In October 1973, Joe Massot and his crew were about to begin filming the most creative portions of the Led Zeppelin movie. He was pleased with the concert footage he had shot in New York, and now he was ready to begin developing individual segments with each band member, mostly shot near their homes. Massot told them to let their imaginations run wild and bring their personalities into the filming. John Bonham thought he was out of his mind.
“I’ll show him a few of my fucking bulls, but I don’t know how he’s going to make something interesting out of that,” Bonzo said. “We should take him to a bar and he can film us getting blotted out of our minds.” Then he asked, “Does this guy really know what he’s doing?”
At the same time, the band began making some demands on Massot’s patience and abilities. Jimmy wanted to film a segment on a steep rock face, where he would meet a hooded figure who ages a century or more before the camera’s eye. Jimmy not only wanted to play both parts in the scene, but he also wanted it filmed at night.
Massot and his crew shook their heads as if to say, “Another spoiled rock star with another crazy idea!” Nevertheless, they erected some scaffolding on the side of the mountain and kept adjusting and readjusting the lighting until the cameras could capture the scene without it looking like a London blackout.
Jimmy, however, soon found out that he himself was in over his head. Massot had to keep reshooting the scene, and after the sixth or seventh take Jimmy was exhausted from climbing and reclimbing the hill. He tried to recuperate between shots, but just as he would catch his breath, the camera rolled again.
When Bonzo heard about Jimmy’s ordeal, he was amused. “If the bastard would just start eating meat, he’d have the energy to climb the Alps. I’ll even sacrifice one of my bulls if the guy will just get off this fucking vegetarian kick.”
Later in the fall, Peter asked to look at the footage that had been shot. And he didn’t like most of what he saw. “Some of this stuff is just fucking ridiculous!” he told me. “I’m fed up! This is turning out to be the most expensive home movie ever made!”
Near the end of 1973, Peter agreed to have his portion of the movie filmed during a large party at his house, celebrating his wife’s birthday. Although he was becoming disillusioned about the movie, he was willing to see it through to the end. Peter had a medieval-style home, so for the party he had caterers wearing costumes from the Middle Ages. When they weren’t serving food, they were jousting on the lawn for entertainment.
Months later, as the progress of the movie moved at a snail’s pace, Peter reached the breaking point. Massot left the project and was replaced with a filmmaker named Peter Clifton. Even so, the movie still had a long way to go. It wouldn’t be released for almost another three years. It was a project that wouldn’t end.
As the movie took on an unpredictable life of its own, Zeppelin began its first rehearsals for its next album. Jimmy had invited the band to his Plumpton Place home, and they began discussing and writing new material. They still had some unused cuts dating back to the last trip to Headley Grange—most notably, “Houses of the Holy” and “Night Flight.” Plant even pulled out a song called “Down by the Seaside” that he and Pagey had written years before at Bron-Yr-Aur.
At about this time, Jimmy was also working on the soundtrack of a movie by Kenneth Anger, an American filmmaker who had made a series of short cult movies—Scorpio Rising was probably the best known—that some critics found incomprehensible. Like Pagey, Anger was a devotee of Aleister Crowley. Anger was particularly fascinated that Jimmy had owned a house that once belonged to Crowley. Pagey told him the story about a man being beheaded at the house centuries ago, and how his spirit supposedly continued to live long beyond the time of decapitation. There were also stories of murders and suicides in the house, although no one really knew whether this was just Jimmy’s imagination running wild.
Page and Anger became close friends, and as Anger worked on Lucifer Rising, a new film with a satanic theme, he asked Jimmy to write the music for it. Jimmy, however, always put his Led Zeppelin work first. Even when he had free time, he procrastinated about finishing the Anger project.
When Pagey finally played Anger some of the music he had written, the filmmaker didn’t like what he heard. Anger thought the music was too macabre, and he asked Jimmy to start over again. The process dragged on, and finally Anger began attacking Jimmy’s lack of discipline in the press. We heard that Anger was suggesting to friends that Pagey might be a drug addict.
I was shocked by Anger’s accusations. After all, if Pagey was a drug addict, that meant I was, too. We were both using a hell of a lot of cocaine. But I wasn’t ready to admit that I had a problem, so I figured Jimmy didn’t have one, either. If we had been more honest with ourselves and faced up to our addictive behavior, we might have avoided a lot of agony down the road.