When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  There were also several hints at Burges’s connections to the occult at the house, most notably in the library where there was a picture of him holding a large compass. Not pictured but as an architect almost certainly within his sight, too, would have been a set-square – the interlocking of set-square and compass, forming an ‘A’, an ancient Masonic symbol, the ‘A’ standing for the Great ‘Architect’, often mistakenly believed to be synonymous with ‘God’. As a renowned architect and favourite of the country’s richest man, Lord Bute, it is, as Dave Dickson says ‘staggeringly unlikely that Burges had not been invited to join the [Masons’] ranks’.

  Similarly, the ceiling of the entrance hall is decorated with astrological signs and other mythical creatures, sometimes minute, appear in the windows, the fireplaces, the walls and the furniture. The windows of the library are decorated with cartoons representing what Mordaunt Crook describes as ‘allegories of Art and Science’ but could as easily be six of the seven Masonic pillars of wisdom, namely Arithmetic, Music, Astronomy, Rhetoric, Grammar, Logic and Geometry. ‘The representations here are slightly different,’ says Dickson, ‘but perhaps Burges simply thought his six better displayed his own pillars of wisdom’. But the most purely Masonic piece in the whole place is ‘The Great Bookcase’, whose panels are separated into two categories: the left side depicting Christian symbols with the right concentrating on Pagan ones, reflecting the fact that Freemasonry is a combination of Christianity, Paganism and the occult. Ultimately, what Burges constructed was a paean to the fabulous, the exotic, and the eccentric, incorporating his own interests in both Paganism and Christianity. That said, he only managed to stay there for three years before he died, his final visitors apparently being Oscar Wilde and James Whistler. Almost a hundred years later, the place had now come into the hands of someone else anxious to retreat from reality and indulge in a Pagan hideaway.

  It was also around this time that Page acquired his own specifically occult bookshop, just a brisk walk from the Tower House, at 4 Holland Street. Named Equinox after Crowley’s magazine, in the days before the internet, the most significant occult books were exceptionally hard to find. As Jimmy said at the time, one of the reasons he bought the place was because ‘I was so pissed off at not being able to get the books I wanted.’ Owning Equinox not only gave him access to its extensive library, it placed him firmly at the forefront of serious occult antiquarians. Equinox would carry books on Tarot, astrology, and of course a large section devoted to Crowley’s works, including several books signed by Crowley, plus his birth chart pinned to one wall, and a first edition set of Crowley’s ten-volume work The Equinox priced at £350 – a substantial sum for a book now, a small fortune in the mid-Seventies.

  Page also saw to it that Equinox published two books under its own imprimatur, including a perfect facsimile of Crowley’s The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King and Astrology: a Cosmic Science by Isabel Hickey. The latter is an expert explanation of how astrology can affect a person’s spiritual development (as opposed to the fatalist ‘predictions’ of standard newspaper columns); the former essentially Crowley’s interpretation of The Lesser Key Of Solomon, ‘Translated into the English Tongue by a Dead Hand and Adorned with Divers [and] other matters Germane Delightful to the Wise. The Whole Edited, Verified, Introduced and Commentated by Aleister Crowley.’ Along with the names, offices and orders of the seventy-two spirits with which Solomon was said to have conversed, together with the seals and characters of each, the text of the conjurations are given in both Enochian and English, as translated by Crowley. Both books are still available under new imprints today. Original Equinox editions are not too hard to find either, although much more expensive. According to Timothy d’Arch Smith, who sold an extremely rare copy of the original to Page, the Equinox version of The Goetia is ‘exactly the same as the original, except it has hard covers and the original has soft. Apart from the one copy on vellum pages on which Crowley’s actually painted the demons in the margin. It’s in the Warburg Institute now but it was Gerald Yorke’s. It’s fantastic.’

  Such a relief to be out of the session world. You still kept your hand in obviously, it was good bread, but you didn’t rely on it anymore. And you were touring again, a hit act, lots of birds screaming and doing their pieces, lots of young geezers with beards asking you how it was done. You’d just smile and say nothing. Not to the blokes anyway. A really happening scene…This was before the boathouse, when you still lived in Elsham Road, round the back of Holland Park Road, near the tracks of the Metropolitan Line tube. Get up late, have a fag, maybe a joint, then go shopping for clobber, on your own or with your mate Jeff Dexter, the DJ from Middle Earth. Checking out Liberty’s, looking for cloth that could be made into groovy new threads. Or the posh shops in Jermyn Street and Cordings in Piccadilly, who did absolutely the best socks. Carnaby Street was only for mugs and punters. Though 26 Kingly Street, which ran parallel to Carnaby Street, was hip to the trip. It was in Keith Albarn’s gallery at 26 Kingly Street that you first met Ian Knight. Ian designed stages for Middle Earth, and it was you who got him working for the Yardbirds and, later, Zeppelin. You, the two Jeffs and Ian, all into the Buffalo Springfield vibe. Them and the Small Faces too, who were so basic and yet so cool. It made you think what you could do with some of that attitude in the Yardbirds. Keep the light shows and the little happenings, keep the good stuff, but add some balls to it. Make it a bit more hooligan, as Jeff called it…

  You were always keeping an eye out for new things. You had to, there was so much to dig back then that was new. Like when you went to see the Ravi Shankar concert and there were no young people in the audience at all, just a lot of older blokes in suits from the Indian Embassy, their wives dragged along in evening dresses, all stifling yawns. This chick you’d been hanging out with said she knew him so afterwards you went backstage and she introduced you. A nice old cat, very mellow vibe, though still sweating buckets from the gig, like you do. You knew the scene and wanted to show you weren’t just anybody so you told him how you had a sitar, but admitted you didn’t really know how to tune it. You couldn’t believe it when he sat down and wrote down the tunings on a piece of paper. Couldn’t believe a nice old cat like that could be so cool, sitting there in his robes, writing it all down for you, like giving you his blessing. Different scenes you could learn from, man…

  By the spring of 1974, Zeppelin was ready to reconvene for their third visit to Headley Grange, taking Ronnie Lane’s mobile studio (cheaper than the Stones’) and engineer Ron Nevison. With Jones having thrown his hat firmly back in the ring, though still antsy about having to put up with the increasingly wayward offstage proclivities of the others, G compromised on the living arrangements and had Cole book them all – bar Page – into the plush nearby Frencham Ponds hotel. ‘Page stayed behind at Headley,’ chortled Cole. ‘He was quite happy in that fucking horrible cold house.’

  Once they had finally begun work, new tracks were laid down quickly and relatively easily with the bones of eight lengthy new compositions rapidly emerging: ‘Custard Pie’, ‘In My Time Of Dying’, ‘Trampled Underfoot’, ‘Kashmir’, ‘In The Light’, ‘Ten Years Gone’, ‘The Wanton Song’ and ‘Sick Again’. With final overdubs and mixes taking place as before back at Olympic in London in May, had they left things as they were they would have emerged with an album somewhere between the gritty sonic overload of their second album and the methodically applied brilliance of their fourth: that is to say, one of their three greatest works. As it was they took the decision to try and build on that remarkable achievement by adding a plethora of older tracks still sitting in the can from as far back as their third album in 1970: ‘The Rover’, ‘Houses of the Holy’ and ‘Black Country Woman’ from their various Houses Of The Holy sessions two years before; ‘Down By The Seaside’ from the December 1970 Basing Street sessions for the fourth album; ‘Night Flight’ and ‘Boogie With Stu’ from the January 1971 Headley Grange visit; and ‘Bron-Yr-Aur’ (spelt correct
ly this time) from the original June 1970 Basing Street sessions for the third album.

  Thus, Led Zeppelin finally got the double album Jimmy had always craved. There were many reasons why he decided the time was finally right for it. To begin with, there was the simple fact of having such a large and impressive backlog of material. In the days before ‘bonus’ tracks and endless box-sets featuring ‘previously unreleased’ material became the norm, the likelihood was that any material leftover from previous albums would never see the light of the day. However, more pressing than that was the burning desire – as with the fourth album – to prove wrong the naysayers who had dared to question the worth of Houses of the Holy. Stung into pushing themselves to their limits with the follow-up, just as they had been after their third album, Jimmy wanted to nail the dissenters once and for all. This was also the age of the double album as Major Status Symbol. Much as with owning their own record label, in order to be considered in the same light as the Beatles, Dylan and the Stones, even Hendrix and The Who, all of whom had been praised for releasing momentous double albums – even career-defining in the case of Blonde On Blonde, Electric Ladyland and Tommy – Page felt deeply that Zeppelin would also benefit from having ‘a bigger palette’ from which to paint their pictures. It was also the fashion now, with everyone from Elton John to Deep Purple, Yes and Genesis having released portentous double albums in the past two years.

  Did it actually make for a better album, though? Certainly the fifteen tracks spread over two LPs created a textural and thematic breadth one could only stand back and admire. As such, Physical Graffiti, as it was to be called – an inspired title Jimmy had come up with at the last minute after viewing early drafts of the proposed artwork – is now regarded by many as the pinnacle of their career. The sheer variety of material – from stonking crowd-pleasers (‘Custard Pie’, ‘Trampled Underfoot’) to left-field acoustic enchantments (‘Bron-Yr-Aur’, ‘Black Country Woman’), lighter pop moments (‘Down By The Seaside’, ‘Boogie With Stu’), slinky, slit-eyed groovers (‘The Rover’ – remodelled from its acoustic blues origins – ‘Sick Again’) and, of course, lengthy body-dredged-from-the-river blues (‘In My Time Of Dying’, ‘In The Light’, ‘Ten Years Gone’) – it also gave the band their third hallmark track in ‘Kashmir’. Of the same order of class as previous touchstone moments as ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘Stairway To Heaven’ – that is, destined to transcend all musical barriers and become universally recognised as a classic – and another song that utilises Jimmy’s signature DADGAD tuning to create a musical and metaphorical drive toward some irresistible far-off horizon, ‘Kashmir’ encapsulated Zeppelin’s multi-strand approach to making rock music (part rock, part funk, part Himalayan dust storm) as completely as ‘Stairway…,’ but is arguably an even greater achievement. Certainly Robert Plant thinks so, even now. Especially now: ‘I wish we were remembered for “Kashmir” more than “Stairway To Heaven”,’ he once said. ‘It’s so right – there’s nothing overblown, no vocal hysterics. Perfect Zeppelin.’

  Jimmy wouldn’t go quite that far, though he agrees it’s one of their finest moments. ‘It was just Bonzo and myself at Headley Grange at the start of that one,’ he explained. ‘He started the drums, and I did the riff and the overdubs, which in fact get duplicated by an orchestra at the end, which brought it even more to life, and it seemed so sort of ominous and had a particular quality to it. It’s nice to go for an actual mood and know that you’ve pulled it off.’

  Of course, there were many different moods on Physical Graffiti, as well as the usual handful of ‘borrowings’. The most notable case was ‘Custard Pie’, credited to Page and Plant, but its juddering intro recalling Blind Boy Fuller’s 1939 recording ‘I Want Some Of Your Pie’ (later reworked by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee for their 1947 recording ‘Custard Pie Blues’), while Plant relies for his lyrics almost entirely on Sleepy John Estes’ 1935 recording, ‘Drop Down Mama’, while also lifting lines from ‘Help Me’ by Sonny Boy Williamson and ‘Shake ’Em On Down’ by Bukka White, before returning to Fuller’s ‘I Want Some Of Your Pie’. Arguably, Sleepy John Estes and Blind Boy Fuller should now be co-credited in the same way Willie Dixon and Memphis Minnie are on current Zeppelin CDs. Similarly, ‘In My Time Of Dying’, credited here to all four Zeppelin members but actually based on an original Blind Willie Johnson tune from 1928 called ‘Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed’ – the title of which Plant references in his own adaptation (along with a cry at the climax of ‘Oh, my Jesus!’ cheekily interspersed allegedly with ‘Oh, Georgina!’, the name of yet another on-the-road conquest) – and famously covered in previous years by everybody from Bob Dylan to Plant himself in pre-Band of Joy days. It’s interesting too that Page uses the song to show off his chops on the slide guitar, one of the few occasions he would actually play one, an instrument Johnson himself famously excelled on.

  Ironically, the one derivation they did try to credit the original source for – ‘Boogie with Stu’, actually an improvised reworking of ‘Ooh My Head’ by Richie Valens (itself little more than a reworking of Little Richard’s ‘Ooh My Soul’) – resulted in the threat of a court action. As Page recalled: ‘What we tried to do was give Ritchie [Valens’] mother credit, because we heard she never received any royalties from any of her [deceased] son’s hits, and Robert did lean on that lyric a bit. So what happens? They tried to sue us for all of the song! We had to say bugger off!’

  There were also some moments where cloaked references to Page’s ongoing deep interest in the occult could be discerned: an obvious, cheesy reference to ‘Satan’s daughter’ and ‘Satan and man’ in ‘Houses of the Holy’ and a less obvious but likely more accurate reference to having ‘an angel on my shoulder, in my hand a sword of gold…’ in the same song. ‘Kashmir’, too, seemed to resonate with occult meaning with its images of ‘Talk and song from tongues of lilting grace’ –

  Enochian calls? – and a ‘pilot of the storm who leaves no trace, like thoughts inside a dream’ – a Magus, perhaps? All pure speculation, of course. As is the fact that the title to ‘Trampled Underfoot’ appears nowhere in the song, but seems to hark back to something the occult writer V.E. Mitchell wrote some years before when he revealed that ‘Whenever a Templar was received into the Order he denied Christ…forced to spit on a crucifix and often even to trample it underfoot.’

  Ultimately, though, none of these things are what made Physical Graffiti such an appealing Zeppelin album. The reason it’s still revered now is for tracks like the sublime ‘Ten Years Gone’ – its woozy moonlit mood light years ahead of something as prosaic by comparison as ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ the eerily affecting ‘In The Light’, with its supernatural drone intro and cathartic entreaty to ‘find the road’ (with Lucifer as ‘light-bearer’, no doubt); even sleazy tunnel-dwellers like ‘Sick Again’, the paean to teenage LA groupies with ‘lips like cherries’ and ‘silver eyes’ (specifically to Lori Maddox, in the line, ‘One day soon you’re gonna reach sixteen’) which closes the album. All tracks so far beyond the wide-eyed blues rock of their early albums the word ‘mature’ barely covers it; so worldly you can almost see their noses dripping in the flickering candlelight, this was no longer the finely manicured, full-spectrum sound Page had meticulously contrived for the second and fourth albums and something much more brutal and uncompromising, everything presented as if done in one take – though no less dizzily exciting in its resolutely don’t-give-a-fuck fashion.

  In that respect, Physical Graffiti resembled the Stones’ earlier double, Exile On Main Street, another ragbag collection made by a band now so far over the rainbow they felt they had nothing more to prove and now appeared more focused on keeping themselves entertained, be that with hard drugs, harder women or simply over-indulging their own musical fantasies, touching down on blues, country, funk…wherever the stoned fancy left them crashed out on the floor, the whole thing working, nevertheless, to eerily stunning effect. Jimmy had, in fact, being hanging out with Keit
h and Mick off and on throughout 1974, bumping into each other at Tramp or the Speakeasy in London, before all going back to Ronnie Wood’s rambling mansion, The Wick, in Twickenham, where Keith had practically moved in that year. One night in November Jimmy found himself embarked on an all-night jam with Keith and Ronnie on a song called ‘Scarlet’, named after Jimmy’s two-year-old daughter. ‘It started out as a sort of gentle folk ballad,’ he later recalled. ‘But then Keith suddenly decided, “Right, now it’s time to add the reggae guitars.”’ Jimmy and Keith, whose mutual interests now extended far beyond music, were especially close, the Stones guitarist teasing the Zeppelin leader about Plant and Bonham, who he referred to as ‘a couple of clueless Ernies from the Midlands’. So close were they at that point it was even rumoured that Jimmy would replace recently departed guitarist Mick Taylor on the band’s 1975 American tour – before Ronnie stepped in.