When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  It was after doing a twenty-minute set at the Plaza one Saturday night with Crawling King Snake when you noticed this beefy-looking bloke standing near the front with a pint in his hand, watching you. When you saw him walking over to the stage afterwards at first you wondered if it was going to mean trouble. That happened some nights, some bird got carried away wetting her knickers watching you, next thing you know her bloody boyfriend wants to have a go. But this bloke goes, ‘I know who you are, you’re pretty good but your band’s shit. What you need is somebody as good as me.’ To which you replied, ‘Well, that’s a good introduction, what’s your story?’ Said he was a drummer. Said, ‘If you like, I’ll come and play with you and see what you think.’ Same age as you, but he looked older, more like someone your dad would knock around with, except your dad wouldn’t have knocked around with a yobbo like that.

  So you said, yeah, okay, and he came along to the next rehearsal. And bugger me if he wasn’t amazing, fantastic, unbelievable – and loud. But bloody good, you’d never heard a drummer like that before. But you already had a drummer and this bloke…well, he had a loud mouth too, didn’t he? Almost as loud as yours and you thought to yourself, ‘Wait a minute, this is gonna be a bit of a struggle here. This guy is a bit too bolshie.’ The sort of bloke who wasn’t afraid to give you his opinion and you weren’t gonna have any of that. So when he told you where he lived you said, ‘Sorry, mate, it’s way too far to come and pick you up,’ even though you and your mates only lived about ten miles away from him in Kidderminster. He gave you his phone number all the same and you kept it just in case.

  Next thing you knew you were ringing it. Groups came and went so easily in them days and decent drummers were bloody hard to find. So he came along – you were hoping maybe he’d calmed down a bit but no bloody chance – and you did a few gigs together, the Plaza, some pubs, all the usual dives. Then you split up again, only this time it wasn’t you ditching him, it was the other bloody way around! Cheeky sod! But John was always leaving groups in them days. Half the time you didn’t even know he was gone till he just stopped turning up for rehearsals or whatever. The sod had this ploy where he’d say he had to have his drums out the van and take ’em home to clean them. That was the sign for those that knew. He wouldn’t be back. It was quite funny, actually, he did it to everyone, jumping like a big, fat burping frog from lily pad to lily pad. It was quite funny as long as it wasn’t you he was doing it to.

  After that you’d run into each other from time to time, like you did everyone on the circuit in them days. Except now he was married to his girlfriend Pat Philips. You could hardly believe it, he was – you were! – still only seventeen. But that was Bonzo; you never knew what was going to happen next with that bastard. Next thing, he was a dad! Not that it meant he’d settled down. Once, when he was just about to jump ship again – this time from Nicky James & the Diplomats – you bumped into him running down the street with a bass guitar under his arm. ‘Quick,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to put this in Pat’s mum’s coalhouse!’ He hadn’t just taken his drums back this time; he’d nicked the bloody bass too! Not that he was a very good thief. The bass sat in Pat’s mother’s coalhouse on the Priory Estate in Dudley for a few weeks. But everyone knew he had it and eventually Nicky told him to bloody well bring it back or else, and he did, just like that. Nobody said anything. Another time at the Cedar Club he was swanning around in this expensive suede orange jacket he’d nicked from somewhere which he ended up selling to about three different people for a tenner each. ‘Bloody hell, Bonzo!’ you’d laughed. Sometimes you’d just be walking down the street with him in West Brom and people would cross the road to avoid him. You had to laugh. Laugh or cry…

  Sometimes you were the one doing the avoiding. You always ended up back together in the end, though. You got to know Pat and she was lovely. And his mum and dad, who were lovely too, even though their son rarely had a normal job and you were another one of the long-haired layabouts he hung around with, nicking milk bottles from doorsteps early in the morning. You were always so full of it, definitely a team…

  With the drum track recorded, the band was left to roll freely on top of the groove, Page’s grinding slide guitar riffs building on the tension as Plant’s phased vocal wailed and vamped through the brutal, elemental drone, the singer’s harmonica solo helping create a whirlpool effect to which Page then added a ghostly backward-echo – the whole thing reputedly slowed down still further at the mixing stage – to create a narcotic, blues rock colossus. ‘I’ll tell you what it was,’ Jimmy said, ‘it was an attempt to have a really hypnotic riff, really hypnotic, hypnotic, hypnotic, to draw you right in. Like a mantra, you know?’

  By the end of January, safely ensconced back at Basing Street Studios where they began working on overdubs, they had fourteen tracks in various states of completion – all eight that would eventually be used on the album plus loose ends like ‘No Quarter’ (which would have to wait until their next album), and ‘Boogie with Stu’, ‘Night Flight’, ‘Down By The Seaside’, and ‘The Rover’, all of which would have to wait another four years before being released. There was some discussion about perhaps releasing it all on a double album, or even, more radically, a four-part series of EPs. Grant argued against such ideas, though. After the ambivalent reaction across the board to Led Zeppelin III, what was needed now, he knew better than most, was a tightly conceived, well-executed, conventionally affordable single-format album of music that Zeppelin fans would find inarguable. Listening to the band working on tracks like ‘Black Dog’, ‘Rock And Roll’, ‘Misty Mountain Hop’, ‘When the Levee Breaks’ and even the more complex ‘Stairway to Heaven’, Grant knew they had it in their hands. Nothing would fuck that up for them, he decided, and Page was happy to be ‘talked out’ of a double album.

  On Andy Johns’ recommendation, Page, Grant and Johns flew to Los Angeles on 9 February to begin mixing the tapes at Sunset Sound Studios. As the plane landed at LA, the city was in the midst of the Sylmar earthquake, whose impact reverberated around the whole State, cracking a dam in San Diego, a weird echo of the line from ‘Going to California’: ‘The mountains and the canyons started to tremble and shake’, and an omen perhaps for the difficulties awaiting them. For when they arrived that first morning at Sunset Sound, the studio Johns had worked in before (with a group called Sky) had been renovated and ‘completely changed’. Forced to use another, unfamiliar room, the end results were less than promising.

  ‘We should have just gone home,’ said Johns, who would later admit that he had an ulterior motive for wanting to be in LA – a girl, inevitably. ‘But I didn’t want to and I don’t think Jimmy did, either,’ who never needed much persuading to spend time in LA. ‘We were having a good time, you know?’ When they returned to London a week later, however, and played the results back at Olympic to the others, ‘It sounded terrible! I thought my number was up!’ Jimmy was embarrassed and furious. ‘Basically, Andy Johns should be hung, drawn and quartered,’ he raged. ‘We wasted a week wanking around.’

  The plan had been to have the album ready for release in the spring, with a world tour already booked to back it up. Now those plans would need to be revised and – yet again – Page was forced to put the finishing touches to the album while on tour. Only the mix of ‘When the Levee Breaks’ survived from the Los Angeles trip, Jimmy later describing it as ‘one of my favourite mixes’, particularly the moment towards the song’s climax where ‘everything starts moving around except for the voice, which stays stationary’.

  There was better news for Jimmy on the home front when he became a father for the first time with the birth in March of his daughter – conceived with Charlotte, he later realised, during his and Plant’s working holiday at Bron-Yr-Aur the previous spring. Named Scarlet Lilith Eleida Page; the ‘Scarlet’ after Crowley’s Scarlet Woman; ‘Lilith’ after one of Crowley’s own children. There was precious little time for celebrations, however, with the band now committed to their first UK t
our in a year, culminating in a deliberately low-key yet intentionally profile-raising string of club dates at the end of March.

  The idea of doing something different had been discussed while the band were down at Headley, with G suggesting unannounced appearances at unheard of locations like London’s Waterloo Station or the headquarters of Surrey Cricket Club, Kennington Oval. In the end, a back-to-the-clubs tour was simpler and more in keeping with their desire to be seen as reconnecting with their roots. ‘The audiences were becoming bigger and bigger but moving further and further away,’ Page explained to Record Mirror. ‘They became specks on the horizon and we were losing contact with people – those people who were responsible for lifting us off the ground in the early days.’ So now they would be playing ‘those clubs like the London Marquee for exactly the same amount as we did in the old days as a thank you to those promoters and the audiences alike. By doing this we will be able to tour the entire of Britain and not just those cities who are fortunate enough to contain large venues.’

  A commendable idea but with one fatal flaw: with Zeppelin in far more demand than the relatively meagre success of their last album had indicated, instead of pleasing an influential cadre of fans (and critics) with their ‘innovative’ step backwards into smaller venues, the band succeeded only in upsetting and alienating thousands of fans who simply could not get into the venues – not that that stopped them turning up. The result: drunken fist fights, civil disturbance and bad headlines. Or as Jimmy later put it, ‘We couldn’t win, either way. First we were this big hype, now we were at fault for not playing places big enough for everybody to see us.’

  For those who did obtain tickets, though, these were historic occasions, with the band starting the tour at Belfast’s Ulster Hall on 5 March 1971. Outside that Friday night, the streets were ablaze as rioters threw Molotov cocktails and set fire to a petrol tanker. Inside, however, Catholics and Protestants alike were able to enjoy the shared experience of witnessing new numbers like ‘Black Dog’, ‘Going to California’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven’ from the new, unreleased album performed live for the first time. Page remembered reaction to the new material as ‘a bit lukewarm, but it was all right, the reaction was fair enough – nobody knew what it was and we were still getting into it.’ As can be heard on the 1998 BBC Sessions double-CD, which includes the band’s In Concert performance recorded live at the Paris Cinema in London on 1 April 1971 and aired on John Peel’s Radio 1 programme three days later: ‘“Stairway to Heaven”’, in particular, ‘was a hard song to actually get right. Getting all these sort of movements right, and the tempo changes, without racing it, just keeping it right.’ The first time Page had played a double-neck guitar on stage, it later became part of his trademark sound, ‘the beginning of my building up harmonised guitars properly.’

  Off stage, however, John Bonham seemed less concerned with musical time-changes as he was the closing times of various hotel bars. After their show at Dublin’s Boxing Stadium (appropriately enough), he got into an altercation in the small hours when he broke into the hotel kitchen looking for food. With the chef brandishing a knife ‘big enough to engrave initials onto a Brontosaurus’ Cole hit Bonzo flush in the nose, breaking it and sending blood everywhere. ‘You’ll thank me for that when you sober up,’ he told him but Bonzo never did.

  Back at the drawing board, despite returning to Olympic in April and again in June, with sessions fitted in between European dates, the final mixes for the fourth album weren’t delivered to Soho’s Trident Studios for mastering until early July 1971 – six months after completing recording – with an extra set of lacquers being cut simultaneously at the Beatles’ Apple Studios. By now they were performing most of the album live, including at the KB Hallen in Copenhagen on 3 May, their only known attempt at ‘Four Sticks’. ‘We’ll try something we’ve never done before,’ Plant told the audience. ‘There’s every chance that we will fall apart…’ A prophecy that almost literally came true at the final date of the European tour at the Vigorelli football stadium, in Milan, on 3 July, when riot police panicked at the sight of the crowd lighting fires and waded in with tear gas and batons, leaving dozens of audience members bloodied and beaten. ‘Absolutely ghastly,’ Page shuddered at the memory. ‘The statement in the press the next day said that a bottle had been thrown [but] the police were just provoking the audience, and suddenly it went off like you couldn’t believe. It was just pandemonium, and nowhere was immune from this blasted tear gas, including us. I was terribly upset afterwards.’

  With the album still in the can, Atlantic were sceptical about the decision to go ahead with the band’s seventh US tour in August – which began in Vancouver on the night of Plant’s twenty-third birthday – with one exec calling it ‘professional suicide’. But all the shows were sold out, the band was on fire, and they received a standing ovation at the LA Forum when they performed ‘Stairway to Heaven’. ‘Not all of the audience stood up,’ Jimmy told me. ‘It was about twenty-five per cent of it, and I thought hey, that’s pretty good. They were really moved and I thought, this is wonderful, this is great. This is what we hoped for, that people would be that receptive to our new music, you know. Cos at that stage the album still hadn’t come out…’

  With the mixes and mastering complete, the problem now, as Plant explained to the audience at Madison Square Garden on 3 September, was that they were ‘trying to get a record cover that looks how we want it’ – an allusion to mounting behind-the-scenes arguments with Ahmet Ertegun and his new chief lieutenant Jerry Greenberg over the ‘concept’ Page had for it: an album sleeve with absolutely no information on it whatsoever; a stubborn attempt to hit back at the familiar cry of ‘hype’ that had dogged them from the word go.

  Finishing up with two shows in Honolulu on 16 and 17 September, the band enjoyed a few days off in Maui before flying to Tokyo for two shows at the Budokan, as part of a five-date tour, their first of Japan. The shows here were longer and more varied than any they had previously done, throwing in off-the-cuff covers of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, ‘Bachelor Boy’ and ‘Please Please Me’. ‘We were taking the piss a bit,’ Jimmy laughingly told me. ‘It was such a shock to go out there and play to Japanese audiences. They are extremely respectful to what they’re listening to [and] think it might be disrespectful if they make a noise, just in case you happen to go very quiet in the music, you know? There’d be applause at the end of each song and then it would just stop abruptly. We weren’t used to all of this after coming from America where the whole show people were drinking and smoking joints and going nuts. In Japan, it was so quiet it was sort of eerie, and so we started just doing all these weird things, just goofing ourselves off and having a laugh. But we could have a laugh in Zeppelin. We did enjoy ourselves…’

  It didn’t look like Robert and Bonzo were enjoying themselves very much though as they stood at the side of the stage that first night ‘knocking six bells out of each other,’ Plant told me. It was the end of the show and the band was debating what to do as an encore. But the singer, whose voice had given out during the latter part of the performance, was distraught. ‘I said, “I can’t do anymore, I’ve got no voice.” Bonzo said, “It never mattered before. You’re no good anyway. Just go out there and look good.” So I bopped him! And then we had to go back on stage.’ It was because they knew each other so well that they could fall out like that and still be friends, he insisted. ‘There was never anything lasting.’

  Perhaps not, but by then Bonham’s increasingly erratic behaviour on tour was starting to become an issue. Taken by promoter Tats Nagashima to what he boasted was ‘the most elegant restaurant in Tokyo’, Bonzo grew fed-up with being served saké in tiny cups and demanded ‘a beer mug or some buckets!’ Later that night, they paid a visit to Tokyo’s then famous Byblos disco where Bonzo showed his disapproval of the music by urinating from a balcony on the DJ. Bundling the drunken drummer into a cab, Cole finally gave up and left him to collapse on the street just feet from th
e entrance to the Tokyo Hilton where they were staying. The next day Bonzo and Cole both bought Samurai swords and, drunk again that night, began enacting a sword fight at the hotel, slashing and cutting at anything they could: chairs, curtains, mirrors, paintings. For an encore, they snuck into John Paul Jones’ room and carried his still sleeping body out into the hall where he spent the rest of the night. (Hotel staff were too polite to wake him and placed screens around his prone body.) At the end of their stay, the Hilton banned Led Zeppelin for life.

  The real enjoyment continued after the tour – at least for Page, Plant and Cole – when they decided not to join Jonesy, Bonham and Grant on their direct flight back to London. Instead, they relaxed into Pagey, Percy and Ricardo mode and decided on a zigzagging path home that took them via Thailand and India. Within hours of arriving in Bangkok, the trio had turned into trinket-buying tourists, visiting the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, where Jimmy bought a near life-size gold, glass and wooden Pegasus. Cole also bought a ‘three-foot-high and three-foot-wide’ wooden Buddha which he jokingly compared to Peter Grant. That night they visited Bangkok’s renowned red light district where, at the urging of their driver Sammy, they spent the evening choosing girls by the number and enjoying endlessly revolving rounds of massages and sex. Or as Jimmy commented on the way home that night: ‘They must have invented the term “fucking your brains out” here.’

  From Bangkok they flew direct to Bombay, where they checked into the Taj Mahal Hotel, opposite the Gateway of India archway, and spent the next four days as they had in Bangkok, shopping for gifts to take back home (including a hand-carved ivory chess set for Page), visiting the red light district and hanging out at a local disco where Jimmy got up and jammed with some amazed local musicians on their Japanese-made guitars. However, the thrills came to an abrupt end when they insisted their hired guide Mr Razark take them for a meal ‘where you go to eat’ and all ended up with what Cole described as ‘vicious cases of diarrhoea’.