(1970–1971)
As Page and Plant pieced together the repertoire for their 1990s reunion with the whole of Led Zeppelin’s career at their fingertips, one album resurfaced again and again in their thoughts. Their fourth LP might, at the end of the day, have commanded the most revisions, as the set list settled into at least a vague simulacrum of Led Zeppelin’s Greatest Hits. But it was their third that provided both the most fascinating challenges, and the most rewarding reinterpretations.
“Immigrant Song,” “Gallows Pole,” “Tangerine,” “Friends,” “Hey Hey (What Can I Do)” (the non-album B-side to the “Immigrant Song” 45), “Celebration Day,” and a seldom-less-than-sense-shattering “Since I’ve Been Loving You” all peeled from the grooves of Led Zeppelin III as the tour progressed, some to become a constant presence in the repertoire, others to merely thrill the fortunates present on the night they were performed. Hearing the so-distinctive cry that ignites “Immigrant Song” rising over the crowds at the 1996 Glastonbury festival remains a precious memory for all who were there, no matter that it quickly resolved itself into a performance instead of “The Wanton Song.” For a few moments, the Vikings took the Summerlands.
Led Zeppelin III remains the band’s most divisive album, at least among their first half dozen. To the group members themselves, it was the acid test for all of the ambition that shaped Led Zeppelin in the first place. To their audience, and many of their critics, it was a brazen abrogation of all that they had promised.
Two albums to date had established the group among the most monstrous sounds around, with the occasional dip into calmer waters regarded as mere moments of contrast before the next heavy hitter crashed into earshot. Led Zeppelin III was to be all contrast. It was an album that would allow Plant to exercise his folkloric passions, and place his love of fantasy into soundscapes a little more appropriate than “Ramble On”; one that would permit Page to give vent to his folk music past, and remind people that not every session he played on in the ’60s was a rocking R&B song or play-by-numbers pop.
In the early 1960s, Plant was a huge Joan Baez fan, and he repaid her for a string of much-loved albums by revisiting her interpretation of “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” on Led Zeppelin I. Later in the decade, he was a part of the team that soundtracked Donovan’s rise to glory, often linking with John Paul Jones across the five albums that encapsulate the sheer magnificence of Donovan at his peak. Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow, Hurdy Gurdy Man, A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, and Barabajagal (the last powered also by two cuts recorded with the Jeff Beck Group) ache with echoes of traditional Celtic folk and lore, exquisitely redrafted through the fascinations of the Summer of Love. Donovan himself admits, “I wrote my best songs in response to events around me. There was an entire generation looking for a spiritual path and my music responded to that. It worked like a soundtrack to that search.”
In many ways, the search had been called off, as the idealism of the ’60s shattered into the bitter factionalism of the decade thereafter. But Page could still conjure the sounds that accompanied it, and Plant—whose own lyrical ambitions far exceeded the “baby yeah ooh” simplicity of the average rock ’n’ roll chestbeater—still ached for a psychic return to the innocent passions of that era. Particularly once his next royalty check afforded him the luxury of buying Jennings Farm, the retreat in the hills of his Tolkien-tossed youth, where every sunrise broke like a new song over the horizon.
It was certainly a distant cry from the urban machinations that now propelled the Zeppelin. That first American tour with the Fudge was the last time they’d play second fiddle to anyone. Established now as headliners in their own right, and with Peter Grant’s insistence that they were the biggest band in the world finding less and less opposition every time he said it, Zeppelin itself became the madness that Plant needed to escape from.
Barely two years had passed since he walked the streets of Birmingham, London, Stourbridge, wherever, in complete and absolute anonymity. Now, even the glimpse of him in the window of a hotel or a dressing room drove crowds of waiting onlookers—and wherever Zeppelin went, there were always waiting onlookers—to paroxysms of excitement. And no matter how wild the dreams he had once entertained—of fame and fortune and instant recognition—the reality outstripped them a thousandfold.
He had never had problems making friends. Now he had hundreds and thousands of them, and most he had never even seen before. He’d never had difficulty meetings girls, either, but now they queued up to meet him. A successful West Coast lawyer today, “Lisa” was backstage for the band in Seattle in 1970, and she laughs as she remembers, “I’d have done anything to meet Robert”—before adding that she knew plenty of girls who had. “Done anything,” that is.
Which is the other thing to remember when considering the library full of stories pertaining to Led Zeppelin’s on-the-road debauchery: just how few of them actually mention the band members by name. It’s simply “Led Zeppelin did this, Led Zeppelin did that.” Reminding us that it’s not necessarily the musicians who have the wildest fun. It’s the roadies and lighting guys, security men and concessions sellers, anyone and everyone within the orbit of the central star. Not that the band members go without, unless of course that’s what they prefer. But it’s their employees who know all the perks of the job, and “What’s in it for me if I get you backstage?” is a pick-up line that has rarely been known to fail.
Get backstage, of course, and there was no longer any need for pick-up lines at all. Particularly when the fan was confronted with what Pamela Des Barres, perhaps the best-known groupie of them all, described as “Robert Plant . . . tossing his gorgeous lion’s mane into the faces of enslaved sycophants. He walked like royalty, his shoulders thrown back, declaring his mighty status.” The moment Led Zeppelin reached Los Angeles, she wrote in her memoir I’m with the Band, “the groupie section went into the highest gear imaginable. You could hear garter belts sliding up young thighs all over Hollywood.”
They didn’t even need to be fans. The NME’s Charles Shaar Murray encountered one such young lady when he joined the band in that city, in time to see a gaggle of girls escorted away from the dressing rooms by Plant himself. “Plant has no patience with groupies these days,” Murray wrote, while one of the luckless ladies consoled herself by declaring, “I don’t even like Led Zeppelin. I’m only staying here because my friends have a room. I think Zep are really tacky.” All of which was fabulous fun while the madness was in full motion. But when the tour was over and the last girl sent home, home itself was the sanctuary where normality reigned. Time to read, time to think, time to sleep. And time to write, which is why, even before Plant met up with Jimmy Page to begin considering their options for album No. 3, he was already sketching ideas out, and leafing through favorite books and records too, pinpointing the urges that now drove his muse.
Which were . . .
A return to basics, similar to those that fired America’s the Band and, closer to home, Steve Winwood’s Traffic. Also, discovering a form of roots music that was uniquely your own but offered a shared fascination for other people too. Concurrent with Led Zeppelin’s own rise to glory, the British underground had been beset by a folk revival that owed little to the nascent strummings of early Baez, Dylan, et al. It was one that was fired, instead, by an awareness, if not the disciplines, of rock ’n’ roll, emerging from a potpourri that fermented around the same folk clubs Plant had once frequented so religiously and taken off from there.
Top of the pile, in terms of esotericism, was the Incredible String Band, a sometimes-duo of Robin Williamson and Mike Heron that tormented ears with a glorious succession of increasingly eccentric folk-infused visions, each one delivered beneath an ever-more-dramatic title: The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, 5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, Wee Tam and the Big Huge. It would be some time before Plant truly opened up about his admiration for the Incredibles, how they took the soul of folk music so far from the fields that everyone seemed to know and into the realm of true mythology, Beowulf, Taliesin, and Mabinogion. But the music he heard in his head as he and Page schemed Led Zeppelin III was certainly firmly in their thrall.
Plant was spending time, too, both musically and physically, in the company of Fairport Convention. Dave Pegg, their newly acquired bassist, was his old friend from the Black Country circuit days, and a one-time bandmate of John Bonham’s, too, in the Way of Life. Four albums old by the time Pegg joined them, Fairport were the undisputed giants of the British folk-rock scene, the Zeppelin of their own musical domain. And as Plant listened to their latest album, Peggy’s debut Full House, and in particular lost himself in the LP’s most epic moment, “Sloth,” the sense of light and dark, of depth and perception, but most of all the drama of cause and effect—all became beacons he instinctively recognized as a part of his own songwriting vision. A vision that nothing he had written before came close to fulfilling.
Early in the new year of 1970, Plant closed up Jennings Farm and, with his family in tow, headed west to a cottage that he’d visited in his childhood, high up in the Dyfi Valley overlooking Machynlleth. An eighteenth-century stone dwelling that he’d been able to rent for the next month, it was called Bron-Yr-Aur, Welsh for “golden hill,” after the nearby mountain Cadair Idris. It was a Spartan spot: no running water in the taps or toilet (there was a chemical setup, with an adjoining cesspit), no electricity, and little warmth beyond a couple of gas heaters. But he arranged with the landlord of a nearby pub to use his facilities whenever they were required, and in any case, the isolation guaranteed one thing. There would be no interruptions from fans, friends, or the music business.
There, the Plant clan would meet up with Page, Page’s girlfriend Charlotte, and a couple of trusted roadies, Clive and Sandy; and while the families explored the surrounding countryside, Plant and Page investigated its moods and melancholy, the myths that swirled in the morning mists, the legends that had so inspired the young Plant to read—and would now inspire him to write. “[It] was a fantastic place in the middle of nowhere,” Plant enthused to Uncut in 2005, “with no facilities at all. . . . It was a fantastic test of what we could do in that environment. Because by that time we’d become obsessed with change, and the great thing was that we were also able to create a pastoral side of Led Zep.”
Page, he continued, had been listening to a lot of Bert Jansch and Davey Graham recently, British folk guitarists whose personal and distinct musical approaches had done so much to encourage the folk genre’s earliest interests in experimentalism. Plant looked back to a teenaged fascination with John Fahey, an American guitarist taking similar strides on the other side of the ocean. Taken together, they created a common ground many miles away from the musical unity he and Page had already forged, while the absence of electricity ensured, as Page later laughed in a 1977 Trouser Press interview, there would be no “crashing away at 100-watt Marshall stacks. It was acoustic guitar time.”
The pair wandered the countryside, guitars in hand. “That’s the Way,” Plant later revealed, was written as the pair of them sat by a brook one day, Plant strumming the chords, Page embellishing them. Other songs fell as easily into place, not only those that would consume the album, but others that would be held back for another day: “Over the Hills and Far Away” and “Down by the Seaside.” They were in Wales for just a month, and the bulk of the new album was written.
They were not, however, finished with self-deprivation. To actually record the final record, they opted not for a well-appointed modern studio in the heart of a major city but rather the village of Headley in Hampshire. There they rented the Grange, a dilapidated mansion house whose history, since it was built as a workhouse in 1795, included its partial destruction by a rampaging mob and a stint in crumbling dereliction.
An unhappy history indeed. In its original guise, it had been a virtual prison for those local unfortunates who could not even subsist in the outside world and were forced to turn to cruel charity for support. If you’ve read Oliver Twist, you’ve seen the workings of the workhouse: the prisonlike conditions, the awful food and living areas. England was changing fast through the first years of the nineteenth century as the Industrial Revolution introduced a whole new layer of oppression into society, and the workhouse was its vilest manifestation.
The structure needed to be destroyed. In 1830, Southern England was wracked by unrest and uprisings, as the people finally tired of falling wages, rising prices, and the insouciant greed of their self-styled “betters.” The so-called Swing Riots would be the last truly popular insurrection in British history until the Poll Tax riots of 150 years later, and the historians J. L. and Barbara Hammond proclaimed, “[Had] these riots . . . succeeded, the day when the Headley workhouse was thrown down would be remembered . . .
as the day of the taking of the Bastille.”
Instead, the uprising was crushed. But not before the rioters descended upon both Headley and the neighboring Selbourne workhouse in November 1830, enraged by a local economy that saw them pay more in tithes to the church than they earned for themselves. Escorting the inmates to safety, the rioters embarked upon an orgy of destruction, smashing the furnishings, burning the fixtures, and effectively rendering both buildings uninhabitable—even by the subhuman standards to which workhouse occupants were accustomed. Later, nine local men were charged with leading the assaults, and all nine were sentenced to transportation to Australia. But the workhouse lay in ruins for many years more, until it was purchased in 1870 by the builder Thomas Kemp, and the modern Grange arose from the rubble.
Still, Headley Grange was scarcely Downton Abbey. Even the lawns on which Led Zeppelin parked the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio were overgrown and weed strewn, while the echoing, icy caverns that passed as the interior of the house still echoed with the emptiness of the building’s sordid past. One night, according to Richard Cole, the inhabitants were forced to tear down one of the building’s bannisters to use as firewood to banish the cold.
They could not, however, banish the spirits of the poor and insane folk who had died there. Strange noises in the night that remained inexplicable even after you considered the current occupants of the building—four rock ’n’ rollers plus their roadies and crew. The sound of movement in rooms that they knew were emptied; lights and shadows in the periphery of vision. “It was very Charles Dickens,” Page told Guitar World in January 2002. “Dank and spooky. The room I chose to live in was at the very top of the building, and the sheets were always sort of wet.”
Page liked the place, even when he saw things that bothered him. “I remember going up the main stairway on the way to my room one night and seeing a gray shape at the top. I double-checked to see if it was just a play of light, and it wasn’t. So I turned around pretty fast, because I didn’t really want to have an encounter with something like that. But I wasn’t surprised to find spirits there, because the place had a miserable past.”
Robert Plant was less enthralled. “It freaked [him] out,” Page continued, and when Led Zeppelin returned to Headley Grange to cut their next album, neither Plant nor Bonham would stay there. There was a nearby hotel that was more to their tastes.
Still, the music that they made at Headley Grange would represent, in their own minds if not a shocked audience’s, the most cohesive and self-sufficient that Led Zeppelin had ever constructed. There was no pandering, even subconsciously, to their audience’s expectations; the complaint with which many first-time listeners emerged, that there was no new “Whole Lotta Love” on there, could be followed by equally valid complaints that there was no “Communication Breakdown,” “Ramble On,” “How Many More Times,” “The Lemon Song,” or “Heartbreaker” either.
Only “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” an epic eight-minute blues that oozed passion and longing from every quarter, truly glanced in the direction of pastures they’d visited previously, a second cousin, perhaps, to the first album’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.” But a fully grown one, conveyed in a voice that not only knew the words to the song, it understood what they meant as well. Even within the realm of the British blues, wherein it seemed that every classic number had been done to death by every singer there was, Plant’s execution of “Since I’ve Been Loving You” was possessed of an authenticity and a depth of emotion that few, if any, other artists had captured. Which made it all the more remarkable that it was a brand new composition, one of the first songs written for the new album, and one of the first to be recorded too.
One take was all that it required, and the result was so perfect that even the sound of a squeaky bass drum pedal was allowed to remain on the tape—much to Page’s annoyance twenty years later, when he revisited the recording for Led Zeppelin’s first box set (“It sounds louder and louder every time I hear it!”). And with that in the can, the rest of the record fell effortlessly into place.
The first opportunity that audiences got to hear the new material arrived in late June, when Led Zeppelin headlined the 1970 Bath Festival. Not all of the album was on display—“Immigrant Song,” the so-stirring epic of Viking valor that would open the finished LP, had itself only just been written, in the aftermath of an Icelandic gig earlier in the month. Another song, a mutated version of Bukka White’s “Shake ’Em On Down,” was still untitled, and would remain so until the very day of the festival, until the band watched Roy Harper perform his afternoon set and promptly christened the orphan for him: “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper.”
Then it was back to the US, with the album now complete and a tour that simply picked up where the last had left off, in terms of both size and audience response. And in September, Zeppelin’s stay at the Continental Hyatt House hotel in Los Angeles was allegedly the catalyst for that establishment’s unofficial rechristening as the Riot House, as band and crew alike took the concept of redecoration to brand-new levels. One night, Plant laughed, he was even forced to ask the front desk to supply him with a new room. “The clerk protested until I asked him how he’d like to reside in a room with wall-to-wall hamburger patties, cola-drenched bedsheets, French-fried plastered walls, mustard-smeared mirrors, a sixteen-piece telephone, and gutted cushions where the furniture used to be. I got a new room immediately.”
The gang mentality persisted, of course—the suddenness with which all four could erect an entire world of their own around themselves, safe in the knowledge that no one could penetrate it. Many a journalist ran into that, sitting down to interview one member of the group while the other three sat around and watched, making comments beneath their breaths, laughing at questions before they were asked, and encouraging the interviewee to become as uncooperative as they. The New Musical Express’s Nick Kent even suffered the ignominy of the entire band walking out of one encounter after he brought up the subject of Zeppelin’s sometimes-misleading songwriting credits.
But the band relished companionship too, particularly that of other musicians. John Entwistle of the Who spoke merrily of his band’s on-the-road meets with Zeppelin, and Fairport’s Dave Pegg as well. Indeed, it was during that same stay in Hollywood that his band and Zeppelin enjoyed their best-known encounter, when Plant led his bandmates down to the Troubadour, where Fairport were enjoying a residency. Of course their arrival ignited a late-night jam session, with songs that took Plant and Bonham both back to Birmingham, “Morning Dew” and “Hey Joe.” And then everybody got drunk.
Life, then, was settling into something approaching a routine. The band would tour, and leave the cities they visited with a wealth of anecdotes about what may or may not have happened there. And then they would go home and try to go about their normal lives, knowing that even the most insignificant outing would become fuel for someone’s gossip, or memoirs, somewhere down the road.
Even Plant, still circulating the same geography as he had grown up with, and therefore a familiar figure to almost everyone he passed, was (and remains) astonished to discover that his most mundane trip to the pub, or most casual greeting to someone he recognized, could become the centerpiece of anecdotes that are still being told today. When really, all he did was say hello (“but it was the way in which he said it”) or stop by the local gun shop to pick up something for the farm. He was trying to live a normal life in between chapters that were absolutely abnormal, by doing the same things that everyone else did—never imagining that by being normal, he struck everyone else as weird. Shouldn’t he be arriving at the pub in a fleet of helicopters? Couldn’t he have sent the butler out to buy a loaf and a pint of milk? What’s he trying to prove?
That he’s still a regular guy?