When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  ‘It was a transitional period,’ argued Jones, not unjustly. ‘It was a chance to see what else we could do. The next album would have been even more interesting had we followed that direction.’ Speaking about the album at the time, Page was typically more gung-ho. ‘It’s not like we’ve felt we had to change the music to relate to any of the developments that have been going on,’ he said, conveniently ignoring the laboured attempts at updating the sound on ‘Ozone Baby’ and ‘Wearing and Tearing’. ‘There’s no tracks with disco beats or anything…’

  With mixes for the album completed back in Stockholm after the Christmas break, the only thing holding back the release of In Through the Outdoor was general agreement on how best to promote it. With Plant still antsy about the thought of embarking on any long tours – refusing point-blank to even contemplate returning to America – Grant bided his time before making any definite plans. Logistically, there was still a lot to do first anyway; decisions still needed to be made regarding the sleeve – with Hipgnosis brought in again to suggest ideas – and whether or not to release a single. Plant was strongly in favour of releasing ‘Wearing and Tearing’ with either ‘Ozone Baby’ or ‘Darlene’ as a possible B-side, while Page thought it a better idea to simply release all three tracks as an EP – another retro concept back in favour with the New Wave crowd. In the event neither suggestion would be pursued as attention turned instead to the idea of the band making their second ‘comeback’ in two years with a brace of enormous outdoor shows in England – at Knebworth Park – an idea suggested by the man who had promoted the two Bath Festival appearances and who had helped launch the band in Britain a decade before: Freddy Bannister.

  Bannister had begun the by now annual Knebworth Festival in 1974, which Grant had originally agreed to Zeppelin headlining that year before a leaked news item in the music press led to a row with Bannister, who he wrongly blamed for deliberately leaking the story, and the immediate withdrawal from the project of the band. Bannister had been trying unsuccessfully every year since to lure Zeppelin back. ‘But the timing was never right,’ he says. ‘So we’d always end up going with someone else.’ Over the years, ‘someone else’ had included Pink Floyd, Genesis and the Rolling Stones. His original plan for ’79 had been The Eagles, then at the height of their popularity. He had also been considering the possibility of another appearance by Pink Floyd. ‘But then all these stories started appearing in the music press about Zeppelin releasing a new album, their first for three years, and I thought: why not? Let’s give it another go…’

  In an attempt to grab Grant’s attention, Bannister wrote to him suggesting Zeppelin do two consecutive Saturday shows – on 4 and 11 August – something that had never been done at Knebworth before, reinforcing the idea that Zeppelin was the biggest band in the world. He also decided to double all his previous financial offers. Grant phoned him a couple of days later. With G still at a loss as to how best to promote the new Zeppelin album without being able to send the band on tour, Freddy’s offer was well timed for once and the two agreed to meet at Horselunges later that same week. Bannister recalls being taken aback at the security cameras and floodlights that had been installed since his last visit a few years before. Grant liked the idea of two weekends but thought the promoter’s offer still too low. G wanted £1 million, he said. Freddy demurred but eventually agreed that a higher than normal ticket price of £7.50 (two pounds more than had been charged for Genesis the year before) might make it ‘manageable’ – assuming, of course, that both shows were a sell-out. With Bannister estimating the 36.4 acre Knebworth site capable of holding approximately 4,000 per acre – or roughly 290,000 people in total over two weekends (an overgenerous estimate, as it turned out) – Zeppelin’s huge fee, plus VAT, equipment hire, fees for two full support bills, plus agent commissions, site rental to David Lytton Cobbold, whose family owned Knebworth Palace, plus the salaries of the numerous site staff that would be required both weekends and various other sundries (advertising, catering, transport, hotels, etc) – there would still be enough left over ‘to make my own cut at the end of it reasonably attractive’.

  What had not been taken fully into consideration was that no Knebworth bill had ever attracted more than the approximately 100,000 paying customers that had attended the Stones show in 1976. The chances of Led Zeppelin beating that figure appeared good when one considered it would be their first British appearance since the Earl’s Court shows four years before and their first anywhere in the world since the debacle of Oakland in 1977. Whether they would be able to do so over consecutive weekends remained to be seen. Eager as he was to commit Grant to the shows, Bannister was savvy enough to get him to agree to the outlandish fee ‘strictly on the understanding’ that they would only go ahead with the second show if the first was a guaranteed 145,000 sell-out. Hence the decision, later regretted, to initially advertise only one show. As was normal with Grant, the deal was sealed on a handshake. Something else Bannister would later bitterly regret.

  On the surface, at least, 1979 had begun more positively for the members of Led Zeppelin than any year since 1975. In January, Maureen Plant gave birth to another son, named Logan Romero, and with the announcement of a new album in the can and two mammoth comeback shows looming on the horizon, despite a predictably sceptical reception from the punk-obsessed UK music press (‘The manner in which old superfart Led Zeppelin have consistently presented themselves has made the band’s name synonymous with gratuitous excess,’ blared the NME), Page was back in London giving interviews for the first time in four years. Drinking beer and chain-smoking Marlboros, he sat in the Swan Song offices and boasted of receiving letters from New Wave fans who ‘got interested in the actual musical content and wanted to go one step further, which is how they discovered bands like us’ and how the new album had moved the band on musically ‘sufficiently to be able to see the next horizon’ but that Knebworth would be ‘far more important’ because ‘the LP’s a frozen statement which can be always referred to, but Knebworth’s going to be different’. There would be further concerts to come after Knebworth, he was quick to assure everyone, though ‘not necessarily in England’. Instead, in an echo of the now-abandoned plans of 1975 to tour ‘new stops on the map’, they were now considering ‘playing Ibiza…just so we’ve got a chance of trying out new ideas and new riffs and arrangements and songs’.

  In an attempt to underline his own right-on credentials and deflect attention away from the long period of drug-induced indolence that had followed the disastrous end to the 1977 tour, Page also went to some length to discuss his involvement with community politics in Scotland, where he had lent support to the utilisation of raw materials to build a harbour wall as part of a local job recreation scheme, attending the unveiling ceremony. He admitted, however, to voting Tory in the 1979 general election that would bring Margaret Thatcher to power – a veritable act of treason in the politicised punk world of the late Seventies – though he insisted it was ‘not just for lighter taxes – I just couldn’t vote Labour. They actually stated that they wanted to nationalise the media – so what possible criticism of them would you be able to have?’ The fact that the Tory Party then held effective control of the British print media anyway seemed lost on him. But then, as he also revealed, as a young multi-millionaire entrepreneur he had voted Conservative at the previous election too.

  Meanwhile, plans for the Knebworth shows in August were not proceeding nearly as smoothly as either Peter Grant or Freddy Bannister had envisaged. Despite the first Knebworth show being announced by Bob Harris on The Old Grey Whistle Test (then the most respected album-oriented weekly music programme on British TV), followed a week later by blanket coverage in the music press, initial demand for tickets was so much lower than Bannister had anticipated it now looked unlikely that a second show would be feasible after all. There was also a tortuous twenty-six hour negotiation with Grant and Showco chief Jack Calmes regarding the budgeting for sound, lights and other necessities – suc
h as the lasers Jimmy wanted, which would need to be flown in from the US – with Grant ‘keeping himself going with long lines of cocaine plus the occasional Mogadon to maintain the balance,’ Bannister recalls.

  The promoter also experienced unexpected problems booking support acts. ‘No-one, it seemed, wanted to play with Led Zeppelin. It was at this point, rather belatedly, that I began to realise just what a reputation the band enjoyed for their egotistical behaviour.’ Turned down by J.J. Gale, Little Feat, Roxy Music and Ian Dury and the Blockheads, in the end Bannister settled for, in ascending order, Chas and Dave, the New Commander Cody Band, South Side Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, and Todd Rundgren’s Utopia. Hardly the most scintillating bill, even by Seventies standards, but it was the best Bannister could do. (Grant had suggested Fairport Convention, who agreed but could only do the first show.)

  The band was kept in blissful ignorance about the unexpected difficulty in selling tickets. Indeed, Page still believes now that Knebworth was a great success; proof that the band was bigger than ever. ‘Everyone said, “Oh, they’re bigger in the States than they are in England”, and all of that,’ he told me in 1999, adding that he never doubted for an instant they would sell out both shows. ‘Actually, I was always confident. Everyone else said that we didn’t have the following [anymore], but I knew we did, there was no doubt about that.’

  In fact, there was now considerable doubt. By the first week of July, just over 115,000 tickets had been sold for the first show; far short of the 150,000 Bannister had viewed as the bare minimum needed to trigger the announcement of a second show. But Grant was adamant; he had told the band they would be doing two shows; he was not prepared to tell them that would no longer be the case as they could not sell enough tickets to do so. It was a matter of face – about all Grant had left at this precarious stage of the game. As a result, Page still maintains, as he told me, that ‘there was more there than what there were officially [declared]’ and that, as a consequence, ‘we were partially paid…Peter Grant told me and the rest of the band that Freddy Bannister reneged on it.’

  In fact, in a last-gasp attempt to stimulate more interest, Bannister announced that the first show was now sold out but that a second show had been scheduled for the following weekend to deal with the ‘extra demand’. To try and kick-start sales for the second show, he took 15,000 ticket applications for the first show – leaving just 100,000 paid for tickets for the first show – and sent them tickets for the second show along with a letter guaranteeing refunds if they could not attend. Unfortunately, a large swathe of disappointed fans did demand a refund. ‘What we hadn’t allowed for was that so many people had already booked their holidays,’ he says now. Fearing the worst, Freddy plucked up the courage and phoned G with the news that they would have to cancel the second show. But G wasn’t having it. Promising to ‘see you all right’ he persuaded Bannister to go ahead with the second show – which the promoter took to mean a renegotiation of their fee. Grant also promised to line up his own ‘big attraction’ to help generate ticket sales for the second show, which turned out to be the New Barbarians, the part-time band fronted by Ronnie Wood and featuring Keith Richards.

  A few weeks before the first show, Richard Cole phoned Bannister to say the band wanted to inspect the site. Specifically, Page wanted to view the memorabilia of Bulmer Lytton, the novelist, also known for his interest in the occult, and one of Knebworth owner David Lytton Cobbold’s forebears. During the visit, they had their photograph taken for the festival programme by Storm Thorgerson. ‘Next to him, posturing for all she was worth, was a naked young woman obviously placed there by Storm to make the band less conscious of the camera,’ recalled Bannister in his memoir, There Must Be a Better Way. ‘Rumour has it that amongst the many photos taken that day is an interesting one of Jimmy Page minus his trousers, but regrettably I have never been able to confirm this.’ The photos were later touched up because the sky was cloudy, superimposing a sunny blue Texan sky.

  The plan had been to release In Through the Outdoor prior to the Knebworth shows. But delays over the cover – yet again – forced the release date back to 15 August, four days after the second show. Designed again by Hipgnosis, the album would come in no less than six different sleeves: all variations on the same New Orleans bar scene, featuring a boater-hat, suit-and-tie wearing man looking wasted at a seedy bar, being served drinks by a tattooed, vest-wearing bartender. In the background an older black man sat at a piano, a middle-aged black woman laughing and holding a drink and, over by the slatted window, a younger mulatto tart-with-a-heart in figure-hugging dress, a look of utmost indifference on her face. Each sleeve was sepia-tinted with a slash of colour daubed across it like a brush stroke – ‘like you were looking inside the bar through its dusty window and the smear was where you’d wiped the pane with your sleeve to peer through,’ explained Storm Thorgerson. The inside paper bag holding the vinyl contained two black-and-white line drawings – before and after scenes – of a shot glass, an ashtray, a cigarette and a lighter, which changed colour when water was added to them, an idea Jimmy had gotten from one of his daughter Scarlet’s colouring books (though thankfully not one present on the modern CD version). Perversely, the finishing touch was to put each sleeve in a plain brown paper bag, the band name and album title added like a postal stamp. Conceived, ostensibly, as a way of preventing the buyer from knowing which of the six sleeves they were purchasing, it was also an in-joke on Thorgerson’s part, who was ‘fed up,’ he said, ‘with the band and the label telling us that it didn’t matter what we put on the cover because a Led Zeppelin album would sell anyway. Peter Grant said we could put it in a brown paper bag and it would sell anyway. So we did and he was right!’

  Indeed, In Through the Outdoor sold over a million copies in the US within forty-eight hours of going on sale, going straight to no. 1 in Britain and America. Over the next few months it would sell more than five million copies in the US, where senior industry figures were now quoted as saying it had ‘almost single-handedly saved the American music industry’, which was then experiencing a serious drought in record sales after the deluge of much more niche-oriented New Wave signings made by all the major record labels in the preceding eighteen months. In the words of writer Stephen Davis, in America at least, punk and the New Wave was ‘for losers and nerds’, while Zeppelin still represented, as fellow American scribe David Owen put it, ‘a vague continuum of big money, fast cars and prestige’.

  Back in Britain, reviews of In Through the Outdoor were as eloquent but much more damning. Even Sounds, along with the Melody Maker the only music paper left still regularly giving positive coverage to hard rock and heavy metal, now brought the hammer down on Zeppelin. Under the heading, ‘Close The Door, Put Out The Lights’, resident rock expert Geoff Barton’s damning two-star review of the album concluded, somewhat sadly, if prophetically: ‘I’m not proud to say it, but the dinosaur is extinct.’ Grant, predictably, was furious. Having already banned Sounds from having their own tent at Knebworth, he now ordered the record company to pull all its advertising from the magazine’s pages. But as then Sounds editor, Alan Lewis, now recalls: ‘That generation of bands were now so out of favour, it didn’t really mean much to us anymore. These days you’d crawl over broken glass for a Jimmy Page interview, but they were past their peak in ’79. By then we had bands like AC/DC and Blondie setting the pace, in terms of what we put on the cover. We certainly wouldn’t have lost any sleep over Zeppelin.’

  The Knebworth shows themselves were strange, forcedly triumphal, occasionally brilliant, more often ramshackle occasions, ultimately eventful for none of the reasons the band had hoped they would be – and the cause of enormous hype both then and even more so in the decades that have followed. Fondly recalled now as two of the most successful, best-attended festival shows of the Seventies, with wildly inaccurate estimates of how many people attended; in reality, while the first show attracted a decent, if unspectacular by previous Knebworth standards, t
urnout of approximately 104,000, the second show was an unmitigated disaster, with barely 40,000 people in attendance on a day full of heavy rain and even heavier vibes.

  Following two small warm-up shows in Copenhagen, the band had helicoptered into the first show so rattled by nerves that they could barely speak to each other, let alone any of the other acts appearing that day, or even their own backstage guests. With only two new numbers added – ‘In the Evening’ and ‘Hot Dog’ – to the set they had been trawling around America two years before, it wasn’t the performance in itself that made them nervous, it was the heavy gravity of history they now felt dragging them down and slowing their steps. Not only was the crowd hyped up beyond reason at the prospect of seeing the first Zeppelin show on British soil for four years but so was everyone behind the scenes too. Seated in a special area at the side of the stage for all Grant and the band’s guests was Ahmet Ertegun. Truly, it felt like their future was in the balance. Robert Plant, for one, no longer felt sure the band was strong enough to tip that balance their way. ‘I didn’t believe there was anything I could do that was really good enough to fulfil people’s expectations,’ he said afterwards. ‘It took half the first show to get over the fact that I was there, and over everything that was going on. My voice was all clammed up with nerves.’

  The day had begun badly for Freddy Bannister when a ‘rather embarrassed-looking’ Richard Cole had walked into the production office that morning and ‘insisted’ he sign a waiver for the film rights to the event. Still smarting over the critical backlash to The Song Remains The Same three years before, and painfully aware that if Plant carried through his threat never to tour America again a promotional Plan B might need to be activated at some point, Grant had hired director Mike Mansfield – whose weekly Supersonic pop show had become commercial TV’s answer to the BBC’s long-running Top of the Pops – to film Knebworth for a new feature-length film the band planned to make. As such, Bannister had agreed to allow more than a dozen cameras and crew to position themselves strategically around the site. As Knebworth promoter, Bannister might have expected some sort of royalty or fee from any resulting commercially available film. However, he was not, in principle, against waiving his rights – for an appropriate ‘consideration’. When Cole told him he would be doing so for the princely sum of ‘one shilling’ (five pence) Bannister was outraged, not just at the insultingly derisory offer but the offensive manner in which it was made. ‘Get lost!’ he told Cole. ‘No fucking way!’ But Cole insisted, pointing out that the offer came from Grant and that ‘with the mood Peter’s in these days you really don’t need the aggravation’. Bannister duly signed, in the knowledge, he says now, that ‘Grant’s meanness’ would also be his undoing. ‘If he had given me £250, the agreement would have been quite legal. However, the only way someone signs their rights away for five pence is under duress, as I was, and this, I was told sometime afterwards, totally invalidates the contract.’