When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  In fact, it’s said that Charlotte was nice to almost everybody that ventured near the house in those woebegone days, going so far as to invite fans inside sometimes, especially those who had travelled all the way from America, or even further afield. ‘There are stories of Charlotte inviting people in and ordering them Chinese takeaways,’ says Dave Lewis, ‘which may not always have been wise.’ He is referring to the fact that several high-quality Zeppelin bootlegs appeared in the early Eighties, many rumoured to have originated from Page’s own collection of live tapes, pilfered by ungrateful houseguests. Jimmy, meanwhile, would lounge around upstairs in his dressing gown, barely leaving the house for weeks at a time. He was convinced Zeppelin would have carried on ‘as normal’ had Bonham not died. ‘We were going to go to the States on tour and then we would have been revitalised,’ he told me. ‘Because that would have been the first really big tour we’d have had for quite a while. I’m sure that would have been enough stimulus to get us in the studio and probably doing…who knows what? Every album was so different from the previous one. That was one of the best things about the band: that it was always in a state of change.’

  None of which took into account the fact that Robert Plant was deeply conflicted over his continued role in the band and was already hankering for a life after Zeppelin; not just a solo career, which he would surely have pursued at some point with or without Bonzo, but to get away from the bad drugs, bad management and – yes – bad vibes. Peter Grant had also ‘just had enough’ as he later admitted. He told Dave Lewis: ‘By 1982 I just wasn’t up to it. Mentally and everything…’ Swan Song was already on the slide long before the final Zeppelin album. In order to preserve the myth and build the legend, the best thing that could have happened to them, arguably, was to split up exactly when they did. Certainly there appeared to be little room in the Eighties – a time when the Seventies had never seemed so far away – for a bloated old rock giant like Led Zeppelin.

  Instead, Jimmy Page’s rehabilitation was slow and painful, beginning with a half-hearted soundtrack album for director Michael Winner’s Death Wish II movie: a hodgepodge of recycled ideas – ‘In the Evening’ reborn as the title track; Chopin’s ‘Prelude No. 3 in G#’ re-jigged for the electric guitar as merely ‘Prelude’ and several ‘mood pieces’ made up of swooping drones that harked back to Lucifer Rising. Neither film nor soundtrack won many plaudits and it would be another two years before Page was heard from again, coming on to play an instrumental version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ at the 1982 ARMS charity concert at the Albert Hall, at the behest of his old mucker, Eric Clapton. Dave Dickson says it was during the making of a video for the charity that he met Page ‘and he couldn’t get a coherent sentence out of his mouth he was that far gone. You could see it in his face; his eyes were revolving in different directions. He was pale, so thin, like a walking skeleton. It was obvious he was still deeply into the heroin at the time.’

  There had been some low-profile dates ‘keeping my hand in’ playing in Roy Harper’s band, but it wasn’t until he teamed up with former Free and Bad Company vocalist Paul Rodgers – who he had reconnected with on the US leg of the ARMS tour the following year – that Page really began to discover a musical life for himself after Zeppelin, finally shrugging off the heroin habit that had dogged him for so many years, in order to make the trip to the US. (He reportedly told friends it had only taken four days to do so, in which case he must really have been using some strong magic. The likelihood is it took considerably longer but he was loath to admit it, always having denied, as he continues to even now, that heroin had a seriously detrimental effect on his life or his career. That said, it’s notable that Page has steered clear of the drugs ever since.)

  With Rodgers also ‘still recovering’ from the loss of his own superstar outfit, ‘Paul was one of the few people that could probably relate to what I was going through,’ said Jimmy. The result: The Firm, a four-piece (also featuring ex-Uriah Heep drummer Chris Slade and former Roy Harper bassist Tony Franklin) that critics complained was neither fish nor fowl, but that Page said ‘saved’ him. The Firm would allow him and Rodgers to simply ‘get out and play and just really enjoy ourselves’. However, both men refused to perform any material from their former bands, relying solely on the much blander, funk-tinged sound of the new outfit, although the closing track on their self-titled debut album in 1985, ‘Midnight Moonlight’, was a revamped unreleased Zeppelin number – another variation on the lost ‘Swan Song’ epic of the mid-Seventies – which Plant had reputedly refused to sing. A second Firm album, Mean Business, was issued in 1986, but neither release troubled the charts for long, despite the band becoming a huge concert attraction in the US. By which time, Page was now harbouring secret plans to put Zeppelin back together. If only Robert Plant would agree.

  Plant, however, had well and truly moved on by then, the thought of resurrecting the behemoth he had spent so long escaping from utterly abhorrent. The death of John Bonham appeared to have affected him more than Page or Jones, but the death of Zeppelin had freed him from the dark clouds he had operated under since 1975. Even so, it would be a while before he would be able to step out from the long shadow of the band’s legacy and begin to forge a musical identity of his own, his first tentative post-Zep steps an otherwise anonymous five-track mini-album of R&B covers called The Honeydrippers: Volume One, and featuring both Jeff Beck (on two tracks) and Jimmy Page (on one). A more decisive leap forward was the release in June 1982 of his first bona-fide solo album, Pictures at Eleven. The last recording to be issued on the Swan Song label, it was a transitional work, never straying far from the sound he was then best known for. In ex-Steve Gibbons Band guitarist Robbie Blunt, Plant had clearly found someone he felt comfortable writing with. Inevitably, though, the best tracks were the most Zep-like. Not least ‘Burning Down One Side’, featuring portentous drumming from Phil Collins in his misguided attempt to fill Bonzo’s almighty shoes; ‘Slow Dancer’, a rather too obvious attempt to create a worthy successor to ‘Kashmir’ and ‘Moonlight In Samosa’, which sounds like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ minus the successful ascent to the summit. Co-written, sung and produced by Plant at a time when Page was still hiding away reclusively, licking his wounds, it was the first encouraging glimpse fans would have of what the post-Zep future might look and sound like. As a result, it did much better in the charts than even Plant had dared hope; reaching no. 3 in America and no. 2 in Britain.

  Before the album was released, Robert took a tape of the basic tracks to the Old Mill House to play to Jimmy. ‘It was very emotional,’ he later said. ‘We just sat there and I sort of had my hand on his knee. We were just sitting through it together. He knew that I’d gone, that I was off on my own with the aid of other people and just forging ahead, and all I wanted was for him to do the same.’ Ultimately, he said, he was still only thirty-four and ‘I didn’t want to be written off as an old fart’. When, a year later, the second Plant solo album, The Principle of Moments, was released – preceded by the fanfare of a big hit single in the wonderfully evocative ballad Plant had written with Blunt and keyboardist Jezz Woodroffe, ‘Big Log’, with its Latin lilt and glossy synthesisers and voice that found a new, more snug fit beyond the howls and moans of Zeppelin – it was a dream come true for the singer, and the confirmation of a new nightmare for the guitarist who had set him on his path so long ago.

  John Paul Jones, being the ‘sensible one’, did what he always did and simply got on with things…quietly. Never any question of joining another group – as he put it, ‘Who could I have joined that was as good as Led Zeppelin?’ – he now became simple John Baldwin again, retreating to the Sussex farmhouse he had owned since 1977, spending time with his wife and daughters. When he did finally emerge from his shell, however, his various credits as musician, producer, arranger and songwriter began cropping up all over the place, as he began to collaborate in various guises with artists as diverse as R.E.M., Heart, Ben E. King, La Fura dels Baus, Brian Eno,
Karl Sabino, the Butthole Surfers…He also worked with Paul McCartney, who had invited him to help out on the soundtrack of his semi-autobiographical musical film Give My Regards To Broad Street. He also fulfilled his earlier ambition of working on film soundtracks, beginning with Michael Winner’s 1986 film Scream for Help, which also featured Jimmy Page on two tracks. He followed that two years later with the more conventional – and much more successful – production of Children, the third and best album from Sisters of Mercy offshoot Goth-outfit, The Mission, from which came the band’s biggest hit, ‘Tower of Strength’. ‘We couldn’t believe our luck, getting John as our producer,’ recalled Mission mainman Wayne Hussey. ‘We kept muttering under our breath, “Look out, Led Zeppelin guy! Led Zeppelin guy!”’ In 1990, he produced an album for his eldest daughter, the singer Jacinda Jones – a less successful but ‘even more wonderful’ collaboration.

  It didn’t really become clear how much he still missed Led Zeppelin until July 1985, when the three surviving members took to the stage at the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia for their part in the Live Aid concert. While their playing that day – augmented by the more than capable former Chic drummer Tony Thompson, but ruinously distorted by the unrehearsed arrival halfway through of Phil Collins – was unarguably sloppy, and the sight and sound of the crowd (which I was fortunate enough to observe from the side of the stage) reacting with uncontrolled hysteria was something none of us who were there will ever be able to forget. In over thirty years in the music business, I’ve never seen anything like it. Even the people working backstage stopped what they were doing and stood, mouths agape, watching the giants walk again. Jimmy was clearly revelling in it, Robert, too, though both men would feel obliged to play it all down afterwards. ‘We virtually ruined the whole thing because we sounded so awful,’ said Plant. ‘I was hoarse and couldn’t sing and Page was out of tune and couldn’t hear his guitar. But on the other hand it was a wondrous thing because it was a wing and a prayer gone wrong again – it was so much like a lot of Led Zeppelin gigs.’ Or as Jimmy told me: ‘My main memories, really, were of total panic.’ Initially, the idea had been for Page and Plant – both then touring America separately, the latter with his solo band, Page with The Firm – to play together as the Honeydrippers. ‘But it sort of snowballed,’ said Jimmy, ‘To where John Paul Jones arrived virtually the same day as the show and we had about an hour’s rehearsal before we did it. And that sounds a bit of a kamikaze stunt, really, when you think of how well rehearsed everybody else was. But it was, under the circumstances, certainly the right time to get together again, because of the reasons for having Live Aid…I mean, our spirit was there as much as everybody else’s was.’ (Tellingly, the current DVD of Live Aid doesn’t include Zeppelin’s perilous performance. Rumour has it they refused to allow the footage to be used because the performance was so bad.)

  John Paul Jones was also left with mixed feelings but for entirely different reasons. ‘I had to barge my way into Live Aid,’ he later told Classic Rock writer Dave Ling. Only finding out about Page and Plant’s intention of playing together the week before the show, by the time he had ‘barged’ his way into the reckoning, Paul Martinez, from Plant’s solo band, had been confirmed as bassist, forcing Jones to take the only available option left open to him and play the keyboards. It was an ignominious way to make one’s return to the big time and naturally Jonesy took it badly. ‘It was Plant again, you see,’ he told Ling. ‘Basically, I had to say to them, “If it’s Zeppelin and you’re gonna be doing Zeppelin songs, hi I’m still here and I wouldn’t mind being a part of it.” Plant went, [adopts Black Country accent] “Oh, bloody ’ell!” But I elbowed my way in.’ He added: ‘It’s all about Robert and what he wants.’

  In fact, Plant had been moved enough by the reaction at Live Aid to begin to consider the previously thought impossible. ‘The rush I got from that size of audience, I’d forgotten what it was like. I’d forgotten how much I missed it…I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t really drunk on the whole event. The fact that they were still chanting for us fifteen minutes later and the fact that there were people crying all over the place…odd stuff. It was something far more powerful than words can convey…’ So much so that when, ten days later, Page joined him on stage again, this time at one of his solo shows at the Meadowlands arena in New Jersey, jamming on the old blues classics ‘Mean Woman Blues’ and ‘Treat Her Right’, they agreed to ‘get back in touch and have a cup of tea’ when the tour was over – and this time bring Jonesy too.

  This led directly to what was very nearly a full-on Led Zeppelin reformation, the first of what would become several such occasions over the next twenty years. Rehearsing in Bath, away from prying eyes in London, with Tony Thompson taking Bonzo’s place, ‘The first day was all right,’ reckoned Jones. ‘I don’t know if Jimmy was quite into it, but it was good.’ However, over the course of the next two weeks, tiny cracks in the relationship between the three principal members began to fissure into caverns, Robert moaning about how long it took Jimmy – who had gotten off drugs but was now drinking heavily – to set up and generally concerned that things were slowly sliding out of his control again. Then Thompson was involved in a minor car accident, being driven back from the pub one night, and it was seen as an omen, certainly by Plant. ‘What I recall is Robert and I getting drunk in the hotel and Robert questioning what we were doing,’ Jones told Lewis. ‘He was saying nobody wants to hear that old stuff again and I said, “Everybody is waiting for it to happen.” It just fell apart from then – I suppose it came down to Robert wanting to pursue his solo career at the expense of anything else.’ Says Lewis now: ‘I think what happened was Robert said to himself, one moment I’ve got a successful solo career, the next it’s back to car crashes and bad karma, I don’t need this.’

  Watching from afar was the unhappy figure of Peter Grant. As the executor of John Bonham’s estate, there was a period immediately after the drummer’s death when G was involved in helping settle the family’s affairs. He also negotiated Plant’s five-album solo deal with Atlantic. But with both Page and Jones retreating from the spotlight, once Swan Song’s affairs had been wrapped up, Grant retired to Horselunges with just his children, Warren and Helen – who he had won custody of – for company and a couple of roadies now employed as domestic servants. Virtually his last act on behalf of Led Zeppelin and/or Swan Song was to oversee Page’s soundtrack album for Death Wish II – ‘another nightmare’ he called it – and the release of Plant’s debut solo album. Then he had ‘a bit of a falling out’ with the singer and that was that. Even Jimmy became a stranger to him.

  Still heavily involved with drugs, he stopped taking phone calls – even from the band – and refused invitations to go out. ‘Why did he take cocaine? Because he was totally depressed,’ said Dire Straits manager Ed Bicknell, who later became close to Grant. ‘He felt responsible for John Bonham’s death in the sense that he felt he should have been there and could have saved him. Swan Song had gone belly up because he couldn’t cope with it and his empire was gone.’ Every day he’d send a minion out to the local supermarket for a sack of sandwiches and several bowls of trifle: comfort food for the twenty-stone hermit. ‘You’d phone him and he’d be in the toilet,’ recalled his old partner, Mickie Most. ‘But he’d been in the toilet for three days! It just meant he didn’t want to speak to anybody.’ The only person left Grant would still take phone calls from was the only friend left from the old days who never rang him – Page. Friends say Jimmy never forgave G for putting Plant on the path to a solo career; the final nails in Zeppelin’s coffin, as he saw it. As former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, who at one point was poised to make a film about Grant’s life, later wrote: ‘Grant needed the camaraderie of hard, dangerous men who gave him a sense of power. The harder they were, the tougher he felt, and only then was his desire for control satisfied. It all fell apart when Grant aped the lifestyle of Jimmy Page, who then ostracised his biggest fan.’

  When
writer Howard Mylett visited Horselunges in 1989, he wrote that Grant was ‘living in a flat above the garage because the house was in a state of disrepair. The stairs were rotten and there was an air of neglect. He weighed eighteen stone, he had diabetes and he was living on water tablets.’ Eventually, like Plant and then Page, Grant did pull himself together, though it took a heart attack to finally make him do it, going into self-imposed withdrawal, locking himself away and drinking pure orange juice by the gallon. He took what was left of his cocaine – nearly three pounds of it, according to one friend – and flushed it down the toilet. His roadie assistants were aghast, complaining they could have got him ‘a refund’ if they’d known. When he emerged from his cold turkey four days later, he was a changed man. With his new sober eyes, he was astounded at the squalor he had allowed himself to fall into.

  By the time I got to know Peter, briefly, in the mid-Nineties, in discussions for writing his official biography, he had changed almost beyond recognition. He was older, of course, than one recalled from the movie clips and music press cuttings, but the main thing was the weight had gone. He looked like a somewhat severe but strictly aboveboard businessman – an antiques dealer perhaps – certainly not someone who had first-hand knowledge of rock’n’roll management at its very height. He had had heart problems but was still smoking like a trouper, although he liked to go for long walks along the seafront at Eastbourne. And he still knew how to make you laugh. By then he had sold Horselunges and bought himself a ‘bachelor’s apartment’ in Eastbourne, and begun rebuilding his collection of Tiffany lamps and William Morris glass – old passions abandoned once the coke took over in the Seventies. He was even invited to become a local magistrate at one point. He turned it down, claiming, he said with a grim smile, ‘It wouldn’t look very good on my CV.’ He also became friendly with an eccentric local aristocrat named Lord John Gould, who shared Grant’s passion for vintage American cars. Gould occasionally hired out one of his vehicles – allegedly once owned by Al Capone, including a compartment on the front passenger side door to fit a Thompson machine gun – for local weddings and on more than one occasion would act as chauffeur on the big day with G tagging along as his assistant. Little did the newlyweds know that the man opening the car door for them was once the most feared and powerful manager on planet rock.