I mean, who wants to know that Led Zeppelin broke an attendance record at such-and-such a place when Mick Jagger’s hanging around with Truman Capote?
JIMMY PAGE, 1973
EDDIE KRAMER There was a point where I stopped working with Zeppelin because I’d said something and they pulled out because they were on their high horse. It was silly, stupid. I was right and they were wrong, but that’s another story.
I didn’t hear anything and then a year later I got a phone call saying, “Do you want to come over and do some work at Stargroves?” It was a nice mansion if you like mansions. It was unfurnished, but Jagger’s bedroom was done up. I think that was where Pagey was sleeping. What we were there for was to record and sleep and eat, and that was it. We managed to get six tracks that were split up between Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti.
LORI MATTIX Houses of the Holy is very much Jonesy and Jimmy. Jimmy said that was the most composed album that he’s ever done, because all the other albums were sort of live. It was way more produced and it was all about the composition.
EDDIE KRAMER The band was in great shape and they were fun to work with and they wound me up something horrible. I’d brought this chick over from the US and Robert bagged her right away. There were all sorts of scenes with Bonzo bursting into the room in the middle of the night. Now it’s hilarious, but then it wasn’t so funny.
All that stuff is crap, really, because the most important thing was, how did they work in those circumstances? They were focused, they were together, the music was incredible. I think we got some really good sounds. Everybody loves “D’yer Maker”, “Dancing Days”.
JOHN PAUL JONES When we did “D’yer Maker”, [John] wouldn’t play anything but the same shuffle beat all the way through it. He hated it, and so did I. It would have been all right if he’d worked at the part: the whole point of reggae is that the drums and bass really have to be very strict about what they play. And he wouldn’t, so it sounded dreadful.
ROBERT PLANT There was no place we wouldn’t try and joyfully go –visiting “The Crunge” one minute, because we’d been to see James Brown when he was really on fire. “The Crunge” is not James Brown, it’s just Zeppelin going on a crazy moment.
EDDIE KRAMER One of the things that I think is so important in this music is the great joy in the fact that the mistakes were left in. We left them in intentionally, and we rejoiced in the mistakes if they were good mistakes. Robert Plant says the classic line in “Black Country Woman” – he’s recording the thing and the plane goes overhead and they say, “What about this aeroplane?” He says, “Nah, leave it.” You can’t create that stuff. You can’t fabricate it. It has to happen exactly like that.
ROBERT PLANT Someone goes, “I ain’t got no bloody lyrics,” and a week later I’d come back with “Over the Hills and Far Away” or “The Crunge”. That was amazing, because Bonzo and I were just going to go in the studio and talk Black Country through the whole thing. And it just evolved there and then: at the end of my tether, it came out. “The Rain Song” was just sort of a little infatuation I had. The next morning I’d scribble it out. If I had done it the day after, it would have been no good.
EDDIE KRAMER Jimmy never forgets. I had all my pictures from Stargroves – a great series of pictures of Robert with an acoustic guitar – and I showed them to Jimmy in a hotel in New York twenty years after the event. He goes, “That fucking prat …” He just went off like a fucking rocket about Robert: “I told him never to touch my fucking guitar. I went round the corner for a quick gypsy’s and he had the fucking audacity to pick up my fucking guitar and I told him never to touch it!” I said, “Jimmy, give it up. It was fucking years ago.” The paranoia and the suspicion and all that stuff is part and parcel of who he is, and unfortunately it manifests itself in some weird ways.
AUBREY POWELL Storm Thorgerson and I went to the office in Oxford Street, and it was very dark and gloomy. There was a massive Art Deco desk with a statue on it, and behind it was this enormous man with long, lank hair and rhinestone jewellery everywhere. He was very polite but incredibly menacing. Jimmy was standing by the window smoking a cigarette, looking very ethereal and Shelley-like. Robert was super-friendly.
They were very gracious. The dialogue was mainly with Robert, with Jimmy coming in and looking for some deeper interpretation. Robert’s enthusiasm drove the thing. Peter sat there going, “Ah, fuckin’ great, love that …” Or the negative of that. At the end of the meeting, when we’d all agreed on the two best ideas, he said, “We’re going off on tour to Japan. You choose which one you like best.” Suddenly the responsibility was completely on Storm and me. And then, as we’re walking out the door thinking, “We’ve got it,” he goes, “And don’t fuck it up.” Just the way he said that sent shivers down my spine. It was a classic Peter move.
There was a hierarchy when it came to approval. I always showed everything to Peter first, and then if he liked it he’d say, “Fuckin’ great, go and show it to Jimmy.” Then it was Robert, and next it was Jonesy. Bonzo was last because Bonzo often didn’t give a shit. The design was presented to them and it seemed appropriate for the title Houses of the Holy. Jimmy didn’t give me that title, nor did he give me any other information about the record. We presented many ideas to them, but this was the one that caught their imagination. It had a comic-book, science-fiction atmosphere celebrating some sort of ceremony or holy communion.
STEFAN GATES (the naked boy on the cover of Houses of the Holy) I am a bit scared of it. There’s this big bad thing out there and it’s got me on it. I just feel I’m in the middle of some hellish scene. The one thing [my sister Sam and I] agree on is we would never let our kids do the same thing.
AUBREY POWELL You have to place the cover in the context of the time. We live in a world now where every other word is paedophile. In the Seventies I never knew that word existed. I was an out-and-out hippie – albeit a materialist hippie because I was interested in becoming well-known – and back then you could see child nudity with families and with parents on every beach and in every swimming pool. That image on the cover was specifically taken from Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, where he describes all the children of the world leaving the earth in a ball of fire – and they’re naked.
*
JUNE HARRIS BARSALONA What was beginning to happen was that promoters like Michael Cole in Canada would go to a manager and say, “I will guarantee you ninety per cent, let’s cut out the agency.” Frank had always been very direct and very honest, and the agency got whatever it was in those days, I think ten per cent. And he was not going to cut his commissions just because one band was greedy.
I’m sure Frank was hurt when Peter decided he was going to do it his way, but he wasn’t going to compromise his principles. There is a possibility that the agency contracts were up, and that gave Peter the freedom to do what he wanted. Frank never held a grudge about it. There was no bad blood.
DANNY GOLDBERG Peter famously left Premier and I think Steve Weiss was considered complicit in that. By the time I was involved, Zeppelin had already left Premier and Steve was considered an enemy.
MITCHELL FOX (Swan Song staffer, 1977–80) When Peter and the band suggested what they wanted, in my experience Steve got it done.
HENRY SMITH Some people looked at it like Peter renegotiating a deal was like the Mafia renegotiating a deal – the take-it-or-leave-it type of deal. Was it English Mafia? Well, maybe it was. Maybe it was musical Mafia. Peter had that with Steve Weiss.
MICKIE MOST Peter changed the industry … he said, “Ninety-ten, take it or leave it.” Promote it? You don’t have to promote Led Zeppelin. Just take an advert in the Jewish Chronicle … You’re gonna get ten per cent for just turning up … the Americans had never met anyone like him before.
PETER GRANT Well, they were greedy fuckers, weren’t they. The thing was, there were so many of them that were cheating bands.
MALCOLM McLAREN He basically changed it by making – for a moment – the band more important than the industry … than the record company. He treated everybody else as parasites.
SAM AIZER You want to know what I honestly believe? Steve Weiss was the business brains behind Zeppelin, not Peter. I believe that from my heart. He came up with the ninety-ten, he came up with all these remarkable ideas. He always gave the credit to “the Leds”, as he called them, but the guy was a genius. Steve could wield somebody else’s power better than anybody – he could squeeze every last nickel. And Peter fed off that. He said, “I’ve got my hired gun and he’s gonna pull the trigger for me.”
Steve had everything to do with the business mystique of Led Zeppelin. When you walked in that office in the old Newsweek building, there was a hall from Shelley Kaye’s office to Steve’s, with a music room in the middle. In this hall there were pictures of Led Zeppelin from the first album, and then a little further down you could see Hendrix, Beck, Vanilla Fudge, the Rascals. And you’d think, “This guy’s been around the block …”
444 Madison Avenue, New York City: Weingarten, Wedeen & Weiss were on the 27th Floor (Art Sperl)
STEVE WEISS Before we started to self-promote [Jimi Hendrix’s] concerts, there was a lot of difficulty in his obtaining dates in America, because at that time – although it seems ludicrous by today’s standards – he was considered to be a very erotic act. Most of the deals available were sixty per cent artist, forty per cent promoter. We hired a promoter and paid him a small [ten per cent] percentage for promoting the concert. That way, if you did very well, the artist made a lot more of the money. You could only do this with an artist of Jimi’s stature, because if you guessed wrong, the artist wouldn’t make as much or might even lose money.
JANINE SAFER Peter Grant had a quite false reputation for being intimidating. He wasn’t. Steve was intimidating, and Peter let Steve be the asshole. Led Zeppelin had incredible power within the Warner family, and not just because they were a huge band but because Steve was their liaison, their mouthpiece, their roadway into the executives. Steve was respected by those guys, whether it was Ahmet or Mo Ostin or Jerry Greenberg.
I don’t know that Jerry liked Steve at all; I suspect he didn’t. But he respected him. When Steve spoke, he had the power of a lot of record sales behind him. And he wasn’t outrageous in his demands. He had an unerring sense of how much he could get for those guys. And they knew he was the reason they were staying in those huge suites in the Plaza Hotel. They fully recognised that Steve was an essential part of Led Zeppelin. Also, they would get themselves in trouble an awful lot, and he would get them out of it.
TONY MANDICH (artist relations manager at Atlantic’s West Coast office, 1972–97) I was present at the meeting when they introduced the ninety-ten split. Certain promoters were making millions from sixty-forty. They were making a fortune doing fucking nothing but making an announcement.
Peter told us, “Let’s go. The band will tour and we’ll call a radio station.” The tour would start in LA and they would do multiple shows. Ahmet told us to call the radio station to tell them that the first show goes on sale Monday morning at 10 a.m. at the box office. In those days there was only one place, the Forum, where they used to play. The tickets would go on sale at 10 a.m. and Peter said, “Call the station and give them that information and see what happens.” By eleven or noon we got a phone call from the Forum that they’d sold out. A couple of days later Peter said, “Call the station and tell them that the second show is on sale.” And boom, the second show would go clean in a minute.
Then he said, “Why do we need promoters or anybody else to work our show?” I think we ended up doing seven shows at the Forum. And that’s where ninety-ten was born. After that it was a different ball game.
JACK CALMES When Concerts West and Jerry Weintraub took over the running of the tours from the agents and the old promoters, Peter and the band were able to tap into the kind of resources that had always been there – having that level of security and having the doctors travel with the tour so that everything that the band wanted could be handled in some way.
JOHN PAUL JONES We would get people turning up and trying to claim the gig as a free show. It became a bit of a two-way fight. From our standpoint it was like saying, “Hey, we’re up here as well – just listen and enjoy it.” Robert was always making gestures for calm. I think we then realised we’d be better off without the police, and we got rid of them and brought in our own security.
MITCHELL FOX Between Phil Carson and Ahmet Ertegun and Joan Hudson, they had a lot of very influential people working for them.
PHIL CARSON Joan was not the original accountant. That was Peter Parker, who worked for the firm that Joan worked for. They decided they wanted Joan to work for them full-time, so they took her out of the firm and set her up in her own business. And she’s been brilliant for them all of these years.
BENJI LEFEVRE As far as I am aware, they all trusted Joan absolutely. She was the legitimate face of Led Zeppelin. She had a very high proper voice and they just loved her.
EDDIE KRAMER Ahmet Ertegun was the epitome of a great record man, and he loved the Zep guys. That’s what’s missing in the music business today, a guy like Ahmet who just knew the music backwards, the history of it, and could hang with the Stones all night doing blow or whatever he did. The guy was like fifty men.
TONY MANDICH Ahmet would go out every night to chat with the bands, see new acts play. You name it, he was there. The dedication was unbelievable.
PHIL CARSON I used to dread Ahmet coming to London. I would show up at the Dorchester at ten o’clock, and routinely he was still horizontal, though already making phone calls. And he wouldn’t come down till eleven, and we would go and do what we did all day. There’d be a lunch with somebody, and then later he’d say, “Come and pick me up at eight, we’re having dinner with so-and-so.” Dinner would turn into going to Tramp or the Speakeasy, and by two o’clock I’m dead and he’s just getting into gear.
BILL CURBISHLEY He stood up to Peter and was not at all intimidated by him. Grant knew who Ahmet was and, in the end, he owed Ahmet. It’s okay to come in with a great album and all that, but you cannot minimise what Ahmet put behind that band.
GEOFF GRIMES We had the four biggest British rock bands that worked all over the world doing what they were doing for Atlantic. So for anybody who was working here, it was a really big honour to be doing it. If one of the big four was coming out with an album, there was a checklist of things that you had to do. Carson was incredibly good at caretaking. He would be deeply aware of the potential rivalries or competitiveness and he’d be there to make sure it all worked.
*
RICHARD COLE We toured Japan in 1972, and coming back we stopped off in India.
ROBERT PLANT We stopped in Bombay and we ended up playing in an old dive there for a bottle of Scotch. It was superb. I was singing through a Fender cabinet which was the size of a twelve-inch telly, and Pagey was playing a guitar that must have had piano strings on it. And the people were so happy because they’d never ever witnessed anybody just passing through, taking the trouble to stop and play. We did some recording in India – yes, they have got studios there, just about.
RICHARD COLE On the plane back to England, Robert and Jimmy decided that they wanted to be in the limelight. I said, “What sort of publicist do you want?” And I told them about BP Fallon and T. Rex, and they said they wanted that.
BILL HARRY I had Suzi Quatro doing an interview in the Coach and Horses, and Bonzo was in there drinking again. I got up to walk somewhere else and he grabbed hold of me. I had all my things in my pocket and he ripped the pocket off me; money went everywhere. I was so pissed off and fed up I just said, “That’s it. I’m fed up with you and I don’t want anything more to do with you. If I see you coming up the street you better cross to the other side.”
I phoned up Peter and said, “Look, I’m sorry but I’m having nothing more to do with Led Zeppelin.” He said, “What did they do?” I said, “They ripped my pocket.” He said, “Go out and buy the most expensive stuff you can.” I said, “I don’t want anything to do with them.”
To him it was a bunch of lads having fun, but for me to be looking after Suzi Quatro and have her witness things like that in front of everybody, it was humiliating. I can put up with a number of things, but that was the last straw.
“A glamorous Gollum …” BP Fallon, New York City, July 2010 (Art Sperl)
BP FALLON BILL Harry was a very nice man but more Pete Best than John Lennon. He wasn’t torn and frayed, and I think you probably had to be to work with Zeppelin.
MICHAEL DES BARRES BP is like a glamorous Gollum combined with the wisdom of Yoda. He and Marc Bolan were two little imps who gravitated towards each other. He turned me on to everything I know about music – took me under his unbelievable wing and just confirmed to me that three chords and a slide guitar could maybe change the world and certainly get you laid.
ROBBIE BLUNT Silverhead were in LA and we called Robert up. He said, “You a bit ’omesick?” I said, “Well, I am a bit.” But I was having a bloody great time. They let us loose in among all these costumes from some film production, and BP got hold of this outrageous coat made of feathers. You could find where he was in the Hyatt House because there was this trail of feathers everywhere. He kept moulting.
BP FALLON Peter and I had a talk. He said, “We’re thinking of doing this tour.” So I said, “Well, show me the dates, then.” And we sat down on the floor and spread them out across the floor. And years later he said, “I knew we were all right when you sat on the floor.” I’m not really one for ceremony. I said, “If we’re going to do this properly, and it’s a 24/7 situation, you can have me heart and soul.” It’s very simple, really: if you have something that’s good, you just let people know about it. Why hadn’t it happened before? Because nobody had applied themselves to it with the correct psychology. All you have to do is let people believe what you’re saying, and they can decide whether it’s bollocks or not.
ROY CARR BP was his own creation. He knew how to handle a lot of artists by tickling their egos. There’s a famous quote from Greg Lake: “That man can’t do our publicity, he doesn’t wear socks!” We were down the Speakeasy one night and a bit the worse for wear, and BP was saying, “People have got to realise that we’re the new aristocracy.” Everybody started throwing food at him.
GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN In the beginning, Beep was the court jester. I never remember him even sitting down with a journalist. Whenever everybody else was a bit down, Beep would start throwing popcorn at people. There were many times when we couldn’t even find him. We’d be on the plane and someone would say, “Anybody know where Beep is? Is he under a seat?” “No.” “Well, we’re not waiting for him this time.” I remember flying back to Chicago without him because he’d gone off with some girl to buy rhinestones.
BP FALLON There’s too much darkness been talked about with Led Zeppelin. Things can’t happen if it’s all darkness. You can say, “Well, look what happened later on,” but that’s not the point. There was so much fucking joy with that band, so much fun and so much mischief. On one American tour I said, “I am now the entertainments manager.” No one complained.
ROBERT PLANT Right the way through Led Zeppelin, the majority of the music was built on an extreme energy. It was excessively extreme at times and joyously so, despite people wanting to think it was dark.
MICHAEL DES BARRES BP validated the magical elements of Led Zeppelin, and that extended their lives. Most people in that position will simply take from you to make themselves feel better. Beep reminded them of what they were meant to be doing.
BP FALLON The first evening with them in Montreux I put all my make-up on, and all the feathers and furs, and I wore a blue velvet cloak. For Bonzo, who was a good stolid chappie, it was all a bit of a shock: “This guy’s gonna get involved with us? Fuck, G, what’s going on?”
CHRIS CHARLESWORTH I always wanted to be in a meeting with BP and the band and Grant, because you’d think they’d have swatted him for being cheeky. He had great lip, did BP. He took me up to Manchester to see Zeppelin at the Hard Rock. Halfway through the show, I decide I need to go to the dressing room for a pee. I open the bathroom door and BP’s in there with two women.
BP FALLON You can do a lot during a twenty-minute drum solo. Especially if you’re not the one playing the drums.
CHRIS CHARLESWORTH Danny Goldberg was the first guy I met in the business who had very long hair in a ponytail, and he was incredibly skinny and laid-back. He was just what Led Zeppelin needed, actually.
DANNY GOLDBERG Steve Weiss told me that they were interested in me working for them. I’d failed as a journalist and this was my new career as a PR person. The first time I met them was at the Georges V, and I was very titillated to be flown over to Paris. I think the whole reason for it was to make it clear who the boss was, and that I wouldn’t be working for Steve.
It was a short meeting. It was, “Jimmy and I want you to be our ambassador.” Peter was very large and scruffy, a mound of a man who wore his shirts outside his pants. It was giant jeans and big shirts over them and a big beard, balding but still with hair on his head. He was very much the gracious, amiable host.
The band had been through some of the demons that people deal with – the disorienting feeling of success where people are extra nice to you and extra mean to you. I think by the time I met them they had become sort of at peace with it and really knew their place in the world.
Jimmy did very little talking. Later it became clear to me that he was really the boss. At first it appeared they were all equals but they were not equals. It was Jimmy’s band and he had to deal with the other guys and keep them happy, but it was like he had two votes. Peter was Jimmy’s guy. When he talked about the band, he talked about Jimmy in a very different tone of voice than the other people, and that was their bond and I think their deal from the birth of the band.
I’m not sure that Jimmy was as devoted to Peter as much as Peter was to Jimmy, but on Peter’s part it was like a love affair. When Peter called me to hire me for the label, it was like, “Jimmy says hello,” and obviously Jimmy hadn’t said hello – it was just something Peter said. And to Peter that was the highest compliment that he could pay somebody.
JAAN UHELSZKI When I talked to Danny in the Nineties about Zeppelin’s relationship with the press, he told me it was a conscious effort to have this conspiracy of silence, because they thought the mystery would add to their sales. But then there was a day in 1972 when they saw the Stones on the cover of Time or Newsweek and thought, “Okay, we’ve got to do more in public.”
DANNY GOLDBERG My memory is that Robert felt that his father didn’t know how successful the band was, and that was one of the things on his mind. He wanted the people he grew up with to know and thought that the media would help and would recognise what the band had accomplished. So that was part of the agenda. What they really cared about was how the coverage of what they did in America would look in England. They didn’t care what it looked like in Philadelphia. At that first meeting, Robert specifically mentioned to me how much press the Stones had got in the last year and how ridiculous it was given that Zeppelin was bigger in terms of concert attendance.
MARIO MEDIOUS Zeppelin were very jealous of the Stones. In ’72, I was on tour with them first, and then I had to tell them, “Guys, I gotta leave tomorrow to meet with Ahmet and the Stones for a couple of days.” And they said, “Fuck the Stones!” They fell out with me behind it. Plus the Stones got all these good reviews, and Ahmet was crazy about them. Ahmet loved all that society stuff, because Jagger had that society thing going on. Zeppelin were straight-up hippies, they hated that fucking bullshit. Movie stars would want to say hello and they wouldn’t even let them backstage. Bonzo would say, “Fuck them!”
LISA ROBINSON Danny called me up and asked if I would go on the road with them. I said, “Don’t be ridiculous, they’re a cheesy heavy metal band.” But I went, because I’d never been to New Orleans before. And then I interviewed Robert and Jimmy and fell in love with Led Zeppelin. I really thought they were great. No one else could be bothered with them – they thought they were over-the-top and a joke – but I started writing this good stuff about them in Disc and Music Echo. So they got some good press in England.
DANNY GOLDBERG Lisa and I were very close, and she went on the tour and wrote a lot of stories about them. She could cover what they were doing in the US for English papers and give them the image they wanted in England. So they always had time for her and she really got it. She wasn’t snobbish about it. She didn’t care about what any of the critics thought and she really developed a relationship with them.
JAAN UHELSZKI Lisa got a little peek into Zeppelin that most women didn’t get, because she was such a kind of society babe. She had complete access to everything, because it kind of gave them more of that appeal to debutantes, and for some reason she’s always been that kind of gossip-columnist writer. She was friends with Danny too, so that kind of opened up that door for her.
LISA ROBINSON Nick Logan contacted me and asked whether I’d do a New York column for the NME, so I jumped from Disc. I would file all these glowing reports about them in England, which they were thrilled about because their parents read it and it was their only good press at the time. I remember Jimmy pissing and moaning about Chris Welch’s review of [Houses of the Holy] in Melody Maker, but I never had a problem with Zeppelin.
MICK FARREN They treated Nick Kent like complete shit. Kent, God bless him, is an honest man in his own way, and he went off to somewhere like Cardiff and saw Zeppelin in their early grandeur and thought they were the best thing he’d ever seen. At which point he got shepherded backstage, where they promptly started to abuse him. It was like “Nick Bent”, you know, real low-level homophobic stuff from Bonzo. Nick put up with that shit and I couldn’t understand it. I wouldn’t have.
NICK KENT I’ve never claimed I was bullied by Led Zeppelin. What happened backstage was not bullying, it was just getting involved in the old cut-and-thrust of being an interviewer. Any journalist was fair game for them, so you can imagine someone like me walking in, dressed up to the nines. They weren’t too keen on this glam-rock thing – though they were using some of it themselves – so I was fair game.
Nick Kent with Atlantic’s Anni Ivil, about 1973 (Courtesy of Anni Ivil)
NICKY CHINN (co-writer for RAK acts Sweet and Suzi Quatro) I remember going to a Zeppelin party at Peter Grant’s place, and they kept on playing Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz”. So I went up to Robert Plant and said, “Do me a favour, stop taking the piss.” He said, “This is one of our favourite records!” Zeppelin were so big that they could afford to appreciate anything. They didn’t have that snobbery.
NICK KENT You really had to learn to tough it out with these guys. You had to be in a room with them and be memorable. If it went badly, at least you had something to write about. I remember once being in the Atlantic office in London, and Bonham walks in with Phil Carson. Carson turns to me and says, “Here, John, you know Nick Kent, don’t you.” And Bonham just looks at me and says, “Ever since Planty started wearing those silly little frilly tops we’ve had benders like this following us around.” But then he would say the same thing to Page – they were all calling each other “big girls”. You didn’t want to get between Jimmy Page or Robert Plant and a full-length mirror in the dressing room – and Bonham was always taking the piss out of both of them.
ROBERT PLANT Nick Kent was with Keith [Richards] or he was with Jimmy. And the psyche of that condition and platform from where he made his assertions were based on the chemicals and the humour. Nick went where he felt the greatest affinity, comfort and stimulation, so looking at Bonzo coming in growling, with a suit and a fedora on and carrying a black stick with a silver top, wasn’t easy for him.
LISA ROBINSON I went on five tours with them and they were total gentlemen to me, lit my cigarettes, opened my car door – just stars. But I could see what they were like. Richard Cole, Peter Grant – they reminded me of Expresso Bongo. All those guys were heavy, dark, that East End music scene.
MICHAEL DES BARRES I adored Peter, not least because of the incredible gangster power he exuded and that seemed to step straight out of Performance. He came from the mean streets of London, which was essentially a “Fuck you” to all of society.
TERRY MANNING One time Peter was in New Orleans and I was in the lobby of the hotel with him. Don Fox, the promoter, was demanding this and demanding that, and they had just delivered coffee to Don and tea to Peter. Peter stood up, pulled down his pants and put his you-know-what right in the hot teacup. And he just stood there looking at Don. It was saying to Don, “There’s nothing you can do to me.” And Don just sort of went, “Okay, I give up.”
JOHN PAUL JONES Peter didn’t heavy everybody; he got pissed off at people who tried to stitch him up, but if you played fair with him he was fine. A lot of stories came from people who tried to pull some number on him and didn’t succeed, and then suddenly it’s, “Oh, Peter Grant tried to rough me up.”
BP FALLON One is completely against violence, but sometimes people can interpret someone being very forceful as being a threat of violence, just because they’re huge. Peter was a big chap and he knew how to work it. But he didn’t become successful by being a horrible, menacing bully. He became successful by being very charming and very bright, and because he loved Jimmy and by extension loved the band and would do anything for them.
HELEN GRANT The temper and all of that, it was all acting. When Dad used to have those moments, he didn’t like himself behaving like that. It really used to get to him and make him very anxious and upset. He’d have an angel on one shoulder going, “Calm down, Peter,” and then a devil on the other egging him and going, “Get in there and show ’em what you’re made of!”
When he used to lose his temper in front of me, he would look so ashamed that he’d behaved like that in front of people he was close to. Jimmy felt quite secure and protected by it, but Robert hated it and was embarrassed by it.
AHMET ERTEGUN Peter … kept them hidden in a shroud of mystery. They became the most unapproachable band in rock history. My life with them thereafter was a rollercoaster ride. The music and the recordings got better and better, the hits were bigger and bigger, the stories of their exploits on the road kept getting wilder and wilder. They were not only inventing the most important rock ’n’ roll music of their time, but they were also inventing the new rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, and the mystique about them was turning into legend.
HENRY SMITH The Beatles kind of opened the door to it, but when the Who and Zeppelin came over, they were the bad boys of rock ’n’ roll. Now whether Peter used that as a tool – and in some ways I think he probably did – there’s nothing like a bad reputation to take you a long way. The Stones went places because the Beatles were the good boys and the Stones were the bad boys. And Zeppelin were the bad boys too. I think some of that mystique helped them in that time period.
CHRIS CHARLESWORTH I travelled to Montreux with them and spent the weekend there, and that was absolutely delightful. They used to go over there to do a couple of warm-up shows before a big tour. They were on their best behaviour because their wives were there. They’d kept a low profile for the previous six months and had been working on Houses of the Holy. Somewhere in my piece I wrote something along the lines of, “Their popularity may be on the wane as a result of their recent lack of activity …” Well, they picked up on this and used this phrase in the adverts for their next tour, which was totally sold out.
BP FALLON Chris wrote something like, “Led Zeppelin may be past their peak” in Melody Maker. All the tickets sold out straight away, so the following week we ran an ad with the dates, all of them “SOLD OUT”, and with Chris’s quote under it. So it was a little message: “Don’t fuck us around because otherwise we’re going to do things like this to you.” Chris and I, we’re friends to this day.
NICK KENT The two shows I saw in ’72 were truly phenomenal, because there was a sense of focus and natural energy. What really struck me about them then was that no one was on cocaine and no one was drunk. It took three songs for them to lock together. After that, they took flight.
GLORIA GRANT I don’t think I realised for a long time that they were the biggest band in the world. I remember being in Montreux and coming back in a Learjet that Peter had hired. And then I realised it was the big time. We were able to stay in the best places and the best suites, the Dorchester and so on. But I never got embroiled in it. Maybe I should have done. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the rich pickings from it, because I did. I always had a nice car and things like that, but it didn’t faze me. I hope I didn’t change a lot.