When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Two months later, on 21 November 1995, G was travelling home in his car with son Warren by his side when he succumbed to another, more severe heart attack. He died later that same night. He was sixty. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were still on tour when they received the news. The funeral was held on a cold, dark morning in December at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Hellingly, the East Sussex village where G had once lived in his grand mansion. In his address, Alan Callan said: ‘His greatness was that he was a man of many parts. He was as adept at the ominous glance as he was at the disarming remark. He could engage you in the greatest conspiratorial friendship and you would know that through thick and thin he would fight with you all the way, unless of course he thought you might appreciate the humour of a sudden change of plan…Wherever Peter is going now, I hope they’ve got their act together.’

  At the funeral were a bevy of familiar names and faces from the past: Page, Plant and Jones plus the Bonham family, Jeff Beck, Paul Rodgers, Simon Kirke, Boz Burrell, Phil Carson, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, Phil May and Denny Laine. Others who couldn’t attend but were there in spirit included Ahmet Ertegun – in frail health – and Mickie Most, who wanted to attend but was told, mysteriously, that it was ‘family only’. As the mourners left the church, no Zeppelin song was played. Instead, Grant had asked for Vera Lynn singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’. ‘I just loved the guy for that,’ smiled Callan. The wake was at Worth Farm, Little Horsted, a small wooden-beamed barn where Grant had once housed his vintage cars, the buffet table in front of Lord John Gould’s famed ‘Al Capone’ car. It was an unhappy, brooding occasion, though, cold and silent. Jimmy Page was the first to leave, walking out and slamming the door loudly behind him. Only Jeff Beck seemed happy to chat, moving amongst the guests with a word and a smile for everybody.

  Of the official statements issued, Robert Plant’s said it best. Grant, he said, ‘rewrote the rulebook. He did so much for us that in 1975 he had to turn around and say, “Look, there’s nothing else I can do. We’ve had performing pigs and high wire acts. We’ve had mud sharks and all that – there’s no more I can do because you really now can go to Saturn.” I owe so much of my confidence to the way he calmed and nurtured and cajoled all of us to be what we were. He was larger than life. A giant who turned the game upside down. Fierce, uncompromising, with great humour.’ Page’s statement was briefer and to the point: ‘Peter was a tower of strength as a business partner and a friend. I will miss him and my heart goes out to his family.’

  There was a second Page/Plant album in 1997, the disappointing Walking into Clarksdale, but by now the writing was already on the wall. Inducted into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the previous year, the Zeppelin flag was flying higher than ever, and more ludicrously rich pickings were to be had from the second Page/Plant world tour. There was even now a whisper that John Paul Jones – who had put in such a convincing performance with his old band mates at the brief Hall of Fame show – might be brought in at some point. But Plant bailed out yet again before that possibility could be explored, walking out on the eve of an Australian tour at the start of 1999, claiming disingenuously, as he told me, ‘I didn’t know how many more English springs I would see.’ A furious Page turned instead to American blues-rockers The Black Crowes, who he successfully toured America with later that year with a set built solidly around the Zep catalogue. The resulting album, Live at the Greek, released initially via the internet, was not only a bigger hit than Walking into Clarksdale, it was simply a much more enjoyable album. ‘I jumped for joy when they told me how many it was selling,’ Page told me.

  The odd collaboration aside – very odd, in the case of the 1998 performance (‘I sent it down the phone line’) on Puff Daddy’s rap version of ‘Kashmir’ – Jimmy Page has mainly spent his post-Zeppelin career concentrating on keeping the flame alive, from producing the excellent Remasters box set to personally overseeing the ground-breaking twin-release in 2003 of the superlative six-hour DVD collection – his long-cherished dream of a chronological live history of the band writ-large, beginning at the Albert Hall in 1970 and ending with extracts from the 12-camera Mansfield shoot at Knebworth almost a decade later – and double-live CD, How The West Was Won (recorded in LA in 1972). Since then there have been at least two more occasions when Page and Plant have set aside their differences long enough to discuss the possibility of performing together again as Led Zeppelin. The first time was in preparation for the release of both DVD – which quickly became the biggest-selling music DVD in history – and How The West Was Won, which entered the US charts at no. 1 in 2003; a plan to undertake a brief but intensely lucrative US summer tour was scuppered, say sources, when Plant became more interested in the coincidental release that year of his Sixty Six to Timbuktu solo compilation. The second time was in 2005, when a brace of shows at Madison Square Garden was mooted to mark the 25th anniversary of Bonzo’s death. The plan was scrapped when Plant couldn’t decide whether it would be a good thing to do or not.

  John Paul Jones, meanwhile, continued to be the odd man out. In 1994, he recorded and received co-billing on the excellent Diamanda Galaés album, The Sporting Life, where his multi-instrumental embellishments on tracks like ‘Devil’s Rodeo’ added depth to the poet-diva’s songs of lust and decay, later also joining her for a spectacularly well-received world tour. Playing with the feisty songstress was ‘the most fun I’d had since Zeppelin’. He recalled how when, at a concert in Chicago, somebody shouted out ‘The song remains the same!’, she had shouted back, ‘No, it doesn’t, motherfucker!’ He also set up his own recording studio, which he dubbed the Sunday School, and where he recorded his first solo album, Zooma, released in 1999. An instrumental tour-de-force, on tracks like ‘Tidal’ and the thunderous title track itself, Jones created tumultuous pieces full of avalanching rhythms and eerie, sonic soundscapes, using a battery of four-, ten- and twelve-string basses. Other tracks, like ‘Bass ‘N’ Drums’ (inspired by his daughter Jacinda introducing him to drum’n’bass, the UK club sound of the mid-Nineties), showed both his sense of humour and his willingness to explore new musical terrains, while ‘The Smile of Your Shadow’ demonstrated he had not lost his ability for conjuring up suitably dry-iced atmospherics, either.

  Two years later he was back with the follow-up, the equally adventurous but more accessible The Thunderthief, on which he played practically everything except the drums. It also, somewhat remarkably, included his debut as a solo vocalist on the witty, punk-derived ‘Angry Angry’ and the more traditional-sounding folk ditty, ‘Freedom Song’. Mostly though, it was the driving rhythms of tracks like ‘Down the River to Pray’ that impressed. Emboldened, he put together his own touring band and gave concerts based on his solo work at home and in America and Japan. No Zeppelin songs, though, ‘except one or two occasionally, for a laugh’. In 2004, he also toured as part of the group Mutual Admiration Society, along with Glen Phillips (previously best known as singer of Toad the Wet Sprocket) and various members of the band Nickel Creek.

  In more recent times, he seemed to have gone back to his habit of simply turning up on other people’s albums, such as the Foo Fighters’ In Your Honor, where he played on two tracks (mandolin on ‘Another Round’ and piano on ‘Miracle’). Foos frontman Dave Grohl later described working with Jones as the ‘second greatest thing to happen to me in my life’. He also made a belated return to production: on latter-day recordings like The Datsuns’ ‘old-school heavy rock’ album Outta Sight, Outta Mind in 2004 and, a year later, on Uncle Earl’s critically acclaimed, neo-country collection, She Waits For Night. He has also completed more soundtrack work, including the theme tune to The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb. Would he still consider strapping on his old fender bass, dusting down his mellotron and striding the boards under the Led Zeppelin banner, though? Of course he would. As he told me in 2003, as I compiled the sleeve notes for DVD, ‘There’s definitely the feeling of unfinished business about the band. Even though it’s unimaginable, in one sense, t
o try it without Bonzo, we had hoped to do to the Eighties what we did to the Seventies. I still very much regret that we never got that chance.’ What he hadn’t told me and which only came out later was that Plant had also recently apologised to him – literally gone down on his knees, according to Dave Lewis – not just for excluding him from the Page/Plant collaboration, but for all the snide comments made at the time, too, along the lines of the ‘he’s just parking the car’ comment at the first press conference when someone asked where Jonesy was.

  And yet with neither Plant nor Jones choosing to join Page on the rostrum at the televised induction into the UK Hall of Fame in 2006, it seemed that the only person left in Led Zeppelin who would still countenance some form of reunion, however temporary or turbulent, was the band’s original creator. Or so it seemed, anyway, right up to the announcement barely six months later that Led Zeppelin was to reform – with Jason Bonham taking his father’s place on drums again – officially to commemorate the life of Ahmet Ertegun, who had died the previous winter, aged eighty-three, after a fall backstage at a Rolling Stones show in New York; unofficially as part of Jimmy Page’s never-ending quest to get the band back together again.

  Whatever the reasons, it could hardly have been a coincidence that the performance, originally scheduled for London’s O2 arena in November 2007, would be accompanied by the release of a new Zeppelin compilation CD, Mothership – an unsatisfactorily unbalanced collection of the ‘hits’ with just one acoustic number, ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ – and, more interestingly, a DVD version, along with all the usual ‘extras’: deleted scenes, up-to-date interviews etc of their once-maligned, now regarded as historic ‘home movie’, The Song Remains The Same, along with a remixed, digitised version of the live album, with its own extras in the form of a handful of ‘bonus’ tracks.

  One of the last times I spoke to Jimmy about getting Led Zeppelin back together he told me: ‘There might have been a couple of occasions where we could have got it back together. I thought we had at least one good album left in us, put it like that. But I just presented scenario after scenario to him and…Robert wasn’t interested. He just didn’t want to know. He said he doesn’t want to sing Led Zeppelin numbers. But I love playing Led Zeppelin music. For me, they were one of the best bands ever and they made some of the best music ever and we should be out there playing it. But I don’t see that it’s ever going to happen again. Not now…’

  No-one should have been surprised when they did finally announce their comeback. At a time when everyone from The Police to Genesis, Pink Floyd and The Who have been reaping the rewards of their ‘classic’ status, from sold-out shows where ticket prices averaged out at £150 a throw, to a rejuvenated back catalogue selling better than ever – Mothership alone would sell more than 600,000 copies in the UK over the Christmas 2007 period – even Robert Plant could now see the benefit of a reunion, especially one so – apparently – brief. With the band committed to performing a full two-hour show for the first – and last, they insisted – time in twenty-eight years, it would, Plant said, be Zeppelin’s chance to ‘say farewell properly’. The implication: that, after the embarrassments of Live Aid and the Atlantic show, a proper send-off was only right, surely? And with a significant chunk – no-one spelled out exactly how much – of the ‘net’ proceeds going to Ertegun’s charity – the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund, which funds university scholarships in Britain, America and Turkey – the public lapped it up. Meanwhile the press was filled with stories of the official website selling tickets for the show – at £135 a pop – being brought down due to the huge demand, up to 25 million hits within the first twenty-four hours of going online, if the stories were to be believed. As part of the build-up, BBC Radio 2 held an auction for two tickets plus the chance to watch the soundcheck and meet the band, all proceeds going to Children In Need. Listener Kenneth Donell from Glasgow won with a bid of £83,000. Online reseller websites like Seatwave and Viagogo also had a field day selling single tickets for an average of £7,425. What was less known to the public was that corporate ticketing was also being conducted on a more discreet basis, with private twenty-eight-seat boxes plus full food-and-drink hospitality package available for the right price. At least a couple of thousand tickets were also held back purely for the band’s ‘friends and family’ – and as many famous faces as they could fit in. The majority of people applying for tickets may well have bought them via the website, the money raised from these sales going to charity, but this was not an opportunity to be missed, either, in terms of reinforcing the Zeppelin legend.

  Planning was meticulous, with all the remixing of the new DVD and CD of The Song Remains The Same and track sequencing and artwork for Mothership completed by May. Unlike the DVD and How The West Was Won package of 2003, where Page was in charge of every aspect of production, this time Plant took the helm. Kevin Shirley, the talented young South African producer who had worked with Jimmy on DVD and How The West Was Won and now found himself working with Robert on the re-jigged The Song Remains The Same, recalls how ‘Jimmy wasn’t that bothered this time around it seemed but Robert was really insistent on being there with me. When we came to that bit on “Stairway to Heaven” when he ad-libs, “Does anyone remember laughter?” he winced and asked if we could delete it. I said, “No, you can’t erase that, it’s what people remember, part of history!” So he very reluctantly allowed me to keep it in. There were a couple of other smaller ad-libs that I did take out for him here and there – a few of the baby, baby, babys – just to keep him happy.’

  Once the job was done, a month was set aside for rehearsals. Meanwhile, all three surviving members were spotted at the O2 checking out shows that summer by Snow Patrol and Elton John. Behind the scenes, however, things were as fraught as ever. All three members had an equal say in the running order of the show, but as always some members were more equal than others. Ultimately, it all came down to what Robert wanted. He laid down several conditions. Specifically, that the music wasn’t ‘too heavy metal’. That meant no ‘Immigrant Song’, which Page and Jones could live with, and no ‘Achilles Last Stand’, which the others were put out by, particularly Jimmy, as he still considered it one of his finest moments. As for ‘Stairway to Heaven’ – the others held their breath – he would be prepared to sing that, he said, but not as any sort of finale. Instead, it would be performed in the middle of the set and with no great fanfare. Jimmy and John Paul had no choice but to agree. On a general level, the other condition Plant laid down was that there be no extended jams, as of days of old. Never mind Jimmy’s talk of ‘telepathy’, improvisation was no longer in vogue; the numbers would be as close as the band could get them to how they sounded on album. Again, neither Page nor Jones were happy with that but there was little they could do about it. It was take it or leave it and both Jimmy and John Paul wanted this too badly not to take it.

  Though the significance of its appearance could not yet be fully understood, there would also be one other, as it turned out even more important, release coinciding with the O2 date: that of a new Plant album, this time a collaboration with renowned American bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. A precocious young talent from Illinois who had signed her first record deal at thirteen, Krauss had spent the past two decades building up a sizeable reputation as the most recognised face in contemporary bluegrass and modern country music, winner of several awards and a seasoned collaborator. She had first performed with Plant at a concert celebrating the music of Leadbelly the year before. Thirty-five when she met him and therefore too young to have experienced Zeppelin first-hand, Alison had been a Def Leppard fan in her teens. Plant, for his part, had spent years as a solo artist bringing elements of world and roots music into his sound. When it was suggested he might like to collaborate with Krauss on some recordings, see how it went, he jumped at the chance. The fact that this coincided with the unexpected resurrection of the Zeppelin monolith was incidental – to begin with anyway.

  The results of their col
laboration, overseen by veteran musician, songwriter and producer T. Bone Burnett (best known for his soundtrack to Oscar-nominated movies O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Walk The Line, and production of albums by Tony Bennett and k.d. lang), turned into the album Raising Sand – an inspired collection of esoteric covers chosen by Burnett, combining a luxurious-sounding mix of modal blues, country soul, rockabilly and old-fashioned balladry. Even so, nobody was quite prepared for the glorious reception it received when it was released in October, just a month before Zeppelin’s O2 date. Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times (who later made it album of the year), the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, Mojo, People, USA Today…everybody fell over themselves to praise the album with the sort of career-defining reviews neither artist had ever experienced before. As a result, it entered the US album chart at no. 2. A week later it was no. 1. A month after that it was certified gold, then platinum. Sales in Britain were slower to kick in but once the ball was rolling, Raising Sand replicated its US success and, at time of writing, has now sold more than half a million copies in the UK – almost double-platinum. Robert Plant couldn’t believe his luck. ‘When we got seventy-five per cent of the way down the line,’ he commented, ‘I realised we’d created something that I could never have dreamt of.’ Krauss was equally blown away. ‘There’s so much romance in contrast,’ she said. ‘It was a real life-changing experience.’