We don’t say “heavy”, do we. Well, I don’t know whether we do. But it’s strong stuff and exciting, and the flame is really burning higher and higher.
ROBERT PLANT, 1971
ROBERT PLANT We had always led a very cloistered existence in Zeppelin. We really didn’t know anybody else. We knew each other and we knew the entourage, but that was about it.
JOHN PAUL JONES Peter never let anybody near us. He wouldn’t let them talk to us, and he took care of everything else. Even he didn’t say, “I think you should do this or you should do that.” You’d know when he was really pleased, which was most of the time. I can’t ever remember him saying or indicating that we’d done something he didn’t like, artistically. And if he’d felt that, he would never have said it, because it wasn’t his place.
ANDY JOHNS They were very much unto themselves. A clique, as it were. There was a tremendous amount of paranoia, because all they knew was each other: “It’s us against them because they’re going to get us.” One time we were taking a break in the middle of the fourth record. I show up at the studio on the day that we’d agreed upon and they say, “Where have you been?” I say, “What do you mean? We said we’d start at noon this Tuesday.” “Well, we’ve been trying to get hold of you and you haven’t been communicating.” “That’s because I was in Gloucestershire with my family.”
I would watch people come in the room and it was, “All right, mate!” and then they’d walk out and it was, “Fucking cunt bastard, he’s trying to stab us in the back.”
Melody Maker, 19 September 1970
MICK FARREN Colonel Parker didn’t want Elvis hanging out with Natalie Wood, because he would have met people who’d have said, “That cracker you’ve got managing you is an idiot.” And I think there was an element of that with Grant and Zeppelin. It was like, “Don’t let them loose out of the Zeppelin pod.”
SAM AIZER The thing that Peter did great was he got them to not talk to anybody for a while. The more you don’t talk to the press, the more they want to talk to you. It’s a different world now, where people will tell you on Twitter, “Hey, I just moved my left foot, I just moved my right foot …” Zeppelin went the other way: you couldn’t talk to them. Any time they did interviews, they were always sketchy and half the time they didn’t make eye contact.
KEITH ALTHAM When you see Jimmy being interviewed, you only get the tip of the iceberg. As soon as his finger goes to his chin, you know he doesn’t want to answer the question and he’s going to find his way around it.
NICK KENT Page is very contained. He always thinks before he says anything, whereas someone like Keith Richards will just say whatever’s on his mind. Page is always editing himself, and inevitably most of what comes out of his mouth is very guarded – like he’s got something to hide.
MAT SNOW (former editor of MOJO) If you approach Page with the absolute attitude of being a bit of a fan but also knowing your stuff and loving the stuff he loves, he does warm up. He doesn’t exactly get interesting, but he will talk. But my God, the initial prickliness and the beady eye …
CHRIS CHARLESWORTH Chris Welch told me that even now, if he ever says anything derogatory about Zep, he has nightmares about the phone ringing and a voice saying, “It’s Peter here. I’d like a word with you.” But Peter was also capable of being very kind to journalists. Roy Hollingworth wrote nice things about Stone the Crows and Maggie Bell, and he once went to Holland with them and Peter. The day after the show they were wandering through a market and Roy was admiring some jacket. Peter said, “You like that, do you, Roy?” – and just bought it for him. So he was capable of these gestures.
JERRY GREENBERG Peter was a collector of Rolls-Royces, so he takes me out to where he stored a bunch of these cars. Sitting there is a 1957 Rolls-Royce James Young body; there were only sixty of these made. I was like, “Maybe someday I’ll own a Rolls.” Steve Weiss calls me up and he says, “Peter is sending you something, but you’re going to have to pay shipping charges.” I thought it was like a glass case, champagne or something. I get a call from the shipper … he’s sent me the car. It was wild, incredible.
PERRY PRESS (estate agent to the stars) I always found Peter a sweetheart. He was very charming to me. He’d call up out of the blue and say, apropos of nothing, “You seen Charlie Watts lately? He looks like Bela Lugosi!” If there was an antique shop, he’d want to rummage through it and perhaps buy you something. That was the sort of generosity of spirit he had.
HELEN GRANT Perry phoned up when we were still living in Purley and said, “I’ve found this fantastic house, you’ve got to come and see it.”
Zep press junket: Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth (centre, in sheepskin coat) with Atlantic’s Anni Ivil (top) and NME’s Roy Carr (right, waving) (Julian Ruthven)
PERRY PRESS There were people who couldn’t afford to run big houses any more, and big houses had in any case become unfashionable. It’s hard to believe that what we now consider “secluded and beautifully remote” was considered “isolated and undesirable” in the pre-mobile and -motorway days. Horselunges Manor was on the market quietly. I probably looked at dozens of places before shortlisting a few that I thought would suit Peter. He was open-minded about where he’d go, and that bit of East Sussex was where those sorts of houses are. You don’t get moated timber-framed houses in Oxfordshire.
HELEN GRANT Of course, Dad went down to see it without Mum. Bought it without telling her, bless him. She was a bit cross about that. I mean, Dad wanted a house and that was it. And it is an amazing house. The woman that Dad bought Horselunges off was very eccentric. She had sort of big boars’ heads and stuffed animals everywhere. It was a strange house, definitely haunted.
Gloria Grant at Horselunges, 1974 (Peter Clifton)
ALAN CALLAN Peter took his mother to Horselunges and she looked at it and said, “Oh Peter, what have you done?” Because she hadn’t come to terms with how successful he was.
GLORIA GRANT I’d started teaching dance when Peter was away, and that kept me busy. At Horselunges, Peter turned the side part of the building into a dance studio with big mirrors and bars all the way round. I probably had about 150 students over the course of three or four years, and I’d put them in for festivals. Peter was absolutely fantastic about it, because he’d come home and the driveway would be filled with cars.
HELEN GRANT Mum’s a very down-to-earth girl. She wasn’t interested in the money at all, she didn’t like what it brought. Even when we were living at Horselunges, she was still going to charity shops to find things. She would still have driven around in an old banger if she could have. Most of the wives spent their whole days in Bond Street. Mum would rather spend her day doing something useful. She kept us very grounded at home. And I’m pleased that she was like that. You’ve got to remember that she and Dad got together when they had nothing, and I think that’s when they were at their happiest.
GLORIA GRANT I remember once when we were on holiday in Miami, and we were all geared up to spend a day by the pool with the children. Somebody called and Peter had to go somewhere. I was very, very upset. Marion Massey, who was Lulu’s manager, said to me, “You’ve got to let him do it, he’s a big noise in the business and you’ve got to hold it together.”
*
DENNY SOMACH (producer of “Get the Led Out” segment on classic rock radio stations) I think America fell in love with Led Zeppelin because most people didn’t get the opportunity to see the Beatles. Zeppelin was a living, breathing band. They were a legend that people had to go and see. It became a religion, and Peter Grant knew it and made it a religion. Everything was geared towards America. They just came in and slayed everybody. We never took to the Hawkwinds and the Iron Maidens, but Zeppelin was different. It was blues-rock-based, which of course is American music.
BEBE BUELL To me, Led Zeppelin was not part of the post-British-Invasion thing. I didn’t consider them to have anything to do with the Stones or the Beatles. I considered them to be a kind of rogue fluke that just came out of nowhere. Much like Jimi Hendrix, they were a band without a colour or a country.
MARIO MEDIOUS They were huge in every major market in America: Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, Dallas, you name it. They didn’t really like to do interviews, but because I knew them well they would talk to the disc jockeys. And so because of that, these guys thought they knew the band. If the band was in town for three days, you wouldn’t hear anything on the station except Zeppelin.
CHRIS DREJA I’m living in New York and I get a call from Peter saying, “The boys are at Madison Square Garden tonight – why don’t you come down with your wife?” I’m thinking, “Madison Square Garden? Doesn’t he mean Carnegie Hall?” And he arranges it all and I go down and meet the guys and they’re awfully polite to me, really nice. None of that “I’m a big rock star” stuff. They said, “We’ve got to go on stage now.” And Madison Square Garden is a concrete place and the dressing rooms are subterranean. They start playing and I walk up the ramp with Peter and I hear the whole building move. Shaking. I come up round the back and they’re playing the “Whole Lotta Love” riff through fifteen megawatts of PA and there’s 20,000 people sitting there. You’ve got to remember that the Yardbirds never played to those sorts of audiences. The scale of it just blew me away.
JOHN BONHAM We did three tours last year and finished off feeling, “We’ve just about had enough.” We had done so much in such a short space of time, we were drained. We had offers to go everywhere, France, America, and we could have done them. But what would be the point? We were tired. We had worked hard, and Peter had probably worked harder than any of us. We enjoyed working but we needed the break before we got stale.
JIMMY PAGE We were fed up with going to America. We’d been going twice a year, and at that time America was really a trial, an effort.
HENRY SMITH We drove to Bron-yr-Aur in a white panelled truck. It was just four of us this time: Jimmy, Robert, Sandy McGregor and myself. No wives, no Peter, no Richard, no nobody else. It was like a camping trip. Jimmy was wearing the high wellies and cardigan sweaters and that famous hat he wore at the Bath festival. It was the folksy look.
In some ways it was grounding for them. Jimmy was a city boy, whereas Robert was more of a country boy. It was interesting to see them work that part of life out to where serenity was. It was a fun place for me, because there were a couple of times Robert and I went out back and sat in the grass by the stream. And he was talking about songs and looking for a little inspiration for some lyrics. I remember talking about little animals in the grass, parting the grass and seeing what was underneath.
JIMMY PAGE Maybe the spark of being at Bron-yr-Aur came to fruition by saying, “Let’s go back to Headley Grange with a mobile truck and get in there and see what comes out of it.” What came out of that with staying in the house was the fourth album. Although some things were recorded outside of that location, like “Stairway to Heaven”, the whole germ of it was Headley.
JOHN PAUL JONES Headley was horrible. [There was] virtually no furniture, no pool table, no pub nearby … we all ran in when we arrived in a mad scramble to get the driest rooms.
RICHARD COLE There weren’t any serious drugs around the band at that point. Just dope and a bit of coke. They were playing at being country squires. They found an old shotgun and used to shoot at squirrels in the woods – not that they ever hit any.
JIMMY PAGE It was really good for discipline and getting on with the job. I suppose that’s why a lot of these came at Headley. For instance, “Going to California” and “The Battle of Evermore” came out of there.
ANDY JOHNS As musicians, and performance-wise, they were so fast. You have no idea. You could get three or four tracks done in a night. Jimmy and John Paul were session musicians and the best session musicians. I may have only slept two or three hours a night, but I’d wake up in the morning thinking, “Today I have another chance to do something that has never been done before.” You had this opportunity and it was fantastic. You learned from some of the best people that ever walked the planet.
JIMMY PAGE Whenever we got together from the third, fourth, fifth album, … we would always say “What have you got?” to anybody else – to see if Jonesy had anything, to be honest.
JOHN PAUL JONES I recall Page and I listening to Electric Mud at the time by Muddy Waters. One track is a long rambling riff and I really liked the idea of writing something like that – a riff that would be like a linear journey. The idea came on a train coming back from Pangbourne. From the first run-through at the Grange, we knew it was a good one.
ROBERT PLANT My daughter’s boyfriend, who was in a psychobilly band, started telling me that part of “Black Dog” was a mistake because there’s a bar of 5/4 in the middle of some 4/4. Well, my dander was up at that so I pulled the record out and plonked it on and said, “Listen you little runt, that’s no mistake, that’s what we were good at!”
ANDY JOHNS We’d done a couple of takes of “When the Levee Breaks” and the sound pressure was building up, as it always did with those buggers. I’d been experimenting with Blind Faith and Blodwyn Pig, and I was always thinking about how to record things with just two microphones.
One night they’re going down the pub and I say, “All right, but Bonzo has to stay behind.” He says, “Why?” I say, “I’ve got this idea. You’re always moaning about your drum sound and I think this is going to work.” So we carted his kit out to this huge lobby, where the ceiling is at least twenty-five foot high. It sounded really good. How can he not like this? “Bonzo, come and listen!” “Fucking hell!” he said. “It’s got thrutch!”
ROBERT PLANT “When The Levee Breaks” was a giant step. Nobody other than John Bonham could have created that sex groove, and many have tried.
RICHARD COLE The first time I heard “Stairway to Heaven”, John Paul was playing it on a recorder. Whenever they got together to write or record, he would come down with a carload of instruments, usually acoustic. This particular time he came down with the mandolins, and I remember Robert sitting on a radiator working out the words.
ROBERT PLANT We just thought rock ’n’ roll needed to be taken on again. So we had all these little rock ’n’ roll nuances, like in “Boogie With Stu” or [“Rock and Roll’]. And I was finally in a really successful band and we felt it was time for actually kicking ass. It wasn’t an intellectual thing, ’cause we didn’t have time for that – we just wanted to let it all come flooding out. It was a very animal thing, a hellishly powerful thing, what we were doing.
RICHARD COLE Ian Stewart, who came down with the truck, had a similar kind of position with the Stones to the one I had with Zeppelin. He was very friendly with Jimmy because he went back to the early Stones days with him. He was a really lovely guy.
DAVE PEGG Sandy Denny was big mates with Jimmy from their school days. She knew Jimmy from way back from when she was at art school.
ANDY JOHNS Robert said, “We’re going to have Sandy come down and sing on ‘The Battle of Evermore’.” I thought it was a brilliant idea. Of course she fit right in – sang like a nightingale with Robert singing at the same time. Literally she was the inspiration for the whole thing. I went “Wow!”
ROBERT PLANT For me to sing with Sandy was great. Sandy and I were friends and it was the most obvious thing to ask her to sing on “The Battle”. If it suffered from a naivety and tweeness – I was only twenty-three – it makes up for it in the cohesion of the voices and the playing.
DIGBY SMITH The band had been in at Island for a couple of nights, and they were due in for one more. I was at home in my little flat in Victoria, looking forward to a well-deserved night off. The phone rang and it was Penny Hanson, the studio manager: “Bob Potter’s not well, can you come in and dep for him on the Zep session?”
Seventy per cent of the drum sound on “Stairway to Heaven” came from a Beyer M500 ribbon microphone hanging four or five feet over Bonham’s head. Jonesy was on a keyboard bass. Jimmy was on acoustic guitar, surrounded by four tall beige baffles that almost obscured him. I don’t think there was even a guide vocal. It’s a complex piece of music, a medley of two or three tunes tied together.
There’s a two-inch tape somewhere of the first take that’s awesome, no mistakes from beginning to end. Andy called everyone into the control room for the playback, turned the volume up to hooligan level. Bonham and Jones and Robert all agree that that’s the one: “We nailed it.” The only person not saying anything is Jimmy. Bonham turns to him and says, “What’s wrong?” Page says nothing’s wrong. Bonham goes, “No, something’s wrong. What is it?” “No, there’s nothing wrong.” “Well, is that the take or isn’t it?” “It’s all right.” “It’s all right. So you want us to do it again.” “I think we’ve got a better take inside us.”
Bonham is fuming at this point. He grabs his sticks, walks out of the control room and down the stairs. I can still see him sitting at the kit, waiting to come in, seething. And when he finally comes in, he’s beating the crap out of his drums and all the meters are going into the red. And they come back up into the control room, play it through, and it’s just that little bit more urgent. And Bonham gives Pagey at least a metaphorical hug and says, “You were right.”
We overdubbed three tracks of John Paul’s recorders. For the guitar solo, instead of headphones we set up some big playback monitors – big orange Lockwood cabinets on wheels, as big as Page was – and he was leaning on one of them with a cigarette in his mouth. We did three takes of lead guitar and comped the solo from those three takes. I was audacious enough, even as a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old, to point out that one of Andy’s switches didn’t quite work and that there was an alternative solution that might. After the solo, Robert went out and did the vocal – one take, maybe two.
ANDY JOHNS Robert was sitting at the back with me and I said, “Come on, it’s your turn now. You’ve got to go sing.” “Oh really? I’m not finished. Play it again.” He’s got this legal pad. So I played it again and he said, “Okay, I’m ready now.” Two takes, one punch-in.
ROSS HALFIN Jimmy told me years ago, “The reason I always changed engineers is that I’m not having anyone saying they’re the sound of Led Zeppelin. I am the sound of Led Zeppelin.” And you know something? He is the sound of Led Zeppelin. You can play any Zeppelin album – apart from In Through the Out Door, which is unmitigated crap – and it sounds like they recorded it this morning. And that is a hundred per cent Jimmy.
ANDY JOHNS What did piss me off in the end was Jimmy intimating about that he’d virtually invented the electric guitar and could charm the birds down from the trees. He always took responsibility for things I’d done. He said, “Andy was just there. He did nothing and I did everything.” I thought, “Come on, man. You wrote the tunes, you play them, and you won’t even give me that?”
JIMMY PAGE [The press] did not really start bothering me until after the third album. After all we had accomplished the press was still calling us a hype. So that is why the fourth album was untitled.
JACK WHITE The genius of Jimmy that people are always missing is the idea of the anti-establishment “punk” things that he was doing. Things like releasing records with no information and no writing on the cover. I mean, that’s pretty bold. It’s a lot more punk than the Sex Pistols signing a contract in front of Buckingham Palace.
RICHARD COLE The picture of the old man was Robert’s, and none of us could work out why the fuck he wanted that old bit of rubbish he’d found on a tip or somewhere.
PETER GRANT We had trouble initially, but Ahmet believed in us. Again it was a case of following our instincts and knowing that the cover would not harm sales one bit. And we were right again.
JIMMY PAGE I remember being in an Atlantic office for two hours with a lawyer who was saying, “You’ve got to have this.” So I said, “All right, run it on the inside bag. Print your Rockefeller Plaza or whatever it is down there.” Of course, they didn’t want to have a rerun on it, so there it is. It was a hard job, but fortunately we were in a position to say, “This is what we want,” because we had attained the status whereby that album was going to sell a lot.
RICHARD COLE I still don’t know what Jimmy’s ZoSo symbol means. For all I know, he could have been having a fucking laugh with everyone. It could just have been some old bollocks he’d thought up to get people at it. Which is not unlikely with him.
*
GLENN HUGHES My band Trapeze was playing as a trio, and we end up playing Mother’s in Birmingham. We were coming to the end of the set with the final number, “Medusa”. Fifteen or twenty feet in front of me, walking up to the stage as bold as brass, is Bonham with his assistant Matthew.
White label advance of the fourth album, side one
JOHN OGDEN They didn’t know John was there. All of a sudden you heard this voice from the back: “Ey, we gonna ’ave a knock, then?”
GLENN HUGHES Bonham gets on to the stage and – without missing a beat – takes the sticks, nicely, from Dave Holland and says, “Right, play that outro section again …” And we played the outro section for about fifteen minutes until we’d gone through all the formats of the arrangement the way he wanted it. That was my first real introduction to John.
That night he took me back to West Hagley. He wasn’t out-of-his-mind nasty-drunk, he was in a really good frame of mind. He told me in the car that Zeppelin had just finished recording the fourth album and he wanted to play it to me. And we got there and he proceeded to play an acetate of the album from tip to toe, “Black Dog” to “When the Levee Breaks”. We must have played it ten times, the whole album, and he was grinning and crying and smoking and back-slapping and dancing.
What I heard – on an amazing stereo, turned up to eleven – was life-changing. “When the Levee Breaks” just did me in. It became embedded in my soul. I didn’t think, “This is going to become one of the biggest-selling albums of all time.” I thought, “Here I am with a great guy, we’re young, we’re fucking rocking, he’s becoming my mentor, he’s giving me advice, he’s dropping the needle back to this moment and telling me how Jonesy did this or that.” He’s giving me a historical lesson on the making of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, and it was one of the biggest moments of my life.
JOHN OGDEN I went to sleep in Jason’s bedroom, with his little drum kit next to me. Everyone’s sitting around hung over the next morning and in comes Planty, full of beans: “C’mon, then! Time to get going!”
GLENN HUGHES Robert’s standing over me and waking me up, because they’re about to leave for the States and he’s come in a car to pick John up.
RICHARD COLE I think the third album had been more about breaking a pattern than anything else. They didn’t want to make it look as though the heavy stuff was all they could do. I don’t know that they didn’t decide to do the acoustic stuff knowing that they were going to go back to the earlier style. When the fourth one came out, there was no disputing what they were.
JOHN PAUL JONES There was always a slight resistance to new material. The first time we played “Stairway” live it was like, “Why aren’t they playing ‘Whole Lotta Love’?” Because people like what they know. And then “Stairway” became what they knew.
PHIL CARSON After the first few times they’d played it live, Peter said, “You know what? You’ve really got to shut up after this song. Jimmy, don’t check your tuning. Bonzo, don’t hit the snare drum.” The idea was that if the band seemed reverent towards the song, then that would impact on the audience.
JERRY GREENBERG “Stairway” was going nuts on the radio, but it was an eight-minute cut. I called Peter and said, “Listen, we’ve got the same thing going on as we had with ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Will Jimmy go in and edit the track?” Peter said no. So I did the exact same thing as I did with “Whole Lotta Love”: we did our own edit. It had to go to at least five minutes; there was no way you were going to make a three-minute version of “Stairway”. But the same thing happened: Peter would not allow it to come out as a single. The only way anybody was going to get “Stairway” was to buy the album. And it was their biggest-selling album ever.
ROY CARR On the “Back to the Clubs” tour in Britain, not only did the door prices have to be the same, but the bar prices had to be the same. And Zeppelin wanted the same money that they’d got at the start, so they were on 125 quid for the night – that’s what they got. The only thing that disappointed them was that they couldn’t do enough gigs.
RICHARD COLE They liked the closeness with the audience, but after doing the stadium tours in America I don’t think they were too enamoured of the space they had backstage. It was like, “Fuck this, we won’t do this again in a hurry!”
ROBERT PLANT It was bollocks: Led Zeppelin go back to the people. Playing Nottingham Boat Club for four cases of Nut Brown or whatever it was. All these great ideas and the great naivety of the time.
Playing the King’s Hall in Aberystwyth was a very well-meant gesture on behalf of Jimmy and I to drag John Paul and Bonzo up to Wales to give something back. In fact, we gave it back to some very disinterested bearded pipe-smoking thespians who were not impressed and quite rightly so. They were obviously in the wrong place. They should have been at the lecture room. We came in peace. It was one of those things where Bonzo was playing away and he looked at me and went, “This was a fucking good idea, wern it?”