When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  John Paul Jones, who had filled in the previous nine months building up his own newly acquired farm in Sussex, ‘cooling out’ with his wife and daughters ‘and just taking stock,’ found the Clearwell get-together decidedly ‘odd,’ he said. ‘I didn’t really feel comfortable. I remember asking, “Why are we doing this?” We were not in good shape mentally or health wise.’ The only positive benefit from his point of view was that he became closer to Plant. ‘If I was a little down Robert would try to cheer me up, if he was down I’d do the same and pull ourselves through…It’s not that we didn’t have a laugh at Clearwell, it just wasn’t going anywhere.’

  Two months later Robert Plant finally stepped on a stage again, his first time since the nightmare of Oakland a year before. Not with Led Zeppelin at some enormous sold-out stadium though, but with an unknown local band called the Turd Burglars before a nonplussed audience of a couple of hundred at a small pub in Worcestershire, performing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and a handful of similar covers. A few weeks later, while holidaying with the family in Ibiza, he also got up at a club called Amnesia and sang with his old chums in Dr Feelgood – again, not Zeppelin songs but a clutch of storming R&B covers. A month after that, he repeated the trick, this time with fellow Swan Song artist Dave Edmunds, at a concert in Birmingham.

  Slowly but surely, Plant was feeling his way back onto the boards. Watching from afar, cautiously excited, was Jimmy Page. The band did not meet again until September, though, when they all attended Richard Cole’s wedding reception in London – a lavish party co-hosted by Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke who had also got married that day. Still, no-one broached the subject of getting the band back together directly with Robert for fear of frightening him off. But for the first time in over a year, positive feelings were beginning to emanate from the Swan Song offices in Chelsea. Then things turned weird again when Who drummer and long-time Bonzo cohort Keith Moon died after attending a party at the Coconut Grove in London hosted by Paul McCartney to celebrate the release of the movie The Buddy Holly Story. Word was that Moony had taken an accidental overdose of a drug he had been prescribed to help him combat his alcoholism, wound-up by being unable to join in with the revelry of the other party guests. Whatever the truth, Richard Cole, who had hung out with Moon at the Grove was shaken when, at the funeral, Pete Townshend came up to him, demanding ‘What the fuck is going on? Keith is dead and you’re alive…’

  Once again, the ‘Zep to Split’ stories started circulating, helped along by suggestions that with Keith Richards facing seven years in jail for his now infamous drug bust in Toronto and Zeppelin apparently in abeyance as Robert considered his future, Jimmy was being lined up to tour with the Stones. Whether he would have, or how that would have worked, being a raving junkie himself at the time, is not known. Clearly, things were starting to acquire a desperate edge. Zep chronicler Dave Lewis, who had first begun visiting the Swan Song offices in 1978, recalls ‘a very weird vibe at the time, everything was very inconclusive. Peter was never around, no-one could get hold of him, and it was just…strange. Here you were, at the headquarters of the biggest band in world and there was just nothing happening at all.’

  Despite taking off like a rocket, the Swan Song label also began withering on the vine as the tangled personal lives of its owners saw them lose interest. Apart from Bad Company, only Dave Edmunds (Robert’s old mucker from Rockfield, signed in 1976) enjoyed success, scoring UK hits with the singles ‘Here Comes The Weekend’, ‘I Knew The Bride’ and ‘Girls Talk’. Page’s old drug buddy Michael Des Barres’ short-lived band, Detective, was also signed but disbanded after just two albums: Detective in 1977 and, a year later, It Takes One to Know One. ‘Once we were signed we never saw any of Led Zeppelin for two years,’ said a disillusioned Des Barres.

  Even Page’s cherished Equinox shop closed down after the lease expired and he could no longer rouse himself to renew it. ‘It obviously wasn’t going to run the way it should without some drastic business changes and I didn’t really want to agree to all of that,’ he shrugged when asked about it. All he had ever wanted was for ‘the shop to be a nucleus,’ he said, for his own occult studies. Timothy d’Arch Smith believes the truth behind Equinox’s closure was more prosaic. ‘He had problems with the manager; I think that’s what he told me. And it all went really rather wrong. They reprinted a couple of things but I think it was really rather a disaster.’

  It wasn’t until November 1978, sixteen months after the death of his son, that Robert Plant finally felt able to go back to work with Led Zeppelin. The first priority, it was decided, should be a new album. It had been nearly three years since they’d last released a collection of new material. A lot had changed since then, both for Zeppelin and the music world in general. It would be important to come back with a strong musical statement. But when they arrived at a rehearsal room in London, it soon became clear that the musical ideas cupboard was embarrassingly bare. Worse, Page, to whom they had always looked for direction, was so untogether now, the long months of inactivity with just his heroin habit to keep him company having sapped whatever creativity he had left. It quickly became apparent to John Paul Jones that with the band’s principal songwriters both having been incapacitated this past year – albeit for very different reasons – it would be up to him to take up the slack and at least try to get the ball rolling again with some ideas of his own. Fortunately, Jonesy had been storing up ideas of one sort or another for years. That they weren’t all necessarily ideal for a Led Zeppelin album hardly mattered; at this point, the important thing was to get something going, and quick, before the other three members of the band – now all so fragile in their various ways – took off in different directions again.

  With Abba’s Polar Studios in Stockholm booked for December, the band was ready to try anything. As with the Musicland sessions three years before, work proceeded extremely quickly. It wasn’t Page cracking the whip this time though, it was Jones. Indeed, of the seven lengthy tracks which eventually emerged from the sessions as ‘keepers’, only five would be co-credited to Page – the first time any Zeppelin album would feature original material not at least part-credited to Jimmy – while all but one would be co-credited to Jones; another first. The only one not credited with any input at all was Bonham, which seems harsh as his drums are one of the few consistently good things about what would be the last, and least impressive, Zeppelin album.

  The other change under Jones’ stewardship was that they kept more regular hours. Page was still a creature of the night, nothing was going to change that, but instead of waiting for him to show up, or even Bonzo on those days he wanted to sleep it off after a heavy night on Sweden’s extra-strength chemical beer, Jones and Plant simply cracked on, in charge of the sessions with everyone else’s implicit if unvoiced blessing. ‘There were two distinct camps by then,’ Jones told Dave Lewis, ‘and we were in the relatively clean one. We’d turn up first, Bonzo would turn up later and Page might turn up a couple of days later.’ He and Robert, he said, ‘spent much of the time drinking pints of Pimms and waiting around for it to happen. So we made it happen.’ Says Lewis now: ‘By then Jonesy and Robert ruled the roost. With Jimmy immersed in his various problems, someone needed to take charge of the music and that was Jonesy. Meanwhile, anything Robert wanted he got, everyone was walking on eggshells around him.’

  While Page would still be credited as producer, in reality Jones and to a lesser extent Plant were now calling the shots there, too. Hence, the over-reliance on certain tracks of Jonesy’s new toy: a Yamaha GX-1 synthesiser, which had just then come onto the market, anticipating the Eighties move towards electronic studio-generated sounds over the organic natural-talent-will-out musicianship epitomised by Zeppelin’s generation of bands. Page was also becoming obsessed with this new technology and favoured a much more treated sound to his guitars throughout the album, which he chose to layer to unusual degrees even by his own intricate standards.

  Every Friday afternoon the band
would fly back to London where they would be met by four separate limos waiting to whisk them home. Every Monday morning the journey would be repeated in the opposite direction. Not even Richard Cole, still scuffing around for heroin (and finding it with a dealer living literally across the road from the studio in Stockholm) could get anyone interested in a party. When the new workmanlike approach succeeded – as it did most spectacularly on the track that would open the album, the desolate yet weirdly majestic ‘In the Evening’ – it seemed possible the band might actually have found a way through the emotional and spiritual morass of the past few years, discovering a new realm in which their music might still find meaning. However, the weaknesses in the new approach – above all, Page’s apparent abdication of his role as band leader, his presence so subdued as to be positively ghostly – were all too plain on obvious filler tracks like Jones’ and Plant’s second-rate Elton John-style romp, ‘South Bound Suarez’, or the lightweight country hoedown parody cooked up by Page and Plant, ‘Hot Dog’. Even its other cornerstone track, ‘Carouselambra’, was a let-down, Jones’s parping synths ladled over everything like gravy disguising the lack of meat on the plate, swamping whatever drive and energy the original idea possessed until it became an inky vacuous dirge…

  You’d first met Grant back when you were touring with Tony Meehan and Jet Harris, and Peter was tour-managing Gene Vincent for Don Arden. Apart from the fact he was a big chap, there was nothing that struck you that was particularly special about him. It wasn’t until you started doing regular sessions for Mickie that you got to see the other side of his partner, sitting there at the Oxford Street office shouting the odds down the phone. There was Peter and Mickie and an accountant whose name no-one knew cos he was never introduced to people and Irene the receptionist, who was wonderful. Peter and Mickie liked to come on like the tough guys of the music biz but Irene ran both of them! Peter was managing the New Vaudeville Band and Mickie was doing so many things you couldn’t keep up with him.

  It was through Mickie you met Jimmy Page properly too. You were quite surprised when he actually rang you back about the New Yardbirds gig. But when you got to that first rehearsal at that pokey little room in Chinatown, you took one look at the other two he’d invited down and knew you’d never fit in with that lot. You just turned up and did what was required, quietly and efficiently, made sure you got paid then went home afterwards, alone…

  But you plugged in and started playing, like you always did, and…something happened. It was really quite odd. You’d never been into blues or rock or any of that stuff, though you did like Cream but that was different, they could actually play and had more in common with jazz, really, if you listened. But you plugged in as you always did and actually began to feel what was going on, feel it way down inside. It was the drummer. He was one of those who played loud – bloody loud! – but he didn’t just do it for effect. It wasn’t, wait till you hear this, it was wait till you hear us. You realised he was actually listening to what you did, that he was actually leaving space for you. On a basic level, you were both just doing a rhythm, but there was something about the way you phrased the bass line that led to something about the way he would play. Next thing you knew you were both just locked into it – together. It didn’t matter what the name of the song was or even whether either of you knew how it went. You just listened to the drummer listening to you and crikey it just exploded!

  And that was just that first rehearsal. You thought, blimey, if we can keep this up, we’ll be able to do it with our eyes closed. This bloke’s great! ‘My name’s John,’ you said, holding out your hand, during the break. He sat there on his drum stool, smoking a cigarette and sweating, looking you over. Then he took your hand and shook it. ‘Me, too,’ he said, and smiled, and you noticed he had an accent.

  The only one co-credited on all seven tracks was Plant, whose lyrics are the most consistently intriguing aspect of the entire album, clearly dealing as they do – unsettlingly explicitly on occasion – with the tragedies he has been through since the death of his son. ‘I hear you crying in the darkness,’ he sings-screams on ‘In the Evening’, ‘Don’t ask nobody’s help, ain’t no pockets full of mercy baby, cause you can only blame yourself…’ ‘Fool in the Rain’, one of the album’s better moments with its lilting piano riff, nice Spanish guitar, and unexpected excursion towards the end into full-blown samba – replete with whistles, kettle drums and handclaps – also contains unveiled references to tragedy and altered perspective. While ‘Carouselambra’, with its off-puttingly self-regarding shape, seems to specifically target Page in its plaintive cries of: ‘Where was your helping, where was your bow?’ Even the clearly dashed off ‘South Bound Suarez’ contains nagging references to having ‘feet back on the ground’.

  The most moving moment though – musically, lyrically, emotionally – was the second of the two songs Page had nothing to do with: Jones’ and Plant’s ‘All My Love’. Built around a swooning synth figure that – unlike other moments on the album – fits the mood of mourning and hoped for redemption all too well, Bonham’s sometimes too brutal drums are restrained and understated, as ceremonious as a guard of honour, Page’s layered acoustic and electric guitars equally tastefully applied, while Plant simply opens up his broken heart and cries, as if directing the entire piece to his beloved son. ‘Yours is the cloth, mine is the hand that sews time,’ he sings, the sob in his voice all too detectable, ‘his is the force that lies within. Ours is the fire, all the warmth we can find. He is a feather in the wind…’ Even the neoclassical synth solo in the middle – soon to be a cliché of the Eighties’ over-fondness for synths-as-orchestral-magma – doesn’t spoil the mood. Page would later disparage ‘All My Love’ as something ‘I could just imagine people doing the wave and all of that…I wouldn’t have wanted to pursue that direction in the future.’ But it was, with ‘In the Evening’, one of only two tracks of sufficient quality to have graced any of the earlier, much greater Zeppelin albums.

  The final track on the album, ‘I’m Gonna Crawl’, was of a similar ilk, though more of a musical pastiche, its echoing vocals and cartwheeling guitars redolent of Elvis at his most melodramatic, the echo of footsteps down an alley after the swelling river of keyboards that usher the song in. Page’s coruscating blues solo – excavated from some dark corner of his smacked-out soul – almost makes up for his lack of ideas elsewhere on the album, while Plant’s heart-rending lyrics are directed this time not to his lost son but to his wife, newly with child and the key, he seems to suggest, to their escape from a pain that can never truly leave, but can, perhaps, be better understood, with time. And love.

  Three other tracks were also recorded during the Stockholm sessions but left off the final running order of the album: two of which, ‘Ozone Baby’ and ‘Wearing And Tearing’, were cringe-making attempts to reinvigorate the classic Zep sound with the ripped-and-torn energy of the new wave which so despised them. The former, full of the ‘ain’t’s and ‘don’t wanna’s that were the lingua franca of early Brit-punk, finds Plant actually trying out some inept punk phrasing while the others do their best to keep it tight. The latter, which Page and Plant were both so pleased with they considered releasing it as a stand-alone single – once considered sacrilege; now the prerequisite of legitimate anti-album punk – was an overworked revamp of ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’, and again found the band bending over backwards trying to rein in their natural inclination to stretch out and groove while Plant croaks away, his voice sounding horribly shot. The third track, ‘Darlene’, was the best of a second-rate bunch, and harked back to an earlier, more easy-fit, pre-punk era, when rockers rolled unself-consciously and girls were actually called Darlene and really did dance with their ‘tight dress on’.

  Ultimately, In Through the Outdoor, as it was jokingly and unhappily prophetically titled, was an unsatisfying mishmash of half-baked ideas and barrel-scraping make-do. Instead of making some grand statement that would both see off the punks and underline the
band’s continued creative health, as it was clearly intended to, it did as Page had once said he hoped all Zeppelin albums would and showed precisely – in this case, painfully – where the four individuals members were at, at the time it was written and recorded: down in the dumps. Even its best material – ‘In the Evening’, ‘Fool in the Rain’, ‘All My Love’ – sounded wan and elegiac; the party over but nobody quite wanting to leave just yet. ‘I don’t think it was really a Led Zeppelin record,’ Plant told me in 2005. ‘It was the four of us but I don’t think it was as Led Zeppelin as it might have been, for a myriad of different reasons.’

  It was certainly Jimmy Page’s least impressive outing on a Zeppelin album, his playing to an expectedly high standard, but displaying remarkably few interesting new ideas, almost as if he were back to playing sessions – on his own album. There wasn’t even the until now almost obligatory blues rip-off. The nearest he came was the recycling of some of the themes from his precious soundtrack to Lucifer Rising for the eerie instrumental intro to ‘In the Evening’ (with Plant stealing its first line, he later confessed, from ‘Tomorrow’s Clown’ by Marty Wilde). As producer, Page was even less impressive, the sound on In Through the Outdoor being conspicuously atrocious in places; the appallingly bad vocal mix on ‘In the Evening’ being its most glaring offence, just when it most needed help too, Plant’s voice now showing the wear and tear of his years on the road, as well as the side-effects of so many drugs and cigarettes and – yes – tears.