(1968–1969)
For all of Norrie Paramor’s nomenclatural trickery, there never was a distinct Birmingham sound, even early on. Unlike Liverpool, where most of the new talent either recorded songs written by the Beatles or were handled by their manager Brian Epstein, the Birmingham scene never came wholly under the sway of any single influence. At least in musical terms. But one man could be said to have dominated the city’s musical aspirations, to the point where he sometimes felt synonymous with the scene: a former merchant seaman turned outrageous publicity hound named Tony Secunda.
Through the 1960s, as manager of first the Moody Blues (as they topped the chart with “Go Now”) and then the Move (with a string of hits beginning in early 1967), Brummie bands both, Secunda was the Black Country’s link to the London music industry. Especially since his taste for wild promotional stunts, and his ability to pull them off whatever the cost, ensured that neither he nor his charges were ever far from the headlines.
True, his activities could occasionally backfire, and do so with spectacular results. Secunda’s relationship with the Move ended especially acrimoniously, after he circulated promotional postcards for the band suggesting that the then–Prime Minister was having an affair with his personal secretary. Which, it turned out, he was, but Secunda had no proof. Royalties for the band’s latest single were confiscated in perpetuity, the Move moved away, and Secunda turned his attentions elsewhere in the city.
Before that happened, however (and even after, for Secunda’s career only continued its meteoric rise, to embrace Procol Harum, T Rex, Steeleye Span, Motörhead, and even Paul McCartney’s Wings), Secunda’s name and reputation hung over the Birmingham scene like a second sky. And an ear that was permanently pressed to the ground soon got wind of the Band of Joy.
Interviewed for his autobiography in the early 1990s (a project that was tragically derailed by his death in 1995), Secunda recalled first seeing Plant somewhere around 1966: “Because it was impossible not to see him. Every show he was at, he’d be the one at the front pestering the band to let him join them onstage, whether they knew who he was or not.”
In fact, that was one of the qualities that turned Secunda away from seeking a formal introduction. “He was like a big bouncy puppy dog—no direction, no discipline, and no loyalty either. He was a bit like Rod Stewart in that respect—no matter what he had, he always wanted more, and word got around. He was a great singer, but he’d only be your singer until something else came along.”
But Trevor Burton, the Move bassist whose opinion Secunda always listened to, played him the Band of Joy demo, and something about it tweaked his attention. “It was the singing. I knew he was a great singer, and if there’d be any market for cover bands at that time, they would have been great. So Denny [business partner Cordell] and I called them down to London for a meeting, and to see what else they could offer.”
Plant and Kevyn Gammond alone made the journey, hitchhiking to London where they were booked into the Madison Hotel, a none-too-salubrious step-up from a fleapit located close to Secunda’s office.
The following day at the Marquee Studios, the pair was sat down at a table and told to write a song. Cordell helped them demo it, and that was it. The pair hitched back to the midlands, and they never heard from Secunda again. Their new demo, he would recall, was “as bad as their old demo. There was nothing there for us, even though we still liked Robert’s voice. So I started putting the word around that there was this terrific singer cooling his heels in the midlands, and if any band needed a vocalist, they should go take a look at him.”
One of the people he mentioned this to was Jimmy Page.
Meanwhile, back home, Plant was reacquainting himself with Alexis Korner, the veteran bluesman who said hi to Band of Joy at the Speakeasy. Korner was playing the Cannon Hill Arts Center in a duo with drummer Steve Miller, and as they ran through their set, Plant in the audience started accompanying them on his omnipresent harp.
“Which took a lot of cheek,” Korner said years later, “because if Steve and I had wanted a harp player, we’d have brought our own along. Anyway, this kid asked if he could do a number with us onstage. I told him no, but said he should stop by the dressing room during the interval, and we talked then and I said okay, we’ll do some eight bars at the end of the set.”
Korner and Miller were impressed. “Okay, we said, maybe we do need a harp player, so I invited him back to London with us, told him he could crash on my couch, and we did some gigs as a trio and some recordings [“Operator” and “Steal Away”], and a couple of years later, once he had Zeppelin going, I recorded ‘Whole Lotta Love’ with my own band CCS, which did well. But it was always very casual. I think we talked about doing an album together, but there were always ideas going around, and he wanted to get home to his girlfriend, so that was it.”
At a loose end again, Plant found a new band to sing with. John Trickett’s band, the Answer, were playing a gig at Dudley Zoo, and after he and Maureen caught their set, he started hanging around with them more. At first it was just friendship; although he still had those three months left before the guillotine descended upon his rock ’n’ roll dreams, Plant had already started to acquaint himself with life away from the stage. Until the evening when Tommy Burton, the Answer’s regular singer, went down with a dose of food poisoning . . . and quickly found himself out of a job.
Plant seamlessly replaced him, first for the one show, and then forever; the luckless Burton’s departure was confirmed when his bandmates announced they were changing the band’s name, the musical equivalent of changing the locks when you kick someone out of the house. They became Obstweedle, a peculiar name for what keyboard player Billy Bonham (no relation)’s father insisted was a rather peculiar band. It was he who came up with the name: “obs” as a contraction of “obscure,” “tweedle” as a whimsical reference to Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland, as author and children’s book alike enjoyed a quite unexpected renaissance at the hands of sundry psychedelic acts. A band called Boeing Duveen had set Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” to music for a startling single; Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” of course, was Alice through and through; and when Plant introduced that song to the new band’s repertoire, even the dullest onlooker asking what “obstweedle” was supposed to mean must surely have seen the light.
Rehearsing at the Bloxwich pub that was also operated by Bonham’s parents, the Three Men in a Boat, Obstweedle played their first show in those same surroundings, on March 13, 1968. Like Band of Joy, their repertoire was largely covers, primarily songs that Plant liked to sing. Moby Grape, Buffalo Springfield, the Airplane of course. And around the local circuit they went, a twice-weekly residency at the pub they called home, and then anyplace else that would book them.
Compared to the circuit that Band of Joy had been playing, it was something of a step back, and Plant was never especially serious about the band’s chances of advancement. In fact, he would later condemn them as flattering to deceive, for compensating with bombast and visuals for all that they lacked in terms of genuine musical content. But it kept him busy, it was fun at the time, and it brought him to the West Midlands College of Education in Walsall, the night that Jimmy Page drove up there to see for himself the singer that people kept telling him about.
Tony Secunda was not Robert Plant’s only cheerleader, it seemed. Terry Reid, a singer in Mickie Most’s stable, was also a fan, having played some shows earlier in the year with Band of Joy opening for him. When he turned down the opportunity to join the band that Page was then putting together, he dropped Plant’s name as someone else he should check out.
Page’s dream, two years earlier, of forming a band called Lead Zeppelin had never been going to get off the ground. Neither Keith Moon nor John Entwistle, who also thought about joining, were ever likely to leave the Who, and Jeff Beck was still in the Yardbirds at the time. Then, when he did leave that band, it was Page who replaced him.
But now the Yardbirds were no more. After five years, four guitarists, and a fistful of legends, the most blueswailin’ birds of them all had combusted, shattered by the rigors of touring behind an album that they really didn’t believe in (Little Games) and disillusioned by their own utter apathy toward a follow-up.
Their last few years had been hectic, so much so that Page sometimes wondered why he’d ever volunteered to join. He’d been making a comfortable living as a session musician until then, playing on so many artists’ records that it could make your ears ache just counting them. When the Yardbirds originally asked him to come on board, following the departure of guitarist Eric Clapton, he refused, and suggested they invite his friend Jeff Beck instead.
They did, and Beck accepted, and that was when Page started to wonder if his initial response had maybe been a little too precipitous. The sight of Beck rejoicing in the sheer musical anarchy of the Yardbirds certainly gave Page pause for thought, and when bassist Paul Samwell-Smith quit the band in July 1966, Page stepped into the breach.
The fact that he had never really played bass in the past didn’t bother him, and the band weren’t in any position to say no. Their next show, at the London Marquee, was just days away, and there was a flood of gigs looming behind it. Even if the Yardbirds did intend seeking out that promised replacement, they would never have time to do so. Instead, rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja switched to bass, and suddenly the Yardbirds had two lead guitarists, a frontline of such scintillating magnificence that there was no way it could survive. The new-look Yardbirds cut one single together, then Beck quit and Page was on his own. No way could he leave them now.
A change of management saw the Yardbirds brought into pop impresario Mickie Most’s empire, and informed in no uncertain terms that Most was in the business of making hits, and the poppier the better.
At first, the Yardbirds thought he was kidding. For the past three years they’d ranked among the most adventurous and experimental rock bands in the land, at least among those who were also having hits. But then they heard what Most had wrung out of Jeff Beck, the bubblegum perfection of “Hi Ho Silver Lining.” So they did what they were told, and Most was granted his wish. Although his work with the Yardbirds—the Little Games album and a clutch of decidedly un-Yardbirds-like singles—never recaptured the band’s glory days, the band remained a fair attraction in the United States. But now it was all over. The Yardbirds’ final recording session in New York on June 2, 1968, was a disaster, even saw them falter when presented with Page’s “My Baby,” a song that would soon be developing into the classic “Tangerine.” Three days later, when the group played their last-ever American show, in Alabama, the musicians already knew that the clutch of British dates that awaited them upon their return home would be the end.
The Yardbirds played what was intended to be their last-ever concert on July 8, 1968, at Luton Technical College. Somehow, however, it seemed that news of the group’s final demise had not quite taken root in management’s mind. Even as the band was preparing to deliver their final performance, Most’s right-hand man Peter Grant was arranging a Scandinavian tour for September, with further dates in Japan, Australia, and the USA just awaiting his final confirmation.
Keith Relf and Jim McCarty shrugged. Their own project, Together, was already underway; the day before the Luton show, in fact, they linked up with Nicky Hopkins, Tony Meehan, folk guitarist Jon Mark, and producer Paul Samwell-Smith to begin work on the new group’s debut single. As far as they were concerned, there was no going back.
Jimmy Page and Chris Dreja were less dismissive. Neither had given much thought to precisely what they intended doing next, beyond the vague possibility of trying to start up a new band together. Advising Grant only to revise the Scandinavian contract somehow, to make it apparent that the Yardbirds themselves would not be touring (Grant opted to rename the band the New Yardbirds), they began casting around for suitable members, beginning with a singer to succeed Keith Relf.
Page’s first choice was Terry Reid, whose solo career under Mickie Most’s auspices had never achieved the breakthrough it deserved. Critically, Reid was regarded as among the greatest vocalists around, and the two albums he’d cut with the producer contained some of the most far-sighted music of Most’s entire career, But the public simply wasn’t biting . . . yet.
Reid remained convinced that he was on the right track, though, and he turned Page’s invitation down. But when he echoed Tony Secunda and recommended Robert Plant, Page, Dreja, and Peter Grant agreed it was time to head north. There, within the distinctly unglamorous surroundings of a Birmingham teacher-training college, on July 20, 1968, Page caught sight for the first time of Robert Plant, a singer who was so good that Page was convinced there had to be something very wrong with him as a person. Nobody this great could still be laboring in the obscurity of a band called Obstweedle.
Page decided to take a chance, however, and, no sooner had Plant accepted the awestricken trio’s offer than he was pushing forth one of his own friends to make up the numbers: John Bonham, now touring the country for £40 a night in Tim Rose’s group. Again, Page had already been turned down by the drummer he first dreamed of playing with, Procol Harum’s BJ Wilson. Maybe he should give Bonham a listen.
Just days after his own first meeting with Page, Plant was accompanying him to another show, this time to see John Bonham playing behind Tim Rose. Again Page was impressed, a lot more so than Bonham was when he heard Page’s plans. They were all up in the air, after all, based on assumption and ambition, whereas Bonham had a steady gig and a two-year-old son, Jason, to think about. Only when Peter Grant weighed in, offering Bonham the princely salary of £35 a week, did the drummer agree to give it a go, and so the pair reported for the new band’s first rehearsal in the basement beneath a friendly London record store.
“We were dealing from the same pack of cards,” Plant said of Page in 2006 in Rolling Stone. “You can smell when people . . . had their doors opened a little wider than most, and you could feel that was the deal with Jimmy. His ability to absorb things and the way he carried himself was far more cerebral than anything I’d come across before, and I was so very impressed.”
Talking with journalist Matt Snow of Mojo in 2007, Plant described the Band of Joy as “the real schooling for Bonzo and myself,” in that it taught them how to take what others might regard as conventional pop music, and break it down, transform it into something new. A direction in which Page, with the Yardbirds, had also been journeying, although the pair did not realize that. “All we knew of the Yardbirds was the occasional single recorded by Mickie Most. Their profile by then was more American than English, so we didn’t have very much idea of this mystery guitarist. But when we started playing with him, we knew it was a crucial combination.”
Page already knew what he wanted from the band. Cream, the leviathan that effectively blueprinted the blues as a dense, deafening roar, were on the way out—they would announce their breakup early the following year. The Jeff Beck Group, revolving around an axis of Beck, singer Rod Stewart and bassist Ron Wood, were blazing, but they were equally unstable, torn between their guitarist’s sharp-tempered restlessness and the ubiquitous Mickie Most’s insistence that they ought to be making pop singles.
If a group would rise up in the footprints of them both, but do so without any of the flaws that were eating away at them, with everybody pulling for the same common cause, Page—and Grant, installed as the band’s manager—believed they would clean up.
In early August, the New Yardbirds—Page, Dreja, Plant, and Bonham—undertook their first rehearsal, running through a clutch of old Yardbirds songs, beginning with the highly appropriate “The Train Kept A-Rollin’.” But though the afternoon went well and the band was sounding good, Chris Dreja knew it wasn’t for him. His heart just wasn’t in it; he simply didn’t have the energy to be starting a new band all over again. “I wanted to be independent, and not have to rely on loonies.” He wasn’t sure how he expected the others to react to the news; the Scandinavian tour, after all, was just six weeks away. But when he told Page of his decision, it turned out that he needn’t have worried. Page already had a replacement lined up.
Like Page, John Paul Jones made his living, and had amassed a massive reputation, on the session circuit. He and Page regularly ran into one another in that world, and the guitarist was still in shock as he delivered the news to Dreja, as he told the San Antonio Light in 1970: “John Paul Jones is unquestionably an incredible arranger and musician—he didn’t need me for a job.”
If Page was astounded by Jones’s enthusiasm for a new, unknown band, however, he readily understood his reasons. Like Page in the years before he joined the Yardbirds, Jones had spent his entire career playing what other people told him to. It was time to begin expressing himself, “and he thought we might be able to do it together. He had a proper musical training, and he had quite brilliant ideas. I jumped at the chance of getting him.”
Page did not, of course, get everything his own way. Casting around for other musicians, he invited pianist Nicky Hopkins, another longstanding veteran of the UK sessions scene. Hopkins turned him down flat. “I was tempted, but only inasmuch as it was work. It sounds odd to say it, but I couldn’t see a future in it. John [Paul Jones] would still play keyboards in the studio, the whole band was writing, John and Jimmy were both great at arranging. Really, what would be left for me to do?”
Grant wrangled the group a short lease on a rehearsal room in central London, beneath a record store on Gerard Street in Soho, while Plant moved into Page’s house in the village of Pangbourne, surrounded by all the luxuries that a decade in session work had afforded him. It was Plant’s first true taste of the lifestyle that, in just a few short years, rock ’n’ roll music had made possible, one that would have been unimaginable to his parents’ generation. Antiques bedecked the rooms, a Bentley purred in the driveway; even the neighbors were cut from the most refined cloth. And the band they had created was sounding better every day. The New Yardbirds were complete, and there wasn’t a single “old” Yardbird in sight. Even before his once-fateful twentieth birthday dawned, Plant was able to turn to his bride-to-be and tell her, “I think we should give it a few more years.”
Not that witnesses to their first shows, a half-dozen through Denmark and Sweden, seemed to care about that. Although the group was absolutely unknown and untried, they nevertheless left nobody in any doubt as to their awesome potential. Photographer Jorgen Angel, a seventeen-year-old student from Copenhagen, caught the band’s opening night—September 14, 1968—and spoke for many in the club when he recalled:
As for these “New Yardbirds,” I didn’t expect much. Not long before the concert actually began, there were still a lot of talking on whether they were going to play under the name of “The Yardbirds” or under the name of “The New Yardbirds,” and how people would react. Because in the club magazine, they were billed as “The Yardbirds,” with a photo of the Yardbirds, not of Bonham, Plant, Page, and John Paul Jones.
Plus, in these days, when you saw a band turning up with the word new in its name, you knew that something was murky, that it wasn’t the same group anymore. Can you imagine a group called “The New Beatles”? Of course not, you would be disappointed even before hearing a single note. So before these New Yardbirds even went on stage, I remember I was annoyed. I wanted “the real thing.” But as soon as they began to play, I was hooked!
In keeping with their name, the group’s repertoire was firmly grounded in a variation on the Yardbirds’ final set, although that in itself offered plenty of clues as to the new group’s future. The showcase “Dazed and Confused” was already in place, albeit under the alternate title of “I’m Confused,” while the band members’ shared love of blues introduced “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” and “How Many More Times” to the brew.
Casting around further, Page seized upon the Stax churner “The Hunter,” a delirious standout in the live repertoire of that most glorious of all London blues bands, Paul Rodgers and Paul Kossoff’s Free (the two bands, Free and the Yardbirds, shared the same publicist, the veteran Bill Harry). Every one of these numbers would be included on the band’s debut album, a disc that would be recorded with as much haste as the quartet could muster—as fast, in fact, as the band made the decision to change their name. Maybe (with just a minor change in the spelling) the Led Zeppelin could take flight after all?
The New Yardbirds’ final Scandinavian date was September 23; Led Zeppelin’s maiden UK tour was to kick off at the Surrey University on October 15. That, then, was the window during which the band would record their debut album, moving into Olympic Studios to bang down the live set they’d just tweaked to perfection.
“I Can’t Quit You Baby,” “How Many More Times,” “Dazed and Confused,” the newly composed “Communication Breakdown,” the acoustic instrumental “Black Mountain Side”—within no more than thirty-six hours (and according to Page, as few as fifteen), Led Zeppelin I was complete. Peter Grant did the rest, convincing Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records that he could not afford to pass up the band—and proving his own faith by setting up Led Zeppelin’s first American tour before they’d even played more than handful of shows in Britain.
With Led Zeppelin I set for release in January 1969, Zeppelin would commence their assault on the US concert circuit by opening for the Vanilla Fudge in Denver on December 26, 1968, before launching into a cross-country tour of venues handpicked by Grant from his experiences road-managing the Jeff Beck Group—five nights at the Whiskey in LA, four at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, three at the Boston Tea Party. The Beck tours had introduced him to the cities that were interested in the kind of music that both bands played; now he was out to consolidate that interest and transform it into devotion.
In Britain, on the other hand, Led Zeppelin were still fulfilling the kinds of engagements that Grant had been landing for the Yardbirds—the Marquee, various universities, the Bristol Boxing Club, the Bath Pavilion, and deep into the provinces.
Already the band’s stock was rising. Journalist Mick Farren, frontman at that time with the Deviants, recalled opening for the newcomers at the Roundhouse in London, and again a few weeks later “somewhere in the west country. We’d . . . met Plant a number of times previously when we’d worked with his earlier group, Band of Joy, and they’d been opening for us.” Now, however, “the entire music industry was watching to see whether LZ was actually going to take off, ad promoters were hedging their bets and printing the words ‘ex-Yardbirds’ on the posters and press announcements almost as large as the name of the band.”
Audiences were not necessarily convinced. The Deviants had already roused the locals into a state of near riot even before Led Zeppelin came on, much to Bonham’s amusement. “You must have been fucking terrible,” he told them as they staggered into the dressing room.
He spoke too soon. The headliners were just a song and a half into their own set, with a phalanx of police stationed between them and the crowd, when the near riot became a full one. “[The audience] couldn’t mount a frontal assault on the stage, so they hurled missiles,” Farren recalled. “This was more than enough for Led Zeppelin, who beat a hasty retreat.
“Now it was our turn to do the laughing. ‘You must have been fucking terrible.’”
Recovering their poise, the band journeyed on, and on December 13, they arrived at the Bridge Country Club in Canterbury. Which is where Jeff Beck caught his own first in-concert glimpse of the burgeoning juggernaut that was Led Zeppelin.
It was not a representative show, or so Page told his distinguished visitor later. “Things went slightly wrong,” Beck laughed, including the unscheduled explosion of Page’s amplifier. Beck recalled, “I went ‘What’s up with that, Jim?’ and then I realized it was my amp, because my roadie had moonlighted and rented Jimmy my equipment. And he’d changed the impedance on the back, so it sounded like a pile of shit.” Nevertheless, after weeks of hearing the grapevine (or at least, Peter Grant) extolling the virtues of Led Zeppelin, Beck finally understood what the fuss was all about.
“I could see the potential. It was just amazing, blew the house down, blew everybody away.” Everything about the group was tailored for success, at least when he compared them with his ragtag little band. “[They] had a better-looking lead singer . . . he had golden curly locks and a bare chest, and the girls fell in love with him. They also had Bonzo on drums, creating all sorts of pandemonium.”
It was “a much better package than I had,” and Beck freely admitted, “I was blind jealous, [although] maybe jealousy is the wrong word, because it’s a negative emotion. But envy and frustration all rolled into one, because . . .
I couldn’t [even] find a drummer or a singer who wanted to experiment and do outrageous stuff. I wanted to break barriers and you need people around you to help you do that. And money! I couldn’t even spring for a session, let alone keep them all on retainer. So obviously they did better.”
Led Zeppelin I was issued on schedule, in January 1969, and immediately set about drawing listeners in one of two directions. Either it was, as Rolling Stone’s John Mendelsohn pointed out, no more than an inferior twin of the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth, offering “little that . . . [they] didn’t say as well or better three months ago,” or, as the bible of the British underground Oz enthused, it was one of those rare LPs that so defy “immediate classification or description, simply because [they are] so obviously a turning point in rock.”
Both opinions are valid. The patent lifting of a version of “You Shook Me” was only the first of the debts that Led Zeppelin I owed to Truth. Elsewhere, “Black Mountain Side” echoed the acoustic interlude offered by “Greensleeves,” while the very sound of the two albums posited heavy blues extremes toward which no other act of the time dared to journey. Zeppelin even borrowed Beck’s typographer for the occasion: Royal College of Art student George Hardie worked with photographer Stephen Goldblatt on the Truth sleeve, and was rewarded with an introduction to Peter Grant. He went on to design the sleeve to Led Zeppelin I.
For all these similarities, coincidences, and borrowings, however, Beck is honest in his assessment of the two records. “The thing with Truth was, it was never really developed. We had a sound, and it turned out to be a colossally influential one, but we weren’t interested in just making the same record again and again. Which means I’ve had to sit back here for the past thirty years, watching people perfect it, and when Led Zeppelin started doing huge concerts, I was sitting in my garage listening to the radio, and going, ‘What’s going on? I started this shit, and look at me!’”
Ultimately, what Led Zeppelin had that the Jeff Beck Group didn’t was vision. Even before he ever put his finger on a life beyond the Yardbirds, Jimmy Page knew that he would be in control of his destiny. “The one thing I was sure of was that I was going to produce the band myself, because I knew about the studio.” He told journalist Nick Kent, “I’d been an apprentice for years, and I’d discovered things that someone like Mickie [Most] didn’t have a clue even existed.”
Without even appearing to question the right, Led Zeppelin took absolute control of everything they did. Everything. Although Peter Grant still operated out of Most’s RAK Music Management offices on Oxford Street, and RAK financed the physical recording of Led Zeppelin I, it was clear from the outset that there was no room for Mickie Most in the new setup. And why, Most admitted later, should there be? Displaying every last ounce of the arrogance and self-confidence that both friends and enemies so admired him for, and a shameless ability to revise history, he threw his own opinion on Led Zeppelin into the same camp as the band’s detractors.
Yes, they were a great band; yes, they had some good ideas. But whatever Led Zeppelin might have achieved so far, he’d already been there, done that, and bought the souvenir T-shirt. “Truth was a forerunner to Led Zeppelin,” he declared. “A great album—which I made.”
Unfortunately, neither he nor the Beck Group were capable of topping it. Cosa Nostra Beck-Ola, the group’s second album, was an unfocused mess. Zeppelin, on the other hand, were going from strength to strength, juggernauting across the United States and not only taking everywhere by storm (because that’s a cliché that every band can lay claim to at one time or another) but actually writing their own history as they journeyed.
At the Fillmore East on January 31, Zeppelin’s performance was so intense, and the audience reaction so hysterical, that the headlining Iron Butterfly delayed their own onstage arrival by forty-five minutes in the hope that the crowd would calm down. They hoped in vain, and Led Zeppelin never went out as a support group again.
Their next UK tour in March 1969, a return visit to Scandinavia that same month, and another US outing, kicking off at the New York University Jazz festival on April 18, would see them headlining every venue they played. By the time their second album, the matter-of-factly titled Led Zeppelin II, was unveiled in October, there wasn’t a venue in the Western world that they couldn’t have filled. And that song would remain the same for the next ten years.