Led Zeppelin, October 1968
Jimmy Page and I had lost touch with each other since he had joined The Yardbirds, so you can imagine my surprise when I got a call from him out of the blue to tell me that he had put a band together with our mutual friend John Paul Jones, and a drummer and singer I had never heard of. He explained that they had assembled enough material and it was their intention to make an album, hopefully with me.
I was up for it, as Jimmy and I grew up in the same town and had been pals since the early sixties, and John had been the number-one session bass player in London for years. When I was an engineer I would see him almost every day, and a nicer guy you could not wish to meet.
Knowing that anything these two had put together was bound to be pretty good, I turned up at Olympic a couple of weeks later, not having any real idea of what I was walking into. I was blown off my feet. The album that we made in the next nine days was a landmark in rock and roll history, taking it to another level altogether.
The sound they created, the arrangements they came up with, and the standard of musicianship were equally astonishing. Each session seemed to be more exciting than the last, as what they had prepared unraveled in front of me. All I had to do was press record, sit back, and try to contain the excitement of being in the same
room with what was going on.
The stereo mix of this record is certainly one of the best sounding that I ever made, but the credit has to go to the band, as all I did was try to faithfully put down on tape what they were giving me, adding a little echo here and there to enhance the mood.
We were putting together The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus just as the album was finished. So I took my acetate to a production meeting and played it to Mick, suggesting that I felt that the band was going to be huge and therefore we should have them on the show as it would be an enormous coup. My suggestion fell on deaf ears, as Mick did not get it at all. A couple of months later I dragged George Harrison to Olympic on the way home from a Beatles session and played him the master tape with the same result, he didn't get it either. I found this slightly disconcerting as I could not understand why they did not get what was so exciting to me. Prior to this I had always felt that we all shared pretty much the same taste in music. Jimmy and John Paul Jones were from the same era with the same influences and yet Mick and George openly disliked what they had done, seeing no value in it at all. In any event, they were perfectly entitled to their opinion, and fortunately a large portion of the record-buying population disagreed with them.
—Glyn Johns, Sound Man: A Life Recording Hits with the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Eric Clapton, the Faces..., 2014
Glyn Johns talked about this night again in a May 2018 interview with Bob Spitz. His recollection was included in Spitz's biography on Led Zeppelin:
Flushed with excitement, he took the acetate to a preproduction meeting for the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus TV show. "Jimmy's put this band together," he told Mick Jagger during a break. "You've got to listen to this." Mick played a few bars and removed it from the turntable. "He didn't like it at all," Johns recalls. A few nights later, he was leaving Apple, where he'd been working on the Let It Be session. "George [Harrison] and I lived in the same direction, and I said, 'On your way home, let's pop around to Olympic. You've got to hear this record Jimmy's done. It's absolutely amazing.'" It was around ten o'clock at night when the two men settled into Studio A, where Johns had made the album. "I got a protection copy of the master that was stored in the basement and played it for George, start to finish. It wasn't that he just didn't get it—he thought it was awful."
Mick wasn't the only member of the Rolling Stones who didn't enjoy Zeppelin's music. Keith Richards said Robert's singing annoyed him in a 6 December 1969 interview with New Musical Express:
Led Zeppelin? "I played their album quite a few times when I first got it, but then the guy's voice started to get on my nerves. I don't know why: maybe he's a little too acrobatic. But Jimmy Page is a great guitar player, and a very respected one."
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