When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Seeing Harper wandering around backstage at Bath, Jimmy, who would make a guest appearance later that year on Harper’s remarkable Stormcock album, approached him and asked to be shown how he played an instrumental from his first album, Blackpool. ‘So I played it for him,’ remembered Harper, ‘and he said, “Thanks very much”. We exchanged pleasantries and then he walked away. The only thing I thought as I watched him leave was, “That guy’s pants are too short for him”.’ It wasn’t until he saw Zeppelin perform that day that he realised who Page was. ‘During the second song, all the young women in the crowd started to stand up involuntarily, with tears running down their faces. It was like, “Jesus, what’s happening here then?” In the end, you knew you’d seen something you were never going to forget.’

  Though he didn’t know it then, it was also the start of a long relationship between the two guitarists, with various members appearing at Harper shows and Harper opening occasionally for Zeppelin. (Harper would fulfil a similar role for Pink Floyd, appearing on their 1975 opus, Wish You Were Here.) Nevertheless, he was taken aback some weeks later to discover his name on the next Zeppelin album. ‘I went to their office one day and Jimmy said, “Here’s the new record.”. “Oh…thanks,” I said, and tucked it under my arm. “Well, look at it then!”’ So Harper looked at it and twirled the little wheel around. ‘Very nice and all that. So he went, “Look at it!” Then I discovered “Hats Off To Harper”. I was very touched.’ As he should have been. That one track would introduce the perennially unsuccessful Harper to millions of album buyers around the world over the next few years. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ said Page, ‘hats off to anybody who does what they think is right and refuses to sell out.’ Or as Plant would later jokingly recall, ‘Somebody had to have a wry sense of humour and a perspective which stripped ego instantly [and] we couldn’t get Zappa.’ Adding: ‘That’s not to say he didn’t occasionally enjoy some of the Led Zeppelin by-products – like the occasional blow-job!’

  Back at Headley Grange, they continued honing their new material. Eventually there would be seventeen near-complete tracks. To the acoustic-based material from Bron-Yr-Aur they now added ‘Hats Off To (Roy) Harper’, a piece of spontaneous combustion initiated by Page late one night inspired by some frenzied slide-guitar channelling of Bukka White’s ‘Shake ’Em On Down’ (credited on the sleeve to Charles Obscure), and ‘Gallows Pole’, a rollicking reinvention of a centuries-old English folk song called ‘The Maid Freed From The Gallows’, a striking contemporary version of which Page remembered fondly from the B-side of a 1965 single by Dorris Henderson. A black American who’d arrived in London singing Appalachian mountain songs, Page first heard Henderson after she’d teamed up briefly with future Pentangle guitarist John Renbourn. Her debut single, a version of Paul Simon’s ‘The Leaves That Are Green’, had sunk without trace, but the B-side, a new arrangement of ‘The Maid…’ by Henderson that she’d dubbed ‘Hangman’ had stuck in Jimmy’s mind. Credited on Led Zeppelin III as ‘Trad arrangement: Page, Plant’, it has since erroneously been cited as a derivative of the Leadbelly tune ‘Gallis Tree’, a version of which Bert Jansch also performed in the mid-Sixties. Page has subsequently claimed that the inspiration came from Fred Gerlach, an American acoustic pioneer whose album of Leadbelly covers, 12 String Guitar, released in the late-Fifties on the Folkways label, also featured a version of the track. However, one listen to the age-old original confirms the truth, along with lyrics barely altered by Plant.

  There were also a handful of electric, more obviously Zep-sounding tub-thumpers like ‘Immigrant Song’, ‘Celebration Day’ and ‘The Bathroom Song’ (so-called because everyone said the drums sounded like they had been recorded in the bathroom, but later changed to ‘Out On The Tiles’), plus the foundation of what would become one of their finest ballads, the exquisite blues, ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’. Begun at Olympic during the same truncated sessions that produced the original electric ‘Jenning’s Farm’, the band had already aired a shorter, tighter version live at Bath, but it wasn’t until now that they tried to finish it. That said, the genesis of what was destined to become one of Zeppelin’s most famous tracks can again be fairly clearly pinned down to an earlier, typically unaccredited blues jam by Moby Grape titled ‘Never’. Located on the giveaway Grape Jam album that accompanied the band’s official debut release, Wow, in 1968, as the Grape remain one of Plant’s favourite San Francisco groups of the period, it’s inconceivable the singer was not already acquainted with ‘Never’. Indeed, the opening lines of ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ – ‘Working from seven to eleven every night, it really makes life a drag, I don’t think that’s right’ – are almost identical to those on ‘Never’, which go: ‘Working from eleven to seven every night, ought to make life a drag, yeah, and I know that ain’t right.’ Plant also appears to echo Grape vocalist Bob Mosley when elsewhere he sings of being ‘the best of fools’ and complains his baby can’t hear him crying.

  There are also uncanny echoes in the music, both songs being extrapolations from a stately BB King-style blues, the main difference being Page’s more coherent direction, working it up into a melodramatic musical statement with beginning, middle and end where the Grape working is more content to meander forth in the one-take jam style it was intended. With Plant also displaying his new Van Morrison and Janis Joplin influences on the scatted vocal amidst the sound of Bonzo’s oil-free bass pedal squeaking, Jonesy’s jazzy bed of keyboards, while playing the bass pedals of the Hammond organ with his feet, all that was needed to round it off was a typically spine-tingling guitar solo from Jimmy. The tape-operative at the session was a young former supermarket shelf-stacker named Richard Digby Smith. As he told Mojo in 2000: ‘I can see Robert at the mike now. He was so passionate. Lived every line. What you got on the record is what happened. His only preparation was a herbal cigarette and a couple of shots of Jack Daniel’s…I remember Pagey pushing him, “Let’s try the outro chorus again, improvise a bit more.”’ He went on, ‘There was a hugeness about everything Zeppelin did. I mean, look behind you and there was Peter Grant sitting on the sofa – the whole sofa.’

  In an effort to try to complete the album, by now they had abandoned Headley for the more polished surrounds of Island’s No. 2 studio at Basing Street in Notting Hill Gate. It was here that Page had demoed a guide solo for ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ – done with no real thought, just off the top of his head using someone else’s amp. But try as he might, he just couldn’t come up with the finished article. It was also during these sessions that the first rough recording of another new song, ‘No Quarter’, written by Jonesy, was etched out. But all other considerations went out the window as Page battled to come up with a suitably spine-tingling solo to finish off ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’. But by the time their next American tour began in Cincinnati on 5 August, the album still wasn’t finished and Page was left with no option but to repeat the gruelling process that had characterised the previous summer’s US tour, jetting off to the studio between shows. Fortunately, he was able to call on his old friend Terry Manning at Ardent Studios in Memphis for help. ‘I’d pick Jimmy up at the airport and drive him straight to the studio to begin work. Peter always accompanied Jimmy too. No-one else, though. I think Robert came in for one day. Bonham came in for one. That was it.’

  Manning remembers editing ‘a lot’ out of ‘Gallows Pole’ and Jimmy trying – and repeatedly failing – to find the right solo for ‘Since…’ ‘In the end Jimmy accepted that the demo solo done in England was not going to be bettered and so that was the one they eventually used. Listening back now, it’s my all-time number one favourite rock guitar solo. We took three or four other takes and tried to put takes together and come up with something, and they were all great. But there’s something magic about that one take [he did], that stream of consciousness.’

  Page worked alone with Manning on the mix of the album. Manning says that the much looser approach – the tape-echo at
the start of ‘Immigrant Song’, the wayward segue between ‘Friends’ and ‘Celebration Day’, the occasional voices you can hear in the background, what a quarter of a century later would be called ‘lo-fi’ – was ‘all thought out, not accidental at all’. It was this aspect, he says now, that demonstrated to him what ‘a really brilliant producer’ Page was. ‘Not to demean or cast any aspersions,’ he adds, choosing his words carefully, ‘but I think he harmed himself perhaps in a few ways later on. But at that particular time, the very early days, Jimmy was an incredibly insightful, true musical genius, in my opinion, and I’ve seen a lot of musical people. I would say that very little happened by accident. Yes, there would be the occasional take that you can’t repeat so you go with that but it did take the insight to know that. He studied everything. When it says “produced by Jimmy Page” it seriously was. He asked me, “What do you think about leaving the beginning of the ‘Celebration Day’ thing on [referring to the moment when Bonham can be heard shouting ‘Fuck!’]? No-one ever seemed to pick up on it. But he said, “That’s not why I wanna leave it, not cos that’s cool. I like the sonic texture of everything. I like the feel that you’re really there.”. We really talked all that through.’

  You had been writing bits of music almost since you’d begun playing the guitar. Then after playing on LP sessions and B-sides for the likes of Nico, John Mayall, Joe Cocker, the Kinks, The Who – endless, nameless – the whole thing was less of a mystery. If they could do it, well…especially when you found out how much money the writers of hit songs could actually make. When you were hired to play on a Burt Bacharach session you were flabbergasted to see him leaving in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Then someone started counting off all the hit songs he and Hal David had written and the light started to dawn in your eyes. You started writing songs and you started punting them around with all your contacts at the publishing companies in Tin Pan Alley.

  Then you met Jackie DeShannon and things started to make more sense. Jackie was from Kentucky. The first American girl you’d ever really known, she was different. A professional songwriter who also sang, she’d been invited by the Beatles to come to London and make a single after they’d all fallen in love with her when she’d opened for them on a tour. And guess who got hired to play on the session…‘Don’t Turn Your Back On Me, Babe’ it was called and it was good, actually. She said ‘It goes like this’ and showed you the guitar chords. You got it first time and she said, ‘That’s fast! It usually takes them a long time to get it off in the States.’ You didn’t know if that was true but the way she looked at you when she said it, you knew what she meant. You ended up back at her hotel, writing songs together. Well, she did most of the writing, you just played along, coming up with a line or two here or there, a title perhaps, but by the end of it you had about eight songs – and you were in love. Weirdest of all, the songs you’d written together started getting picked up by people. Marianne Faithfull did one, P.J. Proby, Esther Phillips…

  It was while you were with Jackie that you made your own first record: ‘She Just Satisfies’. Your own song with you singing and Jackie on backing vocals. You were twenty-one and suddenly it was like you had the whole world by the arse. What a summer that was! You and Jackie, being seen out together around town, you in your navy blue donkey jacket, Jackie looking like the real deal – older, smarter, American, showing it all off in her tight skirts and big jewellery, holding your hand. Marianne Faithfull couldn’t believe it when she saw you! No-one could! Jackie had written ‘When You Walk In The Room’, a hit for The Searchers, and she knew people and things you didn’t. But you were on the scene in London and you could take her places she’d never been, too, show her stuff no-one else knew, her and her best friend Sharon Sheeley – another songwriter who’d been in the car crash that killed Eddie Cochran. Taking them to hip underground scenes to see ‘recitations’ by your favourite folk guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, showing them off, one to the other…

  Even after Jackie went back to America, you kept writing and suddenly, just like that, probably because of the stuff with Jackie you’d already had placed, people started paying attention. ‘Just Like Anyone Would Do’ became a B-side for the Fifth Avenue; ‘The Last Mile’ which your new pal Andrew Loog Oldham did the lyrics for and became a B-side for Gregory Phillips; then there was ‘Wait For Me’, another B-side, this time for the Fleurs De Lys…You never really made any bread out of these things. Not like you did doing sessions. But it was a fair start and you began to divide the two things in your mind: session work that paid the bills – like the awful easy-listening instrumental LP you did called Kinky Music – and what you were starting to see more and more as your own thing, like when you and Jeff sat down together and started busking together on Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. You never turned your back on guys like Big Jim though. They were the salt of the earth, the crème de la crème.

  Even so, for you it all came back to Davy Graham and his album, The Guitar Player, the way he showed you and everybody else how to go from folk to jazz to baroque, blues, even Oriental and Asian. Davy and all the others that got there before you like Bert Jansch, Ralph McTell, Mick Softley, Jon Mark, Wizz Jones, all those weird-beards you’d go and watch play in smoky pubs full of ugly old men and surprisingly beautiful young birds. After Davy Graham, best of all were Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, whose album, Bert and John, you played again and again, figuring out the tunings, the fingerings, the whole weird whatchamacallit. They would play the Olive Tree in Croydon and Eric would also turn up. George Harrison was another who knew and dug the Eastern influence in their playing, who knew what was going on with John Mayer’s Indo-Jazz Fusions and ‘trance jazz’ guitarist Gabor Szabo, the good gear like ‘Krishna’, ‘The Search For Nirvana’ and ‘Ravi’…a ‘salaam’ to Ravi Shankar, the sitar player who’d done Portrait of Genius, which you and George argued over who’d heard first when you both knew it was Renbourn who’d been the first to find it, the first to turn you both onto it. Of course, Ravi was more interested in the fact that a Beatle was a fan of his music but even George knew the score there…

  What you liked best was that it wasn’t meant to go anywhere, just digging the sound of the moment, spontaneous and seductive. McCartney found it ‘boring’ but what did he bloody know? Even Big Jim was into it, going out and buying his own sitar after catching a session by some Indian musicians at Abbey Road. When he used it on a new arrangement of ‘She Moved Through The Fair’ it blew your fucking mind! When Jeff persuaded the Yardbirds manager Georgio Gomelsky to use you on the session for ‘Heart Full Of Soul’, telling him you were good at coming up with ‘weird sounds’, you couldn’t believe it when you turned up and saw the Indian musicians tuning up in the main room. Jeff had dragged you into the toilet where you both sat trying to come up with some gimmick to make the guitar sound like a sitar. Jeff finally came up with something and Georgio decided you and the Indian musicians weren’t needed anymore. But you ran in and persuaded the sitar player to sell you his instrument – that and the bit of old carpet it was wrapped in, Georgio laughing as you walked out the studio with it under your arm, pleased as Punch…

  It was also Terry Manning that Jimmy Page would ask to help master the album. With albums produced, mixed and largely made on computer these days, mastering a vinyl record is almost a lost art. Back in 1970, though, it was still one of the most crucial parts of the recording process. Using a lathe to transfer the sound from acetate onto vinyl, great care and an even greater set of ears were essential. Jimmy and Terry were well aware that many potentially marvellous albums had been ruined over the years because of poor technique at the mastering stage and they approached the task with great seriousness. That is, until the final moments, when adding the usual catalogue numbers that would be stamped onto the run-out groove of the finished record.

  ‘Working with Big Star, we had added some messages of our own on there,’ Manning says now. ‘I mentioned this to Jimmy and said, “Anything you wanna write?�
�� and he said, “Ooh, yeah…”’ Due to the enormous quantity of copies the pressing plant knew they would need to fill the advance orders alone on the next Zeppelin album, they had requested two sets of masters – not unusual for the biggest-selling American acts in those days. As a result, Page would come up with four separate ‘messages’, one per side of each master. Manning continues: ‘We’d been talking about the Aleister Crowley thing, so he said “Give me a few minutes”, and he sat down and he thought and he scribbled some things out and he finally came up with “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law” and “So Mote It Be” and one other one which I’ve forgotten.’ I suggest perhaps either ‘Love Is the Law’ or perhaps ‘Love under Will’, Crowley’s other two most famous maxims, and Manning responds: ‘I suspect the latter. Sounds the most familiar…’

  Did he share Page’s interest in Crowley and the occult? He pauses. ‘Well, I was always of a somewhat philosophical bent, of wonderment and experimentation, and what if and what other cultures think, and that sort of thing. So Jimmy’s Aleister Crowley leanings were interesting to me. I didn’t believe everything that Crowley ever wrote perhaps but it was interesting, I really wanted to study it more and see what it was all about. But [Jimmy] had a big love of all kinds of literature, and he had a definite interest in all things like that. I remember even before a show he would be sitting sometimes just reading things. Once he’d figured out what he wanted to say, I took this little metal pencil-like thing and wrote them very carefully, because if you drop that thing you’ve ruined your master. You can’t touch the grooves, you have to lean over. Very difficult to do, that’s why they don’t really like you doing that. But we did it.’ He recalls with a wry chuckle how: ‘After we had written them we had the biggest laugh in the world. It was such a funny joke. We said, “Ha ha, maybe some day collectors will be trying to buy both sets so they can have everything. Ha ha ha! That’s hilarious, no-one would ever do that!”’