When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  It wasn’t until you started doing sessions that you were forced to learn the ‘textbook’ stuff. You never knew what you were going to be doing until you got to there, which was good and bad. Sometimes it meant making it up as you went along, almost telling them what to do. Others times, you were so clueless you’d turn your amp off and just pretend to play along. It wasn’t like you’d heard it was in America, where you were meant to be a specialist, brought in to do one specific thing, this one for soul, this one for pop, this one for film music…In London, the cats who got the gigs were the ones who could do it all.

  It was amazing how quickly things took off for you. First there was the Johnny Howard and the Silhouettes thing, cheers for that Cyril. Then it was Jet Harris and Tony Meehan and ‘Diamonds’, which Glyn Johns, your old mate from Epsom who’d sung in The Presidents and was now working as a tape op had recommended you for. When that went to no. 1 you couldn’t believe it! So unreal, knowing you’d played on something that was no. 1, yet no-one knowing it was you – except Jet and Tony, of course, and the rest of the people behind the scenes. After that you got offered so many different sessions it all turned into a blur. Some you never forgot, like the time you were booked for the ‘Goldfinger’ session, playing in the John Barry Orchestra for a day. Shirley Bassey turned up, threw her fur coat on the floor, then strode up to the mike and just belted it out, perfect first time – then fainted, spark out on the studio floor, everyone running around like headless chickens trying to revive her. Some like ‘Money Honey’ by Mickie Most and the Gear, you’d forgotten about practically the next day. If someone had told you then how often Mickie the useless singer would cross your path in the future you’d have thought they were bloody mad!

  Even though you only read music ‘like a six-year-old reads a book’ nothing seemed to hold you back. Before you, there had only really been Big Jim Sullivan doing most of the sessions – him and Vic Flick and Alan Parker, older geezers. Vic had played lead on the Bond theme with Big Jim on rhythm. Now there was Little Jimmy Page to play rhythm while Big Jim did the lead, like when you did ‘My Baby Left Me’ by Dave Berry and the Cruisers. It was only a cover of Elvis’s cover of Arthur Crudup’s song. But it got to no. 37 and you and Big Jim became quite matey after that. You were both booked for the next Dave Berry single too, ‘The Crying Game’, you strumming, Big Jim doing the obligato. Same thing when it came to stuff like ‘Diamonds’ and ‘Hold Me’. Big Jim and Little Jimmy: you were the A team. Mostly, you were on your own, doing whatever came along, from the crud – ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’ by The First Gear, ‘It Hurts When I Cry’ by Sean Buckley and his Breadcrumbs – to big stuff like ‘Hold Me’ by PJ Proby, ‘Walk Tall’ by Val Doonican, ‘The Last Waltz’ by Englebert Humperdink, ‘Little Arrows’ by Leapy Lee, ‘Tobacco Road’ by the Nashville Teens – to the stuff that sort of fell in the middle like ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ by Them and ‘Time Drags By’ by Cliff Richard, so many you often didn’t know you’d played on it till you heard it on the radio and recognised yourself. Sometimes not even that helped and you would swear blind you’d never been near the session. You didn’t care. That is, you did and you didn’t. As long as it all came with a nice fat cheque with your name on it what did it matter?

  Except that it did matter. For your twenty-first birthday, you found yourself sitting in a circle with drummer Mickey Waller and a few other familiar faces, playing non-stop from ten in the morning till one in the afternoon on a Sonny Boy Williamson album. Four months later Sonny Boy died and somehow it didn’t make sense. You playing on his last ever recording, but there it was. That’s who you were now – a real pro. Such a pro, in fact, you were now playing on maybe half of all the records that were being produced in London, with Big Jim playing on the other half. The same year you even got to make a single of your own, a song you wrote in about ten minutes called ‘She Just Satisfies’, which – don’t laugh – you even sang on! Yeah, well, so what? No-one would ever remember it anyway…

  Situated along a steep track that leads through a ravine, when Jimmy and Robert arrived at Bron-Yr-Aur in May they found a stone dwelling so derelict it had no electricity, running water or sanitation. Fortunately, as well as their respective partners, they had also brought Zeppelin roadies Clive Coulson and Sandy Macgregor with them, both of whom were now put in charge of domestic chores. ‘It was freezing when we arrived,’ Coulson remembered. He and Macgregor would be sent to carry water from a nearby stream and gather wood for the open-hearth fire, ‘which heated a range with an oven on either side’. There were calor gas heaters but only candles to light the place. ‘A bath was once a week in Machynlleth at the Owen Glendower pub. I’m not sure who got the job of cleaning out the chemical toilet…’

  Evenings off would also be spent at the pub, where they mingled with local farmers (from whom Page bought some goats which he had Coulson drive up to Boleskine House in a Transit), the local biker gang and some volunteers restoring another old house nearby. Invited to join in on ‘Kumbayah’ one night, Jimmy apologised and explained he didn’t play guitar. Meanwhile, back at the cottage, where Page did play the guitar and Plant warbled on his harmonica, the songs began to come, sometimes just scraps, sometimes fully formed. Songs that would ‘prove there was more to us than being a heavy metal band,’ as Jimmy put it. Chief amongst them, ‘Friends’, built on some esoteric scales Page had brought back with him from a trip to India in Yardbirds’ days laid over a conga drum that recalled the lumbering rhythm of ‘Mars’ from Holst’s The Planets Suite, a big favourite; Plant’s dreamy ‘That’s The Way’ and the rousting, misspelled ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’. There were also several begun there that would find a home not just on the next Zeppelin album but on their next four albums, including the bare bones of ‘Stairway To Heaven’, ‘Over The Hills And Far Away’, ‘Down By The Seaside’, ‘The Rover’, the similarly misspelled ‘Bron-Y-Aur’ and ‘Poor Tom’.

  Of the tracks that did make the third album, there was also ‘Tangerine’, with its nicely low-key, deliberate-mistake intro, originally begun at a disastrous final June 1968 Yardbirds session in New York as a song called ‘My Baby’, now reborn in Wales as a country-tinged, Neil Young-inspired dirge. As the Yardbirds had never copyrighted the piece, Page claimed authorship of the entire song, including the lyrics (even if they did smack of the classic flower-child-isms of Keith Relf). ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’ had also begun life as another electric number, ‘Jennings Farm Blues’, laid down at Olympic the previous autumn, here transformed into a jugband hoedown dedicated to Plant’s dog Strider. ‘Walk down the country lanes, I’ll be singin’ a song,’ Plant warbled cheerily, ‘Hear the wind whisper in the trees that Mother Nature’s proud of you and me…’

  The song that really summed up the spirit of adventure at Bron-Yr-Aur was one that arrived almost unbidden late one afternoon as Jimmy and Robert traipsed through the surrounding flower-decked hills, then in full spring bloom. Stopping to smoke a joint and admire the view, Jimmy took the guitar he’d been carrying on his back and began strumming some random chords, half-remembered from Bert Jansch and John Renbourn’s version of the traditional arrangement ‘The Waggoners Lad’. To Jimmy’s delight, Robert began singing along in a much more restrained voice than usual, ad-libbing the opening to what was originally called ‘The Boy Next Door’ but later became ‘That’s The Way’. Afraid to lose the moment, they pulled a cassette recorder out of a knapsack and laid the rest of it down then and there. Afterwards, they celebrated by sharing some squares of Kendal Mint Cake then made their way back to the cottage where they sat before the fire eating a fry-up and drinking cups of cider mulled by red-hot pokers, listening back to endless repeats of the tape. Then they staggered off to bed.

  ‘We wrote those songs and walked and talked and thought and went off to the Abbey where they hid the Grail,’ Plant later told writer Barney Hoskyns. ‘No matter how cute and comical it might be now to look back at that, it gave us so much energy, because we were really close to something
. We believed. It was absolutely wonderful, and my heart was so light and happy. At that time, at that age, 1970 was like the biggest blue sky I ever saw.’

  Jones and Bonham were equally taken with the rough tapes of the songs Page and Plant had returned with from Wales. Back in London for a short stay at Olympic in early June, they struggled however to recreate the atmosphere in the stale environs of a professional recording facility. So they decided to decamp once again, this time for a dilapidated mansion in Hampshire named Headley Grange, where with the aide of the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio, they hoped to have the album finished before returning to the road in America in August.

  Headley Grange had been found for them by Grant’s secretary, Carole Browne, through an ad she’d spotted in The Lady. Once again, Page was attracted to the setting more by its history than its practical application as a workplace. Known as Hallege in the Domesday Book, the origins of Headley Village are even older than that, its landmarks betraying its true age: Rectory Field, Long Cross Hill, Old Robin Hood, Waggoners Lane, the Tithe Barn Pond…Headley Workhouse, as it was originally known, was a three-storey stone manor built for the then substantial sum of £150 in 1795 in order to ‘shelter the infirm, aged paupers, orphans or illegitimate children of Headley’ and nearby Bramshott and Kingsley. Attacked by Swing rioters in 1830, it was still known locally as Headley Poor when, in 1875, it was bought for £420 by a builder, Thomas Kemp, who converted it into a residence and renamed it Headley Grange.

  With the advent of mobile studios – in the Stones’ case, a bunch of recording equipment hot-wired together and loaded onto the back of a truck – and the Sixties fashion for ‘getting it together in the country’, the Grange began to be let out to rock groups by its widowed owner. Both Genesis and Fleetwood Mac had recorded there previously. With Page and Plant still enchanted by their newly consummated creative union, they were especially susceptible to their surroundings, and the austere, often bleak, mansion appealed to their same sense of adventure as the recent trip to Wales. ‘It really looked to me as if it had been – not derelict, but it looked as if it had hardly been lived in,’ said Jimmy. ‘It had been a workhouse and it was quite interesting considering the tests we were going to put it to.’ As Plant put it, ‘We were living in this falling down mansion in the country. The mood was incredible.’

  It wasn’t all work though, with the band breaking for two weekends to play some dates. The first was two shows in Iceland on 20 and 21 June at a converted gymnasium in Reykjavic, from which they returned to Headley with a new, distinctly non-acoustic battle cry of a number called ‘Immigrant Song’, Plant solemnly intoning, ‘We are your o-ver-looords…’ to chilling effect. The workers at the venue were on strike at the time so the local student body ganged together to help put on the show. ‘The students took over,’ Robert later told me, ‘and got the whole thing going and it was just amazing. When we played there it really did feel like we were inhabiting a parallel universe, quite apart from everything else, including the rock world of the times.’

  The following Sunday evening they were back for their second Bath Festival appearance, held not at the Recreation Ground this time but a much larger site in Shepton Mallet, ten miles away, where more than 150,000 people would eventually show up over the duration of the two-day event. The official line peddled by Grant to the press, via Bill Harry, was that the band was playing at Bath despite an offer of $200,000 to play in America that weekend – almost certainly Grant and Harry’s shrewd attempt to drum up a bit of useful PR for the event. Nevertheless, it became another key moment in winning over the British music press.

  B.P. Fallon, then working as PR for T. Rex but soon to become Zeppelin’s publicist as well, was at Bath and remembers it well. ‘Zeppelin had killed at the Bath Festival in 1970,’ he says now from his home in New York. ‘I was there as a punter, me and my girlfriend Eileen Webster, on acid in the VIP enclosure at the very front. The sunset was tickling the skies and this Led Zeppelin monster exploding into action yards away was like a fucking rocket going off and carrying us to Mars and beyond. Beyond brilliant, you know? But there was no strategic follow-up, not really. A bunch of small UK dates in spring 1971 and a month of concerts that autumn. I mean, Zeppelin were big but the focus had been on conquering the States. People in Britain knew that Led Zeppelin were doing very well in America but mostly they were lumped in with Ten Years After or Savoy Brown or Keef Hartley or whoever – this blues-based Second British Invasion Of America.’ However, it was after Bath that Zeppelin began their rapid ascent in Britain to what Fallon describes now as ‘full-on and on fire. They’d never done such an extensive UK tour – up and down the country for two months – and the press en masse finally got it as much as the fans. And after that, Led Zeppelin were treble-mega in Britain. Tick that box! Next!’

  Also on the bill that year were Canned Heat, Steppenwolf, Pink Floyd, Johnny Winter, Fairport Convention, Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, the Moody Blues, the Byrds, Santana, Dr John and nearly a dozen others. It should have been a landmark occasion but despite the eternal hippy ingénue Plant telling the crowd how ‘really nice’ it was ‘to come to an open-air festival where there’s no bad things happening’, for its organisers, Freddy and Wendy Bannister, it became ‘a vision of hell’. The problems began, says Wendy, ‘when it suddenly became a free festival’ after thousands of ticketless fans pulled down the two miles of chain-link fence the Bannisters had erected and just walked in. Freddy continues, ‘Political militancy had grown enormously in just twelve months and there were all these “revolutionary” hippies from France there stirring things up. It was all, “Bannister is a bread-head.” Of course, they never talked about how much money the groups all charged…’

  Zeppelin’s fee alone had risen from the £500 the Bannisters had paid them the previous year to £20,000 – ‘enough for a house in Knightsbridge in those days,’ as Wendy puts it. Grant insisted Zeppelin’s name was double the size of anyone else’s on the poster. ‘As I’d already given my word to [Zappa manager] Bill Thompson that that wouldn’t happen, he was very cross with me,’ says Freddy. ‘But Zeppelin were making it very big in America and we had to have Zeppelin. They were simply so enormous by then we knew that they’d bring in all the people.’

  Intermittent rain throughout the weekend meant that by Sunday the only road leading to the site had become all but impassable. According to John Paul Jones, ‘Peter Grant spent nine hours in a car getting down there.’ Never one to walk when he could ride, Jones eventually hired a helicopter to ferry him to the site from nearby Denham Airport. ‘Cheaper than a hired car, for some reason,’ he recalled. The problem was they could only land in a field a couple of miles from the site. Fortunately for Jonesy, a posse of Hell’s Angels offered him a lift through the mud on the back of one of their bikes ‘It was a great entrance, I have to say. I was carrying a mandolin [and] I had a cowboy hat on – Peter Fonda!’

  There were so many problems the only time Freddy Bannister went into the stage area throughout the entire weekend, he says, ‘was to go and sort the Hell’s Angels out. I’m not sure how tired or how stupid I was, but I did that on my own. I went and bought them off! I got them all backstage and I said, “Hey, this can’t go on. You’re being an absolute pain. I don’t want you here, I want you to leave. I’ll give you money”.’ The Angels took the £400 proffered by the stricken promoter and left without further trouble. ‘Thank goodness they weren’t like their American counterparts,’ Freddy shakes his head, ‘or I’d probably have been shot or stabbed.’

  Also at the show that day was film-maker Joe Massot, who had directed the 1967 cult classic Wonderwall, shooting scenes on stage and off with his own 16mm camera. ‘With the sun setting behind Robert’s hair, the whole gig took on another dimension,’ he recalled. However, the real scene-setter in this instance was Peter Grant, who – realising the sun was setting directly behind the stage – ordered Ricardo and crew to wade in and put a premature end
to the band that was then in mid-set, a jazz-rock ensemble named The Flock. Which they did, unplugging cables and cutting off Flock violinist Jerry Goodman mid-cadenza, as Grant readied his charges into hurriedly following them straight on. ‘I found out from the Met office what time the sun was setting,’ Grant told Dave Lewis, ‘and by going on at eight in the evening I was able to bring the lights up a bit at a time. And it was vital we went on to match that. That’s why I made sure Flock or whoever it was got off on time.’ As a result, Zeppelin’s near three-hour set began with a halo of sunlight descending into the horizon behind their heads, the band dressed, as per their new pastoral mode, as tweedy troubadours, heavily bearded, Page even sporting what looked like a scarecrow’s hat. ‘I remember Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin were also on the bill,’ Plant once told me, ‘and I remember standing there thinking: I’ve gone from West Bromwich to this! I’ve really got to eat this up. The whole thing seemed extraordinary to me. I was as astonished as the audiences some nights…’

  It was also at Bath that Page first met Roy Harper, destined to become the titular subject of another of the songs on their next album – ‘Hats Off To (Roy) Harper’. Rustic jester, folk troubadour, Harper would exert an unusual influence on everyone he came into contact with, including Led Zeppelin. Born in Manchester in 1941 but brought up in Blackpool, Harper was a stereotypical English eccentric whose formative years had seen him feign madness to get out of the RAF, the result of which was five years in and out of mental hospital and prison. He spent the early part of the Sixties reading poetry and busking around Europe. Having washed up in London in 1964, he became a fixture on the folk circuit, where Page had first noticed him, before eventually recording his own albums, all quite distinct, all utterly uncommercial.