With the album completed, the group played their first UK dates, still billed as the Yardbirds. The name, however, was on its last legs. “We realized we were working under false pretences,” Page admitted. “The thing had quickly gone beyond where the Yardbirds had left off. We all agreed that there was no point in retaining the Yardbirds tag, so … we decided to change the name. It was a fresh beginning for us all.”
Playing its last date with the old name at Liverpool University on Saturday, October 19, the band a week later finally became Led Zeppelin, a moniker inspired by a throwaway line of Keith Moon’s. “Moon had made a joke about going down like a lead Zeppelin,” Peter Grant recalled. “In the circumstances, the name seemed perfect. I got rid of the A. I was doodling in the office and it just looked better, and I also didn’t want any confusion over the pronunciation in America.”
The first Led Zeppelin gig took place at Bristol’s Boxing Club on Saturday, October 26, 1968. It was hardly an auspicious start. “It was a tryout for their big hype launch,” remembered Russell Hunter of support act, the Deviants. “The audience hated us and despised them. When [they] came on, they got through a number and a half until the fire extinguishers, buckets, bricks, and everything was being thrown at them.”
Things were very different when Zeppelin played London’s Marquee on December 10. “I went out early afternoon from our office on Oxford Street to Wardour Street,” Peter Grant remembered. “And I thought, ‘Fuck me, what’s this queue?’ There were about 200 already lined up. That’s when I knew that we just wouldn’t need the media. It was going to be about the fans.”
But Grant’s real goal was North America, where big bucks were to be made. “Peter had his eyes set on something I couldn’t even imagine,” said Robert Plant.
In November, Grant flew to New York to discuss a deal with Atlantic Records. Jerry Wexler, the company’s vice president, secretly despised loud guitar rock but wanted to match his partner Ahmet Ertegun’s earlier signing of Cream, who wrapped their farewell tour in Rhode Island on November 2. Aware of Jimmy Page from Bert Berns’s mid-’60s Atlantic sessions in London, Wexler had been further encouraged by the endorsement of his latest UK signing, Dusty Springfield (for whom John Paul Jones had arranged a session in late August, after he’d already agreed to join Page’s band).
Columbia’s Clive Davis and Reprise’s Mo Ostin were also in the race to sign Led Zeppelin, but Wexler, in his own words, “prevailed by offering a 5-year contract with a £75,000 [or appoximately $143,000 US] advance for the first year and four 1-year options.” In the end, Atlantic stumped up £110,000 [or approximately $210,000 US]. “I was proud of the signing,” Wexler wrote in his autobiography, “but as it turned out, I didn’t really hang out with the group. Ahmet [Ertegun] got along famously with them (and Peter Grant).”
For 1968, the Zeppelin deal was unheard-of, testament to Atlantic’s confidence in both Page and Grant and in what they heard on the Olympic tapes. “In one of the biggest deals of the year,” Bob Rolontz wrote in the company’s press release, “Atlantic Records has signed the hot new English group, Led Zeppelin, to a long-term, exclusive recording contract. Although the exact terms of the deal are secret, it can be disclosed that it is one of the most substantial deals Atlantic has ever made.”
From the band’s point of view, to be the first white rock group on such a legendary label—sometime home to Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin—was a major honor. “As far as I know, we were the first white band on Atlantic, because all the earlier white bands had been on Atco,” says Page. “At the time, we said we’d really like to be on Atlantic as opposed to Atco, because it was the first true independent label that had really sailed through and done it well.”
The deal done, it was time for Led Zeppelin to take their music across the ocean. America was calling.
2
REALLY GOT TO RAMBLE
PETER GRANT’S instincts about America were quickly proved right. Led Zeppelin seemed to be made for a country where young white males, in particular, craved louder, heavier sounds. “I can’t really comment on just why we broke so big in the States,” Jimmy Page told NME’s Nick Kent. “I can only think that we were aware of dynamics at a time when everyone was into that drawn-out West Coast style of playing.”
For Robert Plant and John Bonham, arriving in Los Angeles just before Christmas, America was a mind-skewering culture shock. Chauffered to the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard by tour manager Richard Cole, Zeppelin was quickly plunged into the fun and frolics of the LA rock scene. A gallery of freaks and groupies from the stable of Frank Zappa’s Straight and Bizarre labels was ensconced at the Marmont and swiftly took the English quartet to their collective bosom.
“We ended up in the suite Burl Ives had just vacated,” Plant recalled of the hotel. “Down the corridor were the GTOs [Girls Together Outrageously], Wild Man Fischer, and all those Sunset Strip characters of the time. Rodney Binghenheimer was making coffee … [and] all that dour Englishness swiftly disappeared into the powder-blue, post–Summer of Love Californian sunshine. I was teleported.”
For Plant, America was a vast garden of unlimited opportunities. “I was 22 and I was going, ‘Fucking hell, I want some of that,’ ” he says. “ ‘And then I want some of that, and then can you get me some Charley Patton? And who’s that girl over there and what’s in that packet?’ There was no perception of taste, no decorum.”
Booked by heavyweight promoter Frank Barsalona as the support act on a tour headlined by Atlantic act Vanilla Fudge, Led Zeppelin was virtually an unknown quantity in America. “We came over here and nobody knew who we were, and we weren’t following anything,” Plant said in 1971. “We weren’t saying, ‘It’s Gary Puckett for us, and come over here.’ ”
“Jimmy was an old hand at America,” said Richard Cole. “But the others were all relatively new to working there, and I think they had to feel the audience out and get comfortable with it. Vanilla Fudge was a big band, so Zeppelin wasn’t playing to 50 people. I’m sure it was quite intimidating.”
Almost instantly, however, the band made people sit up and take notice. The standard of their musicianship alone was enough to blow Vanilla Fudge clean off the stage. “All of a sudden, the name of the band traveled like wildfire,” said Jimmy Page. “We were supporting bands and they weren’t turning up, because we were really quite an intimidating force.”
“The biggest happening of the 1969 heavy rock scene is Led Zeppelin,” NME’s US correspondent June Harris wrote after the band’s debut album climbed into the American Top 10 in May. “The reaction to the group’s first tour here has not only been incredible, it’s been nothing short of sensational.”
Key gigs on Zeppelin’s first coast-to-coast sortie in early 1969 included shows at the Kinetic Playground in Chicago, Page’s old haunt the Fillmore in San Francisco, and—on the East Coast—the Boston Tea Party. “As far as I’m concerned, the key gig … was one that we played [in Boston],” John Paul Jones told Nick Kent. “The audience just wouldn’t let us off the stage…. When we finally left the stage, we’d played for 4-plus hours. Peter was absolutely ecstatic. He was crying, if you can imagine that, and hugging us all.”
Anyone who really knew Peter Grant—or “G,” as the band often referred to him—could have imagined his tears of pride and joy. “Peter lived, breathed, and slept beside the band,” observed another, equally notorious manager named Malcolm McLaren. “[He] indulged in the same things they did.”
“Jimmy said to me, ‘The difference between Peter and other managers was Peter genuinely loved his bands,’ ” Richard Cole remembered. “Peter loved Maggie Bell, he loved Terry Reid, and he’d loved Rod [Stewart] and Jeff [Beck]. It wasn’t just a money-making machine for him.”
Significantly, Grant never had a written contract with Led Zeppelin. “We just had a gentlemen’s agreement,” John Paul Jones told Chris Welch. “He got the normal management fees and royalties from records as executive producer. [It was] all pretty a
bove board, and as a result, it was a really happy band.”
“Peter never let anybody near us,” Jones said. “Record companies in those days had less say than they do now in what their artists do, but they had no say whatsoever in what we did.”
If Jimmy Page had any misgivings about his group at this early stage, they were solely to do with Robert Plant’s stage presence. “[He] did lack a bit of confidence at first, and I used to hide all the negative reviews we had,” Peter Grant recalled. “But come mid-’69, he was well in the swing of it.”
“I didn’t even know what to do with my arms,” Plant says. “Now I understand why Joe Cocker did that thing for a while, because what are you going to do? There were so many solos!”
As the tour progressed, Led Zeppelin became an ever more assured live act, shaking America’s stages to their foundations. Onstage there seemed to be a kind of telepathy between the four men—one that enabled them to take songs in almost any direction they chose.
“Led Zeppelin’s live performance was so important to the sum of the parts,” Jimmy Page said. “We’d go onstage, and if all four of us were really on top of it, it would just take on this fifth dimension. Improvisation and spontaneity were happening all the time, and that was the beauty of it.”
“Led Zeppelin was an extravaganza,” said Robert Plant. “There were songs that began and ended cut-and-dried—“Communication Breakdown,” “Good Times, Bad Times.” But the thing about the group was the extension of the instrumental parts, and that was in full fling by the time we even made our first record. And now, if you look at all the sort of bits and pieces I used to throw in for my own enjoyment—I mean, it’s a bit corny now, because it’s referring to Eddie Cochran or Elvis—it was what we feasted on to get riffs, to get organized, to become a big band with big riffs.”
Something that communicated itself from the earliest days of Led Zeppelin was the balance of power within the group. Although Page was the founder and putative leader of the group, he never hogged the limelight or lorded it over his comrades. He’d seen the damage Jeff Beck’s ego had done to the Yardbirds and was determined to avoid that in Led Zeppelin. The tensions and skirmishes that blighted such Zeppelin prototypes as the Who were nowhere to be seen in this quasi-supergroup.
“The groups that did have a good sound were successful, but they always seemed to have internal troubles,” John Paul Jones noted, “while the groups who did get on with each other never got heard. Somehow you had to get the two elements together—an amicable group and good sound—plus exposure.”
“The only ones that used to row were Bonham and Plant,” said Richard Cole. “But that had nothing to do with musical direction. It would be something that went on when the two of them were driving home to Birmingham or something. One of them wouldn’t want to pay for the gas, things that were so amusing to the other four of us. They had history, they were very close, and they’d both come into the band as outsiders, so their arguments were like two brothers arguing. But it was never malicious.”
“What you put out, you get back again all the time,” Page told Nick Kent. “The band is a good example of that simply because there’s an amazing chemistry at work there, if only astrologically. Astrologically it’s very powerful indeed. Robert’s the perfect frontman Leo … John Paul Jones and I are stoic Capricorns, Bonzo the Gemini.”
“A lot of it came from Pagey,” says former Zeppelin roadie Henry Smith, who’d worked with Page in the Yardbirds days. “He was very centered, very quiet. He knew himself. And I think that had a lot to do with the chemistry of the band, because those were the types of people that he sought out when he went to start his band. Jeff Beck was like the high-school bully, and Jimmy wasn’t that way.”
“There were really no camps in Led Zeppelin,” said Jones. “People think it was, like, Jimmy and Robert were always together, so that left the rhythm section. But it was always the southerners and the midlanders. Jimmy and I would take the piss out of Robert and Bonzo, and they’d call us poncey [snobby] southern so-and-sos. But the four of us were very protective of Led Zeppelin.”
The relationship between Page and Plant was itself complementary rather than competitive. Physical opposites, Page was as introverted and inscrutable as Plant was open and expansive. If there were echoes of Jagger and Richards in the duality of the erotic frontman and his shadowy foil, there was less of the Stones’ indecent chumminess in Led Zeppelin. Page was the conductor of the group’s sound, Plant his primary emotional vent. Unlike Jagger, too, Plant was modest and self-doubting, frequently prone to stage fright.
Interestingly, one gay Zeppelin fan described the two men as “a more dangerous and more androgynous ‘version’ of Mick and Keith,” thereby setting up a compelling juxtaposition with the apparent machismo of their music. Certainly there was something soft and pretty about Plant, with his barmaid curls, blousey shirts, and camp stage movements, in the same way that there was something effeminate about the darker, more glamorous Page.
The band’s machismo, as it happened, was already a cause of complaint by early 1969, with critics flinching at what they heard as the phallic bombast of Led Zeppelin’s “heavy metal” sound. Zeppelin itself always took issue with its alleged paternity of metal. Both Page and Plant used the term virility in describing the group’s music but resented the way HM was laid at their door. Lumped in with such crass, post-Cream “power trios” as Mountain and Grand Funk Railroad, Zeppelin was persistently misheard as purveyors of Neanderthal riffs for stoned headbangers.
When The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll later stated that “the basic formula for heavy metal was codified [by Led Zeppelin]: blues chords plus high-pitched male tenor vocals singing lyrics that ideally combined mysticism, sexism, and hostility,” its authors were only half right. For a start, real heavy metal requires a strong element of the Gothic, which Zeppelin never had; second, the charge of “hostility” simply doesn’t stand up when you inspect the band’s lyrics. Most important, perhaps, Zeppelin’s “heavy” rock was so much subtler, sexier, and more multitextured than anything a group like Black Sabbath ever produced.
“[Heavy metal] is a bastard term to us,” Page complained. “I can’t relate that to us because the thing that comes to mind when people say heavy metal is riff-bashing, and I don’t think we ever just did riffbashing at any point. It was always inner dynamics, light and shade, drama and versatility that we were going for.”
American critics, perhaps resentful of the group’s almost instant success, carped at Led Zeppelin in a chorus of disdain.
“Like their predecessors,” Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau wrote in 1969, “they build their style on doubling bass and guitar figures, thereby creating a distorted emphasis on the bottom sound range. It is a completely physical approach to sound that usually works better live than on records. Zeppelin’s demeanor was loud, impersonal, exhibitionistic, violent, and often insane. Watching them at a recent concert, I saw little more than Robert Plant’s imitations of sexuality and Jimmy Page’s unwillingness to sustain a musical idea for more than a few measures.”
The feud between the band and the press became a paradoxical feature of Led Zeppelin’s illustrious career, though it only cemented the solidarity between the four of them.
“Instead of just transposing what happens and saying it was accepted,” Plant said despairingly in 1971, “[critics] suddenly start becoming an entity for themselves instead of a courier for the people…. If we get all these blasé attitudes at an early stage where we’re still trying to prove to a lot of people that it’s a wholesome, positive thing and they keep tearing away inside it, well, it’ll be ruined before it’s even gotten halfway.”
Nor was it just critics who jeered. The band’s own peers—no doubt threatened—turned on them with vaguely catty remarks. Pete Townshend poo-pooh’d “solo-guitar-based groups” that did better in America than in England. Eric Clapton thought Zeppelin was “unnecessarily loud.” Keith Richards said Plant’s voice “star
ted to get on my nerves.”
If the put-downs affected the band, it didn’t show in the music they assembled for their second album. A tour de force of pulverizing riffs and febrile bluesology, Led Zeppelin II stands at the gateway to the ’70s as a monstrously powerful record. “Led Zeppelin [has] taken the best aspects of the Yardbirds’ style and the British flash blues tradition,” Lester Bangs wrote in Creem, “and inflated them into a mighty war machine.”
Against all the odds, moreover, Led Zeppelin II was made on the hoof as the band continued their onslaught of the US concert circuit. “The first album had been created in a very crisp, businesslike fashion,” Plant says. “Zeppelin II, on the other hand, was written and recorded mostly on the road.”
“Album two was insane,” Page told Disc in April 1972. “We’d put down a rhythm track in London, add the voice in New York, put in harmonica in Vancouver, then come back to New York to do the mixing.”
Although the group got under way with the album at Olympic Studios in April 1969, laying down basic tracks for “Whole Lotta Love,” “Ramble On,” and “What Is and What Should Never Be,” their departure for America that month necessitated sessions at A&R, Mirror Sound, and Juggy Sound in New York, and at other studios that could be accommodated by the punishing itinerary set up by Peter Grant.
More than anything, Led Zeppelin II is Jimmy Page’s record—an incredible collection of what Robert Plant called “the mightiest riffs in the world.” “Any tribute [that] flows in must go to Jimmy and his riffs,” said John Paul Jones, who thought the bruising “Whole Lotta Love” had probably been born during one of the many “Dazed and Confused” jams. “They were mostly in the key of E, and you could really play around with them … the whole thing, the whole band really, came straight from the blues.”
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