When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  However, speaking in 1985, Plant seemed keen to shove the blame back in Page’s direction, when he joked: ‘When we ripped it off, I said to Jimmy, “Hey, that’s not our song.” And he said, “Shut up and keep walking.”’ Five years later, he argued that in their appropriation of old blues songs, Zeppelin was merely acting in the tradition of the form. Nobody really knew where the songs came from originally. ‘If you read that book Deep Blues by Robert Palmer, you’ll see that we did what everybody else was doing. When Robert Johnson was doing “Preaching Blues”, he was really taking Son House’s “Preacher’s Blues” and remodelling it.’

  Whichever way you looked at it though, there was no mistaking the ‘origins’ of tracks like ‘The Lemon Song’ or ‘Bring It On Home’. Musically, ‘The Lemon Song’ derived directly from Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’, with flashes of Albert King’s ‘Crosscut Saw’, while its lemon-squeezing lyrical refrain also comes direct from source, in this case Robert Johnson’s ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’. Again, however, the songwriting credit given on the sleeve is shared squarely amongst the four band members with no mention of either Chester Burnett (aka Howlin’ Wolf) or Robert Johnson. Over thirty years after his death, whereas the work of the latter is now considered public domain, in the early Seventies, Burnett’s publishers Arc Music would sue Zeppelin for copyright infringement; a suit the band was prepared to settle out of court (with future pressings containing a co-songwriting credit for Burnett). Similarly, ‘Bring It On Home’, which was based on an old Sonny Boy Williamson track written by Willie Dixon but credited simply to Page and Plant, was also later settled out of court at the same time as the action against the band for ‘Whole Lotta Love’, with Dixon also awarded co-songwriting credits for both songs on all future Zeppelin products. Once again, though, Page was unrepentant. ‘The thing with “Bring It On Home”, Christ, there’s only a tiny bit taken from Sonny Boy Williamson’s version and we threw that in as a tribute to him.’

  As Salvador Dali – another arch ‘borrower’ – once famously suggested, genius may steal where talent borrows, but Jimmy Page would continue to be more brazen about it than most. Ultimately, however, even taking into account the obvious plagiarisms in the songwriting, Led Zeppelin II was Page’s record – easily his finest moment as a guitarist yet, certainly his most powerful statement as a producer, and a total vindication of his ambition to take the Yardbirds into truly new territory, even though he ended up having to do it alone with an entirely different line-up. As John Paul Jones was happy to vouchsafe, ‘Any tribute [that] flows in must go to Jimmy.’

  ‘The goal was synaesthesia,’ Page said, ‘creating pictures with sound.’ Hendrix may have been the greatest guitarist ever, the Beatles the world’s best songwriters and Dylan rock’s most profound poet, but the panoply of gifts Jimmy Page brought to bear on Led Zeppelin II as producer, guitarist, songwriter and – not to be understated, band leader and musical director – proved him to be the ultimate sonic sorcerer. Speaking to me nearly four decades later, the pride in his voice was still there. ‘You’ve got things like the light and shade aspect of “Ramble On” where I already know that if Bonzo’s gonna come in and kick-in a chorus, that that’s the way to have this song. And to be light on “What Is And What Should Never Be” then kick-in to the chorus. Because that’s the way you’re gonna get this dynamic. So all of these things are now actually designed, if you like, for [the band]. Having worked on the road with the band, it was starting to permeate into your inner being. I used to write stuff and hear Robert singing, and I knew the kind of thing John would be able to apply to it. His drumming on “Whole Lotta Love”, for example, is just fantastic.’

  He also stressed how ‘ambient’ the whole sound is. It’s true. As he said, there is a certain way the band ‘moved the air about the room’ on those sessions that is clearly evident in the recording. For example, ‘the middle part of “Whole Lotta Love”, which is sort of what psychedelia would have been if they could have got there. That’s what it is. It’s also very organic. We always played together, that was an essential part of the overall thing: the acoustics of the room and how things are bouncing about. That was really important.’

  Not that Page or the rest of the band would have much time to sit back and consider the enormity of what they had just done. Still only halfway through what would be the busiest year of their lives, the flight of the Zeppelin had only just begun.

  7

  Cracking the Whip

  Atlantic had wanted the second Zeppelin album out in America by the summer and had fretted that momentum would be lost when Jimmy Page insisted on tinkering with the mix, pushing its release back to the autumn. But by the time Led Zeppelin II was finally made available on 22 October 1969, the band was already well on its way to becoming the biggest in the world.

  In many ways, it might be said that Seventies-style rock arrived three months early with the release of Led Zeppelin II. With advance orders of 500,000 in the US, it debuted in the Top 40 at no. 25 in its second week of release. Two weeks later it was no. 2. Before the year was out, it was the biggest-selling album in America, deposing not only the final Beatles album, Abbey Road, from no. 1 but keeping the Stones’ Let It Bleed from the top spot. Along with Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, these were the three albums that summarised the epoch. Led Zeppelin II was also epochal, but not for the same reasons. The second Zeppelin album was the beginning of a brand new era. Released ten days later in the UK, it was a similar story, entering the chart on 8 November, where it began an unbroken 138-week residency, eventually climbing to no. 1 in February 1970. Within six months it had sold nearly five million copies worldwide. This at a time when a tenth of that figure was considered a major hit for most top-drawer artists.

  Released a week after their fourth US tour began with a stunning brace of shows at New York’s Carnegie Hall (the first rock shows there since the venue had banned the Stones after a riotous performance five years before), clearly a new order had arrived and with it a whole new chapter for the four Zeppelin members. ‘Our whole lives changed, particularly me and Bonzo’s,’ Plant later told me. ‘It was such a sudden change we weren’t quite sure how to handle it. Bonzo was still in a council flat in Dudley, and he had a Rolls Royce at the bottom of the lift. Somebody keyed it one day and he couldn’t understand why. It’s a bit like that thing in The Commitments with the bloke trying to get a horse into the lift. It was a bit like that in parts of the Black Country, and still is.’

  Chris Welch, who was at Carnegie Hall, remembers ‘every musician that happened to be in town standing at the side of the stage during the show. I also remember the audience. It was the first time I had ever seen a New York audience and I couldn’t believe how wild and noisy they were. They literally went completely mad the moment the band came on.’ There was no party, as such, afterwards, ‘just lots of drinking back at the hotel’. Although somebody in the band did send over some prostitutes with whips to his hotel room in the small hours. ‘There was a lot of sniggering over breakfast the next morning as they awaited my reaction. But I just sent them away. I was a bit shocked actually.’

  Reviews of Led Zeppelin II were generally supportive. In Britain, Time Out praised the album for being ‘much looser than the group’s first’, adding that it was ‘worth buying anyway for Plant’s tortured voice and Page’s guitar, which at times sounds as disturbing as car tyres screaming to a crash’. Disc & Music Echo pointed out that, ‘It’s difficult to capture stage excitement on record, but Led Zeppelin II comes very near to it.’ Even Rolling Stone approved – at least superficially – calling it ‘one fucking heavyweight of an album!’ However, it soon became apparent again that John Mendelssohn was having difficulty maintaining a straight face. ‘Who can deny that Jimmy Page is the absolute number-one heaviest white blues guitarist between 5’4’ and 5’8’ in the world??’ he asked sarcastically. Adding, pointedly, that he’d been listening to the album ‘on some heavy Vietnamese weed�
�mescaline, some old Romilar, novocaine, and ground up Fusion, and it was just as mind-boggling as before’. Followed by the coup de grâce, ‘I must admit I haven’t listened to it straight yet – I don’t think a group this heavy is best enjoyed that way.’ Ultimately, the message remained the same: two years after the Beatles had sung beatifically about only needing love here were the brutish Zeppelin threatening to give every inch of their love to anyone who came near enough for them to do so. The contrast could not have been starker. While the Beatles addressed us from somewhere up there in the cloudless blue sky; Led Zeppelin was the sound of voices writhing in the murky sprawl below; the black pieces on the chessboard to the Beatles’ white.

  Fortunately for the band, their fans’ enthusiasm remained immune to such cartoonish characterisations. Elemental to its core, the music on Led Zeppelin II simply defied analysis, as gloriously impervious to criticism as the sound of a thunderclap on a stormy night. As Jimmy boasted in an interview just before the album came out: ‘There is a tendency to return to some of the early rock’n’roll songs now almost as a reaction against the heavy, intellectual and analytical forms rock has been taking. It’s very understandable to me – we play it when the mood takes us. It’s the perfect balance – so simple. You can’t read anything but what there is into songs like “I’ve Got A Woman”. Some music has just got a little too complicated for the public.’

  Known to fans affectionately as the Brown Bomber due to its sepia-tinted cover, it was essentially the Led Zeppelin sleeve in jaundiced silhouette. British designer David Juniper had just a few days to come up with a rough idea for it. Given nothing to work on, just told to come up with something ‘interesting,’ he hit upon the idea of doctoring a period photo of the Jasta Division of the German Luftwaffe, which had launched the zeppelins that bombed Britain during the First World War. Hand-tinting the photo, he crudely cut the four band members’ faces from already much-used promotional shots and glued them onto the faces of four of the Jasta pilots. Page suggested Juniper also cut out headshots of Grant, Cole and Blind Willie Johnson and glue them onto four of the other pilots, as well as the blonde actress Glynis Johns, who had played the children’s mother in the film Mary Poppins. It’s since been assumed this was Page’s joke on engineer Glyn Johns, who did not work on the album, although his younger brother Andy did. Others speculate it may have had something to do with the suggestion that the original Mary Poppins books by P.L. Travers mix fantasy with real-life magical events such as inanimate objects coming to life. Neither suggestion, however, seems likely on its own. What is now more mysterious is that close-ups of the cover shot, provided for this book by Juniper, naming each figure, look nothing like who they’re supposed to – certainly not Cole or Grant, while the Blind Willie Johnson face is identified by the designer now as that of Miles Davis, though again it looks nothing like him.

  As if to underline the band’s own increasing sense of self-worth, the inside of the original gatefold sleeve – ‘my entire idea,’ says Juniper now – opened out to show a spotlight-swathed golden airship hovering over an ancient acropolis-type structure, beneath which are four coffin-like columns each bearing a band member’s name. Again, the deeper significance of this has never been established, though themes of Ascensionism seem clear – the idea that a melding of science and religion is the next evolutionary step past the ‘natural’ human condition into immortality and beyond; the pyramid surmounted by a sun (see also the Masonic seal on the US dollar bill). Not that the album’s most ardent supporters would necessarily have gotten all that from it, the inside of the sleeve seen mainly as a portable tray on which to roll joints. The rest was just pretty patterns, man…

  Art college was all right. There were certainly a lot of nice birds there. And some crazy cats too. And you liked painting and drawing and mucking around all day. It could never really beat playing the guitar, though. You noticed that even the geezers the girls congregated around, the ones that could really paint and came on like Jackson Pollock, all cigarettes and sunglasses and paint-spattered Levis, you noticed how all that just…dissolved, man, the minute you whipped out your guitar and started strumming, lost in your own world, as if you didn’t really notice the reaction you were getting from all that skirt. Even the other young cats tuned into you, even when they tried not to show it, even when they hated you for it. Take that, Picasso! But for all its grooviness, art college could never quite beat the power of the guitar – something you’d known about ever since the first time you’d stepped on a stage. Plus, you know, you’d already been out there, on the road, smoking and drinking and winking at all those pretty faces looking up at you, dirty cows. It was hard just going back to…normality. Dread idea…

  So you went to the Marquee, always taking the guitar with you, not really knowing why, just that without it you’d be like all the others and who wanted to be like all the others? Not you. Bugger off! Next thing, there you are again, playing in the interval band, standing next to Jeff…When John Gibb from The Silhouettes came up to you afterwards one night and said, you know, blah blah blah, come and help, you’d hardly paid attention. But he seemed serious so you started to listen harder and he seemed to mean it and so you finally wrote down the address, and the time and when and where and bloody hell, what was all this then? A session, he said. You weren’t so sure. There had been a time once before when Glyn Johns had said something similar, come on down, it’ll be great, you can play and you’ll get paid, it’ll be great, come on down. But when you got there they stuck a sheet of paper under your nose. Oh, no! A row of dots, looked like ‘crows on telegraph wires,’ you’d joke later, but it wasn’t so funny at the time. Bloody hurt that did, not knowing what the hell it all meant. Felt a right fool! It hadn’t crossed your mind they’d want you to read music. You didn’t have to read music when you were on stage, did you? No, you bloody didn’t! Then they brought that other bloke in, some old sod, knowing you weren’t up to it, giving you the poxy acoustic to play instead, your face red with shame. And it was so simple what he did, the other bloke. Just a simple poxy riff. Dah-dah-dah-de-dah! Any idiot could do that! Christ, you felt stupid. Stupid and angry. You wouldn’t let that happen again…

  Now here was this bloke John Gibb, talking about EMI and Studio B and all this…what if he stuck a sheet of paper in front of you, too? Fake it, you said to yourself. You could fake it. Why not? Just come up with something. It would be easy. Wouldn’t it? Stood in the bar of the Marquee late that Tuesday night you’d said to yourself, ‘Yeah…’ John smiled and you shook on it…

  When an edited-down version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ reached no. 4 in the US singles’ chart in January 1970, selling more than 900,000 copies along the way, the band’s fate over the coming decade was sealed. Critics be damned, Led Zeppelin was it, baby. Next to them, the Beatles and the Stones seemed positively old-fashioned. That didn’t stop Page being against the idea of the band’s most famous cri-de-coeur being released minus over a minute of his greatest triumph yet as a producer, the psychedelic middle section. But he reluctantly accepted Atlantic’s logic when some AM stations started making their own edits to the album track to fit the three-minute format. As a result, similar bite-size versions of the song reached no. 1 in Germany and Belgium. However, when Atlantic decided to repeat the process in the UK with an official release on 5 December, Jimmy insisted that G put his considerable foot down and veto the idea, much to the chagrin of Atlantic’s recently appointed London chief, Phil Carson. This despite Page’s previous announcement of the band’s plans to release their first UK single in an interview with Top Pops magazine in September. Would it be a deliberate effort to make a hit single, the magazine asked? ‘Everyone says that they will not do that,’ he had replied, ‘but I suppose that is what we will be doing. But I don’t see that we have to compromise our own standards. Jethro Tull managed to make a good-quality single,’ he added, referring to ‘Living in the Past’, a no. 3 hit in Britain in the summer of 1969, though not included on any Tu
ll album.

  Similarly, the official press release Grant’s office put out in early December explaining the decision not to release ‘Whole Lotta Love’ as a seven-inch didn’t seem against the idea of singles per se, just not that one, explaining: ‘Led Zeppelin had no intention of issuing this track as a single, as they felt it was written as part of their concept of the album.’ Page was also quoted as saying: ‘I just don’t like releasing tracks from albums as singles. The two fields aren’t related scenes to my mind.’ The release went on to add that the band would release a special non-album track as their first UK single in the new year, though none ever emerged. According to Zeppelin archivist Dave Lewis, this was either going to be a finished version of ‘Jennings Farm’, a ‘very catchy instrumental the band had worked up at a session at Olympic around that time’ (which later resurfaced in altered form on their next album as ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’) or possibly ‘Baby Come On Home’, a track left over from the original 1968 Olympic sessions when it was called ‘Tribute To Bert Burns’, which Lewis describes as ‘very commercial, bluesy. The thing is, there was big pressure at that time for a single in the UK but they were totally against releasing “Whole Lotta Love” because Jimmy hated the fact it had been edited down. They may even have discussed an EP or a maxi-single, which Jethro Tull had done, or a special “stereo single”, most singles back then still being mixed in mono for the two-inch speakers of transistor radios. Ultimately, it was all academic as they never released a single at all.’