(1971–1973)
The new material barely stood a chance. Although Led Zeppelin III was an instant No. 1, both at home and abroad—and though the band effortlessly topped the annual Melody Maker readers poll, the first group that wasn’t the Beatles to take the best band in the world category—the album’s lifespan was that of a mayfly compared with the mammoth that preceded it.
In and out of the charts in just weeks, not months, and with sales that were but 20 percent of those racked up by Led Zeppelin II, the album’s cover attracted more attention than its contents, a (literally) revolutionary wheel that spun within a pocket on the front flap of the jacket, as if to give the listener something different to do while he waited for the crashing metal chord that would finally wake the record up. And which never came.
Fascinating, too, were the inscriptions on the vinyl around the label, hitherto the playground only of arcane details of cataloging information, matrix numbers and pressing codes. That’s all that was there on their first two albums, anyway. But this time around, all changed. “Do what thou wilt” read the note on side one; “So mote it be,” declared that on side two, the first excerpted from the Thelemic laws devised by Aleister Crowley (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will”), the second from the rituals of the Freemasons, a fourteenth-century addendum commonly (if not altogether accurately) aligned with the Christian “amen.”
Both spoke, in the eyes of those who scour their idols’ output in search of hidden mysteries, to Jimmy Page’s fascination with the occult in general and Crowley in particular—the self-styled “wickedest man in England,” whose death in 1947 had allowed a fascinating, if occasionally ridiculous, philosopher/magician to become the epicenter of a new generation’s own understanding (or lack thereof) of magic and ritual.
Page’s interest in the subject was naturally another tool in the ongoing campaign to mythologize Led Zeppelin. Whereas his bandmates purchased homes in the wilds of the English countryside, Page bought Boleskine House, Crowley’s former home, up in the Scottish highlands. While Plant and Bonham at least played at being “gentlemen farmers,” Page opened an occult bookshop and publishing house, Equinox on Church Street, Kensington, and published a facsimile edition of Crowley’s 1904 The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King, outlining the correct means of summoning seventy-two demons.
Journalist Mick Houghton is one of the writers who tried to pin down Page on this subject, in a 1976 interview with Sounds. But Page was not playing ball:
I’m not trying to interest anyone in Aleister Crowley any more than I am in Charles Dickens. All it was was that at a particular time he was expounding self-liberation which is so important. He was like an eye into the world, into the forthcoming situation.
My studies have been quite intensive, but I don’t particularly want to go into it because it’s a personal thing and isn’t in relation to anything I do as a musician, apart from that I’ve employed his system in my own day to day life.
Not that his audience were buying that. As bookstores go, Equinox was heavy duty, exactly what you’d expect from a shop that was also named for one of Crowley’s works. It was the best occult stockist in the country, and that belief was reinforced by its clientele. On the one hand, there ranged the wall-to-wall weirdoes who affected every sinister demeanor from Charlie Manson to Morgana Le Fey; on the other, a band of would-be warlocks and witches who found themselves fighting for browsing space with an army of teenaged Led Zeppelin fans, snuffling through the books on display in the hope of answering the questions that most bedeviled their nights: What is the meaning of the horned goat lurking to the left of John Paul Jones on the third album’s inner wheel? The ankh that floats beneath him, or the UFOs on the gatefold?
And had Jimmy Page really sold his band’s soul to the Dark Lord?
Even today, there’s a lot of folk who believe all this. In a March 2014 report on Crowley’s continued attraction to a host of latter-day seekers (the late Peaches Geldof among them, apparently), Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper straight-facedly reported, “Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, for example, routinely took part in occult magical rituals and was so intrigued by Crowley he bought his former home.”
If Page had concluded his own Faustian pact, however, Peter Grant suggested that he might want to consider asking for a refund. Though one would scarcely call Led Zeppelin III a failure by most artists’ standards, by those to which Grant held Led Zeppelin, it was a long way from justifying their self-proclaimed status as the biggest band in the world. There was only one remedy. Return to the studio and get another album out quickly. And this time, make sure it had some rockers on board.
The band agreed. Headley Grange was available again, with its peculiar atmospheric mix of calm and cold spots; the Rolling Stones Mobile was back on the lawn; and though the band warmed up for the sessions by simply jamming, even their improvisations appeared golden. Both “Black Dog” and “Rock and Roll,” two of the most assertive rockers the band would ever compose, developed out of jams, old Little Richard rockers that morphed magically into something else.
Other songs were shaped by the mood of the musicians; it was a drunken John Bonham, for example, who conjured up the final feel of the mighty “Four Sticks,” a rolling, free-skating blur thoroughly underpinned by drums that skitter like giant insects. And it was the Grange itself, with its vast halls setting up acoustic patterns that no studio could ever have replicated, that lent its ambience to “When the Levee Breaks.”
All four musicians were sparking. Past chroniclers have credited the month spent with Page at Bron-Yr-Aur the previous year with finally erasing any doubts in Plant’s mind that he was his bandmates’ equal in terms of what he brought to the band, and the confidence certainly bubbled over now, both in his vocal performances and his lyric writing.
“Going to California,” a song whose acoustic bed could easily have slipped onto Led Zeppelin III, may or may not have been intended as a paean to the land that inspired so many of Plant’s late 1960s dreams—just as it may or may not have reflected on the state’s vulnerability to earthquakes. What it did do was offer up a love song to a state of mind he had never hitherto been able to put into words: the mystic peace-and-love vibe that permeated the San Francisco music scene that he had adored as a teen, but whose own creators had long since moved on.
The corollary to this, very deliberately, was “Misty Mountain Hop”: “Walking in the park . . . crowds of people . . . with flowers in their hair” sitting around and getting stoned, losing track of time, and sinking into a sea of such apathy that they didn’t even seem to care when the police arrived to break it all up—and all delivered in a wordy monotone that almost defied the track to be described as a song, just a looped riff and Plant’s droning recital, as pancake flat as the minds it was condemning.
These songs alone marked the new album out as something remarkable. Two songs, however, dominate what became Led Zeppelin IV—one, “Stairway to Heaven,” rising to such heights that more than forty years later, it is still routinely regarded among the greatest compositions of the rock ’n’ roll era; the other, “The Battle of Evermore,” though firmly cast in the shadow of the former by its understated arrangement, deserving acknowledgement among Plant’s finest-ever lyrics.
“Stairway to Heaven” was originally built around a melody that Page was toying with during the Bron-Yr-Aur respite and only slowly took on its final shape, after the guitarist declared that the new album required an all-pervading anthem, a new “Whole Lotta Love,” and set about deliberately marshalling his bandmates into creating one.
Plant wrote as his bandmates played, his lyric building in response to what they were creating at the same time as developing his own themes. The popular modern vision of the song’s mystical meaningfulness was, of course, easily punctured when Page admitted, to writer Brad Tolinski, that when he asked Plant to explain the line about there being “a bustle in your hedgerow,” the singer simply cackled, “That’ll get people thinking.” But it could also be argued that it is the intrinsic redundancy of some of the lines that has led to the song’s popularity and importance. If every lyric was self-explanatory, there would be no room for the listener’s own imagination to take flight, and that was “Stairway to Heaven”’s primary goal.
“It was a milestone for us,” Jimmy Page told Rolling Stone in 1975. “Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality, something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with ‘Stairway.’”
A pagan love song that became the most played and most requested song in the history of American rock radio, the ultimate youth-club slow dance, the best-selling single piece of sheet music in the world—it was the absolute zenith of Led Zeppelin’s folk-rock hybrid. Yet Plant himself was never as impressed with the song as either his bandmates or his audience seemed to be. The lyrics were naive, and sometimes even clumsy. There was no more significance to some than the fact that they rhymed. And, of course, like “Moby Dick” on Led Zeppelin II, it became the parent of any number of later sins, as imitator after imitator flocked to create their own “Stairway to Heaven” and ultimately forged an entire new musical genre from it, in the power-ballad boom of subsequent nightmarish infamy.
Nevertheless, “Stairway to Heaven” did pack a punch—a building, soaring edifice that started soft and sweet and rose, precisely as Page had envisioned, to baroque magnificence. And if it was gargantuan on vinyl, it quickly became even vaster on stage, the cue for the entire audience, it seemed, to hold cigarette lighters up in the air and sing along swaying to an anthem they all adored. It is refreshing, then, to listen to the performance Led Zeppelin gave for the BBC in April 1971, six months before the album was released, where the audience doesn’t simply not know the words, it doesn’t even know the song.
With Plant having apologized for postponing the broadcast the previous week (“We’d done eighteen shows in about six days and my voice just gave out,” he explained), he introduces the song as “another thing off the fourth album,” and the audience is silent as the grave. Even with a lengthy silence while Jones is “tuning in his bass pedal,” leaving Plant “time for a quick swill of tea . . . hold on,” and Page toys with the opening melody, the crowd remains quiet. A far cry indeed from the multiple orgasms with which even the opening note would be greeted on later performances.
“The Battle of Evermore” delves into similar pseudo-mystic territory as “Stairway to Heaven,” but it does so from a far more concrete base. Inspired by his decidedly non-rock-star-ish studies of the semi-mythological tribal warfare that once raged through his beloved borderlands, shot through with a healthy sprinkling of Tolkien lore, “Battle of Evermore” was conceived less as a song than as a musical narrative. To that end, it is set against the simplest of accompaniment, and buoyed not only by Plant’s own repertoire of vocal styles, but also with the addition of Sandy Denny, an old friend of Page’s and a former member of Fairport Convention.
Possessed of one of the loveliest voices in British rock and capable of penning some of its most eloquent songs as well, Denny quit Fairport following 1969’s Liege and Lief album, amid the shattering that opened the door for Dave Pegg to join. A new band followed, Fotheringay, but they broke up during the sessions for their second album, and by 1971, Denny was at work on her first solo LP, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. With its contents ranging from a playful cover of Brenda Lee’s “Let’s Jump the Broomstick” to the traditional “Blackwaterside” (the root of Zeppelin’s early staple “Black Mountain Side”), the so-evocative title track, and the melancholy “Late November,” North Star Grassman was single-mindedly designed to raise Denny free of the folk bracket into which her Fairport years had placed her.
So was her appearance on “The Battle of Evermore,” where her voice hangs as a chilling counterpoint to Plant’s, so effortlessly contradicting and dovetailing with his aural panegyrics that it was like they had been singing together for years. All setting up a scenario that may not, in musical terms, have proved as influential as “Stairway to Heaven,” but certainly spawned more notable offspring. Side two of Queen’s second album, Queen II in 1974, was cast firmly in the shadow of “The Battle of Evermore,” while Heart not only reprised the musical light and shade of the battle across their second (and most courageous) album, Little Queen, they also acknowledged its importance by including the song in their live set.
“Sandy always called that one session of her favorites of all the ones she did,” her husband Trevor Lucas later said. “Not because it was the one that probably gave her the biggest audience she ever had, but because it was so easy for her to sing with Robert. But it did introduce her to people who might never have listened to her in the past, and there were always a few Zeppelin fans at the gigs from then on.”
From Headley Grange, the sessions moved up to London, where Led Zeppelin took up residence at Basing Street Studios to iron out any last kinks in the mix and to wrap a few songs that were still deemed unfinished—“Stairway to Heaven” for instance, which had yet to be gifted with its guitar solo. Then it was back onto the road, through the US and onto their first-ever trip to Japan, after which Plant and Page celebrated a few weeks’ break by taking the tourist route home, via Thailand, India, and Morocco.
It was a relaxing journey, a far cry from the increasingly taut and airless bubble that the last tour had plunged them into. With Bonham descending more and more into his role as Led Zeppelin’s party animal, and Peter Grant’s paranoia that everyone was out to rip off his charges reaching epic proportion, tours felt less like a journey into the heart of their audience than they did a hostile military incursion, the band rolling into each new city as an armored phalanx, setting up a defensive perimeter around hotel and venue and then preparing to repel all boarders.
“Their security were pigs,” says the West Coast lawyer who wanted to get close to Plant in 1969. “I saw kids beaten up just for knocking on the stage door before the show, while we were also hearing these terrible stories about girls being taken back to the band’s hotel and left bleeding in the room when the show moved on the next day. It didn’t stop more girls from trying to get back to meet the band, of course, but there was always that sense of . . . well, other bands might knock you round a bit, but Led Zeppelin would really put you through hell.” A response which does cause one to wonder why anybody would even want to go backstage in the first place, but the fact is, they did. Irrelevant to the Zeppelin story, but apropos regardless, was testimony given at a court case in the UK in 2013, a fan alleging she was sexually assaulted by a top TV soap star several decades before. He raped her the first time she visited his house, she said . . . and he did it again, the second time she visited.
The fact is, certain rock bands had certain reputations, whether brought on by genuinely depraved sexual appetites or by the sheer boredom of life on the road and the constant search for something new to break the cycle, and they had fans who wanted to find out if they were true, perhaps for many of the same reasons. Led Zeppelin simply had an even darker reputation than most—and a publicity machine around them that loved nothing so much as to broadcast it.
Led Zeppelin IV was released in November 1971, delayed by what now seems a quite absurd squabble between Jimmy Page and Atlantic Records. The legend is that Page, tiring of rumors that Zeppelin’s success was as much media and promotion driven as it was derived from genuine audience appreciation, wanted to release the new LP with absolutely no mention of the band’s name—or any other information, come to that—on the cover. No name, no title, no label identification, no catalog number, no track listing, no credits. A completely blank canvas, both inside and out. Only once you opened the shrink wrap and took out the vinyl would you know what it was. It was a notion that Atlantic Records was apparently swift to shoot down. The delay in the album’s release, it is said, was the result of the ensuing standoff.
Or not, as a veteran Atlantic insider recalled. “Atlantic were fine with it. The only reason the album was delayed was because they wanted it out as close to Christmas as they could, knowing everybody would want the new Led Zeppelin as a Christmas present. The story about the sleeve being rejected was just something to tell the press, so that when it came out, everybody would be on the lookout for this amazing revolutionary cover. They didn’t even need to hear the record; they bought it for the sleeve.” In other words, while claiming to be battling the accusations of hype, the entire thing was conceived to take the hype to a whole new level. Brilliant. And yes, everybody did get it for Christmas.
Further mysteries lurked within. At Page’s instigation, the band’s name on the album’s inner sleeve was replaced by four symbols, each one handpicked by each individual band member—and each one (plus a fifth for Sandy Denny) destined to send certain elements of the fan club delving deep into all manner of arcane and obscure lore and litany in search of their actual meanings.
In fact, Plant and Page alone seem to have given the matter any thought; both Jones and Bonham essentially delved into what the modern world would call clip art for their symbols. But Page created a distinctively scripted “Zoso,” which he has since refused to expound on any further, while Plant chose a feather surrounded by a circle, representations of courage and truth.
Ultimately, it was all just an artistic fancy. But it fed deeper into the sense of mystery and magic that now permeated the Led Zeppelin legend, a sense that they were in league with forces that mere mortals might never understand. But which they strove to, with a fervor unseen in rock since the late 1960s’ insistence that Paul McCartney was dead and the Beatles had spent the years since then posting coded obituaries across their lyrics and sleeves.
Neither were Zeppelin (and the Beatles’) fans alone in attempting to decode these messages. With growing force and influence across the United States, the evangelical movement was taking its hatred of the devil’s music into a new sphere of research, with the unveiling of a horrific new trend in rock ’n’ roll.
“Backward masking,” it was revealed, was the art of recording subversive messages on vinyl, and then twisting them so they could only be deciphered if the record was played backwards. Which in these days of defiantly forward-playing CDs and mp3s does not seem that effective a method of getting a message across. Nor was it at the time, with many turntables stubbornly defying any attempt to reverse the natural order of their inner workings.
The Beatles were the first; if you play “Revolution #9” backwards, you can allegedly hear a voice repeating “Turn me on, dead man”—another reference to the late McCartney, allegedly. (At which point, one should point out that whoever they got in to replace him turned out to be a fairly good writer and musician in his own right.)
“Stairway to Heaven” was cruising for a righteous bruising from the moment the evangelicals clapped ears on it, from its very first mention of the pagan May Queen. Spinning it backwards just reinforced the horror. The lyric that begins “Yes, there are two paths you can go by,” played backwards, apparently insists, “There’s no escaping it. It’s my sweet Satan. The one will be the path who makes me sad, whose power is Satan.” Which really doesn’t make much sense, but no matter.
A little later, when Plant asks, “Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow?” what he is really saying, we learn, is “Oh I will sing because I live with Satan.” Which must have come as news to Maureen—now pregnant with the couple’s second child, Karac Pendragon Plant. But of course there was more: Page’s proprietorship of Equinox, and his admission that one of the main reasons he opened a bookshop of his own was so he wouldn’t have to travel all over the place to pick up the books he wanted; his ownership of the old Crowley house and Plant’s alleged refusal to visit it—not necessarily because he disapproved of its former owner, by the way, but because the highlands of Scotland are quite a trek to undertake if you’re just dropping by to say hello.
Still, the controversy was just fresh grist to the mill in terms of publicity—and, Grant admitted, in terms of making sure he got what he wanted when he was issuing demands to promoters and distributors. He’d just mention Jimmy Page’s reputation as a powerful and evil magician, he said, and it was astonishing how quickly people’s resistance crumbled.
Led Zeppelin toured through the remainder of 1972 and into the new year as well, that same well-oiled machine setting down and then picking up again the following day, leaving a trail of rumors, inventions, distressed hoteliers, and debauched groupies in their wake. Jacob Aranza, author of an early 1980s book on rock ’n’ roll’s Satanic leanings, Backward Masking Unmasked, reported, “[Led Zeppelin’s] actions would cause many of us to question their popularity. In one Hollywood Hotel they destroyed a painting, submerged four stereos in a bathtub and ran motorcycle races in the hallways. Other tales include one rock magazine’s account of a groupie they doused with a bucket of urine.”
But they also put on some of the most scintillating rock ’n’ roll shows of the era, events that eschewed the blatant theater that was edging into other bands’ performances as glam rock took hold on the early 1970s, but were as breathless and breathtaking regardless. Released in 2003, the live album How the West Was Won captures Zeppelin at two stops during this epochal year, with Page certainly adamant that this was the height of the band at its fighting fittest, as he told the Times in 2010: “I think what we did on . . . How the West Was Won—that 1972 gig—is pretty much a testament of how good it was.”
But the drive for it to get better had still to be curtailed. Almost as soon as they were off the road, the band was back in the studio, this time moving into Mick Jagger’s Stargroves mansion to cut what became Houses of the Holy—the one Led Zeppelin album whose ambition and sense of humor does not seem to have been forgiven by history.
There was, in the aftermath of Led Zeppelin IV, and particularly in the wake of “Stairway to Heaven,” a very real sense that Led Zeppelin’s next album would follow that same train of thought, continuing into the realms of grand symphonics and overarching verbosity. Instead, they looked toward simple pop and jocular parody, with most cynics turning the full weight of their wrath upon “D’Yer Mak’er,” a song that had already been benighted with what even its admirers confess is one of the most hamfistedly punning titles ever conceived.
It was a mock-reggae number at a time when reggae itself was still largely being mocked by the average rock cognoscenti. Bob Marley was two years away from a breakthrough; Eric Clapton’s genre-bending “I Shot the Sheriff” was twelve months off in the future. Though Page and Plant both adored the music privately, even taking Marley tapes with them as they holidayed together, Zeppelin, riding a lyric that rhymed “You don’t have to go” with “Oh oh oh oh oh,” were apparently taking reggae no more seriously than anybody else at that time. So why did they bother recording it?
Because it was fun. Because, in the midst of all the madness that devoured Led Zeppelin, and the absurdly high standards to which their audience now demanded they aspire, it was good to just kick back and relax and remind people that, after all, they were in this game to enjoy themselves as well. Which is not easy when you’re playing a three-hour concert every night, and your every last word or action is being analyzed by half the watching world.
The treadmill upon which Led Zeppelin found themselves in the early 1970s was not unique. Accustomed as we are today to even brand-new bands taking years between albums, and filling the interim with nothing more exhausting than a quick tour around the summer festivals, it seems incredible that there was once a time in which even a few months’ silence could sound an act’s death knell, no matter how popular they were. Album–tour–album–tour, interspersed with no more vacation time than the average office worker might expect to be granted. Indeed, Zeppelin were considered positively sluggish by some band’s standards—a mere album a year when many others were pumping out one every nine months or so, and in fact, David Bowie was virtually on a six-monthly cycle between late 1971 and early 1975.
The tours were grueling too—months-long assaults that hit every town that could be shoehorned into the itinerary, until every show blended into one another, to be highlighted in the mind only by the memory of anything weird that might have happened. Another reason, of course, for the boys to start behaving badly, but another reason too for them to wonder what it was all actually for.
Was this it—was this their life? A never-ending succession of ever-cheaper thrills punctuating the boredom of travel, hotel rooms, and studios—“a force of nature,” some writers claimed, so powerful that when they did get a break, the four musicians could scarcely stand to even be in one another’s company? Off the road, all four would split for their private estates, return home to family in the knowledge that even their friends would expect to hear all about the adventures from which they’d returned. And they could not understand how those adventures now seemed scarcely more exciting than those friends’ own jobs in shops and offices.
It was this sense not of “job done” but “requirements fulfilled” that permeated the writing and recording of Houses of the Holy, with Plant in particular feeling the need to remarshal his forces. For all his onstage strutting and superhuman confidence, Plant—like the permanently withdrawn John Paul Jones—had little interest in living the rock-style life, or maintaining the rock-style image, when he was off duty.
Jimmy Page, courtesy of the imagery he so painstakingly drew around him, could guarantee deference and respect whenever he showed his face in public. Because, if he didn’t receive it, people worried, he would turn them into something ceramic and place them on the Boleskine House mantelpiece.
John Bonham, thanks to his reputation as a wild man, remained a wildman wherever he was, to the point where, even after he bought the property next door to Jennings Farm, he was seldom a welcome visitor around the place. Especially when he’d been drinking for a few days, which was becoming more and more his default setting.
Plant, on the other hand, knew when to switch off. He told writer Cliff Jones (Rock CD, April 1993), “I reasoned that I could sing about misty mountains and then chip a football into the back of the net on my days off. That felt like the good life to me back then. It wasn’t all-consuming for me in the way it was for the others.”
On the road, he acknowledged, it was easy to “get caught up in all that hotel room and drug binge kind of thing, because it was part of the experience, almost expected.” But as he told Circus in 1973, and also as he reminds people to this day, “I’m a family man, and I thought it was all a bit hysterical. Without sounding a real killjoy, it was all rather silly. I could only go out after a gig and piss about for a short amount of time or else my voice would pack up.” Even when he did pick up a girl on the road, he was more likely to simply disappear to his room with her than share her largesse with bandmates and crew. As though he was seeking a sense of stability within one of the most unstable environments around.
He never lost sight of the fact that once his front door (or hotel room door) closed behind him, he was a husband, a father, a farmer. He bought another property, a sheep farm in Dolgoch, in his old family-vacation stamping grounds, and was as happy mooching around with the flock and a sheepdog as he could ever be on the road. If he felt the need to make music, he’d call in some friends from his very first bands, or the acquaintances that they had introduced to him, and everyone would just sit around the barn, singing and playing.
He’d go to the pub, or go to the soccer; spring 1972 saw Wolves reach the final of the UEFA Cup, one of the major pan-European tournaments, and though they lost (ironically, to another English team, Tottenham Hotspur), it was clear that the side had turned the corner after the dark days of the 1960s. For the first time in a long time, being a Wolves supporter did not mean that fans of other, better-known sides would glance sympathetically over and softly ask, “Why?”
Now if only that same question did not feel equally pertinent to his day job.
For the first time, nobody seemed distressed, or even particularly surprised, that Houses of the Holy—the first Led Zeppelin album to be given an official title—was received with less than unalloyed joy by the critics or public alike. Even Peter Grant’s expected display of outraged umbrage felt forced as he realized that the best album his exhausted charges had in them at the time was not necessarily the best album they had ever made.
Of course it had its highlights: “The Song Remains the Same,” “The Rain Song,” and the third-album offshoot “Over the Hills and Far Away.” “No Quarter” was a fine, lengthy, and atmospheric epic, steeped in mystery and misty suspense—a second cousin of “Immigrant Song” in its invocation of Norse mythology and destined to grant John Paul Jones an onstage showcase at least as virtuosic as Page’s “Dazed and Confused” and Bonham’s “Moby Dick.”
Against those, however, could be balanced the songs that any other album might have left on the cutting room floor: “D’Yer Mak’er,” “The Crunge” (another of the songs that, sharp-eyed gossips murmured, might well have been about Plant’s sister-in-law Shirley), the lightweight “Dancing Days,” and “The Ocean,” a song whose lyrical punchline placed it midway between Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” (“Marie is only six years old . . .”) and the Brotherhood of Man’s “Save Your Kisses for Me” (“even though you’re only three”).
But they had also stockpiled a large amount of material toward their next, sixth, album, including what would otherwise have been this current set’s title track; and perhaps unwittingly, but very effectively all the same, they had released an album that was actually their most perfectly timed ever. 1973 was the year in which Pink Floyd unveiled The Dark Side of the Moon and Mike Oldfield debuted with Tubular Bells, two albums set to dominate both the charts and the critics on both sides of the Atlantic for much of the next year. No record released in their shadow could ever have been granted more than a cursory inspection before attention returned to those two all-conquering Goliaths. If Zeppelin had to release a low-key record, this was precisely the right time to do it.
Besides, if Houses of the Holy was destined for a lifespan scarcely more comfortable than that of Led Zeppelin III, the tour that Grant had lined up for them that summer was the largest and most lavish they, or anybody else for that matter, had ever undertaken. A coast-to-coast scouring of the United States that was already being described as the most successful tour of the decade—and that would also spawn the next installment of the group’s intended conquest of the world.
A feature film, The Song Remains the Same, was to be shot at Madison Square Garden, a massive concert movie that would be further flavored by extravagant fantasy sequences, each member of the band interspersing their personal showcase with a glimpse into his own innermost personal vision. And Plant had already decided upon his sequence. Taking over Raglan Castle in Wales for the shoot, he would be an Arthurian knight, riding to the rescue of a damsel in distress.
Rock movies were in a peculiar place in the early 1970s. Fast outgrowing their initial manifestation as comedic vehicles for top pop stars, but daring not follow Mick Jagger into the psychodrama of Performance, the genre had elected the concert film as the most likely to succeed. Yet it rarely did. Few, if any, of the music movies released in the early 1970s, from Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Pictures at an Exhibition to T. Rex’s Born to Boogie, did business anything like that which record sales might have predicted, while other expected blockbusters—DA Pennebaker’s capture of David Bowie’s 1973 “farewell” performance, for example—did not even wind up being released for close to another decade.
Occasionally, something would break the mold. The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter document of their 1969 show at Altamont Speedway was a hit, but it was Altamont, already a byword for the souring of the ’60s dream, that was the star of the show—that and the on-camera murder of an audience member. Not the Stones themselves.
The Woodstock movie was enormous by virtue of the sheer ubiquity of the festival’s name, but two British Woodstocks, at Glastonbury and the Isle of Wight, faded into cinematic obscurity almost as soon as they were released. And when Neil Young tried to breathe fresh life into the genre with the willful conceptual obscurity of Journey Through the Past, it vanished so quickly that most people never even knew it existed.
This, then, was the landscape into which Led Zeppelin intended releasing their movie, and they too had what they thought was a solution to the genre’s ills. The Song Remains the Same was not intended solely to enshrine the band’s performance, nor to visualize the musicians’ private fantasy lives. It was also to serve as a ninety-minute primer into the sheer magnitude of the Zeppelin experience: the private plane that flew them between cities; the massive crowds that oversold every venue on the tour, setting fresh attendance records in almost every city; the giant PA; the lasers and mirror balls.
The cameras did not linger on the so-called perks of the job—cocaine being snorted through rolled-up $100 bills, fresh girls being lined up so the musicians could take their pick—but the grapevine filled in those gaps, to be joined in later years by the memoirs of crew and passing journalists alike. According to some of those remembrances, Led Zeppelin’s 1973 American tour was the absolute apex of on-the-road debauchery. Yet they are remembrances from which the band members themselves have unflinchingly distanced themselves—according to Grant, with good reason.
“What happened was, the Stones did that American tour in 1972, which was filmed, and a print came out called Cocksucker Blues, because of one short sequence that took place on their plane. Nobody saw it, it was never released, but a bootleg copy went around and the tour picked up a lot of notoriety. The fact that you know what I’m talking about now, all these years later, proves that. So I said to Richard [Coles], ‘We need to top that. We want this tour to be talked about even more than the Stones tour.’ And that’s what happened.”
It’s a comparison that was backed up by the words of a member of the film crew that awaited the band in New York: “You know what that movie’s working title was? Fishfucker Blues. Because of the mudshark story.”
Of course.
The madness boarded the Zeppelin. Following the show at the LA Forum, all concerned were invited to a party in Laurel Canyon, thrown to mark John Bonham’s twenty-first birthday. Music blared, people drank, and a video player looped Deep Throat into the room. Was anybody even watching it? It doesn’t matter. Any journalists present would still have had their Zeppelin Porno Party anecdotes delivered.
Besides, and once again, the band was not entirely blameless. As Bonham’s oldest friend within the band, and closest too, Plant often found himself on the scene when one of the drummer’s legendary furies kicked off, sometimes attempting (but generally failing) to act as peacemaker, other times content to remain a mute witness on the sidelines. Neither would he turn up his well-coked nose at the amount of female flesh that was permanently on offer, although it is interesting to note that the vast majority of kiss-and-tell narratives that have spilled out from the tour are provided by male witnesses to the initial seduction, as opposed to female participants in whatever developed.
So the groupie grapevine reverberated with memories of the night Plant led a Zeppelin deputation along to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco when the tour hit Hollywood in summer 1973, but anyone who followed him back to the hotel seems not to have immortalized their impressions in any public forum—unlike devotees of so many of the Disco’s other superstar visitors. It is the nature of the Disco and the temptations it offered that is remembered—beginning with the distinctly underage but voraciously precocious clientele that called the venue home—as if it is sufficient simply to document the temptations and assume that the succumbing naturally followed.
Three years earlier, recording Led Zeppelin III, Led Zeppelin turned their attention to “Gallows Pole,” a variant on the folk ballad “The Maid Freed from the Gallows,” as collected by the folklorist Francis J. Child. Eleven different versions of the song appear in his English and Scottish Popular Ballads collection. Were some future chronicler to attempt a similar scholarly enterprise with the purported adventures of Led Zeppelin, any single tale you have heard of their antics could probably run to just as many variants.
Off the road, the band’s attention turned to the movie. But it was slow going. The Song Remains the Same, shot across all three of the Madison Square shows (the musicians carefully wore the same outfit each night to allow for seamless editing) would take close to three years to be realized, and when it did finally make it out, it was to a sea of condemnation. Bloated and pretentious, complained the critics. The fantasy scenes were pedestrian and boring; the live footage had already been exceeded by the scale and majesty of the band’s next tour in 1975. The soundtrack had been so remixed and overdubbed that it scarcely felt like a live recording any longer, and the band members themselves were sick of it as well, so long had it taken and so fraught was the process.
By 1976, however, a lot had happened in the Led Zeppelin camp. The birth of their own record label, Swan Song, to mark the renewal of their contract with Atlantic Records. A new double LP, Physical Graffiti, to renew their claim on the acclaim that had hung fire since Led Zeppelin IV. And a brace of tragedies that came close to crashing the Zeppelin once and for all.
“The name ‘Led Zeppelin’ means a failure,” Plant told Rolling Stone’s Lorraine Alterman in 1975. “And ‘Swan Song’ means a last gasp—so why not name our record label that?”