PREFACE

In Through the Out Door: “The Biggest Unknown Group in the World …”

Led Zeppelin was unobtainable and unattainable, and we very seldom talked about it. Basically, the myth propagated itself.

—Robert Plant to the author, May 2003

On a white-hot morning in Twentynine Palms—the Mojave desert town name-checked on Robert Plant's 1993 album Fate of Nations—I can see a number of the strangely shaped Joshua trees that lend their name to the nearby national park, the same place where, on Cap Rock in 1969, Gram Parsons dropped acid with Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg.

Ever since Parsons OD'd and died in Joshua Tree itself—twenty-five miles east along Route 62—the whole area has become one of California's holy rock sites. So it's fitting that as I fill up my rental compact at a Twentynine Palms gas station, I hear the booming strains of a rock song approaching. Within seconds, I know it as a staple of classic-rock radio—an evergreen of easy-riding highway rock—and the pop snob in me groans. Pulling up next to me is a mirror-shaded dude astride a black beast of a motorcycle, its wheels flanked by vast speaker bins that punch out the song I know so well:

“Babe babe babe babe babe babe 'm bayeebee I'm gonna LEEEEAVE you …”

The owner of the song's strangulated male voice ain't joking, woman, he's really got to ramble—rather like this man in his sunglasses. The voice soundtracks the guy's chrome-horse freedom on a song recorded almost four decades ago, and he is making sure we all know it. I look at him and want to dismiss him as an idiot. He's at least as old as the song, and if he took the shades off, he might be old enough to have seen Led Zeppelin in their pomp, maybe at the L.A. Forum, possibly at the Long Beach Arena or the San Diego Sports Arena—the huge venues where the West was won. Perhaps he saw Zep's last, occluded U.S. show at the Oakland Coliseum in the summer of '77. Or he may only have seen the band in his mind, back when he was a beer-chuggin' adolescent spellbound by their satanic limey majesty, one of the vast legion of disciples who worshipped them as “your overlords.”

It doesn't really matter which it is, because I understand the mythic potency of the music that's blasting from his speakers. And slowly I start to see him, in all his delusions, as oddly heroic. Like Robert Plant on “Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You,” he's gotta keep moving, hitting the highway again, on to the next town and the next chick. Maybe he's heading east, farther into the empty Mojave, where he can “feel the heat of your desert heart” (“Twentynine Palms”), and then on to Arizona or New Mexico or just someplace where he can hole up and be free. Alternatively, he could be heading west to gaze out on the infinite Pacific and leave terra firma behind him. He could be a gung-ho libertarian, a man for whom “Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You” says, simply, “I have no responsibility to anyone except me.” Or he could just be a weekend warrior, escaping the deep dreariness of his nine-to-five life.

As the song's frenzied descending chords fade over Plant's frayed larynx, I silently bond with Mr. “Get the Led Out,” as I recall my own first exposure to the second track on Zeppelin's astounding debut album. (When I asked John Paul Jones which album he would play to someone who'd never heard the band, he said, “The first one…. It's all there, right from the word go.” I'm not sure he wasn't right.) I understand why this and other songs became battle cries for a lost generation of disowned teenagers searching for dark magic in their suburban shopping-mall lives. I understand how Zeppelin became a new Fab Four for the younger siblings who missed out on Beatlemania—and for whom the Rolling Stones were just too Côte d'Azur for their own good.

For what you hear on “Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You” and every great Zeppelin track is not just power—amplified aggression matched by priapic swagger—but yearning, journeying, questing for an ideal.

“There is a point in your life,” Chuck Klosterman wrote in Killing Yourself to Live, “when you hear songs like ‘The Ocean' and ‘Out on the Tiles' and ‘Kashmir,' and you suddenly find yourself feeling like these songs are actively making you into the person you want to be. It does not matter if you've heard those songs a hundred times and felt nothing in the past, and it does not matter if you don't normally like rock 'n' roll and just happened to overhear it in somebody else's dorm room. We all still meet at the same vortex: for whatever the reason, there is a point in the male maturation process when the music of Led Zeppelin sounds like the perfect actualisation of the perfectly cool you.” For the scurrilous Svengali Kim Fowley, who consorted with them in their Hyatt House heyday, Led Zeppelin were both “dangerous” and “spiritual”—and you couldn't have one without the other. Another way of saying that is to resort to hoary metaphors of light and dark, good and evil. Certainly, it's difficult to talk of Zeppelin and not speak of evil; many of those interviewed for this oral history do just that. And while it's too easy to identify Robert Plant and John Paul Jones with “the light” and Jimmy Page and John Bonham (and Peter Grant and Richard Cole, et al.) with “the dark,” the occult appeal of Page as a guitar magus steeped in the nefarious teachings of Aleister Crowley remains central to Zeppelin's appeal to adolescents as they strive to create identities for themselves in a world that never recovered from the failure of America's hippie dream.

“Led Zeppelin always drew a difficult element,” reflected the late Bill Graham, the pugnacious San Francisco promoter who became their inadvertent nemesis in Oakland. “A lot of male aggression came along with their shows. This was during the warp of the '70s, which was a very strange era. It was anarchy without a cause.” “By 1975, ZoSo was painted or carved on every static thing rocker kids could find,” wrote the sociologist Dr. Donna Gaines. “It had become a unifying symbol for America's suburban adolescents. The children of ZoSo are Zep's legacy. Mostly white males, nonaffluent American kids mixing up the old-school prole(tariat) values of their parents, mass culture, pagan yearnings and '60s hedonism.” Yet the resonance of Zeppelin's music goes way beyond acne'd initiation rites; otherwise we'd be talking about them today as we talk about (or don't talk about) Kiss or Peter Frampton or Grand Funk Railroad. The reason my biker in Twentynine Palms is blasting “Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You” from his roadhog bins after all those years is because Led Zeppelin still speaks to him of danger and spirituality, darkness and light, power and beauty; because their albums—at least, up to and including 1975's Physical Graffiti—still sound so mighty and so sensual. Because they locked together tighter than any other rock unit in history. Because Jimmy Page wrote the most crunchingly powerful riffs ever fashioned by an electric guitarist. Because encoded within their metal blitzkrieg lies a deep funk that gives even James Brown a run for his money. Because their beauteous acoustic music is as sublime as their amplified anthems. Because live—as the countless Zep bootlegs attest—they took “How Many More Times,” “Dazed and Confused,” “No Quarter,” and “In My Time of Dying” into new dimensions of giddy improvisation. Because John Bonham did things on his drum kit that confound the ear to this day. Because—even when his lyrics smacked of ethereal piffle—Robert Plant possessed the most frighteningly exciting hard-rock voice ever captured on tape, a bloodcurdling fusion of Janis Joplin and Family's Roger Chapman.

Also because of the dizzying diversity of styles and moods the band mastered: dense Chicago blues (“You Shook Me,” “I Can't Quit You, Baby,” “The Lemon Song,” “The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair”); metallic funk (“Whole Lotta Love,” “Bring It on Home,” “Immigrant Song,” “The Ocean,” “Custard Pie,” “The Wanton Song,” “Nobody's Fault but Mine,” “For Your Life”); kinetic folk-rock (“Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You,” “Ramble On,” “Gallows Pole,” “The Battle of Evermore,” “Over the Hills and Far Away,” “Poor Tom”); hyper-prog bombast (“The Song Remains the Same,” “No Quarter,” “In the Light,” “Ten Years Gone,” “Achilles' Last Stand,” “Carouselambra”); unplugged pastoral (“That's the Way,” “Bron-yr-Aur,” “Going to California,” “Black Country Woman,” the first half of “Stairway to Heaven”); headbanger raunch (“Heartbreaker,” “Sick Again”); trebly Big Star swagger (“Dancing Days,” “Houses of the Holy”); swampy Delta dread (“Hats Off to Harper,” “Black Dog,” “When the Levee Breaks,” “In My Time of Dying”); Motor City protopunk (“Communication Breakdown”); eerie Orientalism (“Friends,” “Four Sticks,” “Kashmir”); searing blues balladry (“Since I've Been Loving You,” “Tea for One”); and retro rock 'n' roll (“Rock and Roll,” “Boogie with Stu,” the numerous live covers of Elvis, Eddie Cochran, et al.) … almost all of which I'd put up there with the best of Elvis/Dylan/Beatles/Stones/Hendrix/Young/Nirvana/Radiohead and any other rock act from the last half-century.

Oh, and because all those dumb rock critics just didn't get it.

“It's remarkable that we kept it going for as many records as we did,” Plant told Steven Rosen in 1986. “Really, there wasn't one record that had anything to do with the one before it. And that's a great credit when there are so many artists who will unconsciously rest on their laurels and say, ‘This is it, this is the way it must be.' Complacent? No.” Beyond this is the mythology itself, the shaping of Zeppelin by not just its members but by Grant and Cole and Atlantic Records and lawyer Steve Weiss and agent Frank Barsalona and all of the underage groupies and grizzled roadies who served the band. Many of these people finally get to have their say in this book. All contribute to a narrative—a rise-and-fall-and-resurrection—the scale of which we will never experience again in our lifetimes.

“As the years go on, it's become a little easier to talk about this group,” says Sam Aizer, who worked for Zeppelin's Swan Song label in New York. “For a long time they had such a hold on the people they worked with that no one ever wanted to say anything. It was almost like a secret society.”

• • •

“Those were the days,” Robert Plant says with a big wry smile, “but these are the days …”

I am standing backstage at the Anselmo Valencia Amphitheater in Tucson, Arizona, when the lion-maned, tennis-muscled frontman of the Band of Joy beckons me over to join the gaggle of friends that invariably surrounds him after shows.

Plant knows why I am here: he knows I haven't flown from L.A. to Tucson simply to see him perform with Buddy Miller, Patty Griffin—soon to become the latest of his many inamoratas—and the other Nashville-based players who helped him make Band of Joy, the follow-up to the three-million-selling Raising Sand.

“How on earth did you find John Crutchley?!” Robert says in the semigentrified Black Country tones that have barely changed since he did his first interviews as the nineteen-year-old frontman of Jimmy Page's new band in 1968. Crutchley, one of the sweetest people on God's earth, played guitar in Listen, the mod-era R&B band that provided Plant with his first recording opportunity. Like many from Robert's past, he remains in touch with his former bandmate and still talks of him as if he were just another chum from the old Black Country days.

Plant may publicly disparage retromania—specifically, the unending classic-rock fixation with Zeppelin stories and tropes—but secretly he's as nostalgic as the next man. Holding court on his tour bus and then in Tucson's venerable Mission-style Arizona Inn, he is screamingly funny about the Black Country customs that have brought him so much joy during his sixty-three years. (As he remarked to me in Birmingham in 2003, “The whole deal was that I didn't go to L.A. or Virginia Water or wherever it might be …”)

Regaling the assembled company—which includes Miller, Griffin, his Welsh personal assistant Nicola Powell, and former Ensign Records boss Nigel Grainge—with descriptions of the old Bull and Bladder in Brierley Hill, a pub “where the women played darts with six-inch nails,” he has us all convulsed with laughter. And the more we howl, the more he warms to his themes, telling tales of John Bonham that sorely tempt me to reach inside my shoulder bag and surreptitiously press the “on” button of my Olympus digital recorder.

“Bonzo and I used to called John Paul ‘Stanley,' ” he informs us at one point. “Of course, he didn't think it was funny, because Capricorns don't have any sense of humor.” The line is spoken like the true Leo that Plant is—and like a man who knows full well that there were two Capricorns in Led Zeppelin.

After interspersing two hours of Zep-related tales—one about the fundamentalist Christian owner of a Texas ranch where the band had decided to entertain the infamous “Butter Queen” and her attendant groupies in the swimming pool; another about driving up the Pacific Coast Highway at fifteen miles per hour, so wired on cocaine he thought he was doing seventy and wondered why he was being overtaken by blue-rinsed septuagenarians—with discursions on everything from Joe Meek B-sides to Edward the First's imposition of English rule on Wales in the thirteenth century, Plant decides to hit the hay.

“Night-night,” he says as he grasps my hand with a leonine paw. “See you in the Bull and Bladder!”

• • •

I catch sight of Led Zeppelin's other Capricorn across the crowded launch party for his friend Gary Kemp's autobiography in London. By one of those odd but meaningless coincidences, I have this very afternoon finished a proposal for a new book about Jimmy Page's old band and can't resist telling him as much. He is friendly enough, twinkly smiles lighting up his flat, almost oriental face. The undyed hair is so much better than the shoe-polish look he was sporting when I interviewed him in Covent Garden six years ago. I seize the moment and ask whether he himself is currently contemplating any kind of autobiography. Might he be interested in collaborating on such a book?

I know enough about Page to realize it's a nonstarter, but he surprises me by extracting an ancient Nokia phone from his pocket and taking my number. He surprises me even more by calling the next day and summoning me to the Tower House, his fantastical residence in Holland Park.

For any Zeppelin fan out there thinking, “This story cannot have a happy ending,” prepare not to be disappointed. A few weeks later, after a rambling and inconclusive conversation with Page in the nondescript antechamber that sits above the Tower House's garage-cum-granny-flat, his friend the photographer Ross Halfin tells me in a faintly sneering voice, “You ain't got a hope in hell of doing a book with Jimmy. And if you're wondering why he agreed to meet with you, it was for one reason only: to get all the information he could possibly get out of you.”

Was I crestfallen by Halfin's candor? No. Brusque though Ross is, he wasn't trying to be unkind. Would it have been worth ghosting Page's memoirs? Almost certainly not: Halfin himself told me that when he helped with captions for the guitarist's limited-edition coffee-table book of photographs (which Page had failed to even mention to me), its subject snapped at him when asked for the time and place of one particular image. Apparently, his exact words were: “Why do you need to know?”

“Pagey liked the idea of being considered a man of mystery,” Robert Plant told Mat Snow in 1985. “He really should have been a San Francisco version of Simon Templar, hiding in shadows and peeping round corners. He got some kind of enjoyment out of people having the wrong impression of him. He's a very meek guy, shy to the point where sometimes it's uncomfortable. But he let it all go on, and it's his choice whether it all continues. It's not up to me to start saying the guy plays cricket.”

The many who've fallen foul of Page over the years—usually through mildly paranoid misunderstandings—will be unsurprised to learn that subsequent mention of my name propelled him into minor furies, reportedly because he believed I was telling prospective interviewees that he'd given my book his blessing, something that would have been as stupid as it was dishonest. I never heard from Jimmy again and so set out on the trail of the truth about Led Zeppelin, once described by the late Ahmet Ertegun—their great champion and mentor at Atlantic Records—as “the biggest unknown group in the world.” I was determined to get away from glorifying tales of mudsharks and Riot House mayhem (though you will find plenty of hair-raising stories in these pages). I was more interested in the context from which Zeppelin sprung and in the apparatus around them: the “power” they wielded and how it synced with the might of the music they made. As Erik Davis wrote in his erudite study of their untitled fourth album, “The enjoyment that Led Zeppelin has given to many of us is partly a function of our fantasies about their own engorged enjoyment of the world.”

“Rock on and thanks …” The fourth Zeppelin album, signed by Page on April 17, 2003.

To that extent, Led Zeppelin is as much about Peter Grant, Richard Cole, and others as it is about Zeppelin themselves. The more one learns about the band, the more symbiotic the relationship between Zep and their henchmen becomes. Is it conceivable that Grant himself was the giant inflatable airship that gave the group its name? His own personal tragedy of intimidation, greed, and self-destruction—part Falstaff, part Charles Foster Kane—closely parallels the triumph and tragedy of Zeppelin itself, a morality tale that starts with thrilling promise, climaxes with intoxicating splendor, and declines into pitiful addiction and violence.

It's an old story, you might say, but one rarely told on such a scale of success or excess. For the better part of a decade, Led Zeppelin was the greatest group on the planet, greater than the Stones or anyone else, and eclipsing records set by Elvis and the Beatles. Artistically and financially, they were the apex of the genus Hard Rock in all its—to use Page's preferred term—“light and shade.”

Light and shade, good and evil: with Zeppelin, it all seems to circle back to that central dialectic. How did something born of such potent kismet in a basement rehearsal room in Soho turn into something so colossally callous—not to mention Spinal-Tap-esque?

And should it even matter when we have such astonishing music to remember them by?

—Barney Hoskyns, London