When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  But even Fallon fell foul of the band’s growing reputation for attracting trouble. On Tuesday 3 December 1972, after the first of two shows at Greens Playhouse in Glasgow, the band refused to do an encore after their new PR was beaten up by fans outside the venue following a confrontation over forged tickets. ‘I said, “Excuse me, there seems to be some confusion about the tickets you’re selling”. And they all jumped on me.’

  Now the biggest-selling band in the world, Grant was boasting to anyone within earshot how the band would rake in ‘over thirty million dollars alone this year’. The fact that the band might, if all went well, make even a tenth of that sum was unheard of in those days when promoters still ruled the roost, taking the lion’s share of the gross with artists lucky to walk away with a small percentage. Grant was one of the first managers to stand up to such ‘standard’ practices. Having already faced down the record industry by demanding – and getting – the most lucrative signing-on deal in history, G now took on the promoters, demanding an unprecedented ninety per cent of gross receipts for every Led Zeppelin show.

  ‘You have to understand the kind of man Peter Grant was,’ said Plant, ‘He smashed through so many of the remnants of the old regime of business in America [when] nobody got a cent apart from the promoter. Then we came along and Grant would say to promoters, “Okay, you want these guys but we’re not taking what you say, we’ll tell you what we want and when you’re ready to discuss it you can call us.” And of course, they would call us and do things on our terms, on Grant’s terms, because otherwise they’d be stuck with Iron Butterfly.’ As Plant later put it, he not only rewrote the rules, ‘Peter Grant had written a new book. And we were right in the middle of it all. We were the kind of standard bearers, if you like, from which that kind of patent has been used so many times now, it’s become the general way that people operate.’

  Grant made the same demands on every aspect of the Zeppelin operation, starting with the record companies, agents and promoters, working his way down to the road crew, merchandise sellers, catering crews, even the audience some nights, even the band. ‘We were being powered by the hammer of the gods, if you like,’ said Plant. ‘Somebody was banging that great big skin at the back of the boat and we were just following the rhythm of the whole thing. When Bonzo’s saying, “Oh fuck, I wanna go home now”, Peter Grant used to talk to him and say, “Look, you’ve only got a little way to go…”’

  By 1973, Grant’s reputation preceded him on every level. ‘I know some things have been said about Peter, some good, some maybe not so good,’ says Terry Manning. ‘But he was a truly brilliant manager. He was tough, he was crude on purpose at times, but he was in no way less than a brilliant person. He knew what he was doing and he was totally dedicated to Jimmy and to the band. He was really a part of the family. Seeing him at the moment, in the moment, making decisions and carrying them out – and I saw him backstage do things I don’t know should go in a book or not, I saw him do things in coffee-shops that should not go in a book, it was a heck of a scene – but he was so for that band and it was so much a part of their success.’ Or as Grant said himself: ‘I don’t care if they hate me, you’ve got to do what’s right for your artist. Always remember: it’s the band and the manager versus the rest.’

  It all changed the night you went out after a Bo Diddley show in Newcastle with Jerome the maraca player and the two of you saw the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo. This was your big chance, you knew it. Oh, there was already a local scumbag on the scene, Mike Jeffrey, but there always is with these nothing provincial mobs. You soon took care of him, told him you’d get them the Chuck Berry tour, just sign here, schmucko. Next thing you knew you weren’t working for Don anymore, you were working for yourself. Well, you and Mickie Most, sharing the office in Oxford Street, sitting at the desks facing each other, always on the dog and bone, doing deals. People assumed he was the brains and you were just the brawn, maybe even Mickie too, sometimes. You had to hand him his due though, it was Mickie that recorded ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ with them and suddenly the Animals, as they were now called – much snappier than the Alan Price whatsits – were as big as the Beatles, nearly. Everything changed after that, especially when the bloody record took off in America as well. You couldn’t believe your luck: a no. 1 record in Britain and America with your very first punt! Top of the world, ma!

  You didn’t really know what you were getting into when you went to America with them, but then neither did they so that was all right. Told them you’d been out in Hollywood with Gene when he was making The Girl Can’t Help It. Load of bollocks, of course, but you should have seen the looks on their faces. Followed you around like kittens they did, after that. Mind you, you could have got yourself killed when you sorted out that nutter with the gun in Arizona. Eric, the singer, said he’d never seen such bravery, not even in the shit-hole clubs of Geordieland. But you didn’t feel very brave, just didn’t know what else to do. You saw the cunt pull out a gun and just reacted. Talking to him softly, like on telly, until he’d calmed down and you could grab him and bend his fucking arm round his back till it nearly fucking broke. Cunt! That’s when you decided you might have to get a gun of your own one day. Or hire someone to carry one for you. The band all loved you after that. They weren’t so lovey-dovey, though, when you got back to England and you realised you’d have to read Eric the riot act. Just like the rest of them, the moment he’d had a bit of success his head had started to turn, insisting on driving himself to gigs in that flash new TR6 sports job. Well, all right, everyone likes to flash the cash once they’ve finally got some. But when he started turning up late for the sodding gigs, that’s when you realised you’d have to sort him out good and proper.

  ‘Where the fuck d’yer think you’ve been?’ you roared at him the next time it happened, the rest of the band standing there, watching. Eric had just shrugged, showing off to all the birds hanging around too. So what if he was a bit late, he’d driven there as fast as he could, he said. So you stepped up to him, pushed your gut up against the little shit and yelled: ‘Well, you fucking leave earlier next time, you cunt!’ Then picked him up and threw him across the room, watched him bounce off the wall and hit the floor. He was never late again. None of them were.

  By the time you took the Animals back to America for the tour with Herman’s Hermits you’d really got the hang of it, no messing, and the groups knew it. Knew how to deal with the cops with their guns, getting nervous when the girls started screaming a bit too loud, like they’d never seen a bloody Beatles concert or something, like the crowd was meant to sit there sipping mint juleps or some-fucking-thing. Knew how to handle the cowboys who hated these long-haired layabouts from Limey Land coming over and deflowering their precious virgins. Knew what to do when Eric got drunk and started screaming abuse at the Ku Klux Klan scum handing out their dirty little books outside the hall…Years later, standing backstage one night at a Zeppelin show, reading some little faceless cunt in some crappy American magazine describe you as ‘an ex-rock errand boy’, you just laughed but inside you wanted to explode. Get your own back on the little shit, all the faceless little shits with their glasses and their fucking typewriters that ever doubted you. ‘Fucking great,’ you’d smiled impassively. ‘Fantastic.’ Then strolled off to check on the takings, the taste of blood in your mouth…

  It was now in 1973 that the feeling of invincibility that Grant had helped foster really began to take hold of the band. Of course, this was also the rock-fabulous age of colour TVs out of windows and white Rolls Royces in swimming pools that bands like Zeppelin, the Stones and The Who came to embody. But no Seventies guitar god represented the extreme Byronic sensibility in person quite like Jimmy Page. He may have begun cultivating this dark mystique as a way of concealing his, in reality, more introspective, quietly spoken, earnestly-watching-from-a-distance nature, but by 1973 things had started to change. For those that knew him, it was still just possible to tell the difference, but as the next few
years skittered and jolted by, the mask would become harder and harder for him to peel off. While both Bonham and Plant invested in new farmhouse estates in the country – a hundred-acre pile in Worcestershire, for the former, which he employed his father and brother to help him develop into ‘a home fit for a king’, replete with livestock; a working sheep farm in the Llyfnant Valley on the southern fringe of Snowdonia for the latter, where he took Welsh lessons and pursued his fascination with Celtic mythology at the National Library of Wales in nearby Aberystwyth, naming his first son, Karac, born that year, after the legendary Welsh general Caractacus – Page flitted between his own newly acquired eighteenth-century manor in Sussex (another riverside abode named Plumpton Place, replete with moat and terraces off into lakes) and flying visits to Boleskine House, intent on furthering his ‘studies’ into Crowley and the occult. It was as though, having conquered this world, Page and Zeppelin now looked for dominion of the next.

  Released in March 1973, Houses of the Holy again came with no writing on the sleeve but an inner bag with full lyric sheet for the first time plus attendant info, all in the same enigmatic typeface as used for the track-listing on the previous album, the album’s title stencilled at the top of each page: back to front, as if in a mirror, for side two. There was also a paper band wrapped around the outer sleeve – a last-minute concession to Atlantic who rightly felt this album would need a little more help than their last in terms of hard-selling it – with group name, album title and record company details on it, to be taken off and binned after purchase. The image that adorned the outer gatefold sleeve, however, was their most arresting yet: a view from behind of eleven naked children – all apparently young blonde prepubescent girls – in various stages of ascending a cratered hilltop slope. While the inside appeared to depict a human sacrifice, viewed from a distance, one of the blonde girls being held aloft by what appears to be an older, naked male figure as the sun’s rays begin to appear over the top of a prehistoric castle-like structure at the crest of the hills – an echo of Crowley’s symbolic sacrifice of the inner child perhaps?

  However, surprisingly few of the critics who discussed the sleeve picked up on the likelihood of any occult references this time, preferring to dwell on, as writer Mat Snow put it to Page nearly twenty years later, its ‘naughty overtones…naked little girls clambering up a mountain, a sexual representation of pre-sexual people.’ The guitarist was not amused. ‘I wouldn’t have looked at it that way at all,’ he responded tetchily. ‘Children are houses of the holy; we’re all houses of the holy – I don’t see how that’s naughty.’

  In fact, the Houses of the Holy sleeve was conceived by Hipgnosis designer Aubrey Powell, after Page had angrily rejected the original idea put forward by Powell’s partner, Storm Thorgerson: a picture of an electric green tennis court with a tennis racquet on it. ‘I said, “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”’ Jimmy recalled. ‘And he said, “Racket – don’t you get it?” I said, “Are you trying to imply that our music is a racket? Get out!”’

  Powell, who hadn’t heard the music, put forward two ideas: one involving a photo-shoot in Peru; the other a trip to the Giant’s Causeway, the famous rock formation on the north-east tip of Northern Ireland. Informed that both ideas would be extremely expensive, Powell recalled Grant exploding: ‘Money? We don’t fucking care about money. Just fucking do it!’ Favouring the children climbing the mountain idea, lifted from novelist Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 sci-fi classic Childhood’s End, which climaxes with the children of the story running off the end of the world, Powell promptly arranged a trip to Ireland with two child models, a camera crew and make-up artist.

  Intended as a full-colour shoot, Powell revised his plans when it rained the entire week he was there, shooting ‘in black and white on a totally miserable morning pouring with rain’. A collage of over thirty different shots in which the two children became eleven, Powell had planned for the models to be painted gold and silver but in the final hand-tinted images they appear pale pink, almost white. ‘When I first saw it, I said, “Oh, my God.” Then we looked at it, and I said, “Hang on a minute – this has an otherworldly quality.” So we left it as it was.’ The inside photo was taken at an ancient real-life Celtic castle nearby. The crew was ‘so cold, and so freaked out because it wasn’t working, that the only thing I could keep everybody together with was a bottle of Mandrax and a lot of whisky.’

  The musical content of the album also had a certain colourfully ‘hand-tinted’ quality to it, the sound brighter and more effervescent than on any previous Zeppelin album. Opening with the ringing symphonic guitars of ‘The Song Remains The Same’, the first of four determinedly upbeat Page and Plant songs on which the album is built – part-sonic overture (its working title in the studio was alternatively ‘The Overture’ and/or ‘The Campaign’), part-hippy dream – the overall feeling is one of joyous abundance, excitement at life, the sheer thrill of it all; Plant’s vocals shrilly enhanced by Page speeding them up in the studio, the chiming guitars filched from the opening chords to the Yardbirds’ Little Games track, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’, originally credited to Page and drummer Jim McCarty, layering it to such extremes it begins to resemble the sound of a sitar or tambura, Plant’s artificially accelerated vocals in such a high register they too begin to resemble the excitement of Indian reed and vocal music.

  ‘The Rain Song’, which follows, was originally going to be an extension of ‘The Overture’, but became a track in its own right after Plant had unexpectedly added verses to the latter, turning the former into a smouldering elegy to ‘the springtime of my loving’, an equally euphoric, if slowed down, sunburst of a song, John Paul Jones adding exotic texture with the swelling orchestral sound of his newly acquired mellotron, a kind of semi-mechanical synthesiser, using tape loops triggered by keyboards and a favourite effect until then of progressive rock groups like Genesis and the Moody Blues, unheard of previously on a Zeppelin album. Similarly fresh-sounding was ‘Over The Hills And Far Away’ – another resoundingly upbeat number, acting as almost a climax in a trilogy of crescendoing openers, its signature acoustic-electric dynamic traceable all the way back to ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ and ‘Ramble On’. So, too, ‘Dancing Days’, a snake-hipped, long, hot summer of a song, inspired by a typically slouch-backed melody overheard during their stay in Bombay that finds the Page-Plant axis at its most delirious, all zinging guitars, bouncing drums and Plant’s voice bill-and-cooing like the lovesick hippy he still believed himself to be.

  However, it was the other four tracks that provided most of the talking points, typifying the more ensemble feel of the album, beginning with the last track on side one, a band-composition titled ‘The Crunge’, a taking-it-to-the-bridge funk parody that singularly fails to deliver any laughs, despite a desperate last-ditch attempt by Plant who can be heard at the end demanding, ‘Where’s that confounded bridge?’ A dance groove that you couldn’t actually dance to, the great pity of ‘The Crunge’ is that it’s so utterly unnecessary. Zeppelin had proved they had the funk in abundance from the moment Bonham’s hand-grenade drums exploded over the intro to ‘Good Times Bad Times’ had repeatedly demonstrated, in fact, with tracks like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘When The Levee Breaks’, that white rock musicians could do things with black funk music nobody else had even thought of. Much better was ‘D’Yer Maker’ – a title filched from an old music hall joke: ‘My wife’s gone to the West Indies.’ ‘Jamaica?’ ‘No, she went of her own accord.’ Boom, boom! – another band-composition that critics assumed was another parody, this time of reggae, but was in fact an innovative re-imagining of the form, replete with grafted-on doo-wop vocals.*

  The third band composition, ‘The Ocean’, which closes the album, was another vertiginously upbeat number that contained their most memorable guitar riff since ‘Bring It On Home’ and was so clearly a crowd-pleaser in the most elemental sense – Bonham in full Bonzo mode, growlingly counting the song’s pulveri
sing beat in, (‘We’ve done four already but now we’re steady and then they went one…two…three…’ pow!) – it was already a part of the band’s encores long before it was finally released. The only studiedly ‘down’ track on the album was the one begun three years earlier but never finished until now: John Paul Jones’ self-consciously creepy piano-synthesiser opus ‘No Quarter’, an old pirate saying and Keith Moon catchphrase, its chill ambience – ‘Close the door, put out the lights’ intones Plant solemnly, his voice again filtered through distortion – utterly at odds with the rest of the album, but an exemplary piece of work and another track destined to become a cornerstone of the live set, Jonesy’s own personal showcase.