While the band was off the road in America, Atlantic sensibly decided the best way to keep them in the public eye was to release a single from the album, opting for ‘Good Times Bad Times’ backed with ‘Communication Breakdown’. By the time Grant came to hear of it, several hundred promo copies (industry-only copies, not as yet distributed to general record stores) had already been pressed and mailed out to DJs all over the US, then standard practice in the run-up to a full-scale nationwide release. At the time, singles were not fashionable amongst ‘serious’ artists, although almost all were obliged to release and promote them heavily under the terms of their standard contracts. As Zeppelin’s contract with Atlantic was far from standard, Grant was within his rights to restrain the label from releasing Zeppelin singles – an option he would exercise with force in the UK and the rest of the world.
However, America was always different. Not only was it the home of Atlantic, it was where Grant shrewdly judged Zeppelin’s best chance of long-term success lay. There was also the financial side to consider. On a purely practical level, success in America would mean that, ultimately, it didn’t matter whether the band caught on anywhere else in the world. Financially at least, they would be set for life. The phenomenal reaction from audiences to their first low-profile tour had been beyond even G’s expectations. With a much higher-profile second tour in the process of being finalised, it was crucial to try to keep the momentum going in any way possible. As a result, he not only approved Atlantic’s decision to release a Zeppelin single in America, he insisted the label pay for the band to film a promotional clip of them performing it in case any TV stations wanted to use it while they were out of the country. Atlantic was happy to oblige. The result: an energy-packed film of the band miming to ‘Communication Breakdown’ against a white backdrop, Bonham stick-twirling as Page pretends to sing back-up vocals. Bizarrely, however, the only known broadcast of it in America wasn’t until March 1995, during the ninety-minute MuchMusic Led Zeppelin special, where a short clip was shown.
Everywhere else in the world, Page and Grant agreed, everything would rest on the success of the album as a stand-alone product, something no other major rock artist had ever attempted before but which Grant correctly reasoned would, in time, become a cause célèbre for the band. Moreover – and what really appealed to Jimmy – it was proof positive that Led Zeppelin was anything but some record company-manufactured hype. Let the critics stick that in their pipes and smoke it. Or as John Paul Jones told me in 2003, they were young and it was the era, but also, ‘Page and I were fairly well experienced by then. We’d already played on a lot of hit commercial records as session musicians. We didn’t benefit, in terms of celebrity or royalties, because we were very much behind the scenes. But we’d learned all about the art of compromise – in order to make a living. Which we were prepared to do, there’s nothing wrong in paying the rent. But that wasn’t the way I wanted to make my way in my own musical life. If I was going to join a band, it was to do music that I wanted to do and not compromise. The aim wasn’t to be hugely successful. We felt fairly confident that we would be able to make a living by making music that we wanted to do without compromise. The fact that we were so successful couldn’t have been planned. It was a lucky time as well. Album-oriented artists hardly even existed five years before we made our first record. There was The Beatles and the Beach Boys, and Dylan of course. But this was kind of a cultural step on even from that. I wasn’t even listening to much pop or rock music, at the time. I had one Beatles album, Revolver, and Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, but apart from that I was listening to jazz and soul music.’
As a result, while there would eventually be nine Zeppelin singles officially released in the US no Zeppelin single was ever officially released in the UK (with the sole exception of the ‘Trampled Underfoot’ seven-inch in 1975 – a much-trumpeted limited edition release, swiftly deleted). The immediate effect of the decision to block a single release in Britain was to ensure little or no radio exposure for the new band. The only Radio 1 DJ who went out of his way to regularly play any Led Zeppelin initially was John Peel, on his Top Gear show, aired on a Sunday afternoon and specifically directed at non-chart-oriented music, such as ‘heavy’ and/or ‘progressive’ acts like Zeppelin. Grant felt he had the solution to the lack of airplay when he arranged the first of four live sessions the band would record for the station that year, beginning with a behind-closed-doors performance at London’s Playhouse Theatre on 3 March, and subsequently broadcast on the Peel show on Sunday 23 March. Radio was also a medium Grant felt he had some measure of control over (certainly more than TV where there were so few outlets for rock music in the late Sixties, unless you were a singles-oriented act), especially at the BBC, where production chief Bernie Andrews was someone he’d known since his days working with Bo Diddley, and felt he could trust. It was the start of a relationship with Radio 1 that would endure throughout the Seventies, when Saturday Rock Show presenter Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman would always be the first British DJ to receive an advance copy of a new Zeppelin album.
Although they didn’t realise it at the time, the BBC sessions were an important milestone for the band. John Paul Jones: ‘We were very young and cocky at the time, very sure of ourselves. I don’t think too many bands were doing the sort of improvising we were doing and the BBC, particularly the [later] In Concert live recordings, allowed us the scope to do that on the radio. This was in the days of restricted needle time so we were determined to make the best of every BBC radio opportunity.’
More reluctantly, Grant also allowed the band to undertake a handful of TV appearances throughout March 1969. With the advent of all-music satellite and cable channels, it’s hard to imagine now how little opportunity there was in 1969 for live rock music to be broadcast on TV. Consequently, the band found itself performing at often ill-conceived productions such as the so-so guest-spot they made their television debut with, on 21 March, on a BBC1 pilot show intended as all-round family entertainment called How Late It Is, performing ‘Communication Breakdown’. There were occasional highlights, like the thirty-five-minute live performance on Denmark’s TV-Byen channel, filmed at Gladsaxe, on 17 March, where they steamed through ‘Communication Breakdown’, ‘Dazed And Confused’, ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ and ‘How Many More Times’, surrounded by a small but attentive studio audience seated cross-legged on the floor before them. The same month there was also a lip-synching performance of ‘Communication Breakdown’ on Swedish TV, and a somewhat self-conscious live performance on a short-lived commercial TV programme in Britain called Supershow, recorded in Staines on 25 March, where they noodled around on ‘Dazed and Confused’ for ten minutes. ‘That was a mate of Jimmy’s who buttonholed us into that,’ said Grant. ‘I wasn’t that keen. I didn’t even go to the filming.’
In the main, the band’s attitude towards doing TV was bad right from the start. In the UK they weren’t exactly spoiled for choice anyway. The only regular music show on British television in 1969 was Top of the Pops, a show specifically designed to reflect records in the Top 30 singles chart, which ruled Zeppelin out immediately. (Of course, a pop version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was later used as the theme tune for the programme, but Zeppelin, like The Clash, would go to their graves never having performed on the show.) Even with the arrival in 1971 of the album-oriented, late-night weekly BBC2 show, The Old Grey Whistle Test – filmed in a small back room studio entirely unsuited to the full-on Zep experience – they would steadfastly refuse to appear on TV. As Jones told me, ‘Most other big-name groups had a lot of hit singles. Therefore, they did a lot of television and therefore had a lot of publicity, which we didn’t. It was kind of our own fault, in a way. We decided we didn’t have to do all of those pop shows if we didn’t do singles. Some places in the early days you had to. Like Denmark, whose radio wasn’t very good and that show was the only outlet they had for music like that. We were never really part of the pop scene, though. Doing pop shows on TV just wasn’t us. It was never what Led Zeppelin was supposed to be about. Our thing was always playing live.’ Or as Peter Grant memorably put it, ‘Led Zeppelin was an in-person band.’ Meaning: ‘They weren’t a band you saw on TV, they were the sort of band that to really appreciate you really had to see in-person, live on stage.’
However, one TV slot Grant was happy to give his blessing to was for a team to come along to the Marquee show on 28 March and film it for the BBC1 programme Colour Me Pop. Having talked it up to Jimmy as their best opportunity yet to get the real live experience of the band over to a huge potential audience, Grant’s good mood on the night soon turned to embarrassment and then fury when nobody from the BBC bothered to show up or even have the decency to phone ahead to let him know they would not be coming. Having given it the big build-up, Grant now had the odious task of informing Page and the others he’d been let down without any explanation. He vowed then never to allow himself or Led Zeppelin to be placed at the passing whims of a TV company again, no matter how big or well known. It was a decision that would have fateful ramifications for Zeppelin’s career that neither Page or Plant could have foreseen, not least the large degree of misunderstanding that would increasingly envelop their legacy as the years passed and more TV-friendly contemporaries like The Who and the Stones overtook Zeppelin in terms of both critical appraisal and historical importance, if not actual record sales. ‘That’s when I knew that we just wouldn’t need the media,’ said Grant. ‘It was going to be about the fans.’
As with America, by tour’s end in April the album had started to sell steadily. By the end of the year it would reach the 100,000 sales mark in Britain, reaching No. 6 in the national chart. But that was still some way off and when the band returned to America that spring they did so with a sense of relief. Where on the first tour they had been an opening act, often an afterthought not even included on the advertising for the gig, when they returned for their first show on 18 April at the New York University Jazz Festival, it was the start of twenty-nine shows in thirty-one days as co-headliners with Vanilla Fudge – the deal being whoever was biggest in any particular city going on last. With sales topping 200,000 and the album on its way to the Top 20, perception in America was now of a band on the verge of a major success.
The other change on this tour, as Robert Plant would note, was that ‘people started taking an interest in the other members of the group, and not just Jimmy alone’. As the frontman, inevitably much of this new-found attention was centred on Plant himself. The fact that he hadn’t written any of the material on the album was neither here nor there. Joe Cocker and Rod Stewart didn’t write their own material either. And, like the latter, Plant didn’t just sound great; he was tall, blond and looked good enough to eat, a veritable golden god shaking what he’d got – the perfect visual foil to Page’s darker, more slender, slightly effeminate stage persona. With recognition came a resurgence of confidence, a quality Plant had never lacked in the past but was now rediscovering on a nightly basis. While Page was relieved to see his frontman visibly growing in stature on stage, off it the person who really felt the change was Richard Cole. Having already noted the singer’s mixture of ‘nervousness and arrogance’, Cole recalls in his book that suddenly: ‘He seemed intent on harassing me, at times seeming to even belittle me, making it clear who was the boss and who was the employee. When we were in hotels, he would call my room with requests like, “Richard, ring up room service and have them send up some tea and breakfast for me.” I wanted to tell him to call the hotel kitchen himself. But he appeared to get a kick out of making me angry …’
And, of course, no one could fail to notice Bonham’s immense prowess as a drummer. While his rhythm partner, John Paul Jones, often looked and felt left out – a shadow on stage lingering by the drums while Plant and Page hogged the spotlight – no stage shadows were ever big enough or dark enough to contain Bonzo, not least when he went into his ever-lengthening drum solo, throwing the sticks down halfway through and pummelling the drums with his hands while cursing loudly. ‘Cannons!’ he would roar before bringing down the hammers. ‘I yell like a bear to give it a boost,’ he’d later explain. ‘I like it to be like a thunderstorm.’
It was. Other musicians became particularly fascinated by Bonham’s wildly untutored technique. Page told me a story about bumping into veteran drummer Ronnie Verrall on the second tour. ‘Ronnie was from a previous era,’ Jimmy explained, ‘an amazing drummer who’d played in Ted Heath’s band. Now he was playing in Tom Jones’ touring band, along with Big Jim Sullivan, and we bumped into them at the Chateau Marmont. After saying hello he said, “Where’s your drummer? I wanna talk to him.” He wanted to know if Bonzo was using a double bass drum on “Good Times Bad Times”.’ When Jimmy explained that he wasn’t, Ronnie was even more desperate to meet him. ‘So I took him along to Bonzo and the first thing he said was, “How do you do that?” And I saw his face as Bonzo’s showing him. Ronnie was like, “Fuck!” And here’s a man who was like one of the tops, you know? I thought, wow, when you’ve got this level of musician paying attention to what this kid is doing, that’s fabulous, you know?’
It wasn’t just old jazzers paying attention, either. There was a whole new generation of rock’n’roll drummers coming along who were watching what Bonham was doing. Not least his old pal from Brum, Bill Ward, who was about to discover a similar level of success with Black Sabbath. ‘Today’s drumming masters can really lay down some hot shit and are full of tricks, aided by the amazing new technology that exists,’ he told me. ‘But I heard Bonham doing it on one bass drum when he was seventeen. The only guy I can think of who’d been laying it down close to that, before him, was Buddy Rich, who John was a big fan of. In fact, you have to really look back to the old timers to see that kind of work. Bonzo’s feel and what he put into rock is so refined, he’s the best model that any drummer could listen to. If you wanna know where to put a one, or you wanna know how to use syncopation then listen to the master, because Bonham was the absolute master even as a kid.’ Or as Bev Bevan, another pal from Bonham’s teenage days and later a star in his own right with first The Move and then the Electric Light Orchestra, later told me: ‘What Bonzo could do on the bass drum with a single foot pedal was just outrageous. He certainly overtook me, in regards in sheer ability. It was just his over the top personality that people found hard to take sometimes.’ Bevan said the fledgling Move originally considered offering the drumming job to Bonham, but thought better of it and asked Bevan instead. ‘The Move didn’t drink at all in their earliest days and they thought John might be too much of a loose cannon …’
By the time you met Robert you already knew you were good. It was at the Oldhill Plaza and he was dressed up like a poof doing the MC bit. Then he came on with his group, Crawling King Snake, in T-shirt and jeans. Group was crap and you told him so afterwards, but he was all right, actually. So you told him you’d do him a favour, offering to play with them. He looked at you and laughed and you thought he must be taking the piss and nearly chinned him. But it was obvious he could sing so you let him off just that once. One of them blokes who even looked like a proper singer and you didn’t get many of them to the pound. You were both sixteen but you were always the eldest. And it was all right, doing regular spots at the Wharf, that pub in Worcestershire. You’d play with a pint of bitter at your feet, downing glass after glass. Never missed a fucking beat, though, doing things on the kit nobody else would. Hitting them cunts hard! Never mind the pretty boy singer, have some of that!
You were still living at home then, in Redditch, in the caravan at the back of your mum’s shop in Astwood Bank. You’d already played with all sorts by then: Terry Webb & the Spiders, the Senators, now this lot. They’d either get rid of you for playing too loud – wankers! – or you’d get bored and just naff off. Tell ‘em you had to have the drums cleaned, then once you’d got them back out of the van that would be the last they’d see of you. Ta-ta!
Crawling King Snake only lasted five minutes, too, before you got bored propping them up. Then there was the Nicky James Movement – great singer, no bloody songs – then Locomotive, then A Way of Life – another great group with no poxy songs of their own, none you liked anyway. Those were the ones you remembered anyway. Some you were in only lasted one night. Some wouldn’t let you near them, had already heard of you. Dave Pegg, the bassist in A Way of Life, then later of Fairport Convention, used to say: ‘If you were in a band with Bonham you knew you’d never get booked again. Often we only did the first half of the evening.’ Yeah, all right, but it was like your mate Mac Poole said, you might have got the boot for being too loud or being too drunk or not turning up on time or missing a rehearsal or whatever the bollocking hell it might be. But you never got the sack for not being good enough, sticking silver foil in the bass drum to make it louder. The way you looked at it: I’m doing what I wanna do – you don’t like it, fuck off.
The only thing you liked nearly as much as drumming was having a pint – or ten! It was like your other mate Jim Simpson from Locomotive always said: ‘Time passed quickly in John’s company.’ Didn’t stop the cunt sacking you though, did it? The first time, fair enough, cos you’d stood up on the drums and started taking your clothes off. But he was a gent was Jim, he’d always have you back again in the end. Especially when you’d bring him 200 Benson & Hedges or a bottle of whisky you’d nicked from the shop. Course, you’d end up helping him drink it but it’s the thought that counts, innit?
Even the day before your wedding, you couldn’t help but get pissed big time. You’d been to see Mac play, wearing your wedding suit, and you got on his kit and pepper-potted the skins. He yelled at you, ‘Fucking leave it out!’ But you’d just laughed. You never understood what the fuss was about drum kits anyway. You’d look at blokes like Mac treating theirs like gold dust and you’d pull a face. When the job was done and it was time to pack away the gear you’d just throw the bloody things off the stage and into the van. Mac said it was cos your dad had bought you your kit while he’d had to pay for his own on the HP. Bollocks, you told him, you’re only fucking jealous.
There were some other things besides drums. Like the wife. You’d met Pat Phillips when you were both sixteen, after a gig you’d done at the Oldhill Plaza with Terry Webb. She’d asked you why you didn’t wear a lame suit like Terry and you’d just looked at her and laughed. You and your brother Mick would go out together with Pat and her sisters, Sheila, Margaret and Beryl and it would be like Mick said, ‘a party every night!’ It was only a few months later when Pat found out she was expecting, like, and so you did the decent thing. Even though you were out of work again at the time, you ordered a made-to-measure suit for the wedding from old Robinson’s in Redditch who allowed you to pay for it in instalments. Years later, after you’d made your dough in Zeppelin, you paid him back good and proper, going in and ordering a dozen different suits.
It was different when you were first wed, though. You’d set up home in your mum and dad’s fifteen-foot caravan. It was all right till the boy came along – Jason – and the rows started about getting a proper job. That was in July 1966. You’d do some work as a brickie for your dad but it never lasted long. You were eighteen and there was no way in hell you were gonna stop drumming completely. Instead, you offered to quit smoking to help save some money. That never lasted either, though. You swore to Pat you’d give up the drums if you had to but she said you’d be so bloody miserable if you didn’t drum you’d make life unbearable. Anyway, Dad was always there with a few quid when you needed it.
Things got better when you moved into the council flat in Dudley – Eve’s Hill. You even got a part-time job at Osbourne’s the men’s clothing shop in the high street and for a while things settled down a bit. You might have been a tearaway but you always scrubbed up well, never went out without a clean suit and tie on. And you never gave up on the drumming, drifting from group to group, whoever paid the most, which is when you bumped into Planty again …
The music was evolving at a faster rate on stage, too, with many of the spontaneous jams of the first US tour now taking on a life of their own, turning into fully fledged songs, which was just as well because behind-the-scenes Atlantic was already pressing for a follow-up album, ideally for release in the US that summer. G did his best to shield the band from this extra pressure. Nevertheless, he could see the wisdom of Ahmet’s ways and encouraged Jimmy to take the band back into the studio as early as April, reconvening at Olympic in London for a few days with engineer George Chkiantz. One of the first numbers to emerge was a more elaborate, much heavier arrangement of Chicago bluesman Willie Dixon’s ‘You Need Love’, retitled ‘Whole Lotta Love’, which had first surfaced on tour as part of an extended improvisation during ‘As Long As I Have You’. There was also ‘What Is And What Should Never Be’, guitars making the most of the recent arrival of stereo with its flanged vocal effects and switching from left to right channel; and a shorter, bouncy rocker called ‘Ramble On’.
‘They were the first numbers written with the band in mind,’ Page remembered. ‘It was music more tailor-made for the units – the elements – that you’ve got. Like knowing that Bonzo’s gonna come in hard at some point and building that in.’ The songs were also the first on which Plant would be asked to contribute some of the lyrics. It had, he said, ‘taken a long time, a lot of insecurity and nerves and the “I’m a failure” stuff’ to produce the lyrics for the latter two. ‘Whole Lotta Love’ came from the tight riff Jimmy had come up with, ‘Bonzo taking hold of the whole thing and making it work from the drums point of view.’ Less concerned with specific lyrics, Plant’s main preoccupation had been ‘to try and weave the vocal in amongst it all, and it was very hard. Each song was experimentation …’
Their routine on the second tour was now well established. With the venues getting bigger, responsibility for road management was now split between Richard Cole and Clive Coulson. While Coulson oversaw the technical aspect of every show, taking charge of transporting and setting up the equipment, Cole took care of the band, driving them to and from airports in a rented station wagon, sorting out hotel reservations, airline tickets, gas for the car, and keeping them ‘entertained’ – a euphemism for getting them drunk and introducing them to willing groupies. What Ricardo wasn’t so good at doing was keeping them fed or making sure they got enough sleep. Still travelling on commercial airlines, waiting in line like everybody else, this could lead to some tricky situations, most often for Plant who was still in the habit of going barefoot wherever possible, his hair now stretching down his back. Routinely spat at, yelled at and generally abused by anyone who objected to the sight of an obviously stoned hippy in their midst, instead of stepping in to save him, Cole, who was nursing a growing dislike for the cocky young singer, tended to look the other way. Plant’s personal hygiene wasn’t up to much either and he was often told to take a shower, wash his greasy hair and use some deodorant.
Other problems brought on by their growing popularity now included bootleggers and ticket scalpers. In Chicago, at a sold-out Kinetic Playground, Grant discovered the hall manager selling tickets out of the back door and pocketing the cash. He and Cole grabbed the hapless swindler and forced him to turn out his pockets, confiscating all the spare cash. Still suspicious, they then dragged him into his office and pulled it apart until they discovered a waste bin filled with bogus ticket stubs of the wrong colour. Again, Grant and Cole forced the manager to turn over whatever illicit sums he had pocketed. Grant had seen it all before, you couldn’t fool him. If God was in the detail, Grant was his winged messenger. The result was that Zeppelin would become the first major rock band that actually got to keep most of the money they made.
It wasn’t just their music that was getting them noticed either. Ann Wilson, later of Heart, went with her sister Nancy to see the band at the Green Lake Aqua Theater in Seattle, where they appeared on a bill with Sonny & Cher and Three Dog Night. ‘The level of sexual arousal of the older girls in the audience was an eye-opener,’ she told Classic Rock. ‘This was no Three Dog Night show we were attending!’ For Jimmy Page, twenty-five, single, and already highly attuned to the possibilities offered up by the permissive sexual nature of American groupies (certainly compared to their more staid British counterparts) from his years on tour with The Yardbirds, none of this was new, and he instructed Cole to offer backstage access to only the prettiest girls in the audience. But while tales abounded of Page’s exploits – having Bonzo dress up as a waiter and ‘serving’ Jimmy on a room-service cart to a roomful of delighted young women – for the others this was a whole new world. One in which, despite their marital status, they would all take advantage of sooner or later. As Plant and Bonham’s contemporary, Ozzy Osbourne, once told me, ‘In them days in England, you’d still have to wine ‘em and dine ‘em before they’d let you near ‘em. The first time bands like Sabbath and Zeppelin got to America, none of us could believe it. The chicks would just come straight up to you and go: “I wanna ball you!” None of us could resist that.’
In particular, Plant, who’d never been short of female admirers anyway, now felt overwhelmed by the attention he was getting. ‘All that dour Englishness swiftly disappeared into the powder-blue, post-Summer of Love Californian sunshine, I was teleported …’ he told me. ‘I was [twenty] and I was going, “Fucking hell, I want some of that and then I want some of that, and then can you get me some Charley Patton? And who’s that girl over there and what’s in that packet?” There was no perception of taste, no decorum.’ However, when it came to groupies, the guilt he felt afterwards during the long car rides and plane journeys could be equally overwhelming. Feelings he would try to exorcise in the first song he would complete the lyrics for: a touchingly heartfelt, if somewhat disingenuous, ditty to his wife entitled ‘Thank You’. ‘It took a lot of ribbing and teasing to actually get him into writing,’ said Jimmy, ‘which was funny. And then, on the second LP, he wrote the words of “Thank You”. He said: “I’d like to have a crack at this and write it for my wife.”’
Even Bonham and Jones, both of whom had made a big show of turning down opportunities to frolic on the first US tour, would have their moments. As Jones later admitted, ‘The touring makes you a different person. I realise that when I get home. It takes me weeks to recover after living like an animal for so long.’ But while he tended to be discreet in any clandestine get-togethers with the groupie population, stories of Bonham’s escapades – the drummer being egged on by Cole, with whom he had become regular ‘boozing buddies’ – would soon become almost as legendary as Page’s. The most notorious being when Cole encouraged him to have sex with a notorious LA groupie known as the Dog Act, after her habit of always bringing her Great Dane with her to the hotel. Having tried and failed to get the Great Dane to perform cunnilingus on the girl by dangling pieces of fried bacon from her vagina, Cole dragged a drunken Bonham in to take the dog’s place. As Cole would later tell writer Stephen Davis, ‘So Bonzo’s in there fucking her, and I swear he says to me, “How am I doing?” I said, “You’re doing fine.” Then Grant walks in with this giant industrial-sized can of baked beans and dumped it all over Bonzo and the girl. Then he opened a bottle of champagne and sprayed them.’
As these youthful high-jinks are typical of the sort of thing that rock musicians, bored on the road and far from home, indulge in, the fact that at the same time as a naked Bonzo was having cold beans poured over him, Jimmy Page was in his room having himself photographed covered in offal, which another famous groupie, the GTO Miss Cinderella, pretended to eat off him, should shock no one. Years later, however, when such incidents were related in awed tones in such laughingly prudish tomes as Hammer of the Gods, the shock they caused was enough to add several layers to the Zeppelin myth. In reality, of course, Elvis and The Beatles had been up to much worse long before Zeppelin crash-landed in America. Even in the mid-Fifties, before the so-called sexual revolution, Presley’s former Memphis Mafia crony, Lamar Fike, told Mojo, ‘Elvis got more ass than a toilet seat. Six girls in the room at one time … when we left places it took the National Guard to clean things up.’ Or as John Lennon later told Jann Wenner about The Beatles’ on the road adventures: ‘If you could get on our tours, you were in. Just think of [Fellini’s film] Satyricon. Wherever we were there was always a whole scene going on. [Hotel rooms] full of junk and whores and fuck knows what.’
Even if the general public would remain ignorant of such antics a while longer, the fantasy of the rock star living the life of hedonistic abandon as some sort of entitlement had already been well established; an idea enhanced by such provocative images as that of a roomful of naked women used for the cover photo of Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland album, or the famous bacchanal portrait photo of the Stones taken by Michael Joseph for the inside of the Beggars Banquet album, both released at the tail end of 1968. The new album-buying rock audience itself was hardly innocent, with movies of the period such as Blow Out, Easy Rider and, later, Performance, Woodstock, Zabriskie Point, even latter-day Beatles films such as the acid-influenced Yellow Submarine and the downered-out ambience of Let It Be clearly reflecting the new sex-and-drugs consciousness evident in all aspects of the Sixties’ rock experience, certainly post-summer of love.
The GTOs were half-a-dozen groupie friends who became famous through the patronage of Frank Zappa, who had the idea of turning them into an actual group that would record for his own independent label, the aptly named Bizarre Records. GTO stood for many things: Girls Together Outrageously, Girls Together Only, Girls Together Occasionally, Girls Together Often, and any number of similar acronyms. There was Miss Cinderella, Miss Christine, Miss Pamela, Miss Mercy and Miss Lucy (plus, at different intervals, Miss Sandra and/or Sparky). Having proved themselves by appearing on stage at several Mothers of Invention shows as dancers and/or backing vocalists, in November 1968 Zappa put them on a weekly retainer of $35 each. As Alice Cooper, another notable signing to Zappa’s label, later recalled in his autobiography, Me, Alice, the GTOs ‘were more of a mixed-media event than musicians. People just got off on them. They were a trip to be with …’
As even an unashamed letch like the brutish Cole would acknowledge, groupies played an important role in the well-being of most working rock bands in America in the late Sixties. ‘I don’t think you will ever find an English musician who would ever put down those girls who were called groupies, cos those girls were not sluts or slags or whatever. They fucking saved my arse as far as patience goes, cos you’re talking about twenty-year-old guys away from home. The girls took care of them and were like a second home. You could trust them. They wouldn’t steal from you.’ It wasn’t just in Los Angeles or New York that the tribes gathered, either. ‘There were quite a few of them,’ Plant recalled with a smile, ‘Miss Murphy, The Butter Queen, Little Rock Connie from Arkansas. Some of them are still around, too – but now they’re teachers and lawyers.’
In Los Angeles, in 1969, there was no groupie more highly thought of or lusted after than the prettiest and best known of the GTOs, Pamela Ann Miller, aka Miss Pamela, aka Pamela Des Barres (as she became better-known in the mid-Seventies after marrying rock singer Michael Des Barres). Miss P, as she was also known, would sometimes babysit for the Zappas, make handmade shirts for her boyfriends, and was, she said, ‘too romantic for one-night stands’. If she was with you, it was ‘for the whole tour – at least, locally!’
Remembered by Alice Cooper as ‘a smiling open-faced girl who looked like Ginger Rogers’ with her strawberry blonde hair, freckles and goofy, flower-child smile, Miss Pamela was the epitome of the California Girl the Beach Boys had earlier eulogised. Although still only twenty years old, she already had a long history of ‘hanging out’ with rock stars before she met Jimmy Page, including Iron Butterfly singer Darryl DeLoach, Jim Morrison, Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Chris Hillman of The Byrds and actor-turned-country rock singer Brandon De Wilde. She had also met and spent time with the Jeff Beck Group.
When Zeppelin returned to LA to perform again at the Whisky A Go Go on 29 April, Miss Pamela was there. She later recalled how her friend and fellow groupie, Cynthia Plastercaster (of the Plastercasters of Chicago, famous for casting rock stars’ penises in plaster), had warned her that ‘the music was supposed to be fantastic, but they were supposed to be really dangerous guys, and you’d better stay away from them’. But she went anyway with fellow GTO Miss Mercy. Page looked frail and helpless, she thought, ‘like Sarah Bernhardt’. Instantly smitten by what she perceived to be the guitarist’s ‘demure, almost feminine’ persona, in her subsequent memoir, I’m With The Band, she breathlessly recalls Page wearing a pink velvet suit on stage, ‘his long black curls stuck damply to his pink velvet cheeks. At the end of the set he collapsed to the floor, and was carried up the stairs by two roadies, one of them stopping to retrieve Jimmy’s cherry-red patent-leather slipper.’
After the show, there was a party held for the band at LA’s then most fashionable hang-out, a club called Thee Charming Experience, where Miss Pamela watched Zeppelin ‘carousing at the darkest table at the back’. She was ‘very proud not to know them’ as she watched Richard Cole ‘carrying a young girl around upside down, her high heels flailing in the air, panties spinning around one ankle. He had his face buried in her crotch and she was hanging on to his knees for dear life, her red mouth open wide in a scream that no one could hear. It was hard to tell if she was enjoying herself or living a nightmare. Someone else was getting it right on the table.’ Nevertheless, she found it hard to keep her eyes from straying towards Jimmy, who ‘sat apart from it all, observing the scene as if he had imagined it: overseer, creator, impossibly gorgeous pop star’. Appalled, she fled the scene, despite having ‘sticky thighs’. But she had been noticed and when the band next returned to LA, Page would send out his bloodhound, Cole, to find her …
While the band could not be held responsible for every strange or disturbing thing that happened to them out on the road (for example, when they arrived early one morning in Detroit, having flown overnight, they were greeted by the gruesome sight of a murdered corpse being carried out on a stretcher, a thick pool of blackened blood on the lobby floor where the victim had been gunned down), they clearly revelled in the chaos their mere presence seemed to cause everywhere they went. It was also in Detroit that Life magazine journalist Ellen Sander joined the tour. Sander had originally wanted to cover The Who, also touring the US that summer, but that had fallen through and so a story on the Zeppelin tour was hurriedly installed to replace it. It was her first assignment for Life and she was thoroughly looking forward to it, if a little disappointed not to be covering the much better-known Who. Noting her enthusiasm, Cole immediately organised a betting pool amongst the road crew on which member of the band would fuck her first.
For her part, Sander would characterise them accurately enough. Page was ‘ethereal, effeminate, pale and frail’. Plant was ‘handsome in an obscenely rugged way’. Bonzo ‘played ferocious drums, often shirtless and sweating, like some gorilla on a rampage’. Jones was the one who ‘held the whole thing together and stayed in the shadows’. She concluded that the band ‘had that fire and musicianship going for them and a big burst of incentive; this time around, on their second tour, from the very beginning, they were almost stars’. Sander spent most of her time on tour with Page, not sleeping with him, as the boorish Cole had predicted, but quizzing him about the abuse she observed him dishing out to groupies. She quotes him: ‘Girls come around and pose like starlets, teasing and acting haughty. If you humiliate them a bit, they tend to come on all right after that. Everyone knows what they come for.’
At the end of the tour, when Sander went to the dressing room to say goodbye, she claimed that: ‘Two members of the group attacked me. Shrieking and grabbing at my clothes, totally over the edge.’ Bonzo came at her first, she said, followed by ‘a couple more … all these hands on me, all these big guys’. Unable to identify them from the mêlée, it’s not clear if these were actual members of the band or roadies. Terrified she was going to be raped, Sander says she ‘fought them off until Peter Grant rescued me, but not before they managed to tear my dress down the back’. Furious at the offence, in retaliation Sander refused to write the planned Life article, thus denying the band what might have been important, perception-altering publicity on the grand scale later enjoyed by the Stones. She did, however, make her feelings felt in a subsequent book, Trips, in which she concluded: ‘If you walk inside the cages at the zoo, you get to see the animals close up, stroke the captive pelts and mingle with the energy behind the mystique. You also get to smell the shit first-hand.’
When asked some years later about Sander’s damning account of her experiences on tour with him, Page admitted, ‘That’s not a false picture,’ adding only: ‘But that side of touring isn’t the be all and end all. The worst part is the period of waiting before going on. I always get very edgy, not knowing what to do with myself. It’s the build-up where you reach a point almost like self-hypnosis. There’s a climax at the end of the show and the audience goes away, but you’re still buzzing and you don’t really come down. That’s when you get a sort of restlessness and insomnia, but it doesn’t bother you too much if there’s a creative stream coming through. Maybe it’s necessary to that creative stream. What’s bad is that it’s not always a release. You build yourself to that pitch and the release doesn’t come. There are different ways of releasing that surplus adrenalin. You can smash up hotel rooms – it can get to that state. I think we’ve learnt to come to terms with it. I’ve learnt to enjoy it and achieve something creative from it too.’
Ultimately, Led Zeppelin were neither saints nor sinners, certainly not in the context of rock history where outrageous offstage high-jinks and hyper-sexual activity had been the norm for decades. They were merely one more cast of colourful characters on an already tilted stage. A fact Pamela Des Barres herself now vouchsafes: ‘It wasn’t just them. The Who were doing that stuff, and the Hendrix boys.’ Although, as she adds: ‘Zeppelin were a little extreme, they got a little rude sometimes. The girls would do anything to get near them and they sort of took advantage of that.’
Fucking groups, you’d known what they were like for a long time now. They’d always been the same, from the time you bought your first minibus when you were twenty-five and used it to drive the Shadows to gigs, to when you met Don Arden and he had you driving all these American cunts around on the package shows. The Everly Brothers, Little Richard, Brian Hyland, Chuck Berry … didn’t matter who they were, they all wanted something, expected you or someone else to provide it. When Chuck Berry complained his fee was three shillings and eleven pence short, he refused to go on until someone gave him the money. The crowd was going berserk but you only had to look at his little slit eyes to know the cunt meant it. You were only the driver but you realised that if someone didn’t do something there would be a fucking riot. So you walked over to the cigarette machine, smashed it open and counted out the change until you had three shillings and eleven pence. Then gave it to him. Didn’t even say thank you, just picked up his guitar and walked on …
Even when you started road managing for Don in 1963, looking after Bo Diddley and Little Richard, it was the same old story. Bo was all right, give him his drink and his ‘pretty womens’ and let him get on with it. But Richard … Christ almighty! You needed eyes in the back of your arse. Except then you’d see all of them on the bed together in the morning, six or seven of ‘em, that silly cunt sat there in the middle of it all reading his Bible. Punters loved him, though. You remembered how you’d had to flatten them sometimes to keep them off him. For their own good. They hadn’t seen what you’d seen.
You learnt a lot from working with Don, though. He didn’t take any shit off anybody. He’d go in hard, wallop, don’t bother asking questions afterwards. He was smart, too, showed you how a tough reputation could be almost as effective as a good hiding. As Don used to say: ‘If you don’t like somebody, let ‘em know from the first bell, baby.’ Bloody good advice, you never forgot it. The other thing Don taught you was to always have a healthy respect for cash. That wad of notes at the end of the night that would go into your back pocket and stay there. Accept no substitute, not if you knew what was good for you.
Then came Gene Vincent. Gene and his gammy leg, standing there in the leathers Don bought him, looking at you like it was all your fault. Gene and his gammy leg and his whisky bottle and his gun and his wife and his girlfriends and all the other bloody palaver. Ladies and gentlemen – the King of Rock’n’Roll! What a cunt, made your life a fucking misery. But so good on stage, even you couldn’t help look up to him when he was on form. And the crowds, they fucking loved him, couldn’t get enough of the silly, drunken, curly-haired, miserable, moaning cunt. Screaming for bourbon on a Sunday afternoon in Doncaster. Screaming that he couldn’t go on without it. You knew what to do. Grab the cunt by the throat and push him out there. Or if he was too pissed already, stick a tripod up the back of his jacket and strap him with gaffer-tape to the mic stand, wait for him to fall over and tell everyone he’s suffering from exhaustion, poor fucking lamb. Sorry, no, no money back, he’d started the show, hadn’t he? Not the boy’s fault he’s unwell. An old Don trick and a fucking good one …
By the beginning of May, when the album had reached No. 10 (its highest chart position), the vibe was now starting to spread back to Britain, with the NME’s US correspondent June Harris reporting: ‘The biggest happening of the 1969 heavy rock scene is Led Zeppelin.’ Reaction to the group’s latest American tour, she said, ‘has not only been incredible, it’s been nothing short of sensational’. When, on 25 May, they appeared on the same bill as the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Santa Clara Pop Festival, in San Jose, Jimi told Bonzo, ‘Boy, you’ve got a right foot like a rabbit!’ However, reviews in the US could still be sniffy. Reporting on the final shows of the tour, two nights at the Fillmore East in New York on 30 and 31 May, Variety ignored the audience who were literally banging their heads on the stage and instead wrote of the band’s ‘obsession with power, volume and melodramatic theatrics … forsaking their music sense for the sheer power that entices their predominantly juvenile audience.’ Many of the band’s peers couldn’t resist having a dig, too. Pete Townshend turned his considerable nose up at ‘solo-guitar-based groups’ that did better in America than in Britain. Keith Richards said Plant’s voice ‘started to get on my nerves’. Even Eric Clapton said he thought Zeppelin were ‘unnecessarily loud’.
After the second show, Atlantic held a party for them at the Plaza Hotel in New York, where they were presented with their first gold record for Led Zeppelin. Page could barely contain his delight. Such sudden success, less than a year after forming the band, ‘came as a massive surprise – to be perfectly truthful, the shock didn’t hit me until a number of years later. We were touring until the day when we were presented with a gold record. I thought, “My goodness! A gold record!”‘ An occasion somewhat marred by the fact that it was here they were informed they would need to pull their fingers out and get the second album finished pronto if they wanted to catch the pre-Christmas market that year. Stung into action, Jimmy ordered the band back to the studio straight after the party.
While Page ploughed on in the studio with engineer Eddie Kramer, seemingly oblivious, the studio workaholic, the others yearned simply to go home. Bonzo was morose and homesick, Plant was loudly proclaiming to anyone who would listen how much he missed his wife, while Jonesy kept his head down as usual and said nothing. To try to keep their spirits up, Grant took the opportunity over the next few days to constantly remind them how well they were now doing. Not only were they in the US Top 10, they were making money from the tour. The first jaunt had cost them. This time around, with their nightly fees swinging from $5,000 to $15,000, they would be flying home quids in, he said. Even after all the agents, lawyers, accountants, roadies, hotels and travel expenses had been paid, they would be looking at splitting approximately $150,000 between them. And that was nothing, Grant said, compared to what they would make next time out. The third tour, already being set up, would pull in nearly half a million dollars, he announced – and for far fewer shows! Everything would be better soon, said G, the band nodding their heads resignedly.
In fact, the band had already begun serious work on the second album when they arrived back in Los Angeles in April, and spent their days off recording at A&M Studios. It was a pattern that would be repeated throughout the tour, studio-hopping whenever a small break in their itinerary allowed: as well as A&M, both Mystic and Mirror Studios were utilised in LA, as were A&R, Juggy Sound and Mayfair Studios in New York, plus a one-off stop at an eight-track ‘hut in Vancouver’ where Jimmy took Robert in to lay down some vocal overdubs and harmonica – a set-up so small they didn’t even have headphones for the singer to wear.
Back in London in June, they flitted between engagements – miming ‘Communication Breakdown’ and ‘Dazed And Confused’ in Paris for a French TV show called Tous En Scene, which Grant said Page only agreed to ‘so he could meet Brigitte Bardot’ who never showed up anyway, and a couple more sessions for BBC radio, where the chief interest lay in an improvised rendition of ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’. ‘We were so organic at the time,’ said Jimmy, ‘that we used to make stuff up [on the spot].’ Between times, sessions were booked at Morgan Studios, where they finished off ‘Ramble On’ and hurriedly recorded two additional filler tracks: ‘Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)’, a lightweight, almost country-pop song about a groupie with ‘a purple umbrella and fifty cent hat’ dashed off by Jimmy and Robert as live in the studio, and ‘We’re Gonna Groove’, an old Ben E. King number and one of the covers they routinely played live. It was hardly ideal – in the end they would use only one of the new Morgan tracks – but by then Atlantic was pressing hard for new product. So on-the-hoof were the recording sessions, in fact, that even the always self-confident Page was given to moments of private self-doubt. Seeing this, Jerry Wexler had at one point tried to smooth him out, telling him over and over that the new album was going to be ‘a masterpiece’. Wexler wasn’t just easing his pain, either. He firmly believed it to be ‘the best white blues I have ever heard’ – and that was after only hearing three tracks.
All of which only partially reassured the perfectionist guitarist, who worried that the second album may also be too different from the first, that they had ‘overstepped the mark’. On the other hand, he was determined to show what he could do. As he told writer Ritchie Yorke during an earlier session in New York: ‘Too many groups sit back after the first album, and the second one is a down trip. I want every album to reach out further – that’s the whole point.’ Led Zeppelin II certainly reached out further than its patchwork predecessor. Still essentially blues-, rock- and folk-based, this melded those forms into what, in retrospect, would become the foundation of a whole new genre in popular music: heavy metal; a reductionism that would eventually come to haunt the band that inadvertently did more than anyone to ultimately define its meaning.
Comprised of material built on ideas begun in motel rooms, tinkered with at soundchecks and rehearsals, and thrown into the creative furnace of live improvisations, Led Zeppelin II, as Page had already decided it would be called, was to become the speed-of-night Seventies road album par excellence, the sheer exuberance of the band at that time captured in the grooves which, forty years later, still virtually crackle with energy. The sound, although produced in so many different places, obtained a formidable three-dimensional quality unlike any achieved on record before – a feat made all the more remarkable considering the scattershot approach to its creation. The American engineer on the sessions, Eddie Kramer, who had worked the previous year with Hendrix on Electric Ladyland, recalled ‘scrounging’ recording time in any studio he could. Some of Jimmy’s guitar solos were taped in hallways, he said. The end results of which would be mixed in just two days at A&R Studios in New York ‘on the most primitive console you could imagine’.
And yet somehow it worked. As well as proving an invaluable ally in procuring the band studio time, Page credits Kramer with helping construct the famous psychedelic middle-section of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, in which Plant’s howling lust-maddened vocal-improvs are mixed with an other-worldly cacophony of special effects, from the backwards echo of the slide guitar to the grinding sound of a steel mill, orgasming women, even a napalm-bomb explosion, and above it all, the eerie whining of Jimmy’s recently acquired theremin, like something out of an old black-and-white horror movie. ‘We already had a lot of the sounds on tape,’ said Page, ‘but [Kramer’s] knowledge of low-frequency oscillation helped complete the effect. If he hadn’t known how to do that, I would have had to try for something else.’ For his part, Kramer compared working with Page to working with Hendrix. ‘They were both very clear about what they wanted in the studio,’ he later recalled. ‘They also had a very clear vision and laser-like concentration in the studio – absolute laser-like concentration. It was amazing.’
As a result, while the guitarist may have had his reservations at the time about the ad-hoc way in which the second Zeppelin album came together – his famous ecstatically rendered solo, for example, on ‘Heartbreaker’, was ‘an afterthought’, recorded separately in a different studio to the rest of the song and ‘sort of slotted in the middle’ – even he now agrees the material as a whole displays a remarkable strength and consistency the band would rarely match in future recordings. This was Led Zeppelin at their most blood-and-guts elemental; rock music as bodily function. From the audible gasp with which Plant prefaces the monumental opening track, ‘Whole Lotta Love’, to the sinewy acoustic and harmonised electric guitars Page charms out of the speakers like snakes to transform otherwise straightforward rock moments like ‘Ramble On’ and ‘What Is And What Should Never Be’ into unbelievably subtle vessels of musical mayhem; to the stalking riffs of bones-into-dust headbangers like ‘Heartbreaker’ and ‘Bring It On Home’; to Robert Plant purloining Robert Johnson in ‘The Lemon Song’ in what would become one of the most infamously derided yet joyously insouciant Zeppelin mission statements: ‘I want you to squeeze my lemon … till the juice runs down my leg …’ Then pretending to aim higher in ‘Ramble On’ and its ‘days of old’ Tolkien-esque references to ‘the darkest depths of Mordor’ where ‘Gollum and the evil one’ slip away with his ‘girl so fair’. Or, best of all, the unflinchingly straight face with which he addresses his wife in the almost unbearably sentimental ‘Thank You’, all chiming 12-string guitars, melodramatic drums and swirling-fog organ. ‘That was when [Robert] began to come through as a lyricist,’ Page told me. ‘I’d always hoped that he would.’
All trademark Zeppelin moments, all destined to become cornerstones in rock history; and all rooted in the same brooding, squalling blues as white English contemporaries such as Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack and early Fleetwood Mac, but reinvigorated with its original down-and-dirty, walking-with-the-devil essence. Unlike the earnest bluesologists then frequenting London’s clubland, this was no respectful homage to the past. This was the primeval sex music of the future. What Robert Plant would later characterise as ‘a much more carnal approach to the music and quite flamboyant’.
Even the obvious filler – and at 2 minutes 39 seconds, the shortest track on an album with no real need for such things – ‘Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)’, which none of the band liked, or indeed would ever perform live (although Plant would resurrect a version of it for a solo tour in 1990), came straight from the top drawer; the sort of direct hit to the body groups like T. Rex and Thin Lizzy would build whole careers around in the decade to come.
The only real weak spot was the bone thrown to Bonham in the shape of ‘Moby Dick’ – an exercise Page concocted from various different takes in the studio in order to showcase Bonzo’s usual drum solo, known from the second US tour on, when it first began to feature prominently in the set as ‘Pat’s Delight’. Derived from a riff Jimmy had developed while playing a ‘sleepy’ John Estes song called ‘The Girl I Love She Got Long Wavy Hair’, which the band performed regularly throughout 1969, although drum solos were now becoming de rigueur at rock gigs, only Cream had ever committed what was essentially a drum solo as a track on one of their albums. A highly condensed – 2 minutes 58 seconds of impressive percussive nous sandwiched between some plodding riffage from Page and Jones – version of the real thing, unlike its live counterpart which was a genuinely thrilling spectacle, it’s hardly a must-have moment. It’s soon forgotten, though, as it segues into the album’s closing track and perhaps its best moment, ‘Bring It On Home’, based on the song of the same name that Willie Dixon had written for Sonny Boy Williamson, but lifted onto a much higher musical plain by Page’s own blazing riff and Bonham’s shock-and-awe drums, both of which belonged only to Zeppelin.
The only other faults on an album that still sounds as cutting-edge today as it did forty years ago were, again, to do with how much of the material derives from other, deliberately uncredited sources. The most famous example being ‘Whole Lotta Love’, which, on closer examination, turns out to be one of Zeppelin’s most thrillingly unoriginal moments ever. Not only is the basis of the song – certainly lyrically – taken from Muddy Waters’s version of Willie Dixon’s ‘You Need Love’, as would surface in 1987, when a belated plagiarism suit filed by Dixon’s estate was settled out of court, but even the so-called ‘new’ arrangement they imbue it with is partially lifted from the Small Faces, who used to encore with their own highly energised version of ‘You Need Love’ in the mid-Sixties.
Recorded for their debut 1966 album where it was credited to vocalist Steve Marriott and bassist Ronnie Lane, former Small Faces’ keyboardist Ian McLagan later admitted it was something ‘we stole – or at least, the chorus was a steal. It was a nick Steve used to do – because that’s what was influencing him.’ Zeppelin’s version would also be ‘a steal’, except this time credited to Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham. There’s no mistaking the similarity between the ferocious energy of Zeppelin’s version and that of the Small Faces one, not least in Plant’s vocal phrasing that sounds uncannily like Marriott’s. So much so, the latter would later claim that Plant had copied his vocals. ‘We did a gig with The Yardbirds,’ Marriott says in Paolo Hewitt’s 1995 biography of the band. ‘Jimmy Page asked me what that number was we did … I said, “It’s a Muddy Waters thing”.’ Plant ‘used to come to the gigs whenever we played in Kidderminster or Stourbridge’. As a result, when Plant came to record ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘he sang it the same, phrased it the same, even the stops at the end were the same …’
Even the most memorable part of the song, that punchy B-D, B-D-E riff, was derived from the original guitar refrain of the Muddy Waters’ original. Nevertheless, Page insisted, ‘As far as my end of it goes, I always tried to bring something fresh to anything that I used. I always made sure to come up with some variation. I think in most cases you would never know what the original source could be. Maybe not in every case, but in most cases.’ And while he does laughingly concede that, ‘We did, however, take some liberties,’ he now puts most of the blame for the subsequent plagiarism charges down to Plant, saying that ‘most of the comparisons rest on the lyrics. And Robert was supposed to change the lyrics, and he didn’t always do that, which is what brought on most of our grief. They couldn’t get us on the guitar parts or the music, but they nailed us on the lyrics.’
However, speaking in 1985, Plant seemed keen to shove the blame back in Page’s direction, when he joked: ‘When we ripped it off, I said to Jimmy, “Hey, that’s not our song.” And he said, “Shut up and keep walking.”‘ Five years later, he argued that in their appropriation of old blues songs, Zeppelin was merely acting in the tradition of the form. Nobody really knew where the songs came from originally. ‘If you read that book Deep Blues by Robert Palmer, you’ll see that we did what everybody else was doing. When Robert Johnson was doing “Preaching Blues”, he was really taking Son House’s “Preacher’s Blues” and remodelling it.’
Whichever way you looked at it, though, there was no mistaking the ‘origins’ of tracks like ‘The Lemon Song’ or ‘Bring It On Home’. Musically, ‘The Lemon Song’ derived directly from Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’, with flashes of Albert King’s ‘Crosscut Saw’, while its lemon-squeezing lyrical refrain also comes direct from source, in this case Robert Johnson’s ‘Traveling Riverside Blues’. Again, however, the songwriting credit given on the sleeve is shared squarely amongst the four band members with no mention of either Chester Burnett (aka Howlin’ Wolf) or Robert Johnson. Over thirty years after his death, whereas the work of the latter is now considered public domain, in the early Seventies, Burnett’s publishers Arc Music would sue Zeppelin for copyright infringement; a suit the band was prepared to settle out of court (with future pressings containing a co-song-writing credit for Burnett). Similarly, ‘Bring It On Home’, which was based on an old Sonny Boy Williamson track written by Willie Dixon but credited simply to Page and Plant, was also later settled out of court at the same time as the action against the band for ‘Whole Lotta Love’, with Dixon also awarded co-songwriting credits for both songs on all future Zeppelin products. Once again, though, Page was unrepentant. ‘The thing with “Bring It On Home”, Christ, there’s only a tiny bit taken from Sonny Boy Williamson’s version and we threw that in as a tribute to him.’
As Salvador Dalí – another arch ‘borrower’ – once famously suggested, genius may steal where talent borrows, but Jimmy Page would continue to be more brazen about it than most. Ultimately, however, even taking into account the obvious plagiarisms in the songwriting, Led Zeppelin II was Page’s record – easily his finest moment as a guitarist yet, certainly his most powerful statement as a producer, and a total vindication of his ambition to take The Yardbirds into truly new territory, even though he ended up having to do it alone with an entirely different line-up. As John Paul Jones was happy to vouchsafe, ‘Any tribute [that] flows in must go to Jimmy.’
‘The goal was synaesthesia,’ Page said, ‘creating pictures with sound.’ Hendrix may have been the greatest guitarist ever, The Beatles the world’s best songwriters and Dylan rock’s most profound poet, but the panoply of gifts Jimmy Page brought to bear on Led Zeppelin II as producer, guitarist, songwriter and – not to be understated – band leader and musical director, proved him to be the ultimate sonic sorcerer. Speaking to me nearly four decades later, the pride in his voice was still there. ‘You’ve got things like the light and shade aspect of “Ramble On” where I already know that if Bonzo’s gonna come in and kick-in a chorus, that that’s the way to have this song. And to be light on “What Is And What Should Never Be” then kick-in to the chorus. Because that’s the way you’re gonna get this dynamic. So all of these things are now actually designed, if you like, for [the band]. Having worked on the road with the band, it was starting to permeate into your inner being. I used to write stuff and hear Robert singing, and I knew the kind of thing John would be able to apply to it. His drumming on “Whole Lotta Love”, for example, is just fantastic.’
He also stressed how ‘ambient’ the whole sound is. It’s true. As he said, there is a certain way the band ‘moved the air about the room’ on those sessions that is clearly evident in the recording. For example, ‘the middle part of “Whole Lotta Love”, which is sort of what psychedelia would have been if they could have got there. That’s what it is. It’s also very organic. We always played together, that was an essential part of the overall thing: the acoustics of the room and how things are bouncing about. That was really important.’
Not that Page or the rest of the band would have much time to sit back and consider the enormity of what they had just done. Still only halfway through what would be the busiest year of their lives, the flight of the Zeppelin had only just begun.