“It was time to step back, take stock, and not get lost in it all,” Plant told Cameron Crowe. “Zeppelin was starting to get very big, and we wanted the rest of our journey to take a level course. Hence the trip into the mountains and the beginning of the ethereal Page and Plant. I thought we’d be able to get a little peace and quiet and get your actual Californian, Marin County blues.”
Accompanying the party were Zeppelin roadies Clive Coulson and Sandy McGregor, there to help with more domestic issues such as groceries, transportation, and firewood. “Me and Sandy were the cooks, bottlewashers, and general slaves,” Coulson recalled. “Pagey was the tea man. Plant’s specialty was posing and telling people how to do things.” Water came from a nearby stream and was heated on hot plates for washing. Baths had to be taken at the Owen Glendower hotel in nearby Machynlleth.
Folk had already been heard, of course, on Led Zeppelin’s debut: in “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,” in “Black Mountain Side.” Shortly before departing for Bron-Yr-Aur, Page performed “Black Mountain Side” together with “White Summer” on Julie Felix’s TV Show Once More with Felix. He’d also included the two numbers in Zeppelin’s set at San Francisco’s Fillmore West on January 10, 1969. But for the two men, there was now a need to give proper space to this side of Zeppelin.
“I’m obsessed—not just interested, obsessed—with folk music,” Page told Sounds’s Jonh [sic] Ingham in 1976. “[With] street music, the parallels between a country’s street music and its so-called classical and intellectual music, the way certain scales have traveled right across the globe. All this ethnological and musical interaction fascinates me.”
One afternoon, Page and Plant went for a walk, an acoustic guitar strapped to the former’s back and a small tape recorder in his pocket. “We stopped and sat down,” remembered Page. “I played the tune and Robert sang a verse straight off.” “I don’t know how I’m gonna tell you,” Plant sang, “I can’t play with you no more….” The gorgeous “That’s the Way” (aka “The Boy Next Door”) arrived almost fully formed in that inspired moment, the sun just setting over a ravine, the hedgerows bustling. The experience brought the two men closer together. “Living together at Bron-Yr-Aur,” Page told Zeppelin biographer Ritchie Yorke, “was the first time I really came to know Robert.”
In Wales, Page and Plant sketched out the songs that made up the bulk of Led Zeppelin’s acoustic repertoire for years to come. In addition to “That’s the Way,” they included the rollicking “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” [sic], the traditional “Gallows Pole,” the Tyrannosaurus-Rex–esque “Friends,” plus “Hey Hey, What Can I Do” (B-side of “Immigrant Song”), “Over the Hills and Far Away” (Houses of the Holy), “Down by the Seaside,” “The Rover,” “Bron-Yr-Aur” (Physical Graffiti), and “Poor Tom” (Coda), the latter again very reminiscent of Marc Bolan in his cosmicfolkie days. (On a bootleg version of “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” one can hear the gleeful giggling of a child who must be Carmen Plant.)
Originally entitled “Jennings Farm Blues,” after the farm near Kidderminster that Plant had recently bought for £8,000 (or approximately $15,238 US), “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” perfectly captured the bucolic merriment Page and Plant experienced at the cottage. The stomp in question was a kind of love song to Strider: “Walk down the country lanes, I’ll be singin’ a song, I’ll be callin’ your name/Hear the wind whisper in the trees that Mother Nature’s proud of you and me.”
“We wrote those songs and walked and talked and thought and went off to the Abbey where they hid the Grail,” Plant recalls. “No matter how cute and comical it might be now to look back at that, it gave us so much energy, because we were really close to something. We believed. It was absolutely wonderful, and my heart was so light and happy. At that time, at that age, 1970 was like the biggest blue sky I ever saw.”
When Page and Plant returned to London with “That’s the Way,” “Friends,” and “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp,” Jones and Bonham quickly took the new material in their stride. “Jimmy had always had acoustic guitars lying around,” Jones said. “It was very organic. Suddenly we found ourselves with a bit more time, and we sat down with some acoustic instruments, and we started exploring.”
Jones had himself acquired a mandolin that he’d purchased on tour in America. “I’d probably learned my first mandolin tunes from Fairport Convention’s Liege and Lief,” he remembered. “I mean, there was more folk-rock about, and there were people like Poco and Matthews Southern Comfort, and like any curious musician you just start playing it.”
“The evocation of the ‘folk-’ or acoustic-based music in Led Zeppelin,” Susan Fast wrote in Houses of the Holy, “… helps shape the band’s mythology in terms of linking them to ideals of (perceived) non-commercialism, simplicity, the feeling of intimacy that came with such musical means….”
The ramshackle, “noncommercial” spirit of Bron-Yr-Aur carried through to sessions at Headley Grange, a damp Hampshire mansion to which the band decamped in mid-May. “Rather than waste a lot of studio time thinking of the riffs and lyrics in the studio,” John Paul Jones told Disc in November 1970, “we decided this place in Hampshire was definitely the best place to get the numbers down before we went there.”
“Headley Grange was found by our secretary, Carole Browne,” said Richard Cole. “She used to read those magazines like The Lady, and she’d read that this place was for rent. I think she sent a dispatch rider down there to see if it was suitable and had enough rooms and if they could put a mobile studio in there. It wasn’t very comfortable. I mean, the band was used to five-star hotels and had lovely homes by now.”
“Apparently, it was a Victorian workhouse at one time,” said Jimmy Page, who’d spent summers as a boy at his great-uncle’s manor house in Northamptonshire. “It was a pretty austere place; I loved the atmosphere of it. I really did, personally. The others got a bit spooked out by it.”
“Jimmy thought he’d seen a ghost there too,” said Andy Johns, the engineer brought in for the sessions. “The rest of us moaned about being cold, but Jimmy was more concerned with creepy noises or flying fucking furniture.”
Said Richard Cole, “I sometimes think they recorded in the worst places imaginable because, in the back of Jimmy’s mind, it meant they had to get on with it so they could get out of there.” (When Zeppelin returned to Headley Grange on a third visit in 1974—this time with a mobile unit belonging to Ronnie Lane of the Faces—Cole booked them into a swanky hotel called the Frencham Ponds. “Page stayed behind at Headley,” laughs Cole. “He was quite happy in that fuckin’ horrible cold house.”)
Headley Grange had been built in 1795 as a “House of Industry” to shelter infirm or aged paupers, along with orphans and illegitimate children. It’s hard to believe it was a happy place. On November 23, 1830, a mob of rioters sacked the house, after which it was repaired and continued to be used as a workhouse. It was sold in 1870 to a builder for £420 (or approximately $800 US) and converted into a private house renamed Headley Grange.
A private residence for almost a hundred years, in the 1960s it became a temporary home for visiting Americans, then a hostel for students from the nearby Farnham School of Art. By the end of that decade, it was being regularly used as a rehearsal and recording facility by such bands as Fleetwood Mac and the Pretty Things. “It was magic for me because I knew the area pretty well,” Peter Grant remembers. “I’d been evacuated there in the war.”
“Maybe the spark of actually being in Bron-Yr-Aur came into fruition when we said, ‘Let’s go to Headley Grange,’ ” Jimmy Page reflected. “I knew other bands had been there to rehearse, like Fleetwood Mac. It was like, ‘Let’s go to Headley with a mobile truck, and let’s see what comes out of it all.’ ” The truck in question belonged to the Rolling Stones.
“At Headley, it was literally sitting around a fire and picking things up and trying them out,” said John Paul Jones. “There was no conscious desire along the lines of, ‘Oh, we’ve done Heavy, now we should look at Soft,’ a
nd thank goodness.” Jones also savored the pleasures of “sitting out on the grass a lot playing acoustic guitars and mandolins.”
Plant later made the point that acoustic guitars did not per se signify gentler emotion. “It might be acoustic instrumentation,” he told Record Mirror in March 1972, “but it’s the venom or the bite or the drive, or it’s the life or it’s just what comes from behind. Things like “Friends” could never be done electrically with so much balls.”
There was in any case a generous helping of Heavy on Led Zeppelin III: “Celebration Day” and “Out on the Tiles” were classic Zeppelin pile drivers, and the closing “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper” was a crazed slide-guitar shredding of Bukka White’s “Shake ’em On Down.” A trip to Iceland in the early summer fueled the writing of the mighty “Immigrant Song,” a thunderous Viking threnody delivered in Plant’s most cod-heroic wail. “ ‘Immigrant Song” was supposed to be powerful and funny,” Plant said. “People go, ‘Zeppelin had a sense of humor?’ ”
On the sleeve of Led Zeppelin III, released in October 1970, credit was given to the “small derelict cottage in South Snowdonia” for “painting a somewhat forgotten picture of true completeness, which acted as an incentive to some of these musical statements.”
For Plant, the album was a coming-of-age, as well as being the by-product of the band’s growing links with such folk avatars as Roy Harper, Fairport Convention, and the Incredible String Band.
“The places that the String Band were coming from were places that we loved very much,” the singer said. “But because I was a blues shouter and Pagey was out of the Yardbirds, we didn’t have that pastoral kick. So hanging out with the String Band was pretty great. It was part bluff and part absolute ecstasy, and the Zeppelin thing was moving into that area in its own way, going from ‘You Shook Me’ to ‘That’s the Way.’ Zeppelin III was something we felt good about because it would have been more obvious to use ‘Whole Lotta Love’ as a kind of calling card and carry on in that direction.”
“I’m not sure that they didn’t change direction and do the acoustic thing on Led Zeppelin III, knowing that they were going to go back to the other side,” ventured Richard Cole. “The third album was almost like a break in the pattern. They didn’t want to make it look like that was all they could do. Then when the fourth one came out, there was no dispute as to what they were about.”
On June 28, with Robert Plant sporting a pointy dishevelled beard and Jimmy Page attired like a rock-and-roll farmer in floppy hat and tweed overcoat, the band played to 150,000 people at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, alongside of a slew of Plant’s Californian heroes—the Mothers, the Byrds, Santana, Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane. This was the legendary occasion when Peter Grant pulled the plug on hapless electric-violin act the Flock in order for his boys to take the stage to the backdrop of a glorious sunset.
“As soon as Zeppelin ripped into their first number, the living field of people exploded,” Disc reported. Along with set staples such as “Dazed and Confused,” the band played the new “Since I’ve Been Loving You” and “That’s the Way,” still at that point known as “The Boy Next Door.” The vibe at Bath was benign, a long way from the violence the band had experienced on recent American dates.
“I’d like to say a couple of things,” Plant announced from the stage. “We’ve been playing in America a lot recently and we really thought, coming back here, we might have a dodgy time. There’s a lot of things going wrong in America at the moment. Things are getting a bit sticky and whatnot. It’s really nice to come to an open-air festival where there’s no bad things happening.”
Zeppelin’s appearance at the festival made exactly the difference Grant had hoped for. Fans appreciated the sacrifice the group had made in turning down far more lucrative appearances in America. Subsequently, Zeppelin was regarded in Britain as the equals of the Stones and the Who.
July found the band in Notting Hill Gate, hunkered down at Island Studios on Basing Street. The tortured blues ballad “Since I’ve Been Loving You” would be another of Led Zeppelin III’s electric highlights. It remains one of Plant’s greatest vocal performances— Janis Joplin reborn as a lovelorn Black Country bricklayer.
“I can see Robert at the mike now,” recalled Richard Digby-Smith, the young tape-op on the session. “He was so passionate. Lived every line. What you got on the record is what happened. His only preparation was an herbal cigarette and a couple of shots of Jack Daniel’s.”
“I don’t know where it came from,” said Plant of the song, “but the musical progression at the end of each verse—the chord choice—is not a natural place to go. And it’s that lift up there that’s so regal and so emotional. I don’t know whether that was born from the loins of Jimmy or John Paul, but I know that when we reached that point in the song you could get a lump in the throat from being in the middle of it.”
Led Zeppelin III was finally wrapped while Zeppelin was in the midst of its sixth US tour, which commenced in Cincinnati on August 5. (Page flew to Memphis to complete mixing at Ardent Studios later in the month. Ardent engineer Terry Manning said that when he was there, Jimmy overdubbed “the best rock guitar solo of all time” on “Since I’ve Been Loving You.”) With Led Zeppelin II still high in the US charts, the group capitalized still further on their burgeoning reputation. For two nights in September, a new breed of headbangers packed Madison Square Garden for two September nights, coughing up a cool $200,000 for the privilege. Critics nonetheless continued to sneer.
The reaction to Led Zeppelin III, released in early October 1970, said it all: Having proved it was about so much more than power, the band was now pilloried precisely for going acoustic. Some reviewers implied that Zeppelin was merely imitating Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young and friends. “They missed the point altogether,” Page told NME’s Chris Salewicz in 1977. “They forgot that we’d used acoustic guitars very heavily on the first album.” Not that the reviews affected the album’s skyrocketing sales for a minute: In its second week, it topped the US album chart and stayed there for a month. (Even so, Led Zeppelin III has long been the weakest-selling of the group’s first four albums.)
“It didn’t really start bothering me until after the third album,” Page later told Guitar World. “After all we had accomplished, the press was still calling us a hype.”
“If we were crap and they said we were crap, well, fair enough,” said John Paul Jones. “But we were really good and we couldn’t understand what the agenda was. We felt they’d missed the point. And the problem was that we then put up a defensive shield. Unfortunately, if defensive shields are successful, they defend against the good stuff as well as the bad stuff.”
“When we talk about that time,” Robert Plant reflected, “we have to understand that the press itself was a completely different animal: beer-swilling, monosyllabic guys who reviewed gigs from the beer tent. I don’t think Nick Kent had surfaced, and Lester Bangs and those guys in America, the real poets, weren’t involved in what we’re talking about here. We weren’t even visible, and yet we were everywhere. And that gave it even more power.”
Bangs, who himself wrote of Led Zeppelin’s “insensitive grossness,” admitted that he “kept nursing this love-hate attitude” toward the group. Reviewing Led Zeppelin III for Rolling Stone, he noted that “That’s the Way” was “the first song they’ve ever done that’s truly moved me.”
Whatever the critics felt, the band regarded Led Zeppelin III as a vital stepping-stone in their development. “I’ve talked to you before,” Plant told Melody Maker’s Chris Welch in September 1970, “and probably given you the impression that I believed Zeppelin was never going to do what I wanted to do. But the new album is really getting there.” He later claimed that, “It wasn’t until Led Zeppelin III that I was able to calm it down and have the confidence to sing in a different style.”
For Plant, the third album “showed there was a bit more attached to us … than that “Shake Your
Money-Maker” sort of stuff.” The “simple thunder” of tracks such as “Heartbreaker” was, he said, “easier to assimilate” but “you can’t just do that, otherwise you become stagnant and you’re not really doing anything, you’re just pleasing everybody else.”
A quarter-century later, observing that “the cottage album” had been “incredibly important for my dignity,” Plant went so far as to describe Led Zeppelin III as “our single most important achievement.”
4
FLAMES FROM THE DRAGON OF DARKNESS
BY THE END of September 1970, Led Zeppelin had toured America six times. Exhausted by the constant air travel, the band craved another break. “We were fed up with going to America,” Jimmy Page told NME’s Charles Shaar Murray in June 1973. “We’d been going twice a year, and at that time, America was really a trial, an effort.”
Back in England, the group repeated what they had done in the spring. Jones and Bonham slunk off home while Page and Plant hightailed it to Bron-Yr-Aur in late October. “What we wanted to do was to continue with the momentum of the thread, which was ever onward,” says Page.
“It was just four of us this time,” says Henry Smith, the roadie who accompanied Page and Plant to the cottage with Sandy McGregor. “Jimmy, Robert, Sandy, and myself. No wives, no Peter, no Richard, no nobody else. I think we were there for about a week.”
Among the things Page worked on that week was a sketch for an epic new song that would provide the centerpiece for the fourth album—and maybe supplant “Dazed and Confused” as the pièce de résistance of Zeppelin’s live repertoire.
“It just felt like a good thing,” said Henry Smith. “Like, if you want to write, you need to get away, and this was a great place to go to get away because there was nobody around. It was so off the beaten path. We were in the middle of a sheep field as I remember, and the sheep would almost come into the house while Jimmy and Robert were working on songs.”
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