Led Zeppelin IV
Page 13
“I watched it on the DVD and thought, ‘Christ, that was crap,’ ” Plant said. “I knew how good we had been, and we were so nervous. And yet within it all, my old pal Bonzo was right down in a pocket. And I’d thought he was speeding up on the night—I must have been so nervous myself that every single blemish and twist that was just a little bit away from what I expected was making me a little bit hyper. But for all that went wrong, if you listen to ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ from Knebworth, it’s absolutely spectacular. It’s prog [progressive] rock gone mad.”
“The reality of Knebworth was that it was fantastic,” said Page. “I mean, we had to come in by helicopter, and you could see this huge sea of people. It was astonishing.”
“After it was over,” said Plant, “I don’t know if I was breathing a sigh of relief because we’d got to the end of the show in one piece or whether we’d actually bought some more time to keep going.”
For all three surviving members, the What Might Have Been factor in Led Zeppelin’s story still weighs heavy. “The band had been on its knees,” said Plant. “The cause and effect of all that success had taken its toll, and we just managed to get back. And just as we started to move again….”
On September 24, 1980, at Jimmy Page’s new Thameside mansion near Windsor, John Bonham died after drinking a vast amount of vodka and being helped to a bedroom by Page’s assistant Rick Hobbs. The pathologist’s report stated that the cause was pulmonary edema: Bonzo had drowned in his own vomit.
“Who knows where we would have gone?” said Page. “Maybe the band would have broken up. I don’t know. But what I do know is that Bonzo and I had discussed that the next album was going to be more hard-hitting. I don’t know how that would have turned out.”
For Plant in particular, Bonham’s death meant definitively that Led Zeppelin was no more. Apart from a reunion appearance at Atlantic Records’ 40th birthday party at Madison Square Garden in 1988— and despite reuniting with Jimmy Page for the ’90s albums No Quarter and Walking into Clarksdale— the singer has consistently resisted attempts to resurrect the behemoth that the band represented.
“I wanted to establish an identity that was far removed from the howling and the mud sharks of the ’70s,” he told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke in 1988. To Joe Smith in the same period, he said he was “trying to make some kind of move on my own terms, without the hysteria that was common to that great epoch.” In 1994, he admitted to Mojo’s Mat Snow that he’d “denied Led Zeppelin’s existence because I didn’t want to end up like a fucking fat mouse in a trap.”
“[A Zeppelin reunion] would have been a vast earner and it would have outsold anyone, including the Stones,” Peter Grant admitted in 1993. “But would they have been any happier? I know Jimmy was keen, but Robert didn’t want to do it. [And] let’s face it, it wouldn’t be the same. If they had done it, that invaluable Zeppelin mystique would have gone forever.”
“My peers may flirt with cabaret, some fake the rebel yell,” Plant sang on his blistering 2005 track “Tin Pan Valley.” “I’m moving up to higher ground, I must escape their hell.” That year, Plant declined to appear at the Grammy Awards when Led Zeppelin received a Lifetime Achievement award, prompting Page’s pained words, “It wouldn’t have taken much to just pop over, would it?”
Yet Plant remains deeply proud of his achievements in Led Zeppelin. “We questioned the whole order of things,” he told Vanity Fair’s Lisa Robinson in 2003, “and not just for one or two albums for 10 years.” He also remains hurt and perplexed at the critical kicking the group received. “How can we be reviled in so many different generations,” he asked Robinson rhetorically, “and then find out that we were the people’s favorite band?”
“The funny thing about Led Zeppelin,” said Jack White, “was that American rock radio just played the shit out of them, to the point where it was almost embarrassing to like them. Because it was too obvious. It was almost like quoting Spinal Tap in front of other musicians, and it’s not funny to say it out loud anymore. It’s one of those things where you’re more likely to have a statue of Led Zeppelin in your house than to actually mention them in conversation. It kind of represents so much in that realm, because of punk rock destroying [progressive] rock and all the big regular rock.”
“My position in the game is so radically different to the way it was then,” Robert Plant told me. “What was a priority then has gone; it’s completely passed. I don’t see Zeppelin as any sort of stigma or impediment for my future, and it would be good to see what could happen. But that means that you reinvoke that tired old harness. And I’m very, very happy where I am musically.”
Thirty-five years after their fourth album made Led Zeppelin the biggest, loudest, most demonically powerful band on Earth, their unabashed endorsement by such leading lights of 21st-century rock as the White Stripes is a fitting kind of justice. Twenty-two million copies sold (and counting) has made a yardstick for western rock, an unmatched and unavoidable touchstone that also happens to be the greatest work by the greatest hard rock band of all time.
“From the first rehearsal onward, there was no dead weight in Led Zeppelin,” said John Paul Jones. “It was a very strong lineup, and I’m not that modest about it. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, the drummer’s dad owns the van so we’ll have to put up with him.’ Listening to Zeppelin now, it only dates because of the recording techniques, like the amount of bass drum there is. The music itself is timeless.”
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© 2006 by Barney Hoskyns
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.
Book design by Drew Frantzen
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoskyns, Barney.
Led Zeppelin IV / Barney Hoskyns.
p. cm.
ISBN 978–1–59486–370–7 hardcover
ISBN 978–1–60961–695–3 ebook
1. Led Zeppelin (Musical group) 2. Led Zeppelin (Musical group). Led Zeppelin IV. 3. Rock music—1971-1980—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML421.L4H67 2006
782.42166092’2—dc22 2006024050
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