When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Questioned for details on the fallout, Anger responded that the way Page had been behaving was ‘totally contradictory to the teachings of Aleister Crowley and totally contradictory to the ethos of the film. Lucifer is the angel of light and beauty. But the vibes that come off Jimmy are totally alien to that – and to human contact. It’s like a bleak lunar landscape. By comparison, Lucifer is like a field full of beautiful flowers.’ Encouraged, he went further, voicing the opinion, so far unexpressed but increasingly held by those longstanding fans disappointed – at best confused – by Zeppelin’s latest offering. ‘I’m beginning to think Jimmy’s dried up as a musician. He’s got no themes, no inspiration and no melodies to offer. I’m sure he doesn’t have another “Stairway to Heaven”, which is his most Luciferian song. Presence was very much a downer album.’ He added, knowingly: ‘On the one hand he’s very into enterprise and hard work. But on the other hand he has this problem dragging him down. He’s been acting like Jekyll and Hyde…’ Just in case anyone was left in any doubt as to what he was referring, Anger described Page as having ‘an affair with the White Lady’ – a clear reference to heroin.

  Anger continued to badmouth Page at every opportunity. Trying to communicate with Page was like ‘rapping on inch-thick plate glass,’ he said. He had ‘turned into an undisciplined, rich dilettante, at least as far as magic and any serious belief in Aleister Crowley’s work was concerned.’ A prime example of ‘magic gone haywire, half understood, not under will’.

  For the record, Jimmy now claims the row with Anger was sparked not by Charlotte but by his housekeeper at the Tower House discovering him ‘giving some people a guided tour’. An argument ensued to which ‘Kenneth took umbrage’. When Anger went public, ‘the next thing I knew I started getting all this hate mail directed at [Charlotte] and myself’. More worryingly, the hate mail actually took the form of a ‘curse’ Anger now directed at both Page and Martin. ‘He was a multi-millionaire miser,’ a still furious Anger recalled in 2005. ‘He and Charlotte, they had so many servants, yet they would never offer me a cup of tea or a sandwich. Which is such a mistake on their part because I put the curse of King Midas on them. If you’re greedy and just amass gold you’ll get an illness. So I turned her and Jimmy Page into statues of gold.’

  ‘It was quite pathetic actually,’ said Page, shrugging off any suggestion that Anger’s actions may actually have exerted any power over him, explaining that the ‘curse’ mainly took the form of newspaper cuttings underlined in red ink. ‘I did think about returning all his possessions in a hearse, but then I thought that might be a tad dramatic. Now I almost see it as being a bit sad. This [Lucifer Rising] was going to be a masterpiece, but he didn’t manage to pull it off. All that remains now is the myth.’

  Naturally, it’s always been assumed that the curse Kenneth Anger placed on Jimmy Page didn’t work. Yet it’s interesting to note, in retrospect, how from that point on it was practically all downhill for Page and Zeppelin. Indeed, it could be argued that the ‘curse of King Midas’ – a metaphor for illness, or impotence, despite enormous wealth or fame – describes exactly what lay in store for both Page and Zeppelin over the next five years. It might even be said that the writing was now on the wall – underlined in red ink.

  14

  Caesar’s Chariot

  Sometimes when you looked back you simply couldn’t get your head round it. You’d given yourself until you were twenty. You told everybody if you hadn’t made it by then, you’d knock it on the head, find a proper job. But when the time came you weren’t ready to quit. It was a close run thing, though - when Bonzo buggered off to Tim Rose’s band you knew he wouldn’t be back. Neither would you for forty quid a week. That was better than you were making on the building site. It nearly was you, too, when Alexis Korner stuck his head round the door at the Speakeasy gig. You hadn’t worried about Bonzo or the others then, droning away about the blues to your new best mate, Alexis. When he suggested doing a couple of gigs together, just the two of you and his pianist Steve Miller, you nearly bit his arm off. When he suggested making an LP together you tried playing it cool but you couldn’t contain yourself. ‘This is it,’ you told Maureen. ‘Alexis wants me to go to London and do some stuff in the studio with him.’ And off you went, sleeping on the couch at his flat in Queensway. ‘Goodnight, Robert,’ he’d say in that voice. ‘Oh, by the way, it’s the same couch that Muddy used to sleep on when he stayed here. And I don’t know if we’ve changed the toilet bowl since Buddy Guy was here…’ Good scenes, hanging out, smoking dope and acting like this was nothing. Never did get round to doing the LP but you did record a couple of tracks together: ‘Operator’ and ‘Steal Away’. Really good, you know, if you knew anything about the blues…

  You said goodbye and promised to keep in touch but never did, of course. No-one in the music biz ever did. Ships in the night, man…Back in Brum, things went from bad to worse with the Band of Joy, you and Bonzo always scheming, trying to drum up cash. Lying to the others about how much you were getting paid so you could keep a bit back for yourselves. Pat and Maureen looking at you sitting there smoking and divvying it all up, a right pair. ‘We were like musical second-hand car dealers,’ you’d tell the author, years later, still laughing.

  There was you, Bonzo, Kevin Gammond on guitar, Chris Brown on organ and Paul Lockey on bass. One of the greatest bands ever to come out of the Midlands, everyone said so, and you couldn’t get a bloody deal. The tapes did get you a few tasty gigs here and there, opening for Fairport Convention, Ten Years After, Spooky Tooth, Mick Farren and the Social Deviants…You took the music seriously, kind of psychedelic leaning heavily on West Coast stuff mixed with blues, the plan to take it on and keep extending the music so that it became almost just one long piece of music, just moving through various styles. Whether the world was ready for something like that yet, you weren’t sure, you just knew it was the right way to go. The rest of the time, though, you had a right laugh. One time at Exeter University, supporting Mick Farren’s lot, you’d both been on the cider and were so drunk Bonzo decided to drum standing up. The others hated it but you had to laugh. Then in the van coming back he had a flaming row with Kevin about his time-keeping. Neither of them knew what they were on about. Bonzo was out of his face and Kevin was playing so fast the pair of them had invented their own time-signatures. In the end, Kevin went bonkers and said he was leaving the band, made the van stop while he got out. You ended up doing the next gig in Scotland – the Victoria Hall, in Selkirk, if you please – with Paul playing lead guitar and Chris doing the bass with his left hand on the keyboard. Then it was your turn to have a row with Bonzo. Then got so drunk you fell asleep in a broom cupboard…

  It wasn’t long after that you supported Tim Rose, which is how he heard Bonzo. You were furious when he said he was leaving but, fair play, he’d said, ‘Look, I’ve got to go. We’re broke. I’ve got a kid to support’, and you knew where he was coming from even if you didn’t agree with it. You knew it would be the end of the Band of Joy too and it was. That was in the spring and by the summer of ’68, the summer of love long gone, you were back on the Ma Reagan circuit, working with the Irish navvies, digging up West Bromwich High Street by day and singing with Hobstweedle at the weekend, smiling and poncing about and making like everything was all going to plan but it fucking wasn’t, none of it. Now and again something would crop up. Tony Secunda, the Move’s manager, had asked you down to audition for his new label, Regal-Zonophone, but nothing came of it. Then there was talk of your old mucker Nev Holder making you second vocalist of the ’N Betweens. But that was just the others having a go, they knew Noddy – as he was now called – preferred to go it alone at the mike.

  Your mum and dad had started up again now too, muttering to Maureen that it wasn’t too late for you to resume your ‘promising career’ in chartered accountancy. You could feel the walls closing in. You were nearly twenty and you’d always said you’d knock it on the head if you hadn’t made it by then
and fucking hell you hadn’t made it but you didn’t want to knock it on the head, not to be a bloody accountant. You’d lie in bed some nights and you wouldn’t be able to sleep. Fuck me, what were you going to do…?

  Then one day you got the telegram. You’d never received a telegram before, wondered what it might be about, thought maybe it was bad news, some bloody thing from your past catching up with you, something you’d done with Bonzo when you were out of it perhaps, something you couldn’t even remember you were so stoned…

  It was from someone called Peter Grant asking if you were interested in joining the New Yardbirds, said Terry Reid had put your name forward. You thought it was a joke, someone pulling your leg. You’d never heard of Peter Grant, didn’t know anything about the Yardbirds, new or old, but you did know Terry Reid, who the Band of Joy had opened for once at the Boston Gilderdrome. Then they came up and you met Jimmy, who you’d never heard of either. But it seemed like they meant it, like something was going on. After so long, though, it just didn’t seem real. You didn’t even know if you really liked the Yardbirds. Didn’t even know who Jimmy Page was. You’d heard of Clapton, obviously, and Beck, but not this bloke. But the money on offer seemed real all right.

  Later on, your mate Austin Griffiths from the Stringbeats told a reporter: ‘He was open-mouthed. “The Yardbirds want me”, was all he managed to say.’ It was true. The more you thought about it, the less you could believe it was happening to you. A few months later, after those first shows in Scandinavia and the band had changed its name, you were in a pub in Worcestershire one night, taking a piss, half cut, staring at the grubby white wall in front of you. When you’d zipped up, you took out a biro and wrote on the wall: ROBERT PLANT OF LED ZEPPELIN. Just to see what it looked like. Then you staggered back to the bar and ordered another round for everybody and forgot about it. A few weeks later, though, they told you, when someone pointed out to the landlord what he had on the wall of his bogs, he took some Sellotape and sealed it over the words. For posterity, he said…

  With the swift passing of interest in the Presence album and still unable to tour, the latter half of 1976 was given over to finally releasing The Song Remains The Same, begun more than three years before. Backed with the simultaneous release of a double live ‘soundtrack’ album, the logic was simple: if Zeppelin couldn’t go to the people, the film at least would enable the people to go to Zeppelin.

  However, things did not get off to a promising start when Ahmet Ertegun dozed off during a private screening of the film for Atlantic Records’ executives. Reactions elsewhere were of a similarly somnambulistic nature. Premiered in New York on 20 October 1976, where guests included Mick Jagger and Linda Ronstadt, critics unanimously panned it. It was the same two weeks later in Britain, where there were two premieres: in Birmingham and London. Arriving on screens just as the Sex Pistols were releasing their cataclysmic debut single ‘Anarchy in the UK’ – thus signalling the start of punk rock, a new musical ‘movement’ intrinsically antithetical to groups like Zeppelin – its timing could not have been worse. Not only did the film, with its mishmash of disjointed backstage scenes (usually involving Grant haranguing pirate merchandise sellers for ‘ripping off Led Zeppelin’ or some other unpardonable offence), live footage (of some uneven yet occasionally intoxicating performances) and ‘fantasy sequences’ (roundly condemned as the self-indulgences of a band clearly out of touch with reality) make Led Zeppelin seem dated, it made them one of the first major casualties of punk’s ground-zero approach. On British television, Pistols singer Johnny Rotten claimed he’d ‘fallen asleep’ while watching the film, calling the band ‘dinosaurs’. Sensing a trend, Paul Simonon of The Clash claimed, ‘I don’t have to hear Led Zeppelin. Just looking at their record covers makes me want to be sick.’ More damagingly for the film’s long-term prospects, in the US Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh described it as ‘a tribute to their rapaciousness and inconsideration. While Led Zeppelin’s music remains worthy of respect (even if their best songs are behind them) their sense of themselves merits only contempt.’

  Even the accompanying double live album came in for a drubbing, compared unfavourably to the many excellent Zeppelin bootlegs that already existed. As ever, Page staunchly defended the band against such criticism, insisting he considered the film ‘successful, in so much as it is a frozen celluloid statement of an evening’. He did concede, however, that the soundtrack album ‘wasn’t necessarily the best live material we had but it was the live material that went with the footage so it had to be used. So, you know, it wasn’t like A Magic Night. But it wasn’t a poor night. It was an honest sort of mediocre night.’

  Bonzo had his own way of dealing with things, too. When his ten-year-old son, Jason, got up and played drums at the after-show party for the premiere in Birmingham, John basked proudly in the spontaneous applause the boy’s performance aroused. When the resident club DJ cut him short, though, by joking, ‘If you think you’re so good, let’s hear you play this!’ and put Sandy Nelson’s ‘Let There Be Drums’ on the turntable, Bonham’s eyes glazed over with fury, and he marched over and punched him in the face. According to onlooker David Hadley, the hapless DJ was then ‘thrown into the canal’ by a couple of ‘heavy-looking blokes’.

  Peter Grant was equally merciless when dealing with an errant photographer at the London premiere in Covent Garden, where guests included Paul and Linda McCartney, Lynsey De Paul, Lionel Bart and Joe Strummer. The photographer had been one of many snapping guests, Page recalled, ‘and Peter said, “What are you doing there? Flying a kite or something?” Then somebody picked the guy up and threw him from the first floor balcony onto a car! Meanwhile, we were in there, trying to pull birds – heaven knows what else – and this sort of thing was going on, on the periphery.’

  When Sounds magazine ran a jokey piece about the party in their gossip column, ‘Jaws’, including a picture of an elderly woman busker with a caption making punning reference to Peter Grant’s mother, Grant predictably failed to see the funny side, not least because his real mother had recently died after a serious illness. Rather than instruct the band’s PR to express his disquiet, typically, he decided to take matters into his own hands, phoning the editor, Alan Lewis, late one evening. It was the first serious blow in what would become an increasingly fractious relationship between the band and what had until then been one of its more reliable supporters in the British media.

  Alan Lewis takes up the story: ‘We used to often work late in those days but I was sitting on my own in the Sounds office this particular night, about nine or ten o’clock, when the phone rang and this growly voice said something like: “Is that the editor?” Yes. “That article in your paper today about Led Zeppelin, do you know my mum?” No. “Well, it’s Peter Grant here, you know who I am.” At which point, I realised what this was about and began to rehearse an apology in my head. But before I could speak he said: “Have you seen the film?” I said no. “Well”, he said, “keep an eye on your door!” and hung up. I realised later he was alluding to the gangster sequence where he and his henchmen shoot up a room full of people. Of course, like most music papers back then, Sounds was quite outspoken and used to getting threats from record companies over something one of the writers had said. But this was of a different order. I’m not saying I lost sleep over it but I knew of Grant’s reputation – everybody did – and I must admit there were quite a few occasions after that when I was alone in the Sounds office late at night, wondering if the door was going to burst open at any minute.’

  The poor overall reaction to The Song Remains The Same meant the movie did only moderately well at the box office before quickly disappearing, not seen again outside cheap drive-ins in the American south or occasional late-night showings in the UK. Page and Grant took it all badly. Where in the past they had been able to shrug off poor reviews by merely pointing to the unprecedented level of success the band enjoyed, with the relative failure of the album, too – the Zeppelin fan-base huge enough t
o send it platinum in the US and gold in Britain but again, like Presence, unable to translate that partisanship into a wider interest from a music-buying market largely unimpressed by such second-rate fare – this was much harder to shrug off; their second relative failure in a row.

  By now, Zeppelin appeared to be almost permanently at war with everybody, even the people they had made the movie with. So disillusioned had Peter Clifton become, he later described the band as ‘the rudest, most arrogant people I ever encountered in my twenty-five years of filming music’. While Joe Massot, deemed a ‘traitor’ by Grant after he reacted to his firing from the project by describing the band in the press as ‘bloody difficult, if not impossible’, was forced to buy a public ticket to the New York showing of the movie, in spite of the fact that it consisted almost entirely of footage he had directed.

  Most vociferous in their putdowns of Led Zeppelin were the new breed of punk rock bands, now using them for target practice in the press, despite Jimmy and Robert, at least, making apparently friendly overtures by turning up one night at the Roxy, then London’s number one punk club, to see The Damned, who Jimmy thought were ‘fantastic…I was absolutely amazed by the power that was coming out of them’ and whose Bonham-like drummer, Rat Scabies, he would later become pals with. Robert was also intrigued by the new music, so alien to the more technically adept Zeppelin mien, yet not so far removed from the original Fifties-style rock’n’roll he’d grown up on.