When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  The message that ultimately comes across from the fifth Zeppelin album, as Dave Lewis says ‘is of a band doing exactly what they want to do. The fourth album had huge economy with absolutely everything in its right place. Houses of the Holy was less about being perfect, more about letting loose and having fun. A hugely confident if underrated album.’ A fact reflected in the exceedingly mixed reactions it drew from critics and fans. Similar to the fate that awaited Led Zeppelin III, for many Houses of the Holy was a let down after the monumental achievements of its predecessor. Where there was disappointment that the third album contained nothing of a similar stature to ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or ‘Heartbreaker’, the knee-jerk reaction to Houses Of The Holy was that it lacked something of a similar eminence to ‘Stairway To Heaven’ or ‘When The Levee Breaks’. On reflection, however, it clearly signposted the way forward for a band now operating at its giddy peak. The days of grand statement albums like the first, second and fourth had given way to, as Lewis says, ‘simple fun’, an outlandish concept at a time when a band’s artistic stature was still measured by how ‘heavy’ it was – musically, lyrically, metaphorically. In that sense, the fifth Zeppelin album was a relatively lightweight affair, and therefore, most critics argued, of not much importance either.

  ‘Several tracks on this new Led Zep album are simply bad jokes,’ bleated one typical review in America. Fortunately, not all reviewers were so blinkered. According to Jonh Ingham in Let It Rock, the album showed ‘increasing diversity, humour, and richness, with only moderate self-indulgence.’ Fans were equally divided, however, and while Houses of the Holy became the band’s third album to top the British and American charts, selling more than three million copies in the US where it had symbolically replaced Elvis Presley’s Aloha From Hawaii at no. 1, it slipped out of the UK charts after just thirteen weeks, soon overtaken by its still selling heavily predecessor. The obligatory single from the album in America – ‘Over The Hills And Far Away’, issued in May, also flopped, becoming their first not to reach the Top 50, though ‘D’Yer Maker’, released six months later, got to no. 20. (As usual, neither track was issued as a single in the UK.)

  Publicly, the band, brimming over with confidence, saw the album as another triumph. Tracks like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ were ‘just one colour in the rainbow of what we do and what we are intending to do in the future,’ Plant billowed in NME. ‘It’s my ambition to write something really superb. I listen to people like Mendelssohn – “Fingal’s Cave” – and it’s absolutely superb. You can picture the whole thing and I’d like it to be the same way for us in time to come. I should think that we’ve got it under our belt to get something like that together.’

  Sitting at home, drawbridge raised, Page, however, privately fumed at this latest example of critical misapprehension. Complaining on the phone to G, the manager decided it was time for a change of strategy; that the summer tour of the US that year would see a major change in the band’s attitude to how they dealt with the media, beginning with the appointment, in time for their next US tour, of their first full-time American PR, Danny Goldberg of Solters Roskin & Sabinson. SR&S were best known for working with movie heavy hitters such as Frank Sinatra but had recently opened a music division, and with Goldberg having previously worked as a freelance writer for Rolling Stone – one of the magazines Page and Grant specifically wanted to woo – his inside knowledge made his appointment a done deal. Not that that changed things much, initially. ‘Most of the journalists present seemed so shocked that we’d done this,’ said Jimmy, ‘One of them said: “My first question to you, Mr Page, is – why are you giving me this interview in the first place?’ The answer lay in the band’s determination to see their public image upgraded and moved onto the same footing as the Stones. ‘Without getting too egocentric,’ said Robert, ‘we thought it was time that people heard something about us other than that we were eating women and throwing the bones out the window.’

  This was a view apparently backed by the unprecedented numbers the band was now able to attract to its concerts. Their ninth American tour opened on 4 May with a huge outdoor show at the Atlanta Braves football stadium where a crowd of 49,236 paid a total of $246,180 to see them, beating the previous record of just over 33,000 set by the Beatles in 1965. The following night in Tampa, Florida, an even bigger crowd of 56,800 paid $309,000 to watch them perform – then the most lucrative single performance in show business history, again beating the Beatles’ previous high of 55,000 (and a gross of $301,000) at Shea Stadium eight years before. As the limousine pulled up at the backstage gates, Plant turned to Grant and said, ‘Fucking hell, G! Where did all these people come from?’ Speaking with Jimmy in 1990, he recalled how, ‘That was one of the most surprising times. We didn’t even have a support act, and we thought, hey, what’s going on? I mean, I knew that we were pretty big, but I hadn’t imagined it to be on that sort of scale. In fact, even now I still find it difficult to take it all in, just how much it all meant, you know?’

  Danny Goldberg made himself immediately useful, alerting the Guinness Book of Records armed with a quote from the local mayor, who called the Atlanta show: ‘The biggest event to hit the area since the premiere of Gone with the Wind.’ The mayor of Miami Beach retrospectively presented the band with the keys to the city – quite a turnaround considering Miami had once considered banning rock concerts altogether (following the infamous incident in which Jim Morrison pulled out his penis on stage during a Doors concert). As Plant said, ‘This whole thing about playing the huge ballparks on your own – not as part of a festival bill with Janis and The Doors and the Airplane, but actually just going to Tampa and playing to however many people with no opening act…It was almost as if we had to go out and do that like some kind of study. We were wielding our art; we were moving it in the biggest, most gargantuan way, but without any press, without any promotion, without anything.’

  Well, not quite. Goldberg’s appointment had coincided with a total revamp of the way the band presented itself on stage. Learning from the Stones – who had quickly shoehorned the new ‘glam’ look of recent arrivals on the scene like Marc Bolan and David Bowie into the way they dressed on stage – the new Zeppelin show would be the first to feature a full-on professional lightshow, including lasers, mirror balls and dry ice, as well as a whole new set of stage costumes specially designed for each member – the most flamboyant being Page’s now famous glittering moon-and-stars outfit, the buttonless, wide-lapelled jacket flapping open, his flared trousers boasting three symbols down the side of the leg, the top symbol, like an ornate ‘7’ representing Capricorn, his sun sign, a bastardised ‘M’ representing Scorpio, his ascendant sign, and below that what looked like a ‘69’ representing his moon sign. Even the normally spotlight-avoiding John Paul Jones had his own specially designed suit, a commedia dell’arte-type jester’s jacket with little red hearts hanging from the frockcoat sleeves, while Robert became bare-chested, the lion in spring, his ‘third leg’ showing prominently through his ultra-tight jeans, his shoulders squeezed into a powder-blue puffed-sleeve blouse; even Bonzo was now done up in a black T-shirt with a big shiny star sequinned upon it, the hair now very long indeed, hemmed in by a darkly sparkling headband.

  ‘We came across some people that made these fantastic clothes,’ John Paul Jones later told me. ‘They were very enthusiastic and we bought all this stuff – the outfit with the hearts that I wore and Jimmy’s suit with the moon and stars. It just seemed like, why not? The lights were on us, we might as well have something for them to bounce off of! But the theatrical settings were all produced by the music. Visually, the real theatre relied more on the performances of Robert and Jimmy. They gave the band a visual presence it would never have had otherwise. But it was never contrived. That was just them being…them.’

  ‘It’s a work of art, that suit,’ Jimmy told me. ‘Originally, we saw the whole essence of our live performance as something that the audience listened to very carefully, picking up on what w
as going on, the spontaneity and musicianship. And you can’t do that if you’re running around the stage all night, or at least we couldn’t back then.’ By 1973, however, ‘we were much more ambitious, in that respect. We really wanted to take the live performances as far as they could go.’

  They now travelled by private jet, hired at a cost of $30,000 per tour and christened the Starship – a Boeing 720B forty-seater owned by former singer Bobby Sherman, one of the creators of The Monkees. When they picked it up at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, it was parked next to Playboy boss Hugh Hefner’s plane, the words ‘Led Zeppelin’ emblazoned down one side. Fitted with lounge-seats and dinner tables, a fully stocked bar and a TV lounge, there was also an electric Thomas organ which Jonesy would sometimes entertain the ‘guests’ with, and, in a rear cabin, a double bed covered in shaggy white fur that became one of the most popular compartments on the plane – though few ever slept in it.

  Back ‘home’ in LA at the end of May, they had sold all 36,000 tickets for their two shows at the Forum within hours of the box office opening. The Saturday 30 May show had to be rescheduled for the following Wednesday after Page injured a finger on his left hand messing around climbing a wire fence at San Diego Airport, while the Sunday night show which went ahead as planned was delayed by half an hour due to ‘traffic congestion’. In truth, neither show went as well as their two LA shows the previous summer, Jimmy clearly still struggling to play at the first show – visibly wincing with pain and dipping the injured digit into a glass of iced water between numbers to keep the swelling down – the band surprisingly ragged during parts of the second. Behind the scenes, however, everything appeared to be hurtling along at full throttle.

  The first show happened to coincide with Bonham’s twenty-fifth birthday. His present from the band: a new top-of-the range Harley Davidson motorcycle. ‘He just tore up the hotel corridors and made an incredible mess, apparently,’ said his old pal Bev Bevan, who had left The Move and now joined ELO. ‘But he paid the bill the next day then told ’em – “Oh, and keep the bike.” Unbelievable but that was John.’ The Forum audience had also given him a birthday cheer during his twenty-minute rendition of ‘Moby Dick’. ‘Twenty-one today,’ Plant had announced from the stage, and ‘a bastard all his life’. Afterwards there was a huge party thrown for him at the Laurel Canyon home of a local radio station owner. Guests included George and Patti Harrison, Roy Harper, B.P. Fallon, Phil Carson, and the usual gaggle of dealers, groupies and hangers-on. Writer Charles Shaar Murray, who was also there, recalled ‘Gallons of champagne, snowdrifts of cocaine, bayous full of unfeasibly large shrimp, legendary porn flick Deep Throat looping on a videotape player at a time when VCRs were hugely expensive luxury items available only to the stupendously wealthy.’ George Harrison crowned Bonham with his own birthday cake. Bonzo chased the former Beatle and threw him and his wife into the pool fully clothed, followed by anybody he could lay his hands on. Jimmy, meekly complaining he couldn’t swim, was allowed to walk into the pool in his new white suit with the ‘ZoSo’ symbol on the back. Harrison later claimed it was the most fun he’d had since the Beatles.

  The LA music scene had moved on from the Laurel Canyon vibe the band had become so entranced by three years before. Just as in London and New York, the hip new sound of 1973 belonged to Bowie, T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, Alice Cooper and Roxy Music – glam rock. The complete opposite of the bewhiskered, down-at-heel ambience of the nouveau pastoralists, suddenly artists like Rod Stewart and Elton John were shaving their stubble and donning pink satin pants, stack-heeled boots and spraying their hair with glitter. The new cool hang-out was Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco on Hollywood Boulevard. Soon the walls of Rodney’s office at the club were decorated in pictures of him not just with Bowie et al but Phil Spector, Mick Jagger, John Lennon and, eventually, Led Zeppelin, attracted to the club not for the music but because of the teenage girls that packed the place seven nights a week. Although the glam scene had a large gay following, you’d never have known it sitting at Rodney’s table. ‘Rodney fucked movie-star bitches you would not believe,’ recalled Kim Fowley. ‘He got so much cunt that in his early thirties he had a stroke.’ For which, claimed Fowley, ‘Led Zeppelin paid the hospital bill – a hundred thousand dollars.’

  When Zeppelin hit LA now, they practically owned it. No longer content with booking the entire ninth floor at the Hyatt, they now took over the eleventh floor too, just a few steps from the rooftop swimming pool. They had permanently reserved tables at all the best-known Hollywood rock dives, not just Rodney’s but at their other favourite new hang-out, the Rainbow Bar & Grill, where they had their own special half-moon tables roped-off at the back. With a fleet of limos waiting kerbside, they also attracted star-name hangers-on such as Iggy Pop, sitting cross-legged in the corner of Jimmy’s suite, rolling joints as endless platoons of gorgeous girls wandered in and out, happy to trade ‘favours’ in return for access to the Zeppelin magic kingdom.

  Rejected by the Laurel Canyon sophisticates – much to Plant’s chagrin – who were offended by Zeppelin’s sleazy reputation, the band simply took over Rodney’s or the Rainbow and treated the places as they did the Hyatt: to use and abuse at will. For many chroniclers of the LA music scene, this was the beginning of its bleakest period. Nick Kent, another visitor to Rodney’s, claims he’d ‘never seen anyone behave worse [there] in my life than John Bonham and Richard Cole. I saw them beat a guy senseless for no reason and then drop money on his face.’ Even Miss P – still on the scene but now reconciled to a life without Jimmy, except for those occasions when he suddenly remembered her number – would later tell writer Barney Hoskyns: ‘As much as I really loved Zeppelin, they kind of fucked things up in LA. The magic really went out of rock’n’roll.’

  None of which fazed Jimmy Page at all, who was entranced by the city’s dark side, boasting to Kent about ‘one of his Hollywood girlfriends [who] bit into a sandwich that had razorblades in it’. There was also the city’s strong connection with the occult. As Angie Bowie commented in her autobiography: ‘Hollywood is very likely the most active occult area on the planet, and it’s been that way for decades. The black arts are established to the point of being ingrained, and in the mid-Seventies they were thriving as never before or since. There were almost as many occult bookstores as health food joints.’ Even Robert began to exult in ‘the recklessness that for me became the whole joy of Zeppelin…ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of a hundred years outside it.’

  Mostly though, LA was about the girls. Whatever feelings of fidelity Page had originally expressed for Charlotte Martin were long gone, and though they continued being live-in lovers – and parents – in England, it was now that Page began the most notorious of his on-the-road relationships, lavishing attention on a fourteen-year-old habitué of Rodney’s named Lori Maddox. Tall, dark, skinny, with huge baby seal eyes, Lori and her friend Sable Starr were two of the best-known ‘dancers’ at the club. Having been turned on by pictures B.P. Fallon had taken of the young model the previous year, Jimmy once again ditched Miss P and turned his full attention to Lori. She later recalled being ‘kidnapped’ by Richard Cole one night, who drove her in a limo to the Hyatt, where she was taken to Page’s top-floor candle-lit suite. ‘I saw Jimmy, just sitting there in a corner, wearing this hat slouched over his eyes and holding a cane,’ she said. ‘It was really mysterious and weird…He looked just like a gangster. It was magnificent.’

  But then, as B.P. Fallon says now: ‘The whole world was different then. Better or worse? You choose. The end of the Sixties, much of the Seventies, it was freer then, less uptight, less censorious. For a while it seemed everything and anything was possible. For many young white people, anyway. And if you were a British band on the road in America – any band in America – it was, quite simply, sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. Didn’t mean you were forced to partake but it was there on a plate – or a mirror – if you wanted it. There must be at least a couple of hundred old
geezers dotted around Britain – and many more in the States – who for a few years had the time of their lives beyond their wildest craziest maddest dreams, travelling and playing rock’n’roll and having fun, fun, fun in what was still then the Promised Land. You’d be locked up if you did that stuff now. Underage sex? Forget it, baby. And now at the Hyatt House on Sunset Strip there are screens over the balconies so you couldn’t even throw a peanut out the window. Ah, back then through the dented mists of time, rock’n’roll was a truly powerful potion! There were fresh enthusiastic girls everywhere going completely mad for it and there wasn’t the horror of AIDS. And no-one much thought about the longer-term ramifications of doing hardcore drugs. You can see these anonymous old codgers in a pub now somewhere, looking aged by more than time, buying another round and saying “Did I ever tell you about these girls in Detroit who called themselves The Nymph Five? It was 1971 and…” Yeah, yeah, drink up…’

  He goes on in typically feverish fashion as he recalls what it was like being part of the Zeppelin inner-sanctum. ‘Well, Zeppelin were the kings of the castle – the biggest and, if you could believe your eyes and ears, the baddest – and they took it to a whole other level. You can imagine The Rat Pack at their height in Vegas – Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jnr and their mad mob – all chasing women and going wild and being completely untouchable. Zeppelin were like that, with the volume turned up. There were placid moments but…c’mon! Wonderful.

  ‘The record sales, albums flying out of Atlantic as quick as Ahmet can punch a hole into the middle of ’em. A bigger, flashier, more fun-filled plane than President Nixon that whizzes these deities from city to city where eager policemen on motorbikes with sirens blaring escort this speeding convoy of black-windowed limos through red lights and along highways that lead to yet another huge glowing stadium where the faithful are ready to go mental again at the feet of their redeemers. Golden hordes of nubiles allegedly ready to give themselves over body and soul to these four electric horsemen of the apocalyptic now. Good Lord! And the four cats themselves are more than interesting, if they deign to let anyone in: Jimmy Page the magus, designer of this Led Zeppelin combo and the root of this wild adventure, guitar-playing sonic architect extraordinaire who’s taking the blues and rock’n’roll and folk music to thrilling uncharted territories as his luggage eyes twinkle magnetic naughtinesses. Robert Plant, verily the golden god, feral moans and wistful yearnings and a voice and presence from a benign Valhalla. John Paul Jones enigmatic bass guitarist keyboard maestro, weaver of mood and half of the most pugnacious yet precise rhythm sections in rock’n’roll history. And on the drums, John Henry Bonham! Fuck yeah! John was the powerhouse, magnificent, and when he played it seemed as if the drums were extensions of himself, he became so at one with his instrument. Rhythm. Bonzo, you were the king of rhythm and the engine-room of the band. Stir in Peter Grant, a figure literally larger than life. Stir in laughter. Whack in tales of darkened hotel suites and angels with broken wings and white feathers on the bathroom floor. And thus the seeds to some of the many mysteries of Led Zeppelin…