by Chris Welch
“Well of course every time I saw him after that it was: ‘Well my band’s doing quite well, despite what you thought of them.’ By which time they had become the biggest band in the world. ‘Still too loud for you Keith?’ But I was never a Led Zeppelin fan. All those long guitar and drum solos used to bore me to death. I used to think, ‘For fuck’s sake, get to the song.’ It was all too self-indulgent. ‘Look how clever I am.’”
The band played their last ‘New Yardbirds’ date at Liverpool University on October 19, 1968. Three weeks later, on November 9, Led Zeppelin finally made their London début under their new name with a gig at the Middle Earth Club, which was then held at the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm. They earned the princely sum of £150 and got a standing ovation. There were six more UK dates lined up, mostly pubs and clubs like The Richmond Athletics Club (November 29), another Marquee show (December 10) and the Fishmongers Arms, Wood Green (20).
When Zeppelin played at Exeter City Hall for £125 on December 19, their manager was en route to America, clutching the tapes for the first Led Zeppelin album, together with the completed artwork and some ‘live’ recordings from gigs. His plan was to secure a worldwide deal for Led Zeppelin. His old pal Mickie Most was watching all this frenzied activity with considerable interest.
“The deal was as simple as this. We financed the first album and Jimmy said he’d like to produce it, but as he’d never produced an album before, I would help out if he got lost and it wasn’t going right. But that never happened at all. As soon as he got into the studio he did a brilliant job. I remember he came back with the first acetates. There were no cassettes in those days.
“I was up in the office at 155 Oxford Street when I heard the first tracks they had done and they were brilliant. We started making the album and then Atlantic heard what was going on. Peter had got hold of Ahmet Ertegun and he flew over and listened. We had the Jeff Beck albums on the charts in America – Truth and Beckola which were like forerunners to Led Zeppelin. Truth was a great album – which I made! Then I made the Beckola album, but Jimmy produced the first Led Zeppelin album, which I thought was brilliant. Then Peter went to Atlantic, they gave him a deal and the rest is history.”
Mickie’s recollection of events is slightly at odds with Peter’s, but the crucial fact is that Grant caused a major upset amongst the moguls of the New York record industry. As The Yardbirds with Jimmy Page had been signed to Epic, part of Columbia, it was assumed that Jimmy’s new band would re-sign with them. Columbia executive Dick Asher said later: “We at Columbia felt that Epic had done a really good job in promoting The Yardbirds. We thought we had done well by Jimmy Page. When we heard that The Yardbirds had split up and Jimmy had formed Led Zeppelin, we naturally assumed that the rights to Page would go automatically to Columbia, the other three being subject to mutual agreement. So Grant and Steve Weiss (Zeppelin’s attorney), arrived in Clive Davis’ office (President of Columbia) and we all sat down. It was Clive’s first meeting with Peter Grant and we talked and talked about all sorts of things. It just went on and on but there was no mention of Led Zeppelin. Finally Clive said, ‘Well, aren’t we going to talk about Jimmy Page?’ Grant replied, ‘Oh no, we’ve already signed the Zeppelin to Atlantic.’”
It was explained that Page had never been signed as an individual to Columbia, only as part of The Yardbirds group. At this point Clive Davis went berserk. It turned out The Yardbirds had been one of his favourite projects. Said Dick Asher: “We were all stunned, especially after all we had done for the group.”
Peter had been leading them on. It was the kind of scenario he relished. Behind their backs he’d signed a five-year contract with Atlantic Records, having negotiated a $200,000 advance with label bosses Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler. Grant wanted to sign with Atlantic because, he said, “They had a fantastic reputation and, of course, Cream had been on the label. The Ertegun brothers and Jerry Wexler owned the company and we shook on a deal. That’s how it was back then. Ahmet was the finest record man of all time, and every time we negotiated he just said, ‘Peter, shake on it,’ and you knew it was done.”
It was announced in the press that this was the highest advance ever paid to a new group. Quite whose decision it was to release this statement is not known, but if it was Peter’s, then it must stand as a rare lapse of judgement since it led directly to charges that Led Zeppelin was a ‘hype’. In the climate of the times, when hippies denounced ‘breadheads’ as the antithesis of everything the underground stood for, Led Zeppelin became tarred in the press as mercenaries, at least in America where Rolling Stone magazine, staffed by these very same idealists, was the epitome of cool. It was further claimed that the record company had never even seen the band, another questionable statement in view of prevailing trends. Surely, it was alleged, if a record label has signed a band it hadn’t even seen, then there was the sniff of something resembling subterfuge, or ‘hype’ in the parlance of the times.
None of this reasoning took into account Led Zeppelin’s unquestioned abilities as musicians. The tapes Ahmet Ertegun had heard were all he needed, together with the recommendation of many respected music biz figures. Dusty Springfield was among those who told Atlantic they should sign these upcoming English boys, as Peter Grant fondly remembered. “The story is that she was down at Jerry Wexler’s house and he told her about this new group that was in the offing with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. She said she’d worked with Jonesy on arrangements and such like, and Jerry was knocked out.”
Wexler wanted to sign the band purely on Dusty’s recommendation and the fact that Jimmy was in the group. Said Peter: “We signed largely on the strength of Jimmy’s name. At the time the deal was agreed in principle, there was no band. It was just Jimmy Page. Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler really believed in his talent. They said to me, ‘You’ve got the deal. Just make sure the band is okay.’ When we did eventually play Atlantic the album, I recall them saying they wanted to remix it. Jimmy said, ‘What are they talking about?’ But I said it’s just politics. Tom Dowd was there and Jimmy foxed him with a few technical questions. That was an early battle we won.”
At the same time Peter set up the Atlantic deal, he also established his own production and publishing companies, thus ensuring that the group took control over all the creative aspects of their business. Explained Peter: “We didn’t sign direct to the label, we had a production company called Superhype. The title came from Jimmy, who was aware of the hype surrounding us at the time. So I did a tongue-in-cheek number and called it Superhype Music Inc. We sold off the publishing company some years later. The whole deal with Atlantic gave us various clauses that we were able to use in our favour.” Not least, they could veto any publicity pictures of the band, which a nervous young advertising executive soon discovered.
When Andrew Sheehan, from Melody Maker’s advertising department, went to see Grant at his London office about booking an ad, he took with him a transparency of the band. Peter grasped the expensive ‘tranny’ between two fingers, took out a cigarette lighter and set fire to it. He then produced another one from his drawer and said, “This is the picture you’re going to use.”
The Grant revolution had begun.
Despite his severity with record companies and the media, Grant was quite relaxed about his business deals with Zeppelin. Says John Paul Jones: “Peter never had a contract with us. That was a very strange thing. In fact when Atlantic eventually found out, they nearly went mad. They said, ‘You can’t be serious.’ But we just had a gentlemen’s agreement. Much like I have with my record company now. We were signed to Atlantic, but we weren’t signed to Peter. We never had a management contract. He got the normal management fees and royalties from the records as executive producer.”
Mickie Most: “I never remember seeing a management agreement between Peter and Zeppelin. Peter and I were in business together and we never had a piece of paper either. We never had any serious problems. Peter would say, ‘Well there’s the management commission
’ and that was it. He used to do his thing and I did mine. There were never any fisticuffs.”
John Paul Jones thought the arrangements with their manager were, “All pretty above board and as a result it was a really happy band. We could never believe how other bands got on. They never spoke to each other and travelled in separate cars. Why did they play together if it was that bad? Everybody thought we were the Prima Donnas, yet there was hardly an ounce of attitude in the whole band. Page and I had seen it all before. We just didn’t want to make the obvious mistakes.”
Col. Tom Parker once said, “I’m Elvis Presley’s manager, because Elvis says I am.” The same was true of Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin. Says Ed Bicknell: “Peter’s first principle of management stated that it was him and the act – versus everybody else. The general philosophy in the Sixties was that the artist was at the very bottom of the economic totem pole. It was the unstated position of the record company and the publishers and the managers of the day.
“Peter didn’t have a degree from a university, like so many of the managers who followed. His approach was instinctive and he’d be the first to say he made a few mistakes. But management is about flying by the seat of your pants.
“The most important thing for Peter was to believe in the act he was working with and he was absolutely dedicated to those artists. Peter absolutely believed in Jimmy and right up to the end of his life, they still spoke almost every week. It’s important to remember that the music scene was much smaller than it is now and all the acts were interweaving and crossing. It was all the same people moving around in different bands. Peter was fascinated by the way I did management with Dire Straits. He observed my methods in complete disbelief and his conclusion was the way we had to operate in the Nineties was really boring – and he was dead right about that.
“He had no knowledge of law. I had a huge knowledge of law, which I picked up. He had no knowledge of the minutiae of record contracts. Peter’s thing was to be with the band on the road, which was the bit that was the most fun. Nowadays, in every country you have to pay tax. In Peter’s day, you put the money in the Hammond organ and you made a dash for the border. You can’t do that any more. Now we have computerised ticketing. In those days you could get a bag of cash. It was a cash driven thing. I’m pretty sure that a certain amount of the financing for their operation came out of shoeboxes. ‘Led Zeppelin shoe box money’ was quite famous. Even The Beatles got paid in brown bags. Nowadays that’s virtually impossible. Everything has to be very straight, which is also very tedious. But it means you don’t get a bang on the door in the middle of the night from the Inland Revenue.
“This wasn’t particularly a Zeppelin thing. It was the way bands operated in the UK and America in those days. He also made a conscious decision to go after the American market. Nowadays people wouldn’t do that, because America is less interested in British music than at any point since The Beatles. They don’t give a flying fuck! The idea that bands like Oasis are big in America is rubbish. If all the members of Oasis were on fire and they ran down Fifth Avenue, nobody would piss on them. With very few exceptions, there is no interest in British music. But in those days what influenced Peter’s decision was that Led Zeppelin was essentially playing music that was derivative of American blues.
“There was also an underground scene developing, promoted by people like Bill Graham who had venues like The Fillmore and the Boston Tea Party where bands like Zep could play.
“The underground in Britain basically consisted of the college circuit, run by people like me, Mother’s Club in Birmingham and the Marquee in London. There were few opportunities for bands like them to play and even less opportunity to get on the radio. So Peter made a pragmatic decision. He went where the action was. The funny thing about the deal with Atlantic was that he signed them to everywhere in the world, except for the UK. That’s when he went to Pye Records in London and he was bemused that even Pye turned them down. In the end he basically gave the band to Atlantic in the UK and threw it in as part of the deal.”
Immediately after Christmas 1968, Led Zeppelin was due to go to America to play for the first time. Peter Grant knew all too well that the future of the band depended on how well they performed in the States. He observed later: “Before we got the album out, we couldn’t get work in Britain. It seemed to be a laugh to people that we were getting the group together. I don’t want to name the people who put us down and thought we were wasting our time, but there were plenty of them.”
The opportunity arose for Atlantic’s latest signing to support Vanilla Fudge and MC5. It meant travelling over Christmas and playing their first US show on December 26, 1968, in Denver, Colorado. Peter was nervous about asking the boys to give up their holiday but in the event they all jumped at the chance. Uncharacteristically, especially in view of the role that America would play in the Led Zeppelin saga, Peter Grant actually missed the group’s first date on American soil: “I had to tell them to fly out on December 24 and I caught up with them at the Fillmore West. Robert Plant said that if we didn’t make it there, then there was no hope, because The Yardbirds had a good following at the Fillmore.”
A couple of days later, on December 28 they played at the Boston Tea Party, blowing the other bands off stage with a famously blistering set. Said John Paul Jones: “We played for hours. We did old Beatles numbers, Chuck Berry, anything. It was the greatest night. We knew we had definitely done it by then.”
The American dates continued into January 1969, this first American tour having been arranged by Premier Talent, the major rock music booking agency run out of New York by Frank Barsalona. From his days with The Animals, The Yardbirds and the tour with Jeff Beck, Grant already knew which were the best cities to play. He also decided to concentrate on the West Coast, where rock and underground music were strongest. At the Fillmore West in San Francisco, they supported Country Joe & The Fish, an amiable bunch of anarchists whose ‘Fish Cheer’, a tirade against conscription and the Vietnam war, was very popular – but hardly a band with the firepower of Led Zeppelin. Somewhat predictably, American headliners were becoming wary about going on after these British lads. Meanwhile, their sets were getting longer and longer.
The Californian reaction to the band was overwhelming. To Grant’s immense satisfaction, young American fans cheered and whooped with an enthusiasm that was a million miles away from the drab indifference of the folk at Wood Green’s Fishmongers Arms. The knock-on effects were immediate. Recalled Peter: “The first album went on the charts at 98 just by FM radio play. The impact was incredible. I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly but I just knew it would happen eventually because of the thrill of the music. Right from the first time I saw them play as a band in Copenhagen, I thought they were just wonderful. I wasn’t so much concerned with the commercial success; it was the creative part that impressed me. I wanted to be part of it and made my mind up there and then that I would do everything for the band I possibly could. I was 100 per cent devoted to that band and there was no room for time wasters. In fact the music stood up so well we didn’t need a publicist.”
On February 1 the band played at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York City and Zeppelin found they could win over the East Coast fans as well. Heavy bands like Iron Butterfly ran for cover once they heard the thunder of Zeppelin in action. Said Peter: “Bill Graham really liked The Yardbirds and so I had a good relationship with Bill, which sadly deteriorated at the end. So Bill got us on at the Fillmore with Iron Butterfly. I knew a girl who worked with the band and she tipped me the wink that they had signed the contract for the show without knowing it was us they were up against. Sure enough, the kids were still shouting, ‘Zeppelin, Zeppelin!’ as Iron Butterfly walked on after our set. One up to us.”
There was more joy to come. That same month the band’s album shot higher up the Billboard charts, finally peaking at number 10 in May. The NME’s US correspondent June Harris wired the news to London: “The biggest happening of the 1969 h
eavy rock scene is Led Zeppelin! The reaction to the group’s first tour here has not only been incredible, it’s been nothing short of sensational.”
Zeppelin were forging ahead. Nevertheless, the former members of the ‘old’ Yardbirds didn’t harbour any bitterness over the success of the ‘new’ Yardbirds. Says Chris Dreja: “I remember in New York some years later, Peter Grant ringing me up and asking me to come and see the boys at Madison Square Garden. I went there in a time warp, having experienced Yardbirds gigs with dreadful PAs and equipment problems. I went to meet Zeppelin in their dressing room and they were charming, because they realised they owed us a helluva debt. Then they went up the concrete ramp to perform and I remember them going into ‘Whole Lotta Love’, and the whole building shook. I went out on the stage and heard the band blasting through some huge PA system to an audience of thousands and I was just astounded at the magnitude of it all. In two years the whole scene had changed. We never had those sophisticated, powerful PAs to interpret that music. It happened all of a sudden in 1969. I realised we had missed out, but it was all irrelevant because this was where it had progressed to.”
