segues into the album’s closing track and perhaps its best moment, ‘Bring It On Home’, based on the song of the same name that Willie Dixon had written for Sonny Boy Williamson, but lifted onto a much higher musical plain by Page’s own blazing riff and Bonham’s shock-and-awe drums, both of which belonged only to Zeppelin.

  The only other faults on an album that still sounds as cutting-edge today as it did forty years ago were, again, to do with how much of the material derives from other, deliberately uncredited sources. The most famous example being ‘Whole Lotta Love’, which, on closer examination, turns out to be one of Zeppelin’s most thrillingly unoriginal moments ever. Not only is the basis of the song – certainly lyrically – taken from Muddy Waters’s version of Willie Dixon’s ‘You Need Love’, as would surface in 1987, when a belated plagiarism suit filed by Dixon’s estate was settled out of court, but even the so-called ‘new’ arrangement they imbue it with is partially lifted from the Small Faces, who used to encore with their own highly energised version of ‘You Need Love’ in the mid-Sixties.


  Recorded for their debut 1966 album where it was credited to vocalist Steve Marriott and bassist Ronnie Lane, former Small Faces’ keyboardist Ian McLagan later admitted it was something ‘we stole – or at least, the chorus was a steal. It was a nick Steve used to do – because that’s what was influencing him.’ Zeppelin’s version would also be ‘a steal’, except this time credited to Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham. There’s no mistaking the similarity between the ferocious energy of Zeppelin’s version and that of the Small Faces, not least in Plant’s vocal phrasing that sounds uncannily like Marriott’s. So much so, the latter would later claim that Plant had copied his vocals. ‘We did a gig with The Yardbirds,’ Marriott says in Paolo Hewitt’s 1995 biography of the band. ‘Jimmy Page asked me what that number was we did…I said, “It’s a Muddy Waters thing”.’ Plant ‘used to come to the gigs whenever we played in Kidderminster or Stourbridge.’ As a result, when Plant came to record ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘he sang it the same, phrased it the same, even the stops at the end were the same…’

  Even the most memorable part of the song, that punchy B-D, B-D-E riff, was derived from the original guitar refrain of the Muddy Waters original. Nevertheless, Page insisted, ‘As far as my end of it goes, I always tried to bring something fresh to anything that I used. I always made sure to come up with some variation. I think in most cases you would never know what the original source could be. Maybe not in every case, but in most cases.’ And while he does laughingly concede that, ‘We did, however, take some liberties,’ he now puts most of the blame for the subsequent plagiarism charges down to Plant, saying that ‘most of the comparisons rest on the lyrics. And Robert was supposed to change the lyrics, and he didn’t always do that, which is what brought on most of our grief. They couldn’t get us on the guitar parts or the music, but they nailed us on the lyrics.’