Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin

by Chris Welch

  Before reviving the Zeppelin film Peter Clifton had been working on Sound Of The City for Columbia and The London Rock’n’Roll Show starring Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Bo Diddley, which he had filmed at Wembley Stadium. “I was working for a man called John Heyman who Peter Grant respected and this was a big reason that I got the job. John used to manage Elizabeth Taylor and had his own film company and was a close friend of Robert Stigwood. He was very highly respected and he took me under his wing and I made a couple of movies for him. Peter Grant checked me out and John Heyman gave me the thumbs up, which I didn’t know about. This was the way Peter Grant worked. He checked people out. This period was the absolute peak of Led Zeppelin’s career – from 1974 until 1977. For the next three years we both wanted the same thing, which was to really portray Led Zeppelin as the most amazing band in the world. Because of that we had a symbiotic relationship. But my dealings with the band were on a totally different level.”

  Clifton wasn’t necessarily a huge fan of the band’s music. As with all recording engineers there came a point where overexposure took its toll. But he says: “If you loved rock’n’roll, you loved Led Zeppelin, although there were parts of the band’s music that were very self-indulgent. There were also parts that were very moving. Most of the songs I used in the film I thought were fantastic, but if I hear any of their music now on the radio I can’t listen to it, because I spent so much time with them. I can’t even watch the film. I couldn’t sit down and enjoy it with my friends.”

  Peter Clifton’s name appears three times in the credits. He is listed as the director of ‘a film by Peter Clifton and Joe Massot’ and is also credited as ‘director of editing’, which was added, at his own insistence. He was allowed plenty of time for the project and took care to ensure that every shot had some significance. Despite this lassitude and the fervent desire of Peter Grant to make the film a success, the director claims he was beset with problems.

  “I only met Joe Massot once. He was a nice guy. Peter Grant arranged for me to visit his home in Hampstead in March 1974 where I viewed his attempt at making a film on Led Zeppelin. It was a complete mess. There was no doubting Joe’s talent, but he was in deep waters with this filming attempt and he did not have the strength to push the band members around. None of the material he had captured in 16mm or 35mm actually created sequences. There were a few good shots but they didn’t match up, there was no continuity and no cutaways or matching material to edit or build sequences.” Clifton explained all this in a written report to the band and said that a feature film was unachievable unless they started again and shot everything in 35mm with a new script. He would be able to use some of the Massot ‘fantasy’ material, like Bonzo riding his motorbike and drag racing car and Jimmy climbing the mountain, but they had to re-shoot establishing shots on location and in a London film studio. Clifton had to reassure the band he could do the job, but only with their co-operation.

  “They were always fighting amongst themselves, but at least I had this luxury of time,” he says. “To be honest the guys weren’t really interested in the film. It was more Peter’s idea. He had to sort me out, so I had whatever was needed to make the film. Every time I needed something I’d go to him and he’d make it happen.

  “Jimmy would get very impatient with me, and Peter would come and really tick me off in the strongest way. But I was never afraid of Peter because he needed me. I grew up in Sydney and I could fight. Of course Peter could swat me down with one punch, but he would never do that to me. In fact he was incredibly good to be around because if you had Peter Grant on your side, then you had no problems. He gave you an extraordinary sense of security that I don’t think anybody else has ever given me. And that’s what he gave to Jimmy, because he loved him. Fortunately – he liked me!”

  Clifton deduced quite early on that the relationship between Grant and Page was crucial to an understanding of how Led Zeppelin worked – even why it existed. More importantly, it revealed what motivated Grant and how the strength of the bond with Page affected his life. “They were very close and it was like Jimmy needed Peter and Peter loved Jimmy,” says Clifton. “So having Peter on his side made him realise he could make anything happen. Yet the pair of them turned breaking appointments into an art form. They did just whatever they wanted at whatever time of the day.”

  Clifton soon found that you couldn’t order Zeppelin around or expect them to jump to a schedule. He once hired a screening room in Soho and they turned up three and a half hours late. Columbia was paying the bill, so nobody cared. They just sat around waiting for the phone calls. “‘Jimmy is on his way … Robert is on his way,’ we’d be told. Of course they’d all arrive at exactly the same time, so they had it all figured out. They were extremely self-controlled in that respect. Nobody had the power over them that Peter Grant did. When you were with him, you believed that you could pull it off. At one stage though he said, ‘Look, we’re gonna can the film.’”

  Clifton responded by assuring Grant that he believed in the project so much he was prepared to re-mortgage his house to finish the job. Grant vowed to carry on and finances were secured.

  The next task was to assess the rolls of film that had already been shot.

  “The concerts were anything up to three hours long and the film was two hours and 17 minutes, but we filmed a couple of extra songs. Eddie Kramer engineered the sound and Jimmy Page listened to the tapes. He said, ‘They’re fantastic, let’s make the film around these tapes.’ What Jimmy didn’t realise was that tape doesn’t have sprockets. It doesn’t have synch. Jimmy could never understand when he saw some of Joe Massot’s footage, why we couldn’t alter the synch.”

  This meant that the footage from one night didn’t match another, so in effect, nothing matched. Most of the footage from the tour was on 16mm film, so Clifton suggested that they took bits of the Madison Square concerts like the long shots and wide shots and a couple of action shots and put them into complete reels with the soundtrack. Next came the most controversial move of all, one that would raise doubt and suspicion for years to come. Under conditions of the utmost secrecy, the band assembled at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, which they often used for rehearsals. The plan was to film the whole ‘concert’ again.

  “I said to Led Zeppelin, ‘If you are prepared to take the bits of Madison Square Garden including a couple of incredible action shots, I’ll play you the soundtracks, project the bits on a huge screen in front of you and we’ll put the cameras between you and the screen. When the shots come on, the soundtrack will be right, you play along and I’ll shoot you again.’

  “At first they couldn’t believe I could do it and the trick was to work with an editor called David Gladwell, who had worked for Lindsay Anderson and later became a director himself. Between us we matched up these three nights from Madison Square Garden. We’d cut from Thursday to Friday and then to Saturday and back to Thursday. Jimmy never realised there were 12 to 16 edits on ‘Stairway To Heaven’. I did that so I could grab a piece of Joe Massot footage. We had to be driven by the quality of the sound performance. In ‘Stairway’ we had three great guitar solos we could use.”

  Clifton was amazed that he’d managed to get Led Zeppelin to perform just for him and his crew. “In 1975 you were in awe of Led Zeppelin,” he said. “I got them all on the stage together in their outfits and they suddenly realised they were back on stage together for the first time since Madison Square Garden. They started playing ‘Black Dog’ just for me and we all got such a shock. They were so hot and tight and fuelled up with you know what. There had been a huge argument just minutes beforehand and then suddenly they began playing and it was an extraordinarily electric moment between them. I knew then that I had them in the palms of my hands.”

  The editing took three months during which the band again became extremely impatient. Clifton protested that the work was really difficult and nobody would help him. As an aspiring young director, Clifton’s all-time favourite film was Lawrence Of A
rabia. Like Joe Massot before him, he took great pride in having Ernie Day as his editor on The Song Remains The Same because Day had worked on Lawrence. However, when Peter Grant met Day again at Clifton’s own small studio and the latter ventured to offer an opinion, Grant greeted him with a glare and a roar. “And who the fuck do you think you are?” he yelled.

  Clifton: “He would never speak that way to me, but when he entered the cutting room he abused the editors and cameramen on the band’s behalf. It was to intimidate them and make sure they knew who was boss. The band was quite rude to me a couple of times, especially Bonzo who didn’t like me very much. We finally finished the filming and I was flavour of the month, until I had a falling out with Peter. It was not over money, but how to deal with the boys. Jimmy was the most difficult because he was the most inarticulate and introverted. He once showed me Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising which was half an hour long and quite hideous and about worshipping the devil, which I didn’t want to have in my life. I didn’t understand it or get any good vibes from the film. Anger had used Jimmy’s wailing guitar in a singular sort of way on the soundtrack and Jimmy wanted to see it again. I said that unfortunately we had a 16mm automatic projector and it wouldn’t rewind. He simply said, ‘That’s alright, we’ll see it backwards.’ So we watched it backwards without the sound.”

  Clifton and the guitarist sat and talked at great length after the screening and Peter began to feel he had been accorded a special privilege. “I think Peter had allowed me this sacred time with Jimmy in order to get to know him better. Peter had allowed me to get a little further into the circle. He was this huge, bull-like man but he was unbelievably sensitive. Because of the loose clothes and scarves and the long wispy hair, the big gleaming smile and the shiny white eyes, you sort of lost contact with his bulk and he became this other person – that you could bully and push around.”

  Clifton tried to explain that he wasn’t trying to impose a ‘Peter Clifton Film’ on them. His idea was simply to make a film for the cinema. “I said if we don’t do this now it will never, ever happen. I had to say this to them over and over again, because they kept pulling out! There was one scene where Jimmy Page was climbing a Scottish mountain and he didn’t like those shots because it made his bottom look too big. He had done the climb during a full moon, but I had to shoot the scene again near his house in Sussex. By now I was speaking to Peter Grant three times a day about these problems and sometimes he was leaning on me. We had to shoot some scenes again and again. Peter would bring each of the boys in for a week and we’d edit those fantasies again. Peter Grant had created this incredible aura around them … which partially obscured the fact that they were all arseholes!”

  Peter is quick to exclude John Paul Jones from this blunt assessment. “Jones was very sweet actually and sparkled as a musician. They all had great respect for each other, which was a nice thing in a band. They were like a bunch of footballers, crude and rude. In fact they took a real pleasure in being rude to people. I remember them tying some girls up in their rooms at the Hyatt Hotel in LA. I walked into a bedroom only to find two of the guys asleep in bed together in their underpants. ‘Excuse me guys, I’m trying to do some work here!’ Then I walk into the next bedroom and there are all these groupies tied up. Dreadful girls. They weren’t classy about who they hung out with.”

  It may have been Clifton’s ambivalent attitude towards the band’s lifestyle or simply the fact that he got a better room than them during one stay at the Beverly Hills Hilton. At any rate Zeppelin decided to give him the same treatment they meted out to anyone who got above themselves. He had a room right beside the pool, so Zeppelin decided to bring him down a peg or two by plotting revenge with the aid of Richard Cole. “They were really pissed off with me, so they got Richard to dump everything I had including the TV set into the pool. So I couldn’t stay in the same hotel with them ever again and moved to the Beverley Wilshire.”

  When Peter Clifton finished the film he had good cause to stay even further away from the band and their manager. Events unfolded which soured his relationship with Grant for many years. “They sent Richard Cole round to search my room. He brought a big guy round with him and I couldn’t fight them off. But I was prepared to, in order to avoid the indignity of having my room searched.”

  The Zeppelin camp suspected that Clifton was living at their expense in Los Angeles, which led them to believe he had his own, hidden agenda. It was, of course, all a misunderstanding, as he explains. “They had given me a limo which I had been using for three months while living in LA and mixing the film. Meanwhile I had just sold my other film The London Rock’n’Roll Show to Japan and the distributor wanted a 35mm print. So I went to MGM’s laboratory in Zeppelin’s limo to pick up the Rock’n’Roll Show film. I think the limo driver dropped me in it. Peter Grant called me up and said, ‘What have you been doing?’ I told him I had been working on our film. ‘What else have you been doing?’”

  Peter Clifton stuttered and denied he had been doing anything un-toward, although he agreed he had been using the limo. Under interrogation Clifton’s gaze wavered and he blinked. When he left the room Richard Cole told Peter Grant, “He’s lying.”

  Clifton recalls what happened next. “They were really pissed off and that’s when they came round to search my rooms. Somehow I had stolen the negative of our own film. This was the film I had been working on for two and a half years. As if I would have stolen it from the Technicolor lab. Could anything be crazier? It was nonsensical. The thing was, it was still my film at that stage because I had complete control of the negative and they didn’t know where the negative was stored. But it was at Technicolor – of course. It was complete paranoia.”

  There was more to come. “After I had finished the film, I’d gone on holiday to America, and left my nanny at home in London with my wife and little baby son. That’s when they sent Richard Cole around with their accountant and they got some sort of court order, which allowed them to search my house to see if there was any other Led Zeppelin film in there. I wasn’t even in the house when they did this – and after we had been so close! I just felt my house had been violated. The nanny of course shouldn’t have let them in – but she did and they grabbed a few bits and pieces of stuff.”

  They did find some footage, which seemed to be Led Zeppelin material. “What I’d done had been to create a present for all the boys after we finished the film. It was all the best of the home movie footage, which I was going to give to them. I had already given Peter Grant his copy. I had my son present it to his son Warren. So I tried to do the right thing, and then to be hit by this wave of paranoia … well I felt … ‘You bastards, you cs.’

  “We had gone through all those fights to complete the film and now they’d sent these heavies round to my house. But nothing surprised me at this stage and my conscience was clear. I hadn’t done anything wrong. As if I would sell pirated footage of my own film. It was true they were very paranoid about bootlegging, but in my business, if I screwed one pop star I would be out of business! Anyone with any common sense would have realised that. I was friends with people like Mick Jagger and I had once worked with Jimi Hendrix. Would I jeopardise my reputation like that?”

  After Clifton completed the credits for the film the management took away the film and changed it. He claims they removed the names of all the people who had worked on editing, make-up and effects. Clifton was furious but Peter Grant simply saw this as another personal victory. “The other thing about the film was the debate we had with Frank Wells (president of Warner Brothers) over the titles,” recalls Clifton. “We wanted to bring in Po of Hipgnosis* to do them again. We had a big meeting with all the Warners big shots where Frank said something like, ‘We won’t run out on you Peter,’ and I replied, ‘I know, because I won’t let you get out of the fucking door.’ It got sorted out in the end.”

  When the film was still only semi-complete it had to be shown to Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, for his approv
al, before it could be sold to Warner Bros for distribution. This prompted an episode which Peter Clifton now regards as his favourite Peter Grant story. “The film was only just finished, but nobody had seen it, not even the band. We had to show it to Ahmet and he was the one person that Peter really looked up to. Peter arranged a screening at the MGM Grand room in New York, which had a dozen huge leather seats.

  “We waited until midnight before Peter gave the go-ahead for the screening. Ahmet had come from his wife’s birthday party, which was why he couldn’t make it until midnight. We hit the screening room at half past twelve and Ahmet arrived in his Rolls-Royce with his chauffeur and Peter and I came independently in two limousines. So we had two limos and a white Rolls-Royce waiting outside. We screened the film and it was very scratchy, no titles – it was hard work. By the time it was finished it was three o’clock in the morning and everyone was very tired.

  “For Peter, it was like his first day at school. He was really sharp and cooking. Ahmet, of course, had fallen asleep several times during the movie. He woke up at the end and said to Peter, ‘Who was that guy on the horse?’ Peter was so shocked by this, because if the screening didn’t go well, this was the end of the movie. If Ahmet didn’t like it the movie was over. That’s what we always understood. So Peter just got up, turned on his heels and walked out of the door. Ahmet looked at me beseechingly: ‘What have I said?’