When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  The Physical Graffiti sleeve, designed by Mike Doud and Peter Corriston, would be another controversial talking point. Eschewing the usual gatefold design in favour of a special die-cut cover styled to look like a brownstone New York tenement through whose windows could be viewed an eclectic mix of famous faces including Buster Crabbe’s Flash Gordon, Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, Charles Atlas, Neil Armstrong, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Queen, King Kong, Peter Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Laurel and Hardy, the Virgin Mary, Rossetti’s portrait of Proserpine, Judy Garland’s breasts-strapped Dorothy and the cast of Wizard of Oz, plus the various members of Zeppelin dressed in drag – it was similar to the third album sleeve in its fiddly intricacy. The idea was actually lifted wholesale from the 1973 José Feliciano easy-listening album, Compartments, featuring an almost identical brownstone tenement with windows revealing its occupants, as well as a pull-out card and hidden pockets. Doud and Corriston used a photograph of a real-life New York apartment block at 97 St. Mark’s Place for their version of the same idea. The band loved it, seeing it as another impressive example of their own increasingly ambitious attempts to place themselves above the confines of ‘normal’ rock bands, into a realm uniquely their own – or at least one shared only with the crème-de-la-crème and those who could afford such indulgences.

  Released on 24 February 1975, in the middle of the band’s tenth US tour, a riotous two-leg jaunt that would see them at their preening peak, Physical Graffiti was another chart-topper in both Britain and the US – entering the latter at no. 3 in its first week of release, an unprecedented feat at the time. It also attracted the best set of reviews any of the band’s albums had ever received. In the UK, Melody Maker called it ‘pure genius’ while Let It Rock boldly predicted that ‘by the end of the year Physical Graffiti will be beginning to exude as much of that nebulous “greatness” that clusters around the likes of Blonde On Blonde, Beggars Banquet and Revolver’. In the US, Creem was no less effusive: ‘Graffiti is, in fact, a better album than the other five offerings, the band being more confident, more arrogant in fact, and more consistent…Equal time is given to the cosmic and the terrestrial, the subtle and the passionate.’

  To compound the critical backslapping, it was also on this US tour that Rolling Stone put Zeppelin on its cover for the first time, with an article by their new, fifteen-year-old cub reporter, Cameron Crowe. Untainted by having been amongst the clique of original Stone writers who had routinely trashed the band, Crowe was clearly a real-life fan, and the band treated him to one of their most revealing interviews. Page even opened up about Boleskine House, dropping hints as to its hidden purpose by referring directly to ‘my involvement in magic’ and explaining how ‘I’m attracted by the unknown…all my houses are isolated…I spend a lot of time near water…a few things have happened that would freak some people out, but I was surprised actually at how composed I was’. How he doubted ‘whether I’ll reach thirty-five. I can’t be sure about that.’ But that he wasn’t afraid of death. ‘That is the greatest mystery of all.’ Ultimately, he whispered, ‘I’m still searching for an angel with a broken wing.’ Then added with a grin: ‘It’s not very easy to find them these days. Especially when you’re staying at the Plaza Hotel…’

  It was also at the Plaza in New York at the start of the tour that he set up a large stereo system to playback the music he had so far made for Lucifer Rising. ‘I was on the sixth floor and there were complaints from the twelfth,’ he said at the time. There had already been two private screenings of the first thirty-one minutes of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at Berkeley University in LA where the reaction had been generally positive, and Anger now planned a full release by the end of the year, he said.

  Meanwhile, the tour got underway under something of a cloud when Page yet again injured a finger on his left hand, just days before its official start at the Minneapolis Sports Center on 18 January. ‘It happened when I was on a train in England, on my way to rehearsal,’ he said. ‘I must have grabbed at something, and the finger got caught in the hinge of the door. I was just totally numb – numb with shock. I just looked at it and said, “Oh, no”.’ The band ended up cutting ‘Dazed and Confused’ and doing ‘How Many More Times’ instead, while Page soldiered on by self-administering codeine tablets mixed with Jack Daniel’s whisky to deaden the pain.

  It was now that Danny Goldberg pulled off his biggest PR coup yet, when he arranged for William S. Burroughs to interview Page for a lengthy cover story in Crawdaddy under the heading: ‘The Jimmy and Bill Show’. It may not have been Truman Capote writing about the Stones but it was damn close – better, in Jimmy’s view, as Burroughs was another advocate of Crowley’s sex magick, as famous for being a heroin addict as he was a writer of apocalyptic literature.

  Burroughs wrote of seeing one of the band’s three shows at Madison Square Garden in February, describing the audience as ‘a river of youth looking curiously like a single organism: one well-behaved clean-looking middle-class kid’ and compared the show itself to a bullfight. ‘There was a palpable interchange of energy between the performers and the audience,’ he noted. ‘Leaving the concert hall was like getting off a jet plane.’ The article also discussed how ‘a rock concert is in fact a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy. Rock stars may be compared to priests.’ And how the Zeppelin show, ‘bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose – that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces.’ Adding: ‘It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts – music, painting and writing – is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.’

  The actual interview with Page, conducted ‘over two fingers of whisky’ at Burroughs’ Franklin Street ‘bunker’ – a converted boys’ locker room in downtown New York – was less interesting, with Burroughs doing most of the talking, Jimmy simply adding the occasional ‘wow’ and ‘yeah’. Though Burroughs noted they had ‘friends in common: the real estate agent who negotiated Jimmy Page’s purchase of the Aleister Crowley house on Loch Ness [Boleskine]; John Michel, the flying saucer and pyramid expert; Donald Camell, who worked on Performance; Kenneth Anger, and the Jaggers, Mick and Chris…’ Though Burroughs added: ‘There are no accidents in the world of magic.’ Page, he concluded, was ‘equally aware of the risks involved in handling the fissionable material of the mass unconscious’.

  ‘I pointed out that the moment when the stairway to heaven becomes something actually possible for the audience, would also be the moment of greatest danger. Jimmy expressed himself as well aware of the power in mass concentration, aware of the dangers involved, and of the skill and balance needed to avoid them…rather like driving a load of nitroglycerine.’

  ‘There is a responsibility to the audience,’ Page agreed. ‘We don’t want to release anything we can’t handle.’ He added: ‘Music which involves riffs, anyway, will have a trance-like effect, and it’s really like a mantra…’

  Another memorable meeting Page had during the band’s stint in New York was with David Bowie, then also heavily involved in his own cocaine-fuelled investigations into Crowley and the occult. Introduced by Mick Jagger, in town planning the next Stones tour, Bowie was curious to know more about Page’s work on Anger’s film. Tony Zanetta, then president of Bowie’s management company, Mainman, later wrote in his book, Stardust, about how Crowley’s beliefs encompassed ‘promiscuity and the use of drugs like cocaine…It was another version of David’s beloved Ziggy Stardust.’

  Bowie was convinced that Page’s study of Crowley had given him an especially strong aura – a magnetic sphere composed of three fields or bands of different colours that surrounds the body. He invited Page to the house he was then living in on 20t
h Street. ‘Though he was his polite self, David was wary of Page,’ writes Zanetta. ‘Occasionally during the evening, the conversation touched on the subject of the occult. Whenever the power of the guitarist’s aura was mentioned, Page remained silent but smiled inscrutably. It seemed that he did believe he had the power to control the universe.’

  Eventually, Page’s ‘aura’ so rankled Bowie he began to seriously lose his cool. ‘I’d like you to leave,’ he snapped. Jimmy simply sat there smiling, still saying nothing. Pointing to an open window in the room, Bowie hissed through gritted teeth: ‘Why don’t you leave by the window?’ Again, Page merely sat there smiling, saying nothing, staring right at Bowie as though speaking to him telepathically. Eventually, Jimmy got up and strode out, slamming the door behind him, leaving Bowie quaking in his boots. The next time they bumped into each other at a party, Bowie immediately left the room. Shortly after, claims Zanetta, Bowie insisted the house on 20th Street be exorcised ‘because of the belief it had become overrun with satanic demons whom Crowley’s disciples had summoned straight from hell…’

  13

  The Devil in His Hole

  On stage, the show had moved on considerably from the obvious glitz of 1973, towards a slicker, even more extravagant piece of theatre. Jones’ onstage arsenal of instruments now included a Steinway grand piano, an electric Rhodes piano, a mellotron and clavinet. Bonham’s drum kit was larger than ever and placed high on a rostrum, the stage straddled by large video screens and a neon sign which flashed the name Led Zeppelin up at the end of the show. A whirling umbrella of green lasers was used for the first time during Page’s violin bow section of ‘Dazed and Confused’. From the new album came panoramic versions of ‘Kashmir’, ‘Sick Again’, ‘Trampled Underfoot’, ‘In My Time of Dying’ and ‘The Wanton Song’. The band still wore much the same stage gear as they had two years before, though Jimmy had a new, even more outrageous suit to wear, variously embroidered with dragons, crescent moons, blood-red poppies, spangly stars, the ‘ZoSo’ emblem, what appeared to be a stylised ‘666’ and a Scorpio Rising sign.

  Travelling aboard the Starship again, they had finessed their travel arrangements still further, now working out of ‘bases’ around the country. For the first leg of the tour, they used the Chicago Ambassador as their camp, jetting out to shows in surrounding areas before returning ‘home’ straightaway afterwards. Elvis may have left the building with the crowd still chanting his name; Zeppelin had taken off into the stratosphere long before anyone had even arrived. When Plant got ’flu, leaving them with four days to kill, they rode the Starship down to LA, Jonesy sulking because he’d wanted to go to the Bahamas. But Page had unfinished business in LA, as always, and the band was still Jimmy’s baby. So LA it was…

  The Los Angeles concerts themselves – two nights at Long Beach Arena, three at the Forum – came at the finale of the tour, so LA was used as a base to fly back and forth to shows in Seattle, Vancouver and San Diego. They’d hurry back to LA, hitting the Troubadour in time for the late show from Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland one night, the Roxy for Suzi Quatro another night. As Jimmy told me in 2005: ‘I was living it. It was what it was.’ After playing for three hours a night ‘you can’t just switch off the adrenalin. For us, the way to wind it down was to go to a party. Before you know where you’ve been, you’ve missed a night’s sleep. Then, two weeks later, you’ve missed a few nights’ sleep because you’ve been having such a good time. I certainly wasn’t the only musician on the road back then who stayed up for a few nights on the trot.’

  But even Jimmy Page was now beginning to weary of the groupies who found everything he said ‘far out’. Plant and Jones had gone as far as renting mansions away from the Strip for the duration of their stay. And while Page and Bonham were still happy to hang their hats at the Riot House – if on separate floors – Jimmy appeared to have entered a period of celebrity wife-swapping. Having enjoyed luring Bebe Buell away from Todd Rundgren, he now turned his attentions to Chrissie Wood – wife of Ronnie, then on tour with the Faces – who became his ‘special friend’ throughout the West Coast leg of the tour. Not special enough, though, to prevent him from also trying to woo Joni Mitchell, who he’d become infatuated with since meeting her at a party in London twelve months before. She had appeared more interested in Rod Stewart on that occasion – until her then boyfriend, drummer John Guerin, turned up and both Page and Stewart had beaten a hasty retreat. Guerin had ‘a few hairs on his chest,’ as Stewart put it. Six months later, however, Mitchell was back in London for a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young show at Wembley. Afterwards, there had been another soirée at Quaglino’s that all of Zeppelin attended, only to find Mitchell once again accompanied by her impressively hirsute boyfriend. Now, in LA, when Page found her alone at last with friends at the then fashionable Greenhouse Restaurant on Sunset, they sat and chatted together for half an hour before Mitchell got up to go. Jimmy tried to persuade her to stay but Joni politely refused.

  Another night during the LA stay Jimmy treated writer Nick Kent and some other friends – ‘seriously wired on the voluminous quantities of cocaine [and] heroin’ – to an impromptu late-night showing in his suite of Lucifer Rising. ‘The piece lasted for about half an hour,’ recalled Kent, ‘and consisted of amateurish home-movie-style footage shot by Anger of an extremely stoned Marianne Faithfull in black robes silently stumbling down a staircase holding a lighted candle.’ Viewing the film now, though, there’s clearly more to it than an admittedly stoned Kent recalls. Far from looking ‘extremely stoned’ and holding a candle, Marianne Faithfull – in grey not black robes – casts a solemn, intriguing figure, as she wanders through the Egyptian deserts, dwarfed by the ancient monuments characteristic of the region. The rest of the film – a montage of visually arresting scenes and colourful images reminiscent of the ‘surreal’ early films of Bunuel – is even more intriguing, containing snatches of real-life depictions of magick ritual, though it has to be said that Leslie Huggins as Lucifer fails to cut a completely convincing figure; more Carry On than Rising. Donald Cammell is more in synch as Osiris, the God of Death – chosen for the role, Anger later claimed, ‘because he was always threatening suicide. And finally he did it. He blew his head off.’

  Page’s original soundtrack also works surprisingly well; its dense, ominous tones lending an air of authority to the inevitably oblique imagery. As he explained at the time: ‘The film’s pacing is absolutely superb. It starts so slow, and after say four minutes it gets a little faster and the whole thing starts to suck you in…. There’s a real atmosphere and intensity. It’s disturbing because you know something’s coming.’ There is also reputedly a brief glimpse of Page himself, holding the Stèle of Revealing while gazing at a framed photo of Crowley. The Stèle is an ancient Egyptian funerary artefact that played a role in the creation of Crowley’s Thelema religion as described in The Book of the Law. There are also extracts inscribed on it from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, specifically text ‘to allow the astral form of the deceased to revisit the earth at will’. This curly-haired, bearded figure is glimpsed only for a few seconds, and then only in half-profile, so it is not possible to say with absolute certainty whether it is Page. There is certainly a strong resemblance – years later, facsimiles of this same scene were used to advertise limited edition bootleg copies of the Page soundtrack in California, clearly referencing it as a clip of Jimmy from the film itself – but if it is Page, it’s a wonder Anger himself has never advertised the fact more, considering the added attention such a scene would bring his little-seen film. On the other hand, Anger is perverse enough to not wish to credit Page. Either way, it’s an intriguing sidebar for those fans of Page’s who revel in his clear associations with the occult in general and Crowley in particular.

  As always, the real bad boy of the tour was John Bonham. At the start, it had been fun. Even though he was banned from driving in Britain, where he’d been caught speeding while ‘under the influence,’ in Texas he’d bought a custo
mised 1966 Corvette Stingray for $18,000 (spending hours sitting in it with Keith Moon, now resident and permanently on the rampage in LA, the two of them just revving the engine). John also bought his nine-year-old son Jason a miniature Ludwig drum kit, which he would teach him to play. ‘It wasn’t so much that he wanted me to get involved in the music business,’ Jason told me in a 1990 interview. ‘I think he was more interested in giving me some understanding of what it was he was doing with his life. He used to get a kick out of watching me thump around. Like, “That’s my boy!”’ Plant told me one of his favourite memories was of Bonham ‘standing over Jason with his little mini-kit positioned next to the jukebox. Bonzo with a lilac drape suit on, a fag sticking out of his mouth, going “Come on!” Then sticking the Isley Brothers on yet again until Jason got it right.’ (In a Melody Maker article at the time, Bonham expressed doubts over whether Jason would follow in his father’s footsteps. ‘You can’t teach him anything,’ moaned Dad. ‘He’s got a terrible temper.’)

  However, back on the road it was the frustrated family man who was increasingly showing his bad temper, as once again he transformed into La Bête. Dressed on stage like a Clockwork Orange droog in white boiler suit and black bowler hat, acting like one off it, onlookers ceased to be amused and began to feel disgusted. By now the band’s off-road requirements had been finessed down to intricate details: Jimmy insisted his suite always have the curtains drawn, whatever time of day or night it was, the place lit by scented black candles, the fridge stocked with vintage Dom Perignon champagne. Other members expressed preferences for certain oriental rugs hung from the walls, grand pianos and, in the case of Bonzo, a full-size pool table. Nothing else mattered to the increasingly errant drummer – most of it was inevitably hurled from his window anyway; he even attempted to smash a grand piano into small enough pieces to send it flying out of his suite in LA. Word spread and the New York Plaza now demanded a $10,000 deposit before they would even let Bonzo check in. On the flight to LA during Plant’s ’flu bout, a drunken Bonzo frightened even Cole and Grant who had to restrain him from forcing one of the Starship’s pretty flight attendants into having sex with him. On a flight to Detroit, he grabbed the glasses off a startled Atlantic Records representative’s face and crushed them with his hands, grinding the broken pieces into the floor, then got up and walked calmly to the back of the plane. However, one night at the end of the tour he got a taste of his own medicine when he drunkenly took on one of the bouncers at the Rainbow – an expert in karate who responded by sending Bonzo to the hospital emergency room for the rest of the night. Lesson unlearned, Bonzo wanted to press assault charges but was finally dissuaded by G, who sensed it might open the floodgates to similar complaints from everyone else who had suffered at the hands of La Bête over the years.