by Mick Wall
The only blemish was the opening show of the tour at the KB Hallen in Copenhagen on 21 February, which the band was forced to play under an assumed name after the Countess Eva Von Zeppelin, direct descendent of Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin, who designed the prototype for the airship, threatened to sue the band for defaming the family name, giving a series of inflammatory local press interviews. ‘They may be world-famous but a couple of shrieking monkeys are not going to use a privileged family name without permission,’ she proclaimed haughtily. In a last-ditch effort to spare them from litigation and save the gig, Grant invited the countess to a private meeting with the band, which she surprisingly agreed to attend. There she was schmoozed by G and taken by the hand by Page who patiently explained that the band was immensely popular with people all over the world, none of whom, to his knowledge, had ever taken offence at the name. Suitably reassured, she seemed ready to be won over by the band’s argument and readied to leave. Whereupon she spotted a copy of the first Zeppelin album that someone had left lying around. Horrified to discover the band was using a picture of the exploded zeppelin on its covers, she became upset all over again. There was no pacifying her this time, though, and as she stormed out Grant sat there groaning. ‘This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of,’ he said, ‘but that woman is angry enough to sue us.’ Then he had a brainwave. The band would go ahead with the show – under another name.
Nobody thought this was a good idea but went along with it in the end after Grant spent the next couple of hours browbeating them about it, getting them to see it as having the last laugh over the hatchet-faced countess, rather than the pyrrhic victory it actually amounted to. So the show went on and the band played under the name of…The Nobs. Well, Bonzo found it funny. The band forgot their troubles later that night by visiting one of the city’s numerous sex clubs, where Bonzo felt moved to join one of the naked women on stage at one point, removing the batteries from her vibrator and announcing loudly: ‘You girls gotta work for your pay!’
Back for their fifth US tour in March, it was business as usual as the band forged their way through what were now fervent Zeppelin strongholds – New York, LA, San Francisco – and on into newer territory in the American south like Memphis, Raleigh and Atlanta, where they were made to feel simultaneously both welcome and undesirable – a unique accomplishment even by the double-standards of the racially divided, sexually repressed American south. At the 17 April show in Memphis, the ‘city fathers’ awarded them the keys of the city. However, during the encores that night at the Midsouth Coliseum – the same venue where someone in the audience had thrown a cherry bomb at the Beatles in 1966 in the aftermath of Lennon’s infamous ‘bigger than Jesus’ comment – the manager of the venue, one Bubba Bland, became so alarmed at the over the top reaction of the audience, he panicked and demanded Grant stop the show. When G just laughed in his face, Bland pulled a gun on him. ‘If you don’t cut the show,’ he bellowed, ‘I’m gonna shoot ya!’ According to legend, Grant regarded Bland with disdain. ‘You can’t shoot me, ya cunt!’ he is said to have roared back at him. ‘They’ve just given us the fucking keys to the city!’
However, the only eye-witness to this event, in-house producer and co-owner of Ardent Studios in Memphis, Terry Manning, recalls things somewhat differently. A friend of Page’s from Yardbirds days – they had met when Terry was the rhythm guitarist and keyboard player in Lawson and Four More, a local Memphis outfit hired to open the bill on one of Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars package bills that the Yardbirds were on – Terry had actually been another of the people sounded out by Jimmy in Zeppelin’s earliest days as a possible member. Speaking from his home these days in the Bahamas, Manning recalls Page phoning to ask if he would be interested in coming to England, bringing the Lawson and Four More bassist, Joe Gaston, with him. ‘He said, “I’ve got a great singer called Terry Reid, we’ll get him in.” I said, “Oh, I know Terry”, because I had photographed the cover of his second album [Terry Reid].’ The idea never developed beyond a phone call though. Reid turned Page down and Manning sensibly decided that with his own career now taking off as a producer for Stax Records, working with artists like the Staple Singers, Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes, ‘It just didn’t seem the wisest choice to give it all up to join the New Yardbirds…They weren’t selling any records and it was almost looked on in some circles as an afterthought.’
But they stayed in touch and Terry was a guest at many of the earliest Zeppelin shows in the US. ‘I saw maybe fifty or sixty shows,’ he says, ‘including that night in Memphis.’ He was standing with Grant at the back of the stage when Bland drew his gun and aimed it at him and recalls that far from facing his assailant with blind courage, Grant was actually in fear of his life. ‘He actually held Peter at gunpoint and then pointed the gun at Robert Plant. Peter called Robert over to the back of the stage and was yelling, “Calm them down! Stop the music, no matter what! He’s got a gun on me!” And Robert looks down, like “Huh?” So Robert went back out and stopped the show. They were playing “Whole Lotta Love” and everyone was on their seats and they literally were going crazy. So they stopped, they brought the houselights up, Robert pleaded with the audience, “Please everyone, sit down, the show cannot continue. They’ve actually threatened us back here, I need your help.” And everyone finally did. Then Robert said, “Everyone please stay seated, we’re gonna finish this last song, thanks for a great evening.” Then rat-a-tat-tat, they went back into “Whole Lotta Love” and everyone was right back up and people were jumping again. But the houselights never went back down and finally the show just disintegrated and we went backstage. There was Peter, the four band members and me standing in the dressing room, and Peter was cursing like you cannot believe. The band was so upset and I’m standing there as a resident of Memphis Tennessee at the time, saying, “Guys, I’m so sorry, I apologise. These people are cretins.” The thing is they had been shot at just the week before, leaving a gig in Dallas. They were in the limo, on their way to the hotel and a bullet grazed it. Someone shot at them and just missed. They said, “What is it with the Southern US? We’re never touring here again!” They were just so upset.’
The weirdness didn’t end there, either. Terry had arranged an Indian meal for Jimmy back at his apartment that night – ‘I knew Jimmy loved Indian food and you just couldn’t get it anywhere else in the South back then’ – so instead of leaving in the band limo, he and Charlotte, who was also there, left with Terry in his Merc. On the way out of the venue, however, fans spotted Jimmy and several took off after them in a car chase. ‘All the way through the streets of Memphis with everybody screaming and yelling, “I know you’re in there!” and he was just freaking out of course. While this was happening I had “Heartbreaker” panning back and forth on the car stereo. It was like a bizarre scene from hell…’
8
A Bustle in Your Hedgerow
What Robert Plant calls ‘the craziness count’ had definitely gone up since the band had last toured the States four months before. Bonzo, whose bouts of homesickness seemed to be growing in direct proportion to how successful the band became, began drinking more heavily and taking out his frustrations on hotel rooms. The show in Pittsburgh also had to be stopped when a bloody brawl erupted in the crowd. Elsewhere, cops hassled them at their own shows, blaming them for the uncontrolled antics of the audience. ‘I don’t think we can take America again for a while,’ John Paul Jones told one writer at the end of it. ‘America definitely unhinges you. The knack is to hinge yourself up again when you get back.’ Plant suffered, too. ‘More than anyone,’ Richard Cole later noted, ‘Robert seemed on the brink of collapse.’
As usual, they took refuge in LA. No longer staying at the Chateau Marmont – the Manson murders of the year before had thrown all of LA into a semi-permanent fug of paranoia and Peter Grant decreed the Marmont’s spread of isolated bungalows too easy a target for any potential ‘nutters’, of which there were more than a few now following th
e band around on tour – the band had relocated to the Hyatt House, a few blocks up on Sunset. Or the ‘riot house’ as Bonzo and Plant now dubbed it, and for good reason. With a never-ending parade of girls finding their way up to the ninth floor where the band and its entourage were sequestered for a week, Richard Cole later recalled the limo for the shows being so weighed down by girls ‘the trunk [had] become stuck on the riot house driveway, requiring a push off the curb…absolute madness’. Many were now routinely offering to be whipped by Jimmy, whose proclivities had become well known amongst the groupie community, while Cole and Bonzo devised ever weirder ruses to keep themselves entertained, including handcuffing groupies to the beds in their hotel suites until they returned from gigs. Cole would order them room service and leave a few joints for them to smoke. ‘They never complained,’ he recalled with a smirk. ‘No handcuffs were needed to keep them around.’
Just as Zeppelin were reaching the height of their on-the-road notoriety, they were also on the cusp of making their most enduring music. That monumentally successful second album was only the beginning. In fact, in many ways, they only really began to make the great leaps forward musically that would cement their reputation as one of the all-time rock greats with what came next, starting with what was arguably their first proper album together: Led Zeppelin III. Written and conceived, in large part, in reaction to both criticism of their first two albums and their own frustrations at being forced to write and record so quickly and under so much pressure, although the third Zeppelin album would also eventually be hurried into production, the beginnings of the songs on the album – and indeed the album that followed – were undertaken in much less stressful circumstances. The end result would take everyone by surprise; the whole tenor of the album – acoustic-based songs, rooted in folk and country as well as their already well-established blues influences – the last thing anyone, including Jones and Bonham, who were largely excluded from the songwriting process, would have predicted at that point. Until then the question had been: how would they top the ecstatic thrill of that titanic second album? Would they be able to come up with another ‘Whole Lotta Love’?
The answer was: they wouldn’t even try to. ‘People that thought like that missed the point,’ Page told me in 2001. ‘The whole point was not to try and follow up something like “Whole Lotta Love”. We recognised that it had been a milestone for us, but we had absolutely no intention of trying to repeat it. The idea was to try and do something different. To sum up where the band was now, not where it had been a year ago.’ And where the band was now – or where Page and Plant were anyway – was halfway up a mountainside in Wales.
Page seemed to be trying to put his personal life onto a more even keel, too. Back in LA in April 1970, when he bumped into Miss P and her new boyfriend, Marty, a dresser for rock stars from New York, Jimmy was friendly but distant. When they played on 13 April, it was Plant not Page who invited her along and paid for her cab fare to the show, adding kindly that he wouldn’t go on till she got there. Leaving Marty on his own at home, after the show she and Jimmy ended up back at his suite at the Hyatt till five in the morning. All they did was talk, though. He showed her pictures of Charlotte Martin – who Pamela already knew about, having been tipped off by Miss Christine, who had been in London with Todd Rundgren, where she’d seen Page squiring his new love around town – and said he was ‘being good’. They parted friends but she wept all the way home.
With the final show of the tour cancelled when an exhausted Plant’s voice gave out, the band flew home from Las Vegas on 20 April. Between their first show in December 1968 and their latest in April 1970, they had performed no less than 153 times in the US. They were now playing for guarantees of up to $100,000 per show; they would receive their first substantial royalty payments in 1970. Consequently, 1970 became the year when the band began to live large. Twenty-four-year-old John Paul Jones bought himself a big new place in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, which he and wife Mo and their two daughters moved into as soon as the band returned from America. Twenty-two-year-old John Bonham finally moved out of the council flat in Dudley he’d been living in since before the Atlantic advance and relocated the family into a fifteen-acre farm in West Hagley, just outside Brum. Plant – not twenty-two until August – had already paid £8,000 the year before for a similar dwelling, Jennings Farm, near Kidderminster. He now set about spending several more thousands refurbishing it. Page kept the boathouse in Pangbourne but bought Boleskine House – the home fifty years before of Aleister Crowley – on the banks of Loch Ness.
But while Bonham and Jones immersed themselves in nest-building, Plant was restless and began talking to Page on the phone about a remote eighteenth-century cottage in Wales, which he recalled from a childhood holiday. He told Jimmy how his father would pack the family into his 1953 Vauxhall Wyvern and take them for a drive up the A5 through Shrewsbury and Llangollen into Snowdonia. Places with strange names, full of tales of sword and sorcery. The cottage, named Bron-Yr-Aur (Welsh for, variously, ‘golden hill’, ‘breast of gold’ or even ‘hill of gold’, pronounced Bron-raaar), had been owned by a friend of his father’s, and stood at the end of a narrow road just outside the small market town of Machynlleth in Gwynedd. Plant further intrigued the guitarist by telling him of the giant Idris Gawr, who had a seat on the nearby mountain of Cader Idris, and how legend had it that anyone who sat on it would either die, go mad or become a poet; how King Arthur was said to have fought his final battle in the Ochr-yr-Bwlch pass just east of Dolgellau.
Page, who had only just begun to restore to its former glories the interior of his own new mythological abode – Boleskine – was equally taken by the idea of some time away from it all. Before committing full-time to the Yardbirds, he had been an occasional solo traveller, moving through India, America, Spain and elsewhere. Now, with Charlotte by his side and Plant talking of bringing wife Maureen and infant daughter Carmen and his dog Strider (named after Aragorn’s alter ego in Lord of the Rings) with him, too, plans were laid for a sojourn together into the Welsh mountains.
Both men had also been very taken by the debut album two years before of Bob Dylan’s former backing group, The Band: Music from Big Pink, famously named after the country house it was recorded in, in upstate New York. Jimmy and Robert weren’t the only musicians newly influenced by The Band’s ramshackle musical blend of rock, country, folk and blues. Eric Clapton had been so bowled over he had actually flown to Woodstock and asked to join the band, an overture they merely laughed at as they sat rolling another joint. George Harrison had also since flown out to hang out with them in LA, where they had fetched up to record their second album. Suddenly everyone, including all of Led Zeppelin, had beards, along with a new pastoral chic in sharp contrast to the blend of mod sharpness and pre-Raphaelite foppery which had dominated their look early on. There were other influences too, like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, whose deeply spiritual, if somewhat bleak mix of folk and soul Plant was particularly taken with. Also Joni Mitchell, who Page now became besotted with, partly through her inspiring use of different acoustic guitar tunings, which were almost a match for his own in their range and obscurity, partly through her remarkably honest and clearly autobiographical songs – and, of course, her long blonde hair and aquiline features. The huge impact of Crosby Stills & Nash, who Plant had seen at the Albert Hall just before Zeppelin played there in January, had also been noted with intense interest by both men.
Above all, there was simply the desire to prove something about the band that neither the critics nor even the fans had picked up on yet, which was the fact that Led Zeppelin was not merely a one-trick pony. That there was more to Jimmy Page, certainly, than a growing collection of great rock riffs, not least his deep and abiding interest in the acoustic guitar. As soon as Robert suggested the cottage, Jimmy saw the potential. As he would later explain: ‘It was the tranquillity of the place that set the tone of the album. After all the heavy, intense vibe of touring which is reflected in t
he raw energy of the second album, it was just a totally different feeling.’
You’d never seen yourself as a ‘specialist’ in the way that Eric obviously did. You loved the blues as much as anyone but you wouldn’t have wanted to be lumbered with playing it forever the way he ended up doing. You’d always been too much into rock’n’roll – they didn’t call Elvis the King for nothing. And then there was folk and classical, Celtic, Asian…there would never be another James Burton or Scotty Moore. But there would never be anyone like Segovia or Julian Bream, either. You knew it didn’t really fit together – or wasn’t supposed to anyway. But in your mind it was all different sides of the same story. Same with someone like Manitas de Plata doing flamenco, just different approaches to the same thing really. Then there was Django Reinhardt and another completely different approach. Anything and everything you came across, you were able to digest and turn into something, especially if it involved new ways of playing the guitar, which is how you got into classical Indian music, wondering how on earth you played the sitar with its nine-strings, moveable frets and vibrating under-strings. Eventually buying one to try and find out…
The guitar seemed to mirror your own personality. There was what you called your acoustic side – calm, quiet, meaningful but understated – and there was your electric side, the stuff that came out when you plugged your Gibson ‘Black Beauty’ in – loud, flash, attention-seeking, impossible to ignore. It wasn’t about how good a player you were, it was about simple understanding. You didn’t look upon yourself as particularly brilliant or gifted. You knew there were faster players than you. You knew there were technically better players than you. But there were few better all-rounders. Few who seemed to understand the importance of knowing more than one or two things at a time. That’s why it was such fun playing with Cyril’s interval band at the Marquee. They were bluesers but they could rock’n’roll too. Madmen, most of them, it was no surprise to you when they turned up later in Screaming Lord Sutch’s band.
