Even without the threat of John Paul Jones leaving, the calamitous end of the 1973 tour had forced Page and Grant to sit back and take stock. The plan had been for October and November to be spent recording the next album. Instead, Zeppelin was put on hiatus as Jimmy and G considered their next move. In the works was the proposed tour movie – and accompanying live soundtrack album. Also looming on the horizon was the renewal of the Atlantic deal, the band’s initial five-year contract now having run its course. With all five Zeppelin albums having sold well in excess of a million copies in the US alone, Ahmet Ertegun was happy to propose a five-year extension with attendant multi-million-dollar signature advance. But Grant now demanded more. Having seen both The Beatles and Stones graduate to their own boutique labels, he and Page wanted the same for Led Zeppelin. Despite the disastrous outcome of Apple (where the lack of quality control led to more signings than anybody could properly account for) and the strange inertness of Rolling Stones Records (which, despite occasional one-off signings like Cuban rockers Kracker, and former Wailer Peter Tosh, it soon became clear that it was an outlet purely for the Stones themselves), the allure of owning your own label was strong: not just because it would mean an end to the protracted disputes over record sleeves, mastering, singles, release dates, etc., that had persistently dogged them over the years with Atlantic, but because it was a sign that you really had made it; that you weren’t just big, you were supernova; something that appealed greatly to both Jimmy’s and G’s vanity. Grant was also not slow to grasp that it would help offset some of the gargantuan amounts of tax the band would otherwise have been forced to pay. And so negotiations began for Zeppelin to have the autonomy of their own label, although under the distribution umbrella of Atlantic, thus guaranteeing no immediate shortfall in sales opportunities, distribution being the single most important thing giant corporate labels like Atlantic actually had to offer in the Seventies.
Both Page and Jones, meanwhile, embarked on what were essentially solo projects, with Plant also now thinking of making a Rod Stewart-like plunge into a parallel solo career. Despite denying it as soon the press had gotten wind of the idea, ‘To go away and do a solo album and then come back is an admission that what you really want to do is not play with your band,’ he said, feigning shock at the very idea, Plant was only talked out of proceeding with a solo album when Grant insisted it would be better to wait until the band’s own label was in full swing before embarking on such a venture. In reality, G had no plans whatsoever to allow a Plant solo album, he merely wished to present as united a front as possible to Ahmet during the negotiations over Zeppelin’s own label. Ertegun was well aware that the bass player might need replacing but it was a situation that could be managed; losing the band’s singer, however remote the possibility, could not be.
Relieved to be out of the maelstrom of touring, Jones had begun producing and playing on an album for his old friend, Blue Mink singer Madeline Bell. Titled Comin’ Atcha, he also performed live with Bell in December on the BBC 2 TV show Colour My Soul. Desperately keen to prove to himself that he still had a viable career outside Zeppelin if he so wished, he also appeared at the invitation of producer Eddie Kramer on the Creatures of the Street album by derided American glam rocker Jobriath. Fortunately for Zeppelin, neither album was a major commercial success; with Grant making suitably consoling noises, Jones indicated he’d be happy to return to the fold.
With no need for a solo album – Zeppelin albums were his solo albums – Page, nevertheless, had embarked on an intriguing side project which, while it never threatened to replace Zeppelin in his thoughts, would come shockingly close to derailing the future of the band in ways they could not have considered possible back then: to write the soundtrack for a film by Kenneth Anger, entitled Lucifer Rising.
Page had met Anger at a London auction of Crowley memorabilia in 1970. ‘Anger had some money at the time and he and Jimmy were both … not really outbidding each other but I think there was a time when they were competing,’ recalls Timothy d’Arch Smith, then acting as Page’s chief procurer of occult books, paintings and other memorabilia. ‘I think it was for the Bagh-I-Muattar, actually. I said to Jimmy, “I’m not bidding for it. I’m going to Paris.” Because [Gerald] Yorke had sent Anger in who always scared me to death. He never smiled.’
Described these days by the American Film Institute as ‘the magus of cinema’, Dr Kenneth Anger, as he enjoys being addressed since receiving an honorary doctorate in humanities a few years ago, long ago reached the status of real-life Magus and is, according to Dave Dickson, now one of the highest ranked members of the O.T.O. His credentials for such a role go back to 1955 when he travelled to Cefalu, in Sicily, with Alfred Kinsey, the self-proclaimed ‘sexologist’, where they unearthed a number of pansexual murals at Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema, later mimicked by Page at Boleskine with his Charles Pace-commissioned murals. ‘I never talk about it with people that aren’t magicians,’ Anger told one reporter in 2006. ‘Because they would think you were a fucking liar. But, you see, I’m not a Satanist. Some people think I am. I don’t care …’
Now seventy-eight, Dr Anger lives alone in his Hollywood apartment block, currently too ill to respond to requests for interviews, although he continues to talk of new film and book projects. He is also renowned, says d’Arch Smith, for a volatile temperament and ‘for putting curses’ on anyone who crosses him. However, behind the popular image of an almost Nosferatu-like character lies a clearly visionary thinker, bitter perhaps at so consistently being misinterpreted and misunderstood but whose work, lying so determinedly outside the mainstream, ranks amongst the most innovative in cinematic history.
Born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer, in Santa Monica, California, in 1930, Anger began his career as a child actor, starring alongside Mickey Rooney as the changeling prince in the 1934 Max Reinhardt production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (also featuring James Cagney as Puck). His own career as a filmmaker began in 1947 with Fireworks, a bizarre short featuring sailors with lit candles for penises, and continued in 1954 with Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a gloriously ecstatic exposition of Crowleyan ritual, followed in 1963 by Scorpio Rising, a homosexual fantasy about leather-clad bikers intercut with images of Christ, Hitler and the Devil, and a soundtrack comprised of thirteen pop songs – an innovation that prefigured future cine-icons such as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino in their use of ‘found’ music for their films. Serious critics placed Anger’s work in the same surrealist category as Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet; works that expanded the language of film. Most mainstream cinemagoers, however, remain utterly oblivious of his place in the canon. Instead, he became better known for his Hollywood Babylon books, a trio of tomes published over a forty-five-year period filled to bursting with scurrilous anecdotes concerning the sex and drug thrills of golden-era movieland stars such as Fatty Arbuckle, Gloria Swanson and James Dean, to name just a few.
The late Sixties found Anger in London, where he began a close association with the Rolling Stones, a period which saw the release of the Their Satanic Majesties Request album followed by the song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, which Anger boasted was inspired by his conversations with Mick Jagger. He also became close to Keith Richards, who was now shacked up with Brian Jones’s former girlfriend, the occult-curious Anita Pallenberg. ‘Kenneth had a huge and very conscious influence on the Stones,’ Marianne Faithfull told Mick Brown, explaining that Anger had initially considered Jagger for the title role in Lucifer Rising with Keith as Beelzebub, and how his kinship with the Stones soon led to ‘a veritable witches’ coven of decadent Illuminati, rock princelings and hip nobility’. But the Stones quickly began disassociating themselves from him after he freaked Keith and Anita out by somehow arranging for their front door to be painted gold one night while they slept upstairs, in preparation for a Pagan marriage ceremony they had agreed for him to preside over on Hampstead Heath, so upsetting them that they backed out of the wedding.
Anger claimed that screenings of his films were magickal ceremonies in themselves, describing them as ‘spells and invocations’ specifically designed to exert control over people’s minds. He often revised and updated his movies – he had been working on and off on Lucifer Rising for years before he met Jimmy – adding soundtracks by famous rock stars to some – as with Jagger’s synthesiser contribution to Invocation of My Demon Brother in 1969 – and ELO to a later print of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.
Shot in England, Germany and Egypt, Lucifer Rising was to be based on the story of the Fallen Angel of orthodox Christian mythology, restored to his Gnostic status as ‘the Bringer of Light’ – an implicit part of Crowley’s own teachings, as also depicted in Milton’s Paradise Lost, which ends with the angel, and his host, finding reconciliation with ‘the Beloved’ – and would include real-life Crowleyan occult rituals. As Page well knew, it’s only in recent history that the name Lucifer has become synonymous with that of ‘Satan’. In fact, Lucifer was originally a Latin word meaning ‘light-bearer’; a Roman astrological term for the ‘Morning Star’ and a direct translation of the Greek word eosphorus, meaning ‘dawn-bearer’, while in Romanian mythology, Lucifer (from the Romanian word Luceafãr) was used for the planet Venus.
Anger experienced numerous problems with his much-cherished project from the start, leading to whispers that the film was – literally – cursed. His first attempt at getting it off the ground in 1967 had failed when its original lead, a five-year-old boy – another representation of Crowley’s ‘little child’ perhaps – died in an accident before filming began. His place was initially taken by Bobby Beausoleil – aka Cupid, Jasper, Cherub, and other weird aliases – a former guitarist, briefly, with the group Love. Beausoleil had lived for a time with Anger in San Francisco, at a rambling old mansion on Fulton Street known locally as ‘the Russian Embassy’. They fell out, however, when Anger threw Beausoleil down the stairs after discovering he’d hidden a large parcel of marijuana in the basement. Aggrieved, Beausoleil made off with most of the early footage, burying it in California’s Death Valley. In revenge, Anger placed ‘the curse of the frog’ upon him, trapping a frog in a well. When, soon after, Beausoleil, now running with the Manson family, was arrested for the Tate- and La Bianca-related murder of music teacher Gary Hinman, he was sentenced to life imprisonment – trapped behind four walls, just like Anger’s cursed frog.
Using what little footage he had managed to salvage from the Beausoleil episode, Anger had made Invocation of My Demon Brother using Jagger’s soundtrack. But his intention had always been to return to what he felt would be his magnum opus, this time with Jagger as Lucifer, and Marianne Faithfull and Donald Cammell also in principal roles. When Jagger suddenly changed his mind, setting the production back yet again, Anger punished him by casting his younger brother Chris in the role. But the younger Jagger proved no less malleable and was dismissed after an on-set row. Eventually a Middlesbrough steel worker named Leslie Huggins was given the part, and filming finally began.
‘I was already aware of Anger as an avant-garde filmmaker,’ Page told Classic Rock writer Peter Makowski in 2007. ‘I remember seeing two of his films at a film society in Kent – Scorpio Rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother [and] I was already aware of Anger because I had read and researched Aleister Crowley … [That] made him somebody I would like to meet. Eventually he came to my house in Sussex and I went to his flat in London.’ It was during the visit to Anger’s London flat that ‘he outlined this idea for a film that became Lucifer Rising. It was then he asked me if I would like to take on the commission and do the music and I agreed to that.’ It was a decision that would, quite literally, come back to haunt him.
According to Anger, he and Page had a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ and never discussed money, as their collaboration was to be an ‘offering of love’. The two of them would split the profits from the film, with Page taking all proceeds that were earned from the soundtrack. In response, Page set about creating his aural equivalent of Anger’s film and with it the most imaginative, evocative, if ultimately lost, music of his career. It was, he said, ‘an honour’.
Page now claims he was given no final footage to work with, pointing out that Anger had commissioned the soundtracks for both Scorpio Rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother on a similar basis. All he knew, he told Makowski, was ‘that it was about the deities of Egypt’. And some of the characters: ‘You have Isis who would correlate to the early religions. Isis is the equivalent of man worshipping man, which is now where we have Buddha and Christ and all the rest of it, like the three ages. And then the child is Horus, which is the age of the child. Which is pretty much the New Age as it was seen.’
Back in 1976, however, he told Mick Houghton he’d been given a twenty-five-minute opening sequence to work with. He was nervous, he said, because ‘the opening sequence is a dawning sequence which immediately brings comparisons with [Stanley Kubrick’s] 2001 to mind. The film was shot in Egypt and I wanted to create a timelessness, so by using a synthesiser I tried to change the actual sound of every instrument so you couldn’t say immediately, “that’s a drum or a guitar”. I was juggling around with sounds in order to lose a recognisable identity as such.’
Encouraged by the knowledge that, unlike Zeppelin records, which were designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, ‘This was going to be something which I knew was going to be shown in arts labs and underground cinemas and brotherhoods’, he allowed his imagination to run wild. As well as running his electric guitar through an ARP synthesiser, his used a mellotron, his 12-string acoustic guitar, various keyboards, plus tabla drums and a tempura (an Indian drone instrument), all of which he played himself. For the climax he created a synthesiser effect: ‘These great horns that sound like the horns of Gabriel. It was a good piece.’
The end result, as obtained from an extremely rare bootleg CD, is, as might be expected, an unsettling listening experience. Beginning with a loud, hypnotic drone which continues for several minutes, what few melodies there are – by turns portentous, forbidding, weirdly euphoric – meld into dissonant cadences that both repel and attract, like an electric current. About two-thirds of the way through, a thunderstorm erupts like a growling bowel movement into the aural mire, followed by Buddhist chants that sound like they might have been slowed down and corrupted, harmonic yet dense and ominous, at which point things appear to strive for some sort of staggered, juddering climax as another muted thunderclap is overheard in the distance. Ultimately, the feeling that repeated plays imparts is one of disorientation. Not entirely morbid but a feeling nevertheless of being scattered, dizzy … unhinged. Having played it all the way through several times, I have not been tempted to listen to it much since. Or as the eminent American music critic Juli Le Compte wrote: ‘Haunting and disturbing, this piece is highly expressive of Page’s strain of morbidity.’
Meanwhile, back in the so-called real world, the band’s own movie was also still being shot. Enlarging on the original idea for a concert performance interspersed with interviews and offstage footage, Joe Massot – who found himself struggling to sequence the footage from the two shows he had shot – proposed they ditch the straightforward documentary idea and go for something more representative of who the band really were with each member, plus Grant, filmed in individual segments in which they would assume a character of their choice. Massot said: ‘We wanted to show them as individuals, but not in the traditional way with interviews. They wanted more symbolic representations of themselves. All the individual sequences were to be integrated into the band’s music and concerts.’
Not unlike the 1972 T. Rex movie Born To Boogie, which Marc Bolan pretentiously claimed was based on the dreamlike films of Fellini but had more in common with the self-consciously ‘wacky’ ideas first expressed in The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night – specifically Ringo Starr’s brief metamorphosis into a tramp – and although hampered by the fact that none of them could act or would come up with suitably coherent ideas to sustain five consistently interesting depictions, what became known as the ‘fantasy sequences’ would, however inadvertently, reveal much about each of them. Thus Plant’s incarnation in the finished film as a sword-bearing handsome prince, given to sailing, horse-riding and rescuing damsels-in-distress, relayed during the extended instrumental passage of ‘The Rain Song’. Seen sword-fighting on the cobblestone floor of the Great Tower of Raglan Castle (a fifteenth-century ruin that stands between Monmouth and Abergavenny, and built by Agincourt veteran Sir William ap Thomas, ‘the blue knight of Gwent’) it was, however cringe-making as it looks now, an idea which nonetheless clearly mirrored his self-image as the gallant, peace-making knight of the group.
Similarly, Jones’s highwayman fantasy – played out during ‘No Quarter’ – of leading some subterranean mission through the impenetrable rigmarole of a weird cemetery scene, before whisking off his mask and returning in more familiar guise to his family – may have featured some of the most stultifying acting ever committed to the cinema but was also perfectly in keeping with his perceived role as the behind-the-scenes manic-mechanic of the group. While Bonzo’s metamorphosis during ‘Moby Dick’ from red tractor-driving farmer to drag-racing daredevil clearly reflected the split-personality of the lives he led on the road with Zeppelin (dangerous, speedy, haphazardly flame-throwing) and off it with his family (both wife Pat and son Jason in tenderly glimpsed scenes under the protection of the husband and father only they really knew). Even Peter Grant and Richard Cole are given their own sequence, filmed earlier in 1973 on the Hammerwood Park Estate in Sussex (which the group were then considering purchasing and turning into their own recording and rehearsal facility, an idea later abandoned), in which they become cigar-chomping, machine-gun-toting gangsters, laughing loudly as their bullets strafe a roomful of money-counting adversaries – obvious metaphor for the faceless ‘suits’ who run the music business.
Naturally, the sequence that drew the most comment – as it continues to today – is the one in which Page is seen climbing the steep slopes of some dark, craggy mountain at night, a full moon smudged by thin clouds. At the peak, he encounters the cloaked figure of the ancient Hermit, who stands head bowed, holding aloft his lantern, the light to which Page, the apprentice adept, is purposefully ascending. His visage, when revealed, then retreats backwards in time to reveal Page’s own face through middle-age, adulthood, young man, teenager, child, baby and eventually embryo, forked by white lightning, before returning through the various stages back to that of the ancient Hermit – or Magus. The idea is given extra resonance when one knows that the mountain being climbed is actually Meall Fuarvounie, opposite Boleskine House – the same snow-capped peak Crowley liked to climb half a century before – and the fact that the sequence is intercut in the final version of the movie during Jimmy’s violin bow showcase in the middle of ‘Dazed And Confused’, the bow melding into one clearly occult image as the Hermit/Magus waves his bow/wand in a slow arc through the air, left to right, its colours showing eleven (Crowley’s ‘general number of magick’) shades of green, yellow, blue, red, gold and so on. It’s as if the ‘Barrington Coleby’ painting from the inner sleeve of the fourth Zeppelin album has been brought to life, its visual metaphor obvious: the journey to occult enlightenment.
‘I knew exactly what I wanted to do with that,’ Page told writer Mark Blake upon the re-release of the film on DVD in 2007. ‘I knew I wanted to do it at the house I had in Scotland, and I knew I wanted to be filmed climbing this escarpment, which I’d never actually climbed before.’ The shoot had taken place on the night of the first full moon in December. ‘I wanted the full moon to get a sort of luminescent quality,’ he had told me previously. ‘And I said it would be great if it snowed, too. And it did. Of course that meant it was freezing and when they asked me to do the climb again and again I did think, oh no, what have I let myself in for.’
The scene was intended as ‘an interpretation of the Hermit tarot card,’ he agreed. ‘The Hermit standing there with his beacon of truth, you know the light and everything. And the attainer [sic] or whatever climbing up to try and reach it. But the fact being that when he reaches the Hermit the face starts to change, and the message being that the truth can be attained at any point but you may not have received it and learned that you’ve received it or whatever.’ Elaborating with Blake, he added: ‘It comes from the Rider [-Waite] deck, but that particular interpretation has allusions to the work of [William] Holman-Hunt, a pre-Raphaelite painter … it was a statement about what was going on in my life.’
Earlier in the film, he is pictured cross-legged by the lake at his home in Plumpton, cranking out an ancient folk tune, ‘Autumn Lake’, on a wheezing old hurdy-gurdy. In the background can be seen some of the black swans he had populated the lake with. Then, as he looks up and his eyes meet the camera, they glow a luminous red, as if recalling the lines from ‘Black Dog’: ‘Eyes that shine burning red, dreams of you all through my head.’ Not that he would say exactly what it was supposed to mean, besides allowing for the generalisation of ‘My eyes being mirrors to the soul, that sort of thing …’
When Massot presented a short rough-cut segment of the film at a special screening for the band in early 1974, it was a disaster. ‘They finally came to a preview theatre to see the “Stairway to Heaven” segment,’ he recalled, ‘and started to fight and yell when the film began. They thought it was my fault Robert Plant had such a big cock.’
With or without Bonzo you always knew you’d make it. You had the looks, had the voice, the right ideas. You knew it, everyone knew it. As well as Crawling King Snake there was also The Good Egg, The Tennessee Teens … the Teens were like The Who only better, or just as good, everyone said so. Earned good bread, too, whenever they landed a gig. When they changed their name to Listen and asked you to join full-time you thought you’d cracked it. Bye, bye Snake boys, hello big time! Then CBS came a-calling and you knew you’d cracked it. Only a one-off single deal but it was obvious it would turn into something else, once the world got wind of you. Still only seventeen, you had to get your mum and dad to countersign the contract. Or would have done if they’d got round to posting it to you. But that was all right. CBS was not the big deal it would become later, not in England anyway. Still a proper record label from London though, the Holy Grail …
The A-side was ‘You Better Run’, a note-for-note copy of the American hit by the Young Rascals, only much, much better. The B-side was an original, ‘Everybody’s Gotta Say’, which should have been the A-side really, it was that good but you know what record companies are like, man. Either that or the other one you’d all come up with which everyone loved – ‘The Pakistani Rent Collector’. It wasn’t up to you, though, not yet, so ‘You Better Run’ it was. You had to think commercially when it came to singles and it was obvious it would sound good on the radio. None of the pirates really picked up on it, though, which really surprised you. I mean, come on, it was loads better than some of the old bollocks you heard on there. You were told later that Radio London had played it a few times, actually, but you didn’t live in London so only found out about it when it was too late, otherwise you’d have done something about it. At the end of the day though it wasn’t really a hit and you didn’t really blame CBS when they ‘declined to pick up the option’ on a second single. Bit of a bummer but you’d have done the same if you were them. That’s the way the biz works, you know? It was still a bit of a blow though when Listen sort of drifted apart after that. They could have made it if they’d stuck around, cos they were definitely good enough. Everyone said so …
You weren’t discouraged though. You just started making tapes and posting them out to all the London record companies. In the end, good old CBS stepped in and offered you a solo deal. Obviously the boys in Listen weren’t best pleased when they found out but that’s the way it goes sometimes, you know, those cats in London, what can you do, they just really dug your voice. And what they were talking about was a little bit different, your first solo single a translation of an Italian ballad called ‘Our Song’. Some said it sounded a bit Tom Jones but they were only jealous. Anyway, it did okay, you know, though you never got to hear it on the radio again. But at least they went for a follow-up this time, another cover, not bad this time though, called ‘Long Time Coming’, which definitely was more your thing and got quite a good review in the New Musical Express actually. It was just a shame the bloody radio gits didn’t pick up on it. But then you had to buy wankers like that off, the whole thing was a rip-off, everyone knew that.
It wasn’t long of course before you were singing in another group. It was a stroke of luck CBS not wanting to make any more records with you in the end cos this lot were even better than Listen, with a better name and everything – the Band of Joy. No more R&B covers with this lot. This was more West Coast, kinda like what came after the Animals and The Yardbirds. The sort of thing you could really relate to, though in fact you could actually sing and play a lot better than most of the groups you were listening to. And it was cool cos the band’s leader Vernon Perera was related to your bird, Maureen, from Walsall. You’d known Vernon since he’d been with the Stringbeats, the first white-and-coloured group in the world from Stourbridge, who you’d also sung with sometimes.
Vernon was the one in charge, though, and after a while it began to get you down a bit so you left. Not left, just sort of stopped doing it for a while to give you a chance to get a change of scene and check out the vibe. By the time you came back the band had changed again. They’d kept the name but Vernon was gone and you all went on stage with war paint on your faces like Red Indians. Kind of like what Arthur Brown was into, only better. Then you were doing the Rainbow Suite in Brum one night and got carried away and jumped into the crowd, who all ran from you. That was the last time you went on looking like a Red Indian. You kept the make-up and stuff but made it more sort of mystical and far out, less cowboy-ish.
When Band of Joy needed a new drummer in the summer of 1967, you mentioned Bonzo. The sort of thing you were doing now – covers of Love and Moby Grape and the Jefferson Airplane – was something different for John but he soon got stuck in. Nothing fazed that fucker. The face paint had given way to kaftans and beads and Bonzo was told to do his own thing, too. So he got hold of a milkman’s white jacket and dyed it mauve. Next thing he had a bright green kaftan with beads and bells and he’d grown a moustache. He told you that when he went to see Bill Harvey his dad had said, ‘Who’s that poof?’ He didn’t give a stuff. He even got his mum to make him a frock-coat out of old curtain material, getting on the 147 bus to Redditch with his hair all frizzed out like Jimi Hendrix. He even came on that ‘Legalise Pot’ demo you organised hoping to get into the papers, which you did. Then had to hide them at home in case your bloody old man saw them …
In the end the Band of Joy became quite well known, playing all over, opening for Terry Reid, Spooky Tooth, Keith West’s Tomorrow, Aynsley Dunbar’s Retaliation. It was a happening scene. You even got a date at the Speakeasy in London. You were unloading the old Comma van outside the Speak when a Rolls-Royce pulled up to let an old lady cross the road. Suddenly a voice boomed from the grille, ‘You’ll have to move faster than that, madam!’ Nearly gave the poor old dear a heart attack. It was Keith Moon in the car. You just stood and stared, wanting to laugh but not knowing whether to. Then on stage that night, singing away, giving it loads, bloody hell if there wasn’t Long John Baldry standing there ‘looking lovingly into my eyes’ as you later put it, Bonzo roaring at him to ‘Fuck off!’.
*
The size of Robert’s cock notwithstanding, so deeply disappointed was Jimmy with Massot’s work he instructed G to summarily fire him, installing an Australian filmmaker named Peter Clifton in his place. Viewing Massot’s rough-cut, Clifton could only agree with the band’s view that it was ‘a complete mess. There was no doubting Joe’s talent, but he was in deep waters with this filming attempt and he did not have the strength to push the band members around. None of the material he had captured on 16mm or 35mm actually created sequences. There were a few good shots but they didn’t match up, there was no continuity, and no cutaways or matching material to edit or build sequences.’ Though Clifton agreed to try to salvage the film, he felt that by then the spark had been lost and that ‘the guys weren’t terribly into it’ any more. That it was now ‘more Peter’s idea’ to continue. As a result, it was another nine months before Clifton would have anything new to show them, during which time they had all but abandoned the idea in their minds – even G, who now began referring to it only half-jokingly as ‘the most expensive home movie ever made’.
However, one significant addition Clifton somehow managed to persuade everyone to agree to before the shutters totally came down was to re-shoot the whole show on a soundstage in England in order to fill some of the ‘holes’ left in the original footage. Jimmy rolled his eyes at the memory. ‘We were like, “Oh, no! How are we going to remember the improvisations we did, how can we reproduce it?” But we booked into Shepperton Studios and proceeded with it – miming to our own soundtrack and doing a variation of the one thing we’d always tried to avoid doing – miming on Top of the Pops.’ So unprepared were they for this eventuality that John Paul Jones, who had recently cut his hair, was forced to wear a wig to match the lampshade style of 1973. ‘The office rang me up and asked if I needed anything for the Shepperton shoot. I replied, “Well how about six inches of hair for starters!”‘ he laughingly recalled. ‘So I had to use a wig which caused some laughs.’
But if the band film was becoming a pain in the arse, plans for their own record label were now proceeding apace and by January 1974 a deal was ready to be signed on a group-owned subsidiary label under the Atlantic aegis – to be named Swan Song. Originally the title of an unreleased twenty-minute Page instrumental (also sometimes known as ‘Epic’, yet another theme developed out of his original ‘White Summer’ showcase) then also the working title of their next album, Page brushed off concerns about ‘negative connotations’ by explaining, ‘They say that when a swan dies it makes its most beautiful sound.’ Based on apocryphal tales of mute swans ‘singing’ just prior to death, swans in fact are not mute and do not emit any particular sound when they die. Original suggestions for a label name, however, had included less-inspired suggestions such as Eclipse, Deluxe, Stairway, Superhype (the name of their publishing company), even Slut and Slag: ‘The sort of name one would associate with us touring America,’ joked Plant.
Unlike the Stones’ label, said Page, Swan Song was not ‘going to be an ego thing. We’re going to be signing and developing other acts, too.’ Plant added: ‘We didn’t start Swan Song to make more bread. I mean, what are we going to do with any more bread?’ First to be signed was Bad Company (initially only for America, as vocalist Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke were still under contract to Island in the UK as Free), followed by Maggie Bell (whose band, Stone The Crows, Grant had previously managed) and The Pretty Things, who Jimmy had known since his session days and whose 1970 album, Parachute, achieved the distinction of being the only album voted album of the year by Rolling Stone never to go gold in America. Roy Harper was also supposed to join the roster but eventually demurred. Plant, Page and Bonham had recently guested at his Rainbow concert in London, with Robert acting as MC. But Harper was privately dubious about the enterprise, fearing it would go the same way as Apple, and he remained with EMI.
Offices were opened in New York’s plush Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, where US press agent, Danny Goldberg, was installed as vice-president. A London office, opposite the World’s End pub in the King’s Road, was also opened later that year – a delay caused partly by Grant using the new Swan Song deal as an opportunity to formally bring an end to the co-production deal he was still tied into with Mickie Most, and because for a time he had considered basing Swan Song’s offices from his own sixteenth-century country manor house, Horselunges, in Hellingly, Sussex (famously built by architect, antiquary and topographical historian Walter Hindes Godfrey). The split from Most also allowed Grant and Page to reorganise their publishing, forming Joaneline Music Inc to specifically publish all future Led Zeppelin songs. A sub-company owned by the group known as Cullderstead was also registered for Swan Song as a business name.
Once the new King’s Road offices were established, Zeppelin initially turned to their UK PR man, B.P. Fallon, to head up the new company, but B.P. was a free spirit and didn’t relish what he foresaw as becoming a full-time desk job. So the job went to LA record exec Abe Hock. But he only lasted a few months before being replaced by Alan Callan, another acquaintance of Page’s since The Yardbirds days. Unlike their plush US offices, however, Swan Song’s London base was remarkable for its shabbiness, kitted out with unwanted secondhand furniture from a nearby Salvation Army building. Outside there wasn’t even a sign to let visitors know they had found the Swan Song offices, just grubby off-white walls with peeling paint and a plaque: ‘Dedicated to the memory of Aileen Collen, MBE, who devoted so much of her life to the welfare of ex-servicemen and their families.’ However, there was a sign in the Swan Song reception area that read simply: ‘If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.’
An eye-catching logo was designed for the label, typically full of symbolism. Based on the painting Evening (The Fall of Day) by nineteenth-century symbolist artist, William Rimmer, completed circa 1869–70, the Swan Song logo is almost identical bar a couple of small details. The original painting depicts a winged figure arching its back: a symbolic portrayal of the Greek mythological Sun God, Apollo, rising from the Earth at sunset. While with the Swan Song logo, the only difference was that Rimmer’s painting shows the winged figure with his left arm bent backwards, his left wing a large dark mass (as the sun declines into shadow), and the Swan Song figure has both arms outstretched, his left wing more straightforwardly spread before him, as though greeting the sun.
Over the years, there have been many interpretations of both pictures. Many original observers of Rimmer’s painting mistakenly took it to be a portrait of Icarus, who perished when he flew too close to the sun. In recent times, Robert Plant has also maintained that the figure on the Swan Song label is that of Icarus. When the logo was first revealed in 1974, however, many Zeppelin fans assumed it was actually a mythologised depiction of Plant himself – with wings. But the most popular and enduring myth surrounding the logo is that the figure is, in fact, Lucifer. Given that at the time of the label’s launch Page was concurrently working on the soundtrack music for Lucifer Rising, it’s understandable why such rumours might circulate, with the figure on the Swan Song logo appearing to be Lucifer returning to the Light. Certainly, Page would not have found fault with such an interpretation, though this time he chose to remain silent on the subject. (Interestingly, you can now buy Zeppelin T-shirts on the internet with the words ‘Swan Song’ over a picture not of the logo but the Rimmer painting. Meanwhile, the William Rimmer original currently resides in the Boston Museum of Fine Art.)
Officially launched in May 1974 with lavish, much publicised parties set a week apart in New York and Los Angeles, at the Four Seasons hotel in New York, where more than two hundred guests tucked into swanshaped cream pastries, the food and drinks bill came to over $10,000. Everything went well until a furious Grant realised the ‘swans’ he’d paid to glide elegantly amongst the guests were actually geese. Bonzo and his ever-present accomplice Ricardo – suitably fortified by snorting coke off a plate from the buffet – chased the geese out into the street where two of them were killed in rush-hour Manhattan traffic.
Things went more smoothly at the second party at the Bel-Air hotel in LA, where guests included Groucho Marx, Bill Wyman and Bryan Ferry. After the party the band repaired to their usual half-moon table at the Rainbow, where Jimmy rowed with his new LA main-squeeze, nineteen-year-old model Bebe Buell, who felt he was being unnecessarily cruel ignoring his other girlfriend there, sixteen-year-old Lori Maddox. ‘The first time I heard Led Zeppelin was when this boy played their first album for me in his car as he was trying to get into my knickers,’ Bebe later recalled. ‘Everyone in my crowd was flipping out over them. There was a “who do you like better, Jimmy Page or Robert Plant?” thing. I thought Jimmy Page was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. He was angelic.’
It was also during this LA trip that the band finally agreed to meet Elvis Presley, who was appearing at the Forum. Organised by Jerry Weintraub, agent for both Zeppelin and Presley, Plant recalled: ‘The King demanded to know who these guys were who were selling tickets faster than he was.’ Whisked up to his top-floor penthouse suite, Presley strode straight up to them, ‘and the four of us and him talked for one and a half, two hours. We all stood in a circle and discussed this whole phenomenon, this lunacy. You’d have to go a long way to find someone with a better idea of what it was all about. He was very focused – very different to what you now read.’ Elvis also had a request: would they sign autographs for his six-year-old daughter, Lisa Marie? They would, then stumbled from the room to the elevator, before a fit of the stoned giggles got the better of them. They were signing autographs for Elvis? Far fucking out, man …
The official UK launch of Swan Song occurred six months later on 31 October, Halloween night, at a party at Chislehurst Caves near Bromley, ostensibly to launch the new Pretty Things album Silk Torpedo. Amidst the gallons of booze consumed, naked women reclined before mock black-mass altars while strippers dressed as topless nuns mingled with fire-eaters and conjurers. Not everything ran smoothly, of course, and Bonzo had to be restrained after a Sounds journalist had affronted him by saying he thought Bonzo was the greatest drummer in the world, asking to shake his hand. ‘I’ve taken enough shit from you cunts in the press!’ Bonzo screamed before launching himself at the terrified journo, offering to ‘give that horrible little fucker an interview he’ll never forget!’
Despite dire predictions in the press about the new label being little more than a vanity project, in the short term Swan Song was a much bigger success than even the egocentric Page and Grant could have imagined. When the first Bad Company single, ‘Can’t Get Enough’, and album, Bad Co., both hit No. 1 in America that year, it looked like Swan Song really was more than an ego trip. Within a year all four Swan Song artists – Zeppelin, Bad Company, Maggie Bell and The Pretty Things – had albums in the US Top 100. Ironically, the Bad Company album had been recorded at Headley Grange, using Faces’ bass player Ronnie Lane’s mobile studio, in February 1974 during time originally booked for Zeppelin, but which they were unable to take advantage of, said Page, because Jones ‘wasn’t well’. The more likely scenario is that Jones was still making his mind up about whether he wished to continue with the band. At any rate, Grant was able to pull another rabbit from the hat by sending Swan Song’s first and most prestigious signing down there instead. ‘Grant suggested that we steam in and use the gear to record a few songs,’ Paul Rodgers says now. ‘We’d been rehearsing like mad and we went in and recorded the entire album – banged it all down in one. It was just a great place, a great vibe, you know.’
He went on, ‘It was very communal in a way. We all slept in the same place where we were recording. We’d set the equipment and everything up in different parts of the house. It gave us separation. We’d cook in the kitchen, and someone would light the fires every day and we’d make tea and have breakfast. The wives would cook. We were almost like a bunch of hippies there in the house. It was very organic. As soon as everybody was up and ready, we’d start recording and it was great. Loved it.’
Rodgers later told me how he felt it was the atmosphere at Headley that steered them as much as anything. ‘Headley was definitely strange. There were phantoms walking through walls, white orbs disappearing as you opened your bedroom door. You’d go, “Did I just see that?” And there was an oil painting on the staircase and one day it had all these sheep and a shepherd. Next day there were all wolves. Very strange …’
There were the damp walls and the creaking floorboards and the things that went bump in the night. All of those indefinable elements are somewhere in the record, just as they are in the albums that Led Zeppelin made there and in the subconscious dreamings of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, the record that Genesis would write at Headley Grange just a few weeks after Bad Company had left.
On the heels of the release of their debut, simply titled Bad Co., a supporting mini-tour consisting of a handful of UK dates would showcase the band’s ferocious live presence, setting the table for their historic 1974 US campaign, beginning one month after the album’s release. Never one for subtlety or nuance, Grant orchestrated their North American advance publicity as a no-holds-barred media blitzkrieg. Danny Goldberg proclaimed that, ‘Our entire team is going to be fully concentrated on Bad Company.’ Echoing Goldberg’s commitment, Pete Senoff, the head of promotions at the time for Atlantic Records, launched an extensive national campaign that included papering the United States with literally thousands of vibrant promotional posters and outrageously over-the-top billboards that cheekily asked, ‘Does Your Mama Know You’ve Been Keeping Bad Company?’
The higher the band’s stature grew, so too did the demand for their time from the American media. Always protective of his boys, Grant aggressively shielded them from overexposure, carefully measuring out their interviews to a handpicked few outlets, causing one journalist at the time to grouse, ‘Bad Company will possibly follow Led Zeppelin down the trail to where permission to speak is like a Nobel Prize for Credentials.’ This was, of course, precisely the mystique that Grant had been hoping to create – exactly as he had with Zeppelin.
‘Peter was always one-on-one,’ says Phil Carson now. ‘He loved Bad Company and would do anything to look after them and make sure they always got the best. But he did that for all the artists he got involved with. So Zeppelin help out Bad Company and Bad Company help out Maggie Bell. It was all one big family to Peter. Woe betides anyone who didn’t belong to it though or would seek to do it down. Peter had your back.’
By the end of their first US tour, with Bad Company’s album and attendant hit single, ‘Can’t Get Enough’ both riding the top of the charts, the band arrived for their final night in Boston, Massachusetts. It was 10 October 1974, an unseasonably warm autumn evening in the blue-collar town known as the ‘Cradle of Liberty’, barely a week after reaching the top. But the band’s roaring enthusiasm had suddenly withered as the shape of Peter Grant darkened their dressing-room doorway just as they were preparing to take the stage.
Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke recalls, ‘G came into the dressing room; we were just ready to dash out and play. He puts this meaty arm across the door and says, “You’re not going anywhere”. I thought, Oh, fuck me, is he gonna shoot us? “Let them wait!” he said. That was one of his stock phrases, “Let them wait”.’
Motioning brusquely for them to follow, he led them into an adjoining room. ‘There was a big sheet on one of the tables and he pulled it back and there were four gold albums. He had tears in his eyes, we all had tears in our eyes, and he gave a lovely little speech and then he said, “Now get the fuck out of here and knock ‘em dead!” and we shot out of that dressing room like greyhounds chasing the rabbit, and we just put on a blinding show. And that was how Peter did things.’
The fires continued to burn hot when Bad Company returned to the States for a handful of dates in 1975 in support of their second Swan Song album, Straight Shooter, featuring another huge hit single and future classic rock radio staple, ‘Feel Like Makin’ Love’. That album, like its predecessor, wasted little time making its way into the US Top Ten, earning the band a second gold certification a mere month after its release.
As a gauge of the band’s enduring Stateside success, the Straight Shooter tour would find the band selling out the same venues visited by the likes of Zeppelin, The Who and the Stones. While some have estimated that it typically takes a talented, well-managed band up to seven tours to build a fan base sizable enough to fill Madison Square Garden, Bad Company were there on their second go-round. For a point of comparison, consider that Queen, on their third US tour, were playing 3,000-seat venues, while Bad Company’s second campaign saw the band selling out 20,000-seat arenas in the blink of an eye.
If pressed to identify a singular event that would put the stamp on Bad Company’s US coronation, it would unquestionably be the evening of 16 May 1976, when Bad Company were preparing to headline a show at the Los Angeles Forum with Kansas in support. As the band undertook pre-show preparations for their final show of that tour, across the sprawling, sun-splashed boulevards of Los Angeles, an armada of twelve limousines were departing Beverly Hills en route to the Forum, with a police escort leading the way.
As the motorcade arrived at the venue, from the sunroof of a gold Lincoln, none other than Robert Plant poked out his golden mane to wave to the gobsmacked fans lined outside. Seeing the adoration and excitement marshalled for Bad Company would only whet his own appetite for performing, and after pulling himself back into the limousine, he would confess to a journalist, ‘I wish Bad Company all the luck in the world, but … I’m fucking jealous tonight. Really fucking jealous!’ Though ostensibly there to support his Swan Song siblings, Plant’s enthusiasm through the Bad Company show would not dim and finally, after an impromptu backstage chat following ‘Bad Company’, the intended finale, the crowd were rewarded with a bonus encore, with Bad Company joined onstage by Plant and Jimmy Page for a four-song jam that included ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’, ‘You Shook Me’, ‘Bring It On Home’, and ‘I Just Wanna Make Love To You’.
With Paul and Robert trading choruses and Mick and Jimmy swapping licks, the roar of the audience nearly drowned the levels of the PA system. This historic session would only confirm what the 20,000 fans in attendance had known for three years now – Bad Company had joined the ranks of rock’n’roll’s living legends and on this balmy spring evening, it was official: they had conquered America. Just as G and Pagey had promised them they would.
What was less apparent to the outside world, but was something that insiders like Phil Carson were rapidly becoming aware of, was how the arrival of Swan Song was also, as Carson says now, ‘In many ways actually the beginning of the end. What happened was that Peter asked me to run Swan Song and I agreed to do it. And we went looking for a place to run it from. We found a stately home in Sussex and we bought it! But it never came to fruition. I decided against. Nesuhi said, “Are you crazy? You’re gonna work for them? You’ve got nowhere to go if you do that.” To an extent, it could have been true. So I elected not to join. And that was an ostracisation between band and me. Having travelled the world with them, all over America, all over Europe and the Far East, it became like, “Oh, we’re not talking to Phil Carson any more”. The only one who bucked that situation was John Paul Jones. They were all invited to my wedding to Jenny and the only that showed up was John Paul Jones, because he was kind of above all of that bullshit. Seeing it differently, by then. But it was a very uncomfortable time for me, having had that very close relationship. But, you know, by then I’d actually started to have a life of my own.’
Indeed he had. By 1974, Carson was already regarded as one of the pioneers of rock’s most prolific era, not just the Senior Vice President at Atlantic Records, but playing an integral role in shaping the trailblazing careers of other seventies rock superstars like Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. He was also responsible for bringing Virgin Records to North America by signing a deal with Richard Branson, giving Atlantic distribution rights to the Virgin label. ‘I did a deal with Richard for $125,000, keeping Virgin at Atlantic in America for the first ten years of their existence.’ The first release under that agreement was Mike Oldfield’s soon-to-be multi-platinum Tubular Bells, an epic piece of music that in 1974 became the soundtrack of The Exorcist. Two years later he would sign an unknown Australian band called AC/DC. By then he had also used his old Olga/Polar connections to help bring ABBA to Atlantic in America.
‘By then at Atlantic, I’d become de facto in charge of everything the label did in the world outside America. But I was also talking to the US office every day, too. The label in New York had dropped Yes after their second album, but I stepped in and talked Nesuhi into letting me resign them. When I took Tubular Bells to them, I remember the label’s US label chief at that time, Jerry Greenberg, saying, “This is great but it’s all instrumental. How are we gonna break an instrumental album?” I said, “Well, it did pretty damn well here in England. You’ve got to figure out a way.” By the end of the seventies, Tubular Bells was named the third biggest-selling album of the decade. So Phil Carson, though deeply hurt by his sudden expulsion from Zeppelin’s inner circle, was never in any doubt that he made the right in decision in not taking G’s offer of a job to run Swan Song.
Meanwhile, with time on his hands and money to burn, Page turned his attention to adding to his growing portfolio of weird and wonderful properties when he paid the actor Richard Harris £350,000 – outbidding David Bowie along the way – for the famous Tower House, in London’s Holland Park, which he still owns today. A neo-medieval structure designed by William Burges, completed just before his death in 1881, as his biographer, J. Mordaunt Crook, puts it, the Tower House was a ‘palace of art’ where the architect’s ‘magical, alchemical process [had] converted archaeology into art’. Page’s interest in Burges and the whole pre-Raphaelite movement, he explained thirty years later, went back to his teens. ‘What a wonderful world to discover.’ Notable for the architect’s trademark attention to detail, ‘I was still finding things twenty years after being there, a little beetle on the wall or something like that.’
As with his earlier purchase of Boleskine, Page’s intention was to return the Tower House to its original purpose, in this case an escapist fantasy retreat. A relatively small but architecturally imposing structure, not least because of its most striking feature, the tower, the walls and floors are as thick and solid as a fortress, exactly as the architect intended. It was to here that Burges was able to retreat, shutting out the world to revel in his own self-created fantastical visions. Small wonder Page took such a liking to it. Here he could be in the centre of London but, at the same time, a million miles away. Each of its eight rooms was given over to a particular theme. The master bedroom, which would have appealed to Page, had a colour scheme of deep scarlet, with convex mirrors on the ceiling that aimed to reflect the candlelight, appearing as stars in the sky above the bed. As Mordaunt Crook puts it: ‘Menaced by reality … Burges fled into a dream world of his own creation.’ As Burges, so too, Page. When, not long after its purchase, he surreptitiously invited Bebe Buell to the Tower House while she was in London with her official boyfriend, Todd Rundgren (Charlotte was blissfully unaware, living as she was at the country pile), she recalls in her book how she was awestruck at the bewitching surrounds she found herself in. ‘Maybe it was his Satanic Edwardian quality, maybe it was the medieval Sir Lancelot vibe, I didn’t know or care.’ She recalls how they took mescaline together in the master bedroom, after which, ‘I needed to pull myself together and realise that it was just an average-sized penis.’
There were also several hints at Burges’s connections to the occult at the house, most notably in the library where there was a picture of him holding a large compass. Not pictured, but as an architect almost certainly within his sight, too, would have been a set-square – the interlocking of set-square and compass, forming an ‘A’, an ancient Masonic symbol, the ‘A’ standing for the Great ‘Architect’, often mistakenly believed to be synonymous with ‘God’. As a renowned architect and favourite of the country’s richest man, Lord Bute, it is, as Dave Dickson says ‘staggeringly unlikely that Burges had not been invited to join the [Masons’] ranks’.
Similarly, the ceiling of the entrance hall is decorated with astrological signs and other mythical creatures, sometimes minute, appear in the windows, the fireplaces, the walls and the furniture. The windows of the library are decorated with cartoons representing what Mordaunt Crook describes as ‘allegories of Art and Science’ but could as easily be six of the seven Masonic pillars of wisdom, namely Arithmetic, Music, Astronomy, Rhetoric, Grammar, Logic and Geometry. ‘The representations here are slightly different,’ says Dickson, ‘but perhaps Burges simply thought his six better displayed his own pillars of wisdom.’ But the most purely Masonic piece in the whole place is ‘The Great Bookcase’, whose panels are separated into two categories: the left side depicting Christian symbols with the right concentrating on Pagan ones, reflecting the fact that Freemasonry is a combination of Christianity, Paganism and the occult. Ultimately, what Burges constructed was a paean to the fabulous, the exotic and the eccentric, incorporating his own interests in both Paganism and Christianity. That said, he only managed to stay there for three years before he died, his final visitors apparently being Oscar Wilde and James Whistler. Almost a hundred years later, the place had now come into the hands of someone else anxious to retreat from reality and indulge in a Pagan hideaway.
It was also around this time that Page acquired his own specifically occult bookshop, just a brisk walk from the Tower House, at 4 Holland Street. Named Equinox after Crowley’s magazine, in the days before the internet, the most significant occult books were exceptionally hard to find. As Jimmy said at the time, one of the reasons he bought the place was because ‘I was so pissed off at not being able to get the books I wanted.’ Owning Equinox not only gave him access to its extensive library, it placed him firmly at the forefront of serious occult antiquarians. Equinox would carry books on Tarot, astrology and, of course, a large section devoted to Crowley’s works, including several books signed by Crowley, plus his birth chart pinned to one wall, and a first edition set of Crowley’s ten-volume work The Equinox priced at £350 – a substantial sum for a book now, a small fortune in the mid-Seventies.
Page also saw to it that Equinox published two books under its own imprimatur, including a perfect facsimile of Crowley’s The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King and Astrology: a Cosmic Science by Isabel Hickey. The latter is an expert explanation of how astrology can affect a person’s spiritual development (as opposed to the fatalist ‘predictions’ of standard newspaper columns); the former essentially Crowley’s interpretation of The Lesser Key Of Solomon, Translated, it relates, ‘into the English Tongue by a Dead Hand and Adorned with Divers [and] other matters Germane Delightful to the Wise. The Whole Edited, Verified, Introduced and Commentated by Aleister Crowley.’ Along with the names, offices and orders of the seventy-two spirits with which Solomon was said to have conversed, together with the seals and characters of each, the text of the conjurations are given in both Enochian and English, as translated by Crowley. Both books are still available under new imprints today. Original Equinox editions are not too hard to find, either, although much more expensive. According to Timothy d’Arch Smith, who sold an extremely rare copy of the original to Page, the Equinox version of The Goetia is ‘exactly the same as the original, except it has hard covers and the original has soft. Apart from the one copy on vellum pages on which Crowley’s actually painted the demons in the margin. It’s in the Warburg Institute now but it was Gerald Yorke’s. It’s fantastic.’
Such a relief to be out of the session world. You still kept your hand in obviously, it was good bread, but you didn’t rely on it any more. And you were touring again, a hit act, lots of birds screaming and doing their pieces, lots of young geezers with beards asking you how it was done. You’d just smile and say nothing. Not to the blokes anyway. A really happening scene … This was before the boathouse, when you still lived in Elsham Road, round the back of Holland Park Road, near the tracks of the Metropolitan Line tube. Get up late, have a fag, maybe a joint, then go shopping for clobber, on your own or with your mate Jeff Dexter, the DJ from Middle Earth. Checking out Liberty’s, looking for cloth that could be made into groovy new threads. Or the posh shops in Jermyn Street and Cordings in Piccadilly, who did absolutely the best socks. Carnaby Street was only for mugs and punters. Though 26 Kingly Street, which ran parallel to Carnaby Street, was hip to the trip. It was in Keith Albarn’s gallery at 26 Kingly Street that you first met Ian Knight. Ian designed stages for Middle Earth, and it was you who got him working for The Yardbirds and, later, Zeppelin. You, the two Jeffs and Ian, all into the Buffalo Springfield vibe. Them and the Small Faces, too, who were so basic and yet so cool. It made you think what you could do with some of that attitude in The Yardbirds. Keep the light shows and the little happenings, keep the good stuff, but add some balls to it. Make it a bit more hooligan, as Jeff called it …
You were always keeping an eye out for new things. You had to, there was so much to dig back then that was new. Like when you went to see the Ravi Shankar concert and there were no young people in the audience at all, just a lot of older blokes in suits from the Indian Embassy, their wives dragged along in evening dresses, all stifling yawns. This chick you’d been hanging out with said she knew him so afterwards you went backstage and she introduced you. A nice old cat, very mellow vibe, though still sweating buckets from the gig, like you do. You knew the scene and wanted to show you weren’t just anybody so you told him how you had a sitar, but admitted you didn’t really know how to tune it. You couldn’t believe it when he sat down and wrote down the tunings on a piece of paper. Couldn’t believe a nice old cat like that could be so cool, sitting there in his robes, writing it all down for you, like giving you his blessing. Different scenes you could learn from, man …
By the spring of 1974, Zeppelin was ready to reconvene for their third visit to Headley Grange, taking Ronnie Lane’s mobile studio (cheaper than the Stones’) and engineer Ron Nevison. With Jones having thrown his hat firmly back in the ring, though still antsy about having to put up with the increasingly wayward offstage proclivities of the others, G compromised on the living arrangements and had Cole book them all – bar Page – into the plush nearby Frensham Pond Hotel. ‘Page stayed behind at Headley,’ chortled Cole. ‘He was quite happy in that fucking horrible cold house.’
Once they had finally begun work, new tracks were laid down quickly and relatively easily with the bones of eight lengthy new compositions rapidly emerging: ‘Custard Pie’, ‘In My Time Of Dying’, ‘Trampled Under Foot’, ‘Kashmir’, ‘In The Light’, ‘Ten Years Gone’, ‘The Wanton Song’ and ‘Sick Again’. With final overdubs and mixes taking place as before back at Olympic, in London, in May, had they left things as they were they would have emerged with an album somewhere between the gritty sonic overload of their second album and the methodically applied brilliance of their fourth: that is to say, one of their three greatest works. As it was they took the decision to try to build on that remarkable achievement by adding a plethora of older tracks still sitting in the can from as far back as their third album in 1970: ‘The Rover’, ‘Houses of the Holy’ and ‘Black Country Woman’ from their various Houses Of The Holy sessions two years before; ‘Down By The Seaside’ from the December 1970 Basing Street sessions for the fourth album; ‘Night Flight’ and ‘Boogie With Stu’ from the January 1971 Headley Grange visit; and ‘Bron-Yr-Aur’ (spelt correctly this time) from the original June 1970 Basing Street sessions for the third album.
Thus, Led Zeppelin finally got the double album Jimmy had always craved. There were many reasons why he decided the time was finally right for it. To begin with, there was the simple fact of having such a large and impressive backlog of material. In the days before ‘bonus’ tracks and endless box-sets featuring ‘previously unreleased’ material became the norm, the likelihood was that any material left over from previous albums would never see the light of the day. However, more pressing than that was the burning desire – as with the fourth album – to prove wrong the naysayers who had dared to question the worth of Houses of the Holy. Stung into pushing themselves to their limits with the follow-up, just as they had been after their third album, Jimmy wanted to nail the dissenters once and for all. This was also the age of the double album as Major Status Symbol. Much as with owning their own record label, in order to be considered in the same light as The Beatles, Dylan and the Stones, even Hendrix and The Who, all of whom had been praised for releasing momentous double albums – even career-defining in the case of Blonde On Blonde, Electric Ladyland and Tommy – Page felt deeply that Zeppelin would also benefit from having ‘a bigger palette’ from which to paint their pictures. It was also the fashion now, with everyone from Elton John to Deep Purple, Yes and Genesis having released portentous double albums in the past two years.
Did it actually make for a better album, though? Certainly the fifteen tracks spread over two LPs created a textural and thematic breadth one could only stand back and admire. As such, Physical Graffiti, as it was to be called – an inspired title Jimmy had come up with at the last minute after viewing early drafts of the proposed artwork – is now regarded by many as the pinnacle of their career. The sheer variety of material – from stonking crowd-pleasers (‘Custard Pie’, ‘Trampled Under Foot’) to left-field acoustic enchantments (‘Bron-Yr-Aur’, ‘Black Country Woman’), lighter pop moments (‘Down By The Seaside’, ‘Boogie With Stu’), slinky, slit-eyed groovers (‘The Rover’ – remodelled from its acoustic blues origins – ‘Sick Again’) and, of course, lengthy body-dredged-from-the-river blues (‘In My Time Of Dying’, ‘In The Light’, ‘Ten Years Gone’) – it also gave the band their third hallmark track in ‘Kashmir’. Of the same order of class as previous touchstone moments as ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘Stairway To Heaven’ – that is, destined to transcend all musical barriers and become universally recognised as a classic – and another song that utilises Jimmy’s signature DADGAD – another trick learned from Davy Graham – tuning to create a musical and metaphorical drive towards some irresistible far-off horizon, ‘Kashmir’ encapsulated Zeppelin’s multi-strand approach to making rock music (part rock, part funk, part Himalayan dust storm) as completely as ‘Stairway …’, but is arguably an even greater achievement. Certainly Robert Plant thinks so, even now. Especially now: ‘I wish we were remembered for “Kashmir” more than “Stairway To Heaven”,’ he once said. ‘It’s so right – there’s nothing overblown, no vocal hysterics. Perfect Zeppelin.’
Jimmy wouldn’t go quite that far, though he agrees it’s one of their finest moments. ‘It was just Bonzo and myself at Headley Grange at the start of that one,’ he explained. ‘He started the drums, and I did the riff and the overdubs, which in fact get duplicated by an orchestra at the end, which brought it even more to life, and it seemed so sort of ominous and had a particular quality to it. It’s nice to go for an actual mood and know that you’ve pulled it off.’
Of course, there were many different moods on Physical Graffiti, as well as the usual handful of ‘borrowings’. The most notable case was ‘Custard Pie’, credited to Page and Plant, but its juddering intro recalling Blind Boy Fuller’s 1939 recording ‘I Want Some Of Your Pie’ (later reworked by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee for their 1947 recording ‘Custard Pie Blues’), while Plant relies for his lyrics almost entirely on Sleepy John Estes’ 1935 recording, ‘Drop Down Mama’, while also lifting lines from ‘Help Me’ by Sonny Boy Williamson and ‘Shake ‘Em On Down’ by Bukka White, before returning to Fuller’s ‘I Want Some Of Your Pie’. Arguably, Sleepy John Estes and Blind Boy Fuller should now be co-credited in the same way that Willie Dixon and Memphis Minnie are on current Zeppelin CDs. Similarly, ‘In My Time Of Dying’, credited here to all four Zeppelin members but actually based on an original Blind Willie Johnson tune from 1928 called ‘Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed’ – the title of which Plant references in his own adaptation (along with a cry at the climax of ‘Oh, my Jesus!’ cheekily interspersed allegedly with ‘Oh, Georgina!’, the name of yet another on-the-road conquest) – and famously covered in previous years by everybody from Bob Dylan to Plant himself in pre-Band of Joy days. It’s interesting, too, that Page uses the song to show off his chops on the slide guitar, one of the few occasions he would actually play one, an instrument Johnson himself famously excelled on.
Ironically, the one derivation they did try to credit the original source for – ‘Boogie with Stu’, actually an improvised reworking of ‘Ooh My Head’ by Ritchie Valens (itself little more than a reworking of Little Richard’s ‘Ooh My Soul’) – resulted in the threat of a court action. As Page recalled: ‘What we tried to do was give Ritchie [Valens’] mother credit, because we heard she never received any royalties from any of her [deceased] son’s hits, and Robert did lean on that lyric a bit. So what happens? They tried to sue us for all of the song! We had to say bugger off!’
There were also some moments where cloaked references to Page’s ongoing deep interest in the occult could be discerned: an obvious, cheesy reference to ‘Satan’s daughter’ and ‘Satan and man’ in ‘Houses of the Holy’ and a less obvious but likely more accurate reference to having ‘an angel on my shoulder, in my hand a sword of gold …’ in the same song. ‘Kashmir’, too, seemed to resonate with occult meaning with its images of ‘Talk and song from tongues of lilting grace’ – Enochian calls? – and a ‘pilot of the storm who leaves no trace, like thoughts inside a dream’ – a Magus, perhaps? All pure speculation, of course. As is the fact that the title to ‘Trampled Under Foot’ appears nowhere in the song, but seems to hark back to something the occult writer V.E. Mitchell wrote some years before when he revealed that ‘Whenever a Templar was received into the Order he denied Christ … forced to spit on a crucifix and often even to trample it underfoot.’
Ultimately, though, none of these things are what made Physical Graffiti such an appealing Zeppelin album. The reason it’s still revered now is for tracks like the sublime ‘Ten Years Gone’ – its woozy moonlit mood light years ahead of something as prosaic by comparison as ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’; the eerily affecting ‘In The Light’, with its supernatural drone intro and cathartic entreaty to ‘find the road’ (with Lucifer as ‘light-bearer’, no doubt); even sleazy tunnel-dwellers like ‘Sick Again’, the paean to teenage LA groupies with ‘lips like cherries’ and ‘silver eyes’ (specifically to Lori Maddox, in the line, ‘One day soon you’re gonna reach sixteen’) which closes the album. All the tracks were so far beyond the wide-eyed blues rock of their early albums the word ‘mature’ barely covers it; so worldly you can almost see their noses dripping in the flickering candlelight, this was no longer the finely manicured, full-spectrum sound Page had meticulously contrived for the second and fourth albums and something much more brutal and uncompromising, everything presented as if done in one take – though no less dizzily exciting in its resolutely don’t-give-a-fuck fashion.
In that respect, Physical Graffiti resembled the Stones’ earlier double, Exile On Main Street, another ragbag collection made by a band now so far over the rainbow they felt they had nothing more to prove and now appeared more focused on keeping themselves entertained, be that with hard drugs, harder women or simply overindulging their own musical fantasies, touching down on blues, country, funk … wherever the stoned fancy left them crashed out on the floor, the whole thing working, nevertheless, to eerily stunning effect. Jimmy had, in fact, been hanging out with Keith and Mick off and on throughout 1974, bumping into each other at Tramp or the Speakeasy in London, before all going back to Ronnie Wood’s rambling mansion, The Wick, in Richmond, where Keith had practically moved in that year. One night in November Jimmy found himself embarked on an all-night jam with Keith and Ronnie on a song called ‘Scarlet’, named after Jimmy’s two-year-old daughter. ‘It started out as a sort of gentle folk ballad,’ he later recalled. ‘But then Keith suddenly decided, “Right, now it’s time to add the reggae guitars.”‘ Jimmy and Keith, whose mutual interests now extended far beyond music, were especially close, the Stones guitarist teasing the Zeppelin leader about Plant and Bonham, who he referred to as ‘a couple of clueless Ernies from the Midlands’. So close were they at that point it was even rumoured that Jimmy would replace recently departed guitarist Mick Taylor on the band’s 1975 American tour – before Ronnie stepped in.
The Physical Graffiti sleeve, designed by Mike Doud and Peter Corriston, would be another controversial talking point. Eschewing the usual gatefold design in favour of a special die-cut cover styled to look like a brownstone New York tenement – through whose windows could be viewed an eclectic mix of famous faces including Buster Crabbe’s Flash Gordon, Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, Charles Atlas, Neil Armstrong, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Queen, King Kong, Peter Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Laurel and Hardy, the Virgin Mary, Rossetti’s portrait of Proserpine, Judy Garland’s breasts-strapped Dorothy and the cast of Wizard of Oz, plus the various members of Zeppelin dressed in drag – it was similar to the third album sleeve in its fiddly intricacy. The idea was actually lifted wholesale from the 1973 José Feliciano easy-listening album, Compartments, featuring an almost identical brownstone tenement with windows revealing its occupants, as well as a pull-out card and hidden pockets. Doud and Corriston used a photograph of a real-life New York apartment block at 97 St Mark’s Place for their version of the same idea. The band loved it, seeing it as another impressive example of their own increasingly ambitious attempts to place themselves above the confines of ‘normal’ rock bands, into a realm uniquely their own – or at least one shared only with the crème-de-la-crème and those who could afford such indulgences.
Released on 24 February 1975, in the middle of the band’s tenth US tour, a riotous two-leg jaunt that would see them at their preening peak, Physical Graffiti was another chart-topper in both Britain and the US – entering the latter at No. 3 in its first week of release, an unprecedented feat at the time. It also attracted the best set of reviews any of the band’s albums had ever received. In the UK, Melody Maker called it ‘pure genius’ while Let It Rock boldly predicted that ‘by the end of the year Physical Graffiti will be beginning to exude as much of that nebulous “greatness” that clusters around the likes of Blonde On Blonde, Beggars Banquet and Revolver’. In the US, Creem was no less effusive: ‘Graffiti is, in fact, a better album than the other five offerings, the band being more confident, more arrogant in fact, and more consistent … Equal time is given to the cosmic and the terrestrial, the subtle and the passionate.’
To compound the critical backslapping, it was also on this US tour that Rolling Stone put Zeppelin on its cover for the first time, with an article by their new, fifteen-year-old cub reporter, Cameron Crowe. Untainted by having been amongst the clique of original Stone writers who had routinely trashed the band, Crowe was clearly a real-life fan, and the band treated him to one of their most revealing interviews. Page even opened up about Boleskine House, dropping hints as to its hidden purpose by referring directly to ‘my involvement in magic’ and explaining how ‘I’m attracted by the unknown … all my houses are isolated … I spend a lot of time near water … a few things have happened that would freak some people out, but I was surprised actually at how composed I was’. How he doubted ‘whether I’ll reach thirty-five. I can’t be sure about that.’ But that he wasn’t afraid of death. ‘That is the greatest mystery of all.’ Ultimately, he whispered, ‘I’m still searching for an angel with a broken wing.’ Then added with a grin: ‘It’s not very easy to find them these days. Especially when you’re staying at the Plaza Hotel …’
It was also at the Plaza in New York at the start of the tour that he set up a large stereo system to play back the music he had so far made for Lucifer Rising. ‘I was on the sixth floor and there were complaints from the twelfth,’ he said at the time. There had already been two private screenings of the first thirty-one minutes of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at Berkeley University in LA, where the reaction had been generally positive, and Anger now planned a full release by the end of the year, he said.
Meanwhile, the tour got underway under something of a cloud when Page yet again injured a finger on his left hand, just days before its official start at the Minneapolis Sports Center on 18 January. ‘It happened when I was on a train in England, on my way to rehearsal,’ he said. ‘I must have grabbed at something, and the finger got caught in the hinge of the door. I was just totally numb – numb with shock. I just looked at it and said, “Oh, no”.’ The band ended up cutting ‘Dazed and Confused’ and doing ‘How Many More Times’ instead, while Page soldiered on by self-administering codeine tablets mixed with Jack Daniel’s whisky to deaden the pain.
It was now that Danny Goldberg pulled off his biggest PR coup yet, when he arranged for William S. Burroughs to interview Page for a lengthy cover story in Crawdaddy under the heading: ‘The Jimmy and Bill Show’. It may not have been Truman Capote writing about the Stones but it was damn close – better, in Jimmy’s view, as Burroughs was another advocate of Crowley’s sex magick, as famous for being a heroin addict as he was a writer of apocalyptic literature.
Burroughs wrote of seeing one of the band’s three shows at Madison Square Garden in February, describing the audience as ‘a river of youth looking curiously like a single organism: one well-behaved clean-looking middle-class kid’ and compared the show itself to a bullfight. ‘There was a palpable interchange of energy between the performers and the audience,’ he noted. ‘Leaving the concert hall was like getting off a jet plane.’ The article also discussed how ‘a rock concert is in fact a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy. Rock stars may be compared to priests.’ And how the Zeppelin show ‘bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose – that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces’. Adding: ‘It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts – music, painting and writing – is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.’
The actual interview with Page, conducted ‘over two fingers of whisky’ at Burroughs’ Franklin Street ‘bunker’ – a converted boys’ locker room in downtown New York – was less interesting, with Burroughs doing most of the talking, Jimmy simply adding the occasional ‘wow’ and ‘yeah’. Though Burroughs noted they had ‘friends in common: the real estate agent who negotiated Jimmy Page’s purchase of the Aleister Crowley house on Loch Ness [Boleskine]; John Michel, the flying saucer and pyramid expert; Donald Camell, who worked on Performance; Kenneth Anger, and the Jaggers, Mick and Chris …’ Though Burroughs added: ‘There are no accidents in the world of magic.’ Page, he concluded, was ‘equally aware of the risks involved in handling the fissionable material of the mass unconscious’.
‘I pointed out that the moment when the stairway to heaven becomes something actually possible for the audience, would also be the moment of greatest danger. Jimmy expressed himself as well aware of the power in mass concentration, aware of the dangers involved, and of the skill and balance needed to avoid them … rather like driving a load of nitroglycerine.’
‘There is a responsibility to the audience,’ Page agreed. ‘We don’t want to release anything we can’t handle.’ He added: ‘Music which involves riffs, anyway, will have a trance-like effect, and it’s really like a mantra …’
Another memorable meeting Page had during the band’s stint in New York was with David Bowie, then also heavily involved in his own cocaine-fuelled investigations into Crowley and the occult. Introduced by Mick Jagger, in town planning the next Stones tour, Bowie was curious to know more about Page’s work on Anger’s film. Tony Zanetta, then president of Bowie’s management company, MainMan, later wrote in his book, Stardust, about how Crowley’s beliefs encompassed ‘promiscuity and the use of drugs like cocaine … It was another version of David’s beloved Ziggy Stardust.’
Bowie was convinced that Page’s study of Crowley had given him an especially strong aura – a magnetic sphere composed of three fields or bands of different colours that surrounds the body. He invited Page to the house he was then living in on 20th Street. ‘Though he was his polite self, David was wary of Page,’ writes Zanetta. ‘Occasionally during the evening, the conversation touched on the subject of the occult. Whenever the power of the guitarist’s aura was mentioned, Page remained silent but smiled inscrutably. It seemed that he did believe he had the power to control the universe.’
Eventually, Page’s ‘aura’ so rankled Bowie he began to seriously lose his cool. ‘I’d like you to leave,’ he snapped. Jimmy simply sat there smiling, still saying nothing. Pointing to an open window in the room, Bowie hissed through gritted teeth: ‘Why don’t you leave by the window?’ Again, Page merely sat there smiling, saying nothing, staring right at Bowie as though speaking to him telepathically. Eventually, Jimmy got up and strode out, slamming the door behind him, leaving Bowie quaking in his boots. The next time they bumped into each other at a party, Bowie immediately left the room. Shortly after, claims Zanetta, Bowie insisted the house on 20th Street be exorcised ‘because of the belief it had become overrun with satanic demons whom Crowley’s disciples had summoned straight from hell …’
As Phil Carson says now, ‘There’s no question it was a very dark period. But they made some pretty amazing music during that period and the band was so big, particularly in America that they couldn’t do anything wrong.’ No matter what was going down offstage, whether it be the voluminous amounts of drugs being consumed, or the hundreds of groupies and hangers-on that descended on them wherever they landed, or Jimmy’s ‘aura’ being lit up, once they put on their glad-rags and hit the stage, ‘They’d just get up and play and it was terrific.’