When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  The closest you really got to going where you wanted to after Jeff left the Yardbirds was on ‘Glimpses’, which was the first time you really started using the violin bow for more than just tricks. They called it your gimmick but using the bow on the guitar was more than just a novelty to you. This was about making music, digging new sounds, as much as anything else you might have been able to do with it. You tried to show the others where it could all go, making up tapes with all these sound-effects on them, which you would play along with, improvising to the sound of the Staten Island Ferry, all these crunching noises and horns. You wanted to have some Hitler speeches on the tapes too but the others said you were going too far. Too far? No such thing. Try telling that to Keith after he’s had a few, though. Or Chris, sitting there fiddling with his camera…But to you, those nights at places like the Fillmore East, making the sky fall during ‘Glimpses’, that was where it was at, where it could be, where it should be going. Why couldn’t the rest of them see that? You talked about using tape recorders that were triggered by light beams, with a go-go dancer doing her thing, making the lights flash and the music take off…and they just looked at you and shook their heads like you were mad. Wankers. But you knew. One day everyone would be doing stuff like this. Lights and music and dancers. Rituals. Sex. Magic…

  One person blissfully unconcerned with the niceties of songwriting at this point was John Bonham, whose enforced year away from home was beginning to have the anticipated effects. One night during the SIR sessions, he arrived at the Rainbow where he sat at the bar and ordered twenty Black Russians – polishing off half of them in one go. Swivelling on his seat he espied a familiar face, Michelle Myer, long-time associate of producer and LA socialite Kim Fowley. Myer, sitting eating dinner, looked over and smiled. Bonzo did not smile back. Instead, he waded over and punched her in the face, knocking her off her seat. ‘Don’t ever look at me that way again!’ he roared.

  The band finally left LA at the end of October, Jimmy insisting they move at once following an unusually thunderous storm that erupted over the Malibu coastline, which he took as a bad omen. On the flight to Munich, where Musicland Studios had been booked for them to complete the album, Bonzo knocked himself out on several large G&Ts, a couple of bottles of white wine and champagne, causing so much disruption the other first-class passengers begged the steward not to wake him when the food was served. When he came to a couple of hours later, he had pissed himself. Shouting for Mick Hinton, his personal roadie, he forced him to stand in front while he changed his pants then made Hinton sit in his urine-drenched seat while Bonzo took Hinton’s seat in Economy.

  Situated in the basement of the Arabella Hotel, Musicland Studios were bright and modern, sparsely furnished, the accent firmly on the functional. Thin Lizzy had just been there recording overdubs for their Johnny the Fox album and the Stones were due in straight after Zeppelin. So tight was the scheduling squeeze, in fact, that the band had exactly eighteen days to work in. No Zeppelin album since their first eight years before had been recorded so quickly but Page was determined to make it work. In the event, he would find himself calling Jagger, begging for more time, a request the Stones’ mainman was happy to acquiesce to – up to a point. He could let Jimmy have three extra days, he said. Hardly any time at all, in recording terms, but it was all Page needed to finish the job, laying down all his guitar overdubs in a frantic fourteen-hour session, including at least six for ‘Achilles Last Stand’, quitting only when his fingers ached so much he could no longer manipulate them properly.

  Working round the clock, inside the studio it was permanent midnight, Jimmy staying up for three days at a time, sleeping on the floor of the studio. ‘The band did the basic tracks and then went away,’ he recalled, ‘leaving me and [engineer] Keith Harwood to do all the overdubs. We had a deal between us: whoever woke up first woke up the other one and we’d continue the studio work.’ As a result, Page remains inordinately proud of what at the time he initially referred to as simply ‘the Munich LP’, its final title undecided until the cover had been finalised. ‘It was a very, very intense album,’ Jimmy told me, ‘Robert had had the accident, and we didn’t know how he was gonna heal. He was on crutches and singing from a wheelchair.’ Or as Plant said at the time, it was ‘our stand against everything. Against the elements and chance…’

  However, the chief element aiding Page throughout his long ‘intense’ nights in the studio was much more prosaic. As Cole would later recall, ‘One of our roadies…pulled a bag of smack out of his coat pocket. “There’s a lot of this junk here, and it’s good,” he said. With his help, I located a local drug connection within walking distance of the studio.’ For Page – and soon Bonham and Cole too – heroin was ceasing to become a ‘recreational’ drug of choice and more of an addiction. For Cole, the first signs of such occurred within weeks of the album’s completion, during a meeting in LA, when Page complained privately to him of unusual aches and pains and a constantly runny nose – classic signs of heroin withdrawal. Then, at the end of the stay, sharing the drive to the airport, as Cole relates in his book, Stairway to Heaven, Page turned to him and said, ‘Christ sakes, Richard, don’t get into this shit.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Cole.

  ‘Heroin. I think I’m hooked. It’s terrible.’

  ‘Have you tried to stop?’

  ‘I’ve tried, but I can’t. It’s a real bastard.’

  It was the first open acknowledgement of the rapidly deepening darkness that was to cast its long shadow over the remainder of the band’s career, even – some would argue – hastening its end. However, only once during the Munich sessions did the weird momentum Page had created threaten to unravel, when Plant, still in plaster – Bonzo rather unfunnily nicknaming him ‘the Leaning Tower of Pisa’ – pulled himself up from his wheelchair one afternoon to stretch, lost his balance and fell onto his bad leg, a horrifyingly loud cracking sound filling the room.

  ‘Fuck!’ he screamed. ‘Not again! Not again!’ First to reach him was Page, petrified the singer had broken his leg again. ‘I’d never known Jimmy to move so quickly,’ Robert later laughingly recalled. ‘He was out of the mixing booth and holding me up, fragile as he might be, within a second. He became quite Germanic in his organisation of things and instantly I was rushed off to hospital again in case I’d reopened the fracture.’ So worried was Page that no more work could be done that day. Fortunately, a call later that night confirming no further injury to the singer found the guitarist back in the studio, putting in another all-nighter.

  The album was finally finished on the day before Thanksgiving in America. The following morning while Page was still sleeping, a delighted and relieved Plant put an international call through to the Swan Song office in New York to give them the good news, even suggesting they call the album Thanksgiving. A week later the entire band was back on Jersey, where, on 3 December, Bonham and Jones made an impromptu appearance on stage with Norman Hale, resident pianist at local watering hole Behan’s Park West. A former member of the Tornados, a week later the whole band joined Hale for a surprise forty-five-minute set at the club, where less than three hundred people watched as the band tore through their ‘Eddie Cochran and Little Richard repertoire,’ as Plant put it. ‘I was sitting on a stool and every time I hit a high note I stood up but not putting any weight on my foot.’ By the end of the set, ‘I was wiggling the stool past the drums and further out. Once we got going we didn’t want to stop.’ In Paris three weeks later, celebrating New Year’s Day, he took his first steps unaided since the crash five months before. ‘One small step for man,’ he joked, ‘One giant leap for six nights at Madison Square Garden…’

  January 1976 found the whole band in New York, staying at the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South. While Page began tinkering again with the mix of the live soundtrack to the long-delayed ‘road movie’, Plant was hitting the town in the company of Benji Le Fevre and an English bodyguard named David. Although the plaster had now
been removed, he still walked with a cane or crutch. Less conspicuously but more worryingly, Bonzo was also intent on getting the most out of his enforced stay in the city. When Deep Purple arrived in town for a show at Nassau Coliseum, a drunken Bonzo walked on in the middle of their set and, grabbing a free mike, announced: ‘My name is John Bonham of Led Zeppelin, and I just wanna tell ya that we got a new album comin’ out called Presence and that it’s fucking great!’ Then turned to Deep Purple’s guitarist: ‘And as far as Tommy Bolin is concerned, he can’t play for shit…’

  The album’s eventual title, Presence – as irritatingly revealed ahead of time by Bonzo – was inspired by the sleeve it came in, a typically incongruous Hipgnosis creation, from an idea Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell and friends Peter Christopherson and George Hardie (who had worked on the first Zeppelin sleeve), were already tinkering with. Reminiscent of the sleeve the same team had come up with the year before for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (including images of two suited businessmen shaking hands, one of them on fire; a swimmer front-crawling through sand and others of that ilk), the front of Presence featured a photograph of a ‘normal’ family (Mum, Dad and 2.2 children) seated at a restaurant table. Positioned on the centre of the white tablecloth is not a candle, as might be expected, or some floral arrangement, perhaps, but a twisted black oblong shape mounted on a plinth, dubbed ‘The Object’ by Hardie and co. In the background to this central image, shot in a studio in Bow Street, London, are photographs from that year’s Earl’s Court Boat Show. The rest of the gatefold sleeve contains similarly contrived images: beginning with the back of the outer sleeve, where a schoolgirl (modelled by Samantha Giles, previously one of the children on the Houses of the Holy sleeve) is seen with her teacher and another pupil at a desk on which stands another image of The Object. Eight more similarly enigmatic images – many taken from the archives of Life and Look magazines – furnish the inner sleeve, while the bag containing the vinyl carried unvarnished images of The Object on its own.

  Later copyrighted by Swan Song, the object in question was a twelve-inch black obelisk, designed by Hardie as ‘a black hole’ then completed by model maker Crispin Mellor. It was nicknamed ‘the present’, recalled Hardie, as ‘a play on the fact that the actual object, a hole in fact, wasn’t present at all, but absent’. Storm Thorgerson, who had first met Hardie while the pair were studying at London’s Royal College of Art, described ‘contaminating’ the deliberately dated images with what he describes as ‘the black obsessional object’, which he maintained ‘stands as being as powerful as one’s imagination cares it to be…we felt Zeppelin could rightfully feel the same way about themselves in the world of rock music.’ According to Page: ‘They came up with “the object” and wanted to call [the album] Obelisk. I held out for Presence. You think about more than just a symbol that way.’ And of course, the acknowledgement of a ‘presence’ had more occult resonance than a mere ‘object’. Unlike their previous two albums, however, this time they did allow for the band’s name and album title to adorn the sleeve, albeit embossed within the white sleeve, similar to the Beatles’ White Album. (The original UK shipment added a shrink-wrapped outer package, with title and band name in black with a red underlined border. In the US, the shrink-wrap also included a track-listing.)

  To launch the album, Swan Song had a thousand copies of the obelisk made which they planned to place simultaneously outside a wide range of iconic buildings across the globe, including the White House, the Houses of Parliament and 10 Downing Street – again, not dissimilar to how Pink Floyd would a year later launch their Animals album by floating a giant pig over London’s Battersea Power Station, another typically incongruous image taken from the Hipgnosis-designed sleeve. But the idea was cancelled when Sounds magazine got wind and leaked the news. Instead, models of The Object were eventually gifted to various favoured journalists, DJs and other media people, and are now highly collectable artefacts. (Mancunian comic rockers Albertos Y Los Trios Paranoias later spoofed the ‘object’ in press adverts for their debut album.)

  When Presence was released on 31 March 1976, it was another instant, no. 1 hit, going gold in the UK, platinum in the US, on advance sales alone, becoming the fastest-selling album in the Atlantic group’s history. Reviews were generally good, too – Jonh Ingham in Sounds called it ‘unadulterated rock and roll’ and described ‘Achilles Last Stand’ as the song to ‘succeed “Stairway To Heaven”.’ While Stephen Davis, in Rolling Stone, said it confirmed Zeppelin as ‘heavy-metal champions of the known universe’. Adding the caveat: ‘Give an Englishman 50,000 watts, a chartered jet, a little cocaine and some groupies and he thinks he’s a god. It’s getting to be an old story…’ A more piercingly accurate comment than even the writer probably knew.

  But sales soon tailed off, just as they had for Led Zeppelin III and Houses of the Holy, initial excitement failing to translate into wider general interest amongst non-partisan record buyers as what was correctly perceived as the album’s generally depressing ambience became known. Even the more uplifting ‘Candy Store Rock’, released as a single in the US that summer, backed with ‘Royal Orleans’, failed to make any impression on the charts. Undeterred, Page and Grant dismissed the lack of a strong following sales wind for the album as a side-effect of the band’s inability to promote it with a world tour. But the fact is, Presence remains one of Zeppelin’s least satisfying musical confections; the story behind it of more lasting interest than the often rather turgid music that resulted, despite the fact that both Page and Plant regarded it as a personal triumph. ‘Against the odds, sitting in a fucking chair, pushed everywhere for months and months, we were still able to look the devil in the eye and say, “We’re as strong as you and stronger, and we should not only write, we should record”,’ Plant told a reporter from Creem. ‘I took a very good, close scrutiny of myself, and transcended the death vibe, and now I’m here again, and it’s mad city again.’ Page’s affection for Presence was more to do with fond reminiscences of the nights he spent alone with just Harwood for company, doodling away to his stoned heart’s desire, than with the end product in itself. He was also doubtless thrilled that the end result had cost so little, certainly compared to all previous albums bar their first, and yet yielded so much – over the first few weeks of its bizarre half-life, anyway.

  Not that Zeppelin’s overall popularity was particularly affected. Promoters, eager to tempt the band back onto the road, told Grant that demand for Zeppelin tickets would be greater than ever – if and when the band decided they were able to return. In a presidential election year in America, the band also found itself in the invidious position of being publicly supported by both sides of the political divide, beginning with incumbent President Ford’s daughter Susan announcing on the Dick Cavett talk show that Led Zeppelin was her favourite group. Not to be outdone, Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter then reminisced publicly about listening to Zeppelin records during all-night sessions as governor of Georgia.

  With time on their hands and interest in Presence quickly flagging, attention turned instead to the release of the movie, now provisionally titled The Song Remains The Same, and soundtrack album. Not that there was much for them to do as they waited for the editing process to be completed, so while Plant continued his physical rehabilitation in the company of Maureen and the kids, and Jones used the time to quietly forget about Zeppelin as he also attempted to make up for lost time with his family, Page and Bonham were left to get up to their by now all too usual tricks.

  Bonzo had spent most of the summer in a rented château in the south of France with Pat and the children. Having sent them back to England with Matthew, his chauffeur, in time for the new school term to begin, he flew to Monte Carlo with Mick Hinton and his girlfriend, then had his own ‘girlfriend’ flown in from LA, the party also joined by Richard Cole. One night the gang was at Jimmy’s, an expensive Monte Carlo nightclub. Drunk and stoned as usual, Bonzo lost his temper – as usual – with Hinton and
pulled a gun on him. ‘It was only a gas gun,’ Cole recalled, but in a venue frequented by millionaire Arabs, Greeks, Corsican gangsters and members of the Italian Mafia – most of them surrounded by heavies armed with real guns – this was a deeply unwise move. Cole tried to intervene but Bonzo rounded on him, too. ‘Shut up, you cunt, or I’ll do you as well!’ At which point Cole punched him in the face, knocking the drummer out of his seat and breaking his nose in the process. As the gun clattered to the floor Cole told Hinton’s girlfriend to ‘hide it, get rid of it’ before the police arrived, which they duly did, arresting all three men who spent the next few hours in custody. Fortunately, recalled Cole, the police were so intent on finding the missing gun they overlooked the cocaine Bonzo and Cole had in their pockets.

  Page, meanwhile, was locked up in his own dispute, concerning his much-touted soundtrack music to Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising film project. Anger, who had been working on editing down seventeen hours’ worth of film he had so far shot into a manageable length, had spent the late spring and early summer working out of the basement of the Tower House, where Page had furnished him with the expensive editing equipment he needed to complete the job. Intrigued, Peter Grant even offered to co-finance the film when it was ready for release.

  However, things came to a bad end when Anger was kicked out one evening, he said, by Charlotte Martin, who felt he was beginning to ‘take over’ the place, inviting people around she didn’t know. Already frustrated and dismayed by what he saw as Page’s flagging interest in the project, failing to deliver more than the twenty-five minutes or so of music he had initially come up with, despite persistent pleas from the director, Anger immediately went public with his grievances, announcing he had ‘fired’ Page from the project and claiming he had been locked out of the house, unable to collect his belongings, chief amongst them, besides the unfinished film, his cherished ‘crown of Lucifer’, studded with rhinestones from a dress once worn by Mae West.