When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  ‘It was just all in fun,’ recalled Fudge drummer Carmine Appice. ‘The chick was my groupie, I found her, we had a day off and she kept wanting to be on film with us.’ Though he concedes that ‘what actually happened, it was pretty disgusting, you know. It was pretty nutso.’ The next day at the airport, Appice ran into Frank Zappa and told him the story. Zappa turned it into one of his most notorious songs of the period, ‘The Mud Shark’, released on his 1971 live concept album, Fillmore East. While such adventures have never been denied, nor Page’s own less well-documented proclivities for whips and handcuffs, it’s equally clear how little such tawdry scenes meant to him or the rest of the band. As Plant later told me, ‘The thing people forget when they tut-tut about this stuff is what a laugh we were having. People have a tendency to look back on the band as this dark force spreading its wings when we were just young guys, having a good time. The main thing I remember most about those days now is the laughter.’

  Nor was the American groupie scene in the late Sixties entirely down to one-night stands. Three days after the shark incident, the band was back in LA. This time the party at Thee Experience came before any gigs. Throngs of girls ran over to their table. But Jimmy wasn’t there. Instead Cole grabbed the arm of Miss Pamela – who was there – and gave her Page’s room number at the Hyatt House. ‘He’s waiting for you,’ he told her. But, tempted though she was, she didn’t go. Not straight away. ‘That always made you seem intriguing to whoever it was,’ she said. But Jimmy had gotten Miss Pamela’s phone number and they hooked up the following night after their show in Santa Barbara, at the Earl Warren Showgrounds. Treated as not just another groupie but an honoured guest, she was immediately swept off her feet. Sitting next to Jimmy in the back of the limo after the gig, ‘Whatever I did, it was just perfect: “Oh, Miss P, how could you say that, how could you do that? Oh my god, I’ve been looking for you all my life.” And of course, years later, we found out he said that to all the girls…’

  According to Des Barres, Page already had ‘an evil reputation’ as a ‘heartbreaking, gut-wrenching lady-killer, wielding a whip and handcuffs, a concept that appeared to be in total contradiction to his perfectly poetic, angelic face.’ However, that didn’t stop her from becoming his LA girlfriend for the rest of 1969. On days off in August he would stay with Pamela, listening over and again to test pressings of Led Zeppelin II and taking ‘reams of notes’. Robert, meanwhile, was spending time with one of Pamela’s friends, Michele Overman.

  On the night of the Manson murders, there had been a big party for the band after the Anaheim show but Jimmy and Pamela went to The Ex instead, got drunk and high on weed and wine, then retired to the hotel ‘where we made exquisite love and crashed out’. Pamela had seen ‘his whips curled up in his suitcase like they were taking a nap’ but he had promised: ‘Don’t worry Miss P, I’ll never use them on you.’ Plainly, this was a side of Jimmy the girls he did whip never got to see. Instead, the guy Des Barres recalls now liked to go hunting for antiques and bought art, taking Pamela with him to buy some MC Escher prints (a typically shrewd Page purchase as Escher died shortly afterwards sending the value of the prints rocketing). Jimmy, she recalled, ‘liked to be in control and didn’t take many drugs or drink much alcohol. I think he believed his beauty was too important to tamper with. He was always in the mirror, primping on his splendid image, and putting perfect waves in his long black hair with a little crimping machine.’ The next day they flew to Las Vegas together and sat in the front row of an Elvis Presley show, Elvis in black leather and looking sleek, à la his recent TV comeback. Afterwards, one of Presley’s Memphis Mafia boys came out and asked Jimmy if he’d like to go backstage with his ‘date’ and meet the King. ‘No, thank you,’ said Page. ‘I never quite got over it,’ said Des Barres.

  At the end of August, at Jimmy’s invitation, Pamela joined the band in New York where they had a week off before their next show, a return date at Flushing Meadow’s Singer Bowl. She stayed for three days and sat on Jimmy’s amp while they played. Even Peter Grant, whose attitude to groupies was even icier than Cole’s, took to her, bouncing her on his knee like a little girl, instructing Ricardo to make sure she didn’t get lost in the seething mass of girls that now swarmed over the band after every show. Everyone in the band’s entourage addressed her politely as Miss P, an endearment she ‘accepted with slavish gratitude’.

  When they parted at the airport, Jimmy bound for London, Pamela on her way home to LA, she was wearing his shirt and he was professing undying love. He had taken to introducing her to people as ‘Mrs Page,’ she said, and she was sure it was the start of something more than a ‘one tour-stand’. But Zeppelin was back six weeks later for the start of their fourth US tour and by then Page’s feelings had already cooled. He didn’t even phone until he was in San Francisco for the band’s three-night headline stint at the Winterland Ballroom between 6 and 8 November, the last dates of the tour, then welched on his promise to fly down to LA to see her. In the end she was forced to buy her own plane ticket and fly north to see him, but though he ‘made a big display of being overjoyed to see me’ it was clear he was ‘slipping away from me’. Finally, he told her: ‘P, you’re such a lovely little girl, I don’t deserve you, I’m such a bastard, you know.’ Then he flew home to England and she was left alone again at the airport. As she puts it: ‘Handed a one-way ticket to Palookaville.’ Less than three weeks later, she was having a fling with Mick Jagger.

  Back in England, with the band scheduled to take a break until after Christmas, Jimmy Page could look back over the past twelve months with unusual satisfaction. Bristling with even more self-confidence than usual, high on the speed of his band’s giddy rise to the top in America, the huge transatlantic success of Led Zeppelin II may have taken certain critics by surprise, but the band saw it more as their just deserts. In the same year that Neil Armstrong would take his ‘giant leap for mankind’ onto the moon – 29 July, the day after the shark incident – the flight of the Zeppelin was arrowing ever deeper into the wide blue yonder.

  A headline show before a packed Lyceum Ballroom in London on 12 October had also reconfirmed their growing status in Britain. Two weeks before Christmas, a special reception was held for them at the Savoy Hotel, where they were presented with two gold (for album sales worth one million dollars) and two platinum (for sales in excess of one million copies sold) records for both their albums. The event was presided over by the Hon. Mrs Dunwoody MP, who in her speech described them as ‘not so much a Led Zeppelin, more a gas rocket’ to Britain’s export drive. Grant had been against the idea – ‘too establishment,’ he later announced – but this time Phil Carson got his way and the story made the papers the next day. More to the band’s taste was a similar party held for them a few weeks later in Stockholm, which Grant insisted be held not at a posh hotel but a sex club. ‘There’s all of us getting the awards and on the floor are a couple having it away,’ Grant recalled with a broad smile. ‘The press didn’t know what to make of that…’

  However, the press knew exactly what to make of the sold-out eight-date British tour they had completed in the new year, the highlight of which, a headline show at the Albert Hall on 9 January, would fall on Page’s 26th birthday. There would be no support act on the tour, either, a trend they had decided would continue in America when they returned there in March, where the shows would be billed as ‘An Evening With Led Zeppelin’, allowing them to play for as long as they wished each night, setting entirely new precedents for spontaneous live performance no rock artist – not Cream, not Hendrix, not the Stones, no-one – had ever attempted before. ‘I know it was corny,’ said Grant, who came up with the ‘An Evening With…’ tag, ‘but it was like the old Thirties stage line. I guess that was a by-product of my days as a fourteen-year-old stage hand.’

  Grant had arranged for the Albert Hall show to be filmed documentary-style by the film-makers Peter Whitehead and Stanley Dorfman, their crew literally following the band onto the
stage that night, where they clustered about them in such close proximity the surviving footage provides a splendidly candid representation of just how powerful and fully realised the Zeppelin live experience now was. The band had played over 140 shows in the preceding twelve months, the vast majority of them in the US, and it shows on the film footage, from the opening gunshot of Bonham’s volcanic drums on ‘We’re Gonna Groove’ to Plant’s unfathomably vast vocal pyrotechnics, lion’s mane of hair shaking as his hands pummel an invisible drum or guitar, to that huge but surprisingly nimble bass with which Jones effortlessly anchors the rhythm.

  Page is, of course, the one you can’t keep your eyes off, dressed down in his harlequin tank-top and skinny straight-legged jeans, skipping about the stage with the guitar at his knees, full of a savage intensity belied only by the way he peeps almost shyly out at the audience occasionally from behind the curtains of dark hair that smother his face.

  ‘I look at the Albert Hall footage now,’ said Plant, ‘and the first thing I notice is how young we all are. I look like what I was: a Black Country hippy full of high ideals and low-cost living. I still couldn’t quite believe where I was, everything had happened so fast for the group. Also, Jimmy’s way of playing was very British, or rather not very American. If you listen to what were recognised as the big guitar records of the period just before Zeppelin – stuff by the Kinks and The Who – the solos are a much more tic-tack style of playing. Jimmy opened up the whole idea of having wonderful sustains amidst the chaos of the rhythm section.’

  This was the voice that landed you your first proper gigs in bands like the New Memphis Bluesbreakers, the Black Snake Moan (after the Blind Lemon Jefferson song), the Banned…nothing outfits that meant the whole world to you. All this and still your dad going on and on at you, life at home now so unbearable that some nights you preferred to sleep in the van than go home. Your hair was too long, your mouth was too big, your head full of too much nonsense. A contrary bugger, your dad called you. Contrary and ungrateful and for the high jump sooner or later, you wait and bloody see…

  Thank god for your mates. They were the same as you, most of them. You were all going to be pop stars or footballers. Not just worker-bees and drones like your mums and dads but rich and famous and creative and free, chuffing away on the good stuff, the birds all hanging around stroking your hair and gazing up at you admiringly. None of this get-a-boring-bloody-job rubbish. When you and Neville Holder went to Brum town hall that night and saw the Spencer Davis Group and was told the singer was barely older than you it was like the blanket being pulled off the budgie cage. Suddenly it was blindingly obvious what you should being doing with your life. Nev, a couple of years older than you, was the same. You both fancied yourselves as singers, though in Nev’s case his mum and dad were all for it, encouraging him to practise his guitar and keep trying. Why couldn’t your mum and dad be like that? All the same, if someone had told you then that you and Nev would both end up as singers in big rock bands – as stars – you’d never have believed it. Not of Nev anyway, god bless him. You thought you were doing him a favour when you let him become the driver of the van in one of your later bands, Listen. Even after he’d become the singer in the ‘N Betweens with your other mate Dave Hill you never really saw it. But it was there that Nev and Dave met the rest of Slade, which just shows you how wrong you can be…

  It would be a long time before you learned that lesson though. Right now you were too busy living out your fantasy life as pop-star-in-the-making. A dream that came a step nearer when you smart-mouthed your way into becoming a regular at the Star and Garter in Halesowen, doing a bit of compering, playing fab gear Merseybeat covers in the Javelins. That was all right for five minutes. You eventually got your own way though when you persuaded them to play a ‘farewell’ gig – then returned the following week as the Crawling King Snakes (after the John Lee Hooker song – obviously!).

  The Star and Garter was part of what they called the Ma Reagan Circuit. Mary ‘Ma’ Reagan was the best-known promoter in the whole of the Midlands. There wasn’t a decent pub or club she didn’t have the big say-so in. You were told to stay in with her if you knew what was good for you and you did. It wasn’t long before you were bothering her to let you put on your own group at the Star, or the Oldhill Plaza, the other place you used to go regularly at weekends. By then you were also acting as part-time compere, introducing the bands, so it worked out all right. Crawling King Snake was one of the first you wangled in there. You thought you were the bloody bees-knees. And you were all right, actually, for what you were, a bunch of teenagers acting like they knew something about the blues.

  That was when you learned how some of the best times were after it was over, sitting round drinking and smoking and having a right laugh about it. How it had gone, who did what, who didn’t, who buggered it up good and proper. After hours on a Saturday night you’d all meet up at Alex’s Fleur De Lys mobile pie stall, which would sit opposite the Albany Hotel, right in the middle of Brum. That’s where you got to know them all. Danny King and his Mayfair Set, Carl Wayne and the Vikings, Johnny Neal and the Starliners, Gerry Levene and the Avengers, Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders…A couple of wankers but mostly right good blokes, most of ’em. Later, after you’d had your pie and chips you might go off to the Elbow Room, or maybe the Rum Runner, or the Club Cedar or some other late-night joint. Which is when you first met Bonzo…

  Equally exciting amongst the Albert Hall footage is Bonham’s jaw-dropping ‘Moby Dick’ drum solo, a work in progress that would eventually stretch to almost forty minutes some nights but is caught here at an earlier, more economical though no less overwhelming stage. ‘Watching Bonzo now, being able to hear the detail, to actually see him close-up working, it’s marvellous,’ agrees Jones. ‘That was the thing about the smaller gigs. Drums get fairly unsubtle through a large PA. But in a smaller place like the Albert Hall you can hear all the incredible detail he was always putting into his work. He was constantly varying, constantly changing all the time. He was just such an exciting musician to play with. Some musicians hate it if the drummer or one of the other musicians starts to diversify from the song, or go off into their own thing. But in Zeppelin that was the whole point, and John was magnificent at that. He really kept you on your toes as a musician and a listener. That’s when the empathy becomes incredibly exhilarating. He was the best drummer I’ve ever played with, bar none.’

  For Jimmy Page, the Albert Hall show would contain even more lasting significance. Watching from the wings that night was The Who’s vocalist Roger Daltrey. Misunderstanding the lack of support act, he observed, ‘I know why no-one wants to play with these guys. They’re too good.’ With him that night was his then girlfriend, Heather, accompanied by a friend, a young French model named Charlotte Martin. A slim, elegant blonde with perfect features, she was Jimmy’s type and he made sure Roger introduced him to her after the show. Having dated Eric Clapton for a period in 1968, Charlotte was used to the attention of musicians, but Jimmy was different. Compared to most rock musicians she’d met he seemed quite sophisticated. Quietly spoken, undemonstrative, but confident and quite sure of himself. When she invited him back to her London flat, he agreed to go without a second thought, getting Cole to drive them.

  When the band gathered at Grant’s office four days later to begin the drive down to their next show in Portsmouth, Charlotte was still on Jimmy’s arm. With Pat Bonham, Maureen Plant and Mo Jones also joining the band on the road for the UK tour, suddenly Charlotte became the new ‘Mrs Page’, the slot previously occupied by Miss Pamela. However, Jimmy’s affair with Charlotte would remain in place a lot longer than his dalliance with the prettiest GTO. It was, in fact, the start of the first really significant love affair of the guitarist’s life, and one he would remain true to even after the band had returned to the road in America. An almost unheard of sacrifice, even for the married men in the band, for Jimmy it was a sign of something much deeper.

  The three
-week, seven-country tour of the continent that followed the British dates was equally euphoric. Unlike America where, as Plant said, it was now ‘a bit of a rant with cherry-bombs and firecrackers and blood-curdling whoops,’ European audiences, though no less excited, tended to sit back and listen more, a quality that Plant, who often found himself, because of the long musical improvisations, forced to ‘stand back and regard the band like another member of the audience’ came to appreciate more as time went by. ‘People talk now about the bombast and the dexterity,’ he said, ‘and while they were key ingredients, some of the most crucial elements in the performances were those indefinable moments inside the actual songs that were always going somewhere else. It was so subtle that it was something we didn’t recognise at first. Then, once we did, we started really playing with it. There was a feeling of reaching and stretching for something that wasn’t quite so evident on the records. Playing these things live was the real jewel in our existence, everybody had the capacity to take it and move it around until it took on whole new meanings. It was one of the most remarkable things about the life of the group. The travelling and the endless pressure to come up with the goods may have taken its toll some nights, but even then I defy anyone outside the band to ever know when that happened because the level we maintained was so high. On the right night, however, a Led Zeppelin show was a spectacular place to be.’