(1969)
Led Zeppelin was a democracy. All four members decided on the group’s direction; all (at the discretion of Peter Grant, of course) decided on its ambition. But there was one place where democracy was cast aside: in the studio.
As the most experienced musicians in the band, Page and Jones naturally assumed control of the recording process; they did so without even thinking about it. Any questions that their bandmates might have asked—“How do we do this” or “How did you do that”—one or the other would know the answer. If a procedure or process needed to be explained, it would be Page or Jones who did the explaining. A decade apiece spent working in every major studio in Britain had taught both of them all they needed to know, with Page automatically assuming the role of overall producer and Jones the unquestioned authority on arrangements. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the band,” Page admitted. “I knew precisely what I was after, and how to get it.”
Plus, he controlled the purse strings too, with Plant and Bonham still on a weekly wage and therefore forever aware that one word from Peter Grant could see either or both of them cut adrift. And already, both had too much to lose. Zeppelin received an unprecedented $200,000 advance from Atlantic Records—unprecedented, that is, for an unknown band—and both Plant and Bonham were promptly handed £3,000 apiece, to do with what they would. They bought matching gold Jaguars. For Plant, this went some way toward compensating him for missing his own wedding reception, as Zeppelin’s gig at the London Roundhouse pulled him away from the festivities, and for missing his first Christmas as a married man too. Zeppelin were off to America.
They flew into Los Angeles and booked into the Chateau Marmont in the company of Richard Cole, a roadie whom both Grant and Page knew from the final Yardbirds tour. It was he, more than their bandmates, who would be responsible for easing the new boys, Plant and Bonham, into the rhythm of life in America, acquainting them not only with the high life with which every touring rock band of the era was to become au fait, but also with the less salubrious aspects. Why they shouldn’t consider going out to a gig in that particular part of town. Why they could visit this record store here, but should probably avoid that one there.
Growing up in England, Plant had long since grown accustomed to being harangued on the streets for having long hair, to the point where he no longer thought anything of it. It was Cole’s responsibility to inform him that Americans often let their fists do the talking if they saw something they didn’t like. Their fists or worse.
Likewise the police. The old-fashioned British Bobby was already a thing of the past at home, as rumors flew of the police’s penchant for planting drugs on hapless hippies. American cops, however, didn’t have an especially warm and fuzzy reputation to shake off in the first place, and they could bang you up for a lot less than a few grams of suspicion.
Politically, America was at war with itself, as the conflict in Vietnam continued dividing society down every line it could, while poverty, race, and injustice all spewed their own bitter pills into the pot. The ensuing seismic splits shattered American society like so many dropped vases. But there was one thing that everybody seemed to agree on. Rock ’n’ roll, and the people who made it, was the scapegoat for almost all of the country’s ills. And for all Peter Grant’s bluster as he promoted the band around the USA, Led Zeppelin were not yet big enough that fame could offer them any protection whatsoever.
They would make friends, however, whose own reputation would serve them well. Bill Graham, the bearlike owner of the Fillmore in San Francisco, was one, his instant admiration for the group establishing him as the most prominent of the myriad cheerleaders they gathered on that first tour. He was by no means the only one, though, as word of their performances spread among promoters, audiences, and even other musicians, who suddenly found themselves dreading the call to take the stage in the wake of a Zep support slot and try to follow the barrage they laid down.
Compared with what the group would go on to accomplish onstage, those early shows were little more than competent blasts of the blues, interspersed with virtuoso elements that could bore as many people as they delighted (as many people took the drum solos enacted by bands throughout the first half of the ’70s as opportunities to head to the bar for a refill as actually sat and enjoyed them). And John Bonham’s displays were no exception. Guitar solos, too, could grow boring after a time, and some of Page’s did.
It was Plant, then, who captivated. Even before he ever set foot on a stage, he demanded attention with his very appearance. Now, honed by six years of stalking the tiniest stages in front of audiences whose only requirement, as they stood with their arms folded, staring fully at the stage, was to be impressed, he had become impressive.
He was shameless. Moves that he borrowed from every performer he’d ever admired—Elvis and Jagger, Daltrey and Relf—were regurgitated as though he had only just created them, and it was a mark of the aplomb with which he played the part that many onlookers actually agreed with the impression. They had never seen a frontman like him. Then he’d open his mouth to sing, and every other revelation was suddenly merely an appetizer.
Singers still sang in the ’60s. Even those vocalists whose lungs would become an object of wonder in later years—Roger Daltrey again, Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne—did so in the aftermath of Plant. Of contemporary rock ’n’ roll stars, only Arthur Brown, whose Crazy World scored the monster hit “Fire” in 1968 and did nothing else of commercial note thereafter, had truly harnessed the passion of the unbridled scream—not only while he was actually screaming, but elsewhere in his tone as well.
Track back in time, and sidestep genres as well, and James Brown and Little Richard had been doing a similar thing for years, taking notes and holding them long after mere mortals might have run out of breath. So neither Brown nor Plant were doing anything new. But genres were important now, as radio streamlined its Top 40 past into more specialized niches of individual taste and record stores started segregating sounds by their marketing. In the world of white rock ’n’ roll, which would soon become heavy rock, and then heavy metal, Robert Plant was unique. A man, as writer Nick Kent put it, “who preened and screamed out blood-curdling notes that seemed capable of sending [a] venue’s . . . architecture crashing down around us all in a heap of rubble like Joshua’s trumpet destroying the wall of Jericho.”
Peter Grant’s job, and Richard Cole’s too, was to convince the world that the rest of the band shared that quality. Not as musicians, not as a band, but as an entity. That Led Zeppelin was more than a band, they were hard news as well.
They started small, encouraging the musicians to make themselves seen and heard. They worked on Plant mostly, with Bonham by his side; the less outward-going Jones and Page were worked less, unless there was something extra-special going on.
Friendships should be cultivated, photos should be taken. A shot of Plant at the Whiskey with Janis Joplin or Grace Slick had far more value than a picture of the band onstage or hanging out together in front of a local landmark. In one photo, they were isolated, just another bunch of hairies. In the other, they were hobnobbing with the already-anointed royalty of rock. Gilt by association.
“What we did with Zeppelin,” Grant explained years later, “was no different to what the Colonel did with Elvis, or what [Tony] Defries would do with Bowie. We created a myth. Right from the beginning, when I was first talking to Jimmy, that was the idea.” They had watched past superstars rise and fall, and Cream and the Beck Group were just the most recent. They’d watched, and learned from their greatest mistake, which was the insistence that the stars did not want to be stars, that the fame that rose up to consume them was merely a by-product of their talent.
Led Zeppelin did not want that; they did not want to be known purely as a great band and then forgotten until the next tour rolled around. They wanted to epitomize a great band, to become the blueprint for every great band that came after them and a role model for all who followed them too. And it was no coincidence that Grant would reference Tony Defries, because the two had worked together briefly in the employ of Mickie Most—Grant as the legendary producer’s Mr. Fix-It, Defries as part of his legal team. They did not, at that time, discuss the future, because at that time there was no future to discuss. Grant had yet to branch into management, Defries had not even heard of David Bowie. But side by side regardless, the two men would erect monoliths set to bestride the 1970s, and they did so by making myths.
Until David Bowie came along in 1972, and Elvis aside, nobody had ever heard of a rock star employing a personal bodyguard. Bowie had one, a foreboding man-mountain named Stuart. Why? Because it would make people wonder why he required one.
Grant watched, and soon Zeppelin had their own private heavies—a mass of muscle that ultimately resolved itself, in 1977, in the form of John Bindon, a hard-man actor whose greatest gangster roles were drawn from his own past history as a gangster in real life. With exquisite serendipity, Defries had known Bindon back when they were teens.
Defries employed a gaggle of Warholian actors to act as Bowie’s promotional team, knowing that their natural gift for gossip would ensure that his name and his antics were always on the grapevine—and also that if his own antics did not measure up to their standards, they were more than capable of inventing some and spreading those tales instead. Grant engaged his own little coterie to serve the same function for Zeppelin: journalists who could be relied upon to make certain a story both spread and stick, road crew and assistants to deliver first-hand accounts, groupies who would be proud to document their dealings in superhuman stud-farm detail, and so on. It all cost money; of course it did. But Grant knew that if all his ducks were in place, Led Zeppelin would be making money. And a lot of it.
“It came down to keeping your ear to the ground,” Grant continued. “You’d hear such and such a band did this or that thing to a girl, or a venue, or a hotel suite, and before they got their story out to the public, or while it was still floating around as an unattributed rumor, we’d start the whisper that it was Zeppelin who did it. As long as it was outrageous, and as long as it sounded good.”
The Mudshark incident, for example: a willing groupie squirming bound and naked on the bed while her hosts, the Vanilla Fudge, fished for mudsharks from their window at Seattle’s Edgewater Inn. Or for red snappers. Or even for octopus and squid. And then introduced her to the curious fish. In very intimate ways.
Or maybe the girl was in the bathtub. And maybe it wasn’t Vanilla Fudge, but members of their support band, Led Zeppelin. Maybe the Fudge’s Mark Stein filmed the whole thing. Maybe he didn’t.
There’s a clutch of supposed eye-witness accounts, and not one of them agrees with the other. Frank Zappa even set the whole saga to music, and his version makes it clear that the Fudge were the dudes who did the deed. But it was Zeppelin’s legend that took the credit, and Zeppelin that reinforced it four years later when the band returned to that same hotel and were banned from ever staying there again after leaving their rooms strewn with dead, stinking fish, presumably to replace the furniture they’d thrown into the bay outside.
And as late as 2012, in a poem condemning the sexual depravity with which recent news sensations had revealed the show-biz ’70s to be rife, poet Heathcote Williams condemned Led Zeppelin for amusing themselves by “[tying] a red-haired teenage groupie to a bed” and doing unmentionable things to her with a red snapper.
Forty-three years on from the night in question, the story still had the capacity to shock and awe. Now, that is myth-making at its finest.
None of which is to suggest that, even as first-time visitors to the United States, the occasionally homesick youngsters were a bunch of shrinking violets. Indeed, according to the groupie grapevine, shrinkage was the last thing that Robert Plant ever worried about—and that despite him not even playing ball with the crown princesses of American groupiedom the night the legendary Plaster Casters came to call.
Their modus operandi was simple. To preserve, in plaster of Paris, a life-size, life-like representation of the sexual organs of visiting rock stars. A lot of rockers had succumbed to their blandishments, too, and even admired the castings of their contemporaries.
Not Robert Plant. Back in England, interviewed by the International Times, Plant confessed:
These two girls came into the room with a wooden case, suitably inscribed and all very ceremonious. All of a sudden, one of them starts to take her clothes off. She’s rather large, no doubt about it, and there she is, standing naked as the day she was born.
Then she covered herself with soap, cream doughnuts and whiskey, all rubbed in together, head to toe, and she’s this moving mountain of soapy flesh. At first, she dug it. But her friend, who come along for the ride, began trying to disappear under the bed. Eventually, she got into the shower, grabbed her clothes and split.
Nevertheless, anybody puzzling over Plant’s rechristening with the nickname “Percy” (and maybe doubting the later insistence that it was derived from his unwillingness to ever open his purse) needs look no further than a movie of the same name, released in the UK in 1971, detailing the none-too-unpleasant travails of a young man who underwent a penis transplant and found himself blessed with unslakeable lust.
Plant, at least, looked back on this first tour with just a hint of self-reproach. “I must have been pretty insecure to want to run around, pushing my chest out, pursing my lips and throwing my hair back like some West Midlands giraffe,” he told Q magazine in 1988. And insecurity can often lead to people either taking the credit for, or actually, physically, undertaking, actions and behavior that they might not want to tell their wives about.
But the fact remains, or so Grant confirmed:
Led Zeppelin were no worse behaved on tour than any other band at the time, and really didn’t do much that other groups would have considered out of the ordinary. I saw, or heard about, far worse things going on when Jimmy and I toured with the Yardbirds, and the same with Jeff Beck. Bad Company, the Pretty Things . . . if a girl, or girls, were up for it, there’s not many boys who’d turn them away.
Plus, you have to remember that Percy, Bonzo and Jonesy were all married men, and Jimmy might as well have been, because Charlotte [girlfriend Charlotte Martin] was always around. I’m not saying they didn’t misbehave. Just that a lot of the things people think they did . . . they didn’t.
Not so much Hammer of the Gods, then, as much as Floppy Rubber Mallet Such as Clowns Sometimes Have?
“Maybe. But even they can leave a bruise if they catch you correctly.”
If tales of Zeppelin’s superhuman debauchery may have been exaggerated by people whose job description included embroidering half truths into rock legend—and if a recitation of their purported misdeeds is interesting more because of who they were than what they actually did—those pertaining to the Zeppelin organization’s capacity for violence are somewhat less open to interpretation.
As an ex-wrestler himself, Grant was renowned for his ability to cow even the most recalcitrant promoter, and he purposefully staffed the band’s entourage with like-minded souls. John Bonham, too, had a ferocious appetite for destruction, coupled with a bottomless capacity for alcohol and a sense of fun that began at most people’s outer limits. When animal rights organizations rose to condemn Zeppelin after reports that a flock of geese had been assembled at a New York City hotel reception and then chased out onto the street where several were killed by the traffic, it was Bonham who had done the chasing. When some London record executives were found mummified in sticky tape and deposited in the middle of Oxford Street, it was Bonham who had wielded the tape gun.
But perhaps the story that best sums up Bonham was another recounted by Peter Grant: “We were at a party, and somebody came out with the [joke] about ‘What do you call a man who hangs with musicians . . . a drummer.’ Bonzo walked over, towering above this guy, and asked, ‘And what do you call a man who hangs with drummers?’ Then he just picked the guy up and swung him over the balcony, about twenty floors above the ground.” Grant laughed. “I never did hear the punchline, but I’m so glad the guy didn’t say ‘Let me go.’ Bonzo probably would have.”
For all the acclaim that awaited the live show, Led Zeppelin I did not receive an easy ride at the hands of the critics. Many regarded it as a pale imitation of the Beck album, released almost a full year earlier; others got their kicks from reading through the writing credits, then finding earlier versions of the songs that Led Zeppelin claimed were their own. Disputes and lawsuits dating from the band’s first few records were still being sorted out years, even decades, later, and some of them proved as difficult to unravel as any attempt to actually pigeonhole the album.
Blues consumed much of the disc. But folk, too, played its part in the record, and so did something approaching conventional pop, as “Communication Breakdown” rose out of its staccato-riff intro to become an apocalypse in under three minutes. All of which either thrilled or repulsed the critics who heard it, with many in the latter category even switching off the stereo long before they reached the album’s climax: two songs (although the credits listed just one) that remain the single, shining example on that first LP of all that Led Zeppelin would go onto create.
Albert King’s “The Hunter” was a recent addition to the bluesman’s own catalog; he cut it for the first time in 1967, but it immediately moved into Ike and Tina Turner’s repertoire, and also into that of the then-fledgling Free. Zeppelin took it too, jamming their own interpretation of Howling Wolf’s “How Many More [Years] Times” one night in the studio, and then slipping seamlessly into a few lines of “The Hunter” and sliding sweetly into overdrive.
There is no showboating, no grandstanding. No single instrument outplays any other, no ingredient is less focused than another. No matter which player you choose to focus your ears upon, he is unleashing his greatest performance ever. For some, it is Plant’s so-intuitive vocal, locating his true voice for the first time on the record. For others, it is the gymnastics turned by both Page and Jones. And for others, it is Bonham’s drums that raise “The Hunter” to glory, chasing the melody with such deliberate strength that the song still ranked among his very finest outings even during the band’s last days. And that was the spirit that they took onstage with them.
By Led Zeppelin’s own standards, they played good gigs and they played bad ones, nights when the equipment didn’t work correctly, or the venue’s acoustics seemed ranged against their sound, or maybe someone’s mind was elsewhere and a few cues were dropped or solos flew south. By their audience’s standards, however, enshrined as Zeppelin had been by the miasmic meanderings of so many of the era’s best bands—and even Vanilla Fudge, for all their bombast, were capable of some staggeringly inane slabs of noodle—they represented the return of rock to something approaching its earth-shattering, sense-crushing origin. At a time when the Who were dragging Tommy round the country, subverting their natural might and majesty for a collection of passages that only flared intermittently; with the Beatles broken and the Stones off the road; with the Dead drawing doodles and the Doors fast descending into more paunch than punch, Led Zeppelin arose from nowhere to slam a heavyweight fist into the belly of bland complacency. And if the critics didn’t get it . . . then who cares? When was the last time a critic paid for music anyway?
Back home, the International Times did understand, referring to the band as “the Archetypal rock supergroup,” and—even more importantly—one in which all four members were equal partners, both on stage and in the media. There was no single stand-out musician, no one player to whom the public made a singular bee-line. Ten Years After (Alvin Lee), Fleetwood Mac (Peter Green), and the Nice (Keith Emerson) all represented examples of that particular snakepit. Led Zeppelin would face no such crisis.
Work on Led Zeppelin’s second album began in Los Angeles in April 1969 and continued on over the remainder of the year, a far cry from the speed with which Led Zeppelin I was hammered down, but an unavoidable consequence of their workload. Off the road in the States, they were touring the UK; breaking from that circuit, they were back in the States. New material was still flowing, though, as Plant resurrected his old “Lemon Song” showstopper for an even more lasciviously pleading, dripping, slice of salacity; as “Heartbreaker” and “Thank You” swaggered into view; as the broad and so exquisitely landscaped “What Is and What Should Never Be” chased light and dark, quiescence and chaos, across the musical spectrum.
True, the freshness of ideas was certainly flagging by the time they came to add John Bonham’s “Moby Dick” drum solo to the running order, a workout that might indeed have been physically and technically brilliant but really is a drag to listen to more than once. But balancing that was another new song that, more than any other in sight, would guarantee Led Zeppelin II’s immortality—at the same time as not simply blueprinting the entire future history of Heavy Metal but also dispensing with any need for it to even have a history. “Whole Lotta Love” said it all in five minutes.
Across the first album, Plant had been constrained from taking any songwriting credits by his two-year-old contract with CBS. Freed from that now, his lyrical nous was spread across the disc, including several songs with very fixed eyes on his life outside the band: ”Thank You,” written for Maureen; “Ramble On,” with its blatant dedication to his beloved Lord of the Rings, name-checks for “the darkest depths of Mordor,” and “Gollum, and the evil one.” And “Whole Lotta Love,” infused not only by his pen but, when the band performed it live, by his love of so much other music, a showcase for stolen moments that ranged from “Boogie Mama” to Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.”
And while the critics again grumbled that the song was already remaining the same and Led Zeppelin II was mere lumpen idiocy playing to rock’s lowest common denominators, audiences positively went wild for it. Released in October 1969, it chased the Beatles’ latest up the chart and then knocked it off the top. A little more than a year later, Alexis Korner’s take on “Whole Lotta Love” was beginning a decade-long life as the theme to British TV’s Top of the Pops, the single-most influential music show of the age—and that despite Zeppelin never even releasing a single in Britain and thus removing themselves from the show’s catchment area. And across both the US and Europe, news that Led Zeppelin were flying overhead saw concert halls placed under hysterical siege.
Led Zeppelin I had subverted the blues, but largely remained within their parameters. Most listeners imagined that Led Zeppelin II would continue plying that same boisterous journey. Instead, the band had skewed off on a new route entirely, and produced a second record that in no way echoed their first. Which is a very clever trick if you can pull it off properly. And one that Robert Plant would not prove at all averse to repeating, twenty years on down the road.