He liked to shroud himself in a kind of Byronic mystique but was too inherently well-mannered and gentlemanly to be a fully qualified emissary of the 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' brigade. Uninformed people back then talked about Page's occultist dabbling as though the guitarist spent his leisure hours with his head in a cowl ritually slaughtering various species of livestock and then drinking their blood like some corny apparition in a Dennis Wheatley satanic potboiler. This was pure fiction. He was just another seeker after esoteric knowledge, a collector of old dusty books and committed student of the 'magical' information that was supposedly contained within their yellowing pages. And his interests certainly weren't shared by his fellow players, who viewed their guitarist's preoccupations with guarded amusement rather than any sense of trepidation.
—Nick Kent, Apathy for the Devil: A 1970s Memoir, 2010
"Robert Plant In His Own Words" (Hit Parader, March 1983)
In the late ‘60s, Led Zeppelin’s takeoff caused quite a commotion. This was hard-driving rock and roll like no one had ever heard before. Robert Plant’s trademark vocals served as a blueprint for many, although few could even hope to come close to achieving that dynamic range. Whole Lotta Love blasting through the stereo speakers moved delighted music fans into a frenzy.
Before long, a tradition began: the heavy metal seeds had been Planted, sprouted and were spreading like wildfire. There was no turning back.
For ten years Led Zeppelin’s albums and tours captivated the rock world. Then, suddenly, drummer John Bonham’s death ended a decade of thrills. The tremendous success of Robert Plant’s solo LP, Pictures At Eleven, proves, however, that the legend of Led Zeppelin will never die. Further proof is the recent release of Coda, a collection of never-before-released Led Zeppelin cuts.
“At 13 and a half I liked girls all of a sudden, and it came down to attracting them the best way I could. So I grew my hair. It flopped down over my ears and was immediately chopped off by demand. I forgot about lessons for the next few years and kept joining pop groups.
“I was supposed to start training as a chartered accountant. Although I was young, really, I suddenly decided where I was going. I packed up the accountancy training after only a couple of weeks and I went back to college to get some more ‘O’ levels. It was getting to the stage where I only dared to go home at night because my hair was so long. So at 16 I left home and started my real education musically.”
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“I’d been singing with a lot of groups and … it really just went in circles until I formed the first Band of Joy. The manager told me I couldn’t sing and sacked me from the group. I asked him to give me another chance but he wouldn’t.
“The new band (Band of Joy, Mk. II) decided to have painted faces on stage. It went all right for awhile, but we were frightening our audiences to death. This big fat bass player would come running on and dive straight off the stage. I was howling with laughter at the sight of him in kaftan and bell bottoms, billowing in the audience. It was absurd.”
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“The Yardbirds needed a drummer who was a good timekeeper and who really laid it down, and the only one I knew was the one I’d been playing with for years - Bonzo Bonham. I got so enthusiastic that I hitched back to Oxford and chased after John, got him to one side at a gig and said, ‘Look, mate, you’ve got to join the Yardbirds.’
“But he wasn’t easily convinced. He said, ‘Well, I’m all right here, aren’t I?’ He’d never earned the sort of bread he was getting with Tim Rose before, so I had to try to persuade him. I had nothing to convince him with, really, except a name that got lost in American pop history.”
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“No matter what the critics said, the proof of the pudding was the fact that Led Zeppelin II got a lot of people off. The reviewer for Rolling Stone, for instance, was just a frustrated musician. Maybe I’m just flying my own little ego ship, but sometimes people seem to resent talent. I don’t even remember what the criticism was, but as far as I’m concerned it was a good - maybe even great - road album.”
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“I am a reflection of what I sing. Sometimes I have to get serious because the things I’ve been through are serious. We’ve been to America so much and seen so many things that we don’t agree with, that our feelings of protest have to reflect in our music.”
“America makes you aware of the proximity of man’s fate. You see so much that is great, but so much that is terrible. The rush, the hassles, the police… People may say we make a lot of bread, but in some cities it’s so rough that people are scared to come to our concerts. Our manager once had a gun pulled on him, and we’ve been threatened with arrest if we returned to the stage for an encore. The police even accused us of being drug addicts. That’s all part of where That’s the Way came from.”
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“Let me tell you a little story about the song Ten Years Gone. I was working my ass off before joining Zeppelin. A lady I really dearly loved said, ‘It’s me or your fans.’ Not that I had any fans, but I said, ‘I can’t stop. I’ve got to keep going.’ She’s quite content these days, I imagine. She’s got a washing machine that works by itself and a little sports car. We wouldn’t have anything to say anymore. I could probably relate to her, but she couldn’t relate to me. I’d be smiling too much. Ten years gone, I’m afraid.”
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“Presence was our stand against everything. Our stand against the elements, against chance. We were literally fighting against existence itself. We’d left home for 12 months and it seemed that everything was about to crumble.”
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“Abba were very kind and said, ‘why don’t you have a look at the studios (Polar Studios in Stockholm, Sweden, where Zep recorded In Through The Out Door)?’ Sweden is a weird place to go. If you’ve got any choice at all, you might choose other alternatives. But to trek to Sweden in the middle of the winter, a studio has to be good - and it was sensational.
“Normally, a regimental attitude has to be taken in the studio, but with Abba’s it was very easy-going and the whole series of rooms beckoned for you to play good stuff and dictated the mood - along with the Swedish beer. They’ve got special homes for people who drink it out there because they go loony after about three weeks.”
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“Without the audience throwing back vibrations, I just could not do it, could not extend myself. When I’m looking into those thousands of faces, it just seems to pour out of me. By allowing your mind to be free and open, you get a new dimension going and the audience comes back at us. I suspect you could put a lot of the group’s success down to that. We’ve never had the attitude of going on stage, playing like clockwork for the allotted time and then pissing off. That’s not our trip at all.”
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“Most of the girls who come backstage simply want to say, ‘Thank you for giving a good concert.’ Outsiders who think that all sorts of stuff is going on just don’t know us. I’ll admit the first year or two that I became a star I was very young and on a trip. But we’ve gotten over that now, and we’re mostly concerned with out music.”
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“It’s usually one of our roadies that rides along with us and then gets us a bad reputation with his shenanigans. You get bored. Anything that’s ever happened has been in the spirit of fun. We never hurt anybody. Well, no one who didn’t dig it.”
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“We decided to hire our first publicity firm when we toured America in the summer of ’72. That was the same summer that the Stones toured, and we knew full well that we were doing more business than them. We were getting better gates in comparison to a lot of people who were constantly glorified in the press. So without getting egocentric, we thought it was time people heard something about us other than that we were eating women and throwing the bones out of the window. The whole lunacy thing was all people knew about us, and it was all word-of-mouth. All those times of lunacy were OK, but we aren’t and never were monsters. Just good-time boys, loved by their fans and hated by their critics.”
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“Marriage for me was the make-or-break of being a stable person or just going on with this out-and-out looning. In the pop world where everything gets blown up and unreal, you never know what’s going to happen. You are going to have children here, there and everywhere if you lead that sort of life - and you’ve got to expect the consequences. Being married is part of the peace of mind and stability thing I hope I’ve found.”
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“It seems funny that once I was an ungratified singer and now they’re calling me a sex symbol. I must admit that I don’t really know how people think about sex symbols. Maybe if the audience can see a cock through a pair of trousers, then that must make you a sex symbol.
“Since I’m the only one who doesn’t have a guitar or drums in front of mine, I suppose I started out with a bit more chance than anyone else in the band. You can’t take it seriously simply because you read all these things about it in the papers. You just get into your music, and the sexual thing isn’t really apparent to you. It’s simply not what we’re there for.”
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“I’ve been told I’m a ‘sexual beacon.’”
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Excerpted from Led Zeppelin (Delilah Books)
Part Four Of An Exclusive Four-Part Led Zeppelin Series.
Led Zeppelin "conquer the world" in 1973, Uncut, February 2023
Heavy band, heavy year. By 1973, Led Zeppelin were on their way to becoming the biggest rock'n'roll band in the world. Embarking on an American tour to promote their new album Houses Of The Holy, they shattered box office records, rewriting the blueprint for rock'n'roll tours as they went. Peter Watts climbs aboard the Starship to hear tales of glorious, transcendent music — but also unsolved robberies, giant mirror balls, cake fights during John Bonham's 25th birthday party and motorbike rides down hotel corridors. "As the venues got bigger, they got better," recalls one confidant. "They blasted you into the middle of next week."
July 29, 1973. Inside Madison Square Garden, the ground was shaking. It was the final night of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 tour of the United States and Eddie Kramer was recording the show behind the stage in Wally Heider’s Mobile Studio Truck. The three sold-out nights at the Garden marked the climax of a gargantuan trek in support of March’s multi-million selling album Houses Of The Holy. Over three months, Zep blazed across the States, playing to crowds that eclipsed The Rolling Stones’ huge American tour the previous year and breaking box office records held by The Beatles. From packed stadiums and surreal album covers to trashed hotel rooms, Zeppelin crafted a new reality, one that could even make the earth move.
“I was in the truck with my hands on the fader and all of a sudden it began moving up and down,” recalls Kramer. “It was like an earthquake. The audience was going crazy, cheering and stomping. When you can feel 20,000 people jumping up and down… well that gives you a moment to remember.”
Kramer was taping the Madison Square Garden show for The Song Remains The Same, a live album eventually released in 76 alongside a rather bovine motion picture. It seemed apposite that Kramer should record the Garden show: after all, he’d been there the previous year, when the band had recorded Houses Of The Holy during unforgettable spring days at Mick Jagger’s Hampshire mansion. Back then, the band were looking to follow the blockbuster success of Led Zeppelin IV, expanding on their razor riffs and electric mayhem by embracing multiple styles and textures. While Zeppelin experienced the thrill of liberation in the studio, they also knew it was important to capture the vibe correctly.
“None of us really knew what we were doing,” admits Robert Plant. “We’d had a great deal of success, but it didn’t follow there would be more success as times move on. We wanted to spend time doing it properly and it was time well spent.”
America — a land Led Zeppelin had set out to conquer in 1969 — went wild. It seemed appropriate that the album title was a reference to the almost religious fervour experienced in the concert arena. Watching in New York from the side of the Garden stage — and sporting a knotted hankie and carrying a rubber monkey — was musician Roy Harper. Part of the entourage, the “emotional protection unit” that travelled with the band, Harper spent the tour in luxury hotels — the Drake in New York and the Hyatt in LA — before travelling to shows on the Starship, the band’s luxurious Boeing 720 private jet. Amid parties with George Harrison, cake fights with Robert Plant and motorbikes ridden along hotel corridors, Harper saw Zeppelin produce the goods on stage every single night. On this tour, he believes, the West was finally won.
“‘Unique’ is one of those words like ‘genius’ that is thrown around quite a lot, but Zeppelin were unique,” says Harper. “They pulled a crowd because of the bite, the sheer bite, of that. It became a thing — a walking, talking monster — and as the venues got bigger, they got better, heavier, because they could exercise control. It was a kind of magic and you were blasted into the middle of next week. You paid attention, because attention was being demanded. That wasn’t the same as being in England. You couldn’t pull that off in the Marquee.”
BP Fallon, the band’s effusive press officer, recalls the impact Led Zeppelin had the moment they arrived in a city on the Starship. Band and entourage were ushered into a fleet of limousines before speeding through the streets with a police escort, sirens wailing towards a stadium where 50,000 people awaited in feverish anticipation. “The Stones sang about sex,” he says. “The music of Led Zeppelin was sex. The audience knew that, the girls dug it and the guys too. This wasn’t a knitting lesson. And remember too, you can do a lot during a wild drum solo — especially if you’re not the drummer.”
Mick Jagger bought Stargroves — a vast Victorian Gothic mansion in East Woodhay, Hampshire — for £55,000 during an acid trip. It was built sometime after 1848 after the previous property — a manor house that once entertained Oliver Cromwell — was destroyed by fire. Jagger used the house as a base for the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio. Parts of Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main St were recorded at Stargroves, while Pete Townshend brought The Who down to start work on Who’s Next. Led Zeppelin, Atlantic labelmates of the Stones, had used Bron-Yr-Aur and Headley Grange as studios and writing workshops for Led Zeppelin III and IV. This time, they turned to Stargroves.
Eddie Kramer hadn’t heard from Led Zeppelin since 1971, when he had a row with the band at Electric Lady over an Indian takeaway. But Zeppelin were not ones to hold a grudge, and in early 1972 he got a call from the office of Zeppelin’s tough New York lawyer, Steve Weiss. “The lads would do that,” says Kramer. “You wouldn’t hear from them and then they’d get back in touch after a year, all forgotten.”
Sessions began in May. As it transpired, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones had been working on material for several months. Kramer was impressed by their preparation, which allowed for relaxed sessions, the band lazing on the lawn between takes. Stargroves proved to be a good base. Of the 30 or 40 rooms to choose from, Page took Jagger’s. If hunger struck, a chef was on hand to whip up something between courses.
“I think we probably started each day at about 11am,” says Kramer. “We had a nice dining room, so we would be gentlemen and break for lunch and dinner. In some senses it was very civilised, quote unquote, depending on what nonsense the boys were getting up to. Musically, they were always very professional. They were having so much fun. It just seemed as if they were constantly laughing and giggling. I was around to be the butt of their jokes if they got fed up of taking the piss out of each other."
Kramer's first priority was to get the right sound for Bonham's drums. To achieve this, he relied on the architecture of Stargroves itself. "Bonzo could get into a mood: 'Don't fuck with me or I'll come and get you.' But he relaxed once he realised I could get a good sound. He had tremendous wallop when he hit the snare and bass. We could get the mics up high and away from the kit so you got this tremendous depth. My mentor, Bob Auger at Pye, would tell me that 'distance makes depth' and I always kept that in my brain. I loved the idea of getting the mic up high to capture the acoustic resonance of the room to enhance the sound of the drums. We also put Jimmy's amp in a fireplace."
Kramer even recorded out on the lawn. That's where he captured "Black Country Woman", which includes the sound of an airplane flying overhead. The acoustic "Black Country Woman" was held over until Physical Graffiti, along with "Houses Of The Holy" and "The Rover" — both heavy numbers that show Page was seeking to release something strikingly different to Led Zeppelin IV. While Houses Of The Holy was bookended by two turbocharged rockers — "The Song Remains The Same" and "The Ocean" — this was an album that stretched out, sampled new, exotic flavours and fully embraced the freedom their success had brought them. One of the biggest departures was "No Quarter", a song written by John Paul Jones and recorded by Andy Johns at Island, which saw Zeppelin deploying swirling, Floydian synths. "John Paul Jones is underestimated except he's not," says Roy Harper. "Everybody who knows the band understands how important he was."
“On things like ‘No Quarter’, Jonesy came into his own,” says Kramer. “His influence was one of reason and order. He also had funk and downright groove. If the groove wasn’t right, he’d get pissed off. Jones knew where to put the notes. They were always in the right place at the right time.”
Jones contributed Mellotron on “The Rain Song”, written in direct response to George Harrison’s suggestion that Page never wrote ballads. “Over The Hills And Far Away” was landmark Zep, taking the band’s folk and blues elements and bringing them together in a single, thrilling song. Radical new territory was explored on “The Crunge” (funk) and “D’Yer Mak’er” (reggae). These may have appeared divisive to a hard rock audience in 1973, but they revealed a relaxed, almost fun side to the band.
“‘The Crunge’ and ‘D’Yer Mak’er’ came from jams, but in a more educated way in the sense they were riffs they were ready to work on,” says Kramer. “They’d start playing and because they were so tight and intuitively tuned in to each other, they went on a journey. If somebody came up with an idea, within 20 minutes we’d have something we could use.”
For Kramer, the light-hearted mood was summarised by “Dancing Days”, which emerged at Stargroves from another jam built around a sensational, spooling Page riff. During playback, Kramer watched from the truck as the band danced along in formation, arms out, front leg forward, immersed in a world of their own creation.
In May, 1972, Led Zeppelin embarked on a 16-date tour of North America. While every show was full, their achievements were overshadowed by The Rolling Stones’ tour to promote Exile On Main St that crossed the States at the same time. Peter Grant vowed that would never happen again. At the end of the tour, Zep reconvened with Kramer at Electric Lady to mix their new album, pulling together the sessions from Stargroves along with material recorded at Island and Olympic with engineers George Chkiantz and Keith Harwood. Before they left for six dates in Japan, they commissioned a cover for Houses Of The Holy from Hipgnosis.
“They were really switched on and their glossary was incredible,” says Plant of Hipgnosis. “They had very bright, sharp, iridescent ideas and also great reference points, a huge number of places to go in the world of art and surrealist film and photography.”
Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell came up with the core idea — a silver-and-gold nuclear family climbing a mountain towards a metallic alien — inspired by Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End. This was shot at Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland in October. “I drew it on the back of a fag packet,” says Powell. “I also had an idea of going to Nazca and bulldozing the word ZOSO, but I knew that was impossible, the Peruvian government would never agree to that. The band liked the idea, went to Japan and said to let them know when it was finished. I showed the final image to Jimmy Page in the back of my Mini Cooper at Victoria Station.”
Photographer Bob Gruen on that famous photograph of the Starship
“Lisa Robinson called me. I was doing a lot of work with her for Rock Scene. She asked if I could get to Pittsburgh to see Led Zep. I said, 'Sure, but how do we get to Pittsburgh?' She told me they had their own plane. They were playing the Three River Stadium, which surprised me — nobody was playing stadiums then. We were flying from Teterboro in New Jersey, just over the river. Somebody suggested we get a shot of the band with the plane. What I like about it is that the band are standing by the engine and the plane is so big, it doesn't fit in the picture. You can see the name of the band and they look as if they own the plane even though they didn't.
"It was very nice inside. In the front there was maybe four rows of first-class seating. Behind that was a lounge with couches and a brass bar with a bartender who had anything you wanted. At the end of the bar was a keyboard, so you could serenade the passengers. Beyond that were two bedrooms; I think one had a waterbed and the other had an electric fireplace. It was pretty fancy.
"The only conversation I had with them was asking them to stand by the plane. It was almost the last frame on the roll. They weren't going to stand around waiting for me to change my film, it wasn't that sort of session. If I had a picture of the plane, that was enough. At the time it was no big deal, but later it turned out to be this perfect expression of the excess of the 1970s, it became a symbol. It wasn't like that in the moment. Some bands had really nice buses. Zep had a plane.”
Bad weather meant Powell had to improvise at the shoot. He decided to only photograph the children — Stefan and Samantha Gates — in close-up on the hexagonal basalt rocks. These photos were cut together to form a montage, a trademark Hipgnosis method, with the final composite hand-tinted to create an eerie image of children crawling across rocks on an alien landscape.
“We were dabbling in super-surrealism but also super-realism,” says Po. “If you look at any Hipgnosis photograph that has a montage like Houses Of The Holy, you’ll see everything in very sharp focus from front to back. That’s not something possible for the human eye, which focuses on one thing. We focused on everything. It’s like a Dali painting. It’s an impossible photograph. That was our style.”
The album’s release was delayed while Powell went back and forward across the Atlantic to deal with the New York printers, who were struggling with the colours. “It was important that those covers were right for the musical adventures,” says Plant. “So we held up the release of Houses Of The Holy because we hadn’t got the cover right. Jimmy always said the album should be heard as a whole, an entire piece, and the cover accompaniment, however abstract, had to be part of that. I still believe in that now.”
During the winter, Led Zeppelin set out on a UK tour. Their itinerary included Green’s Playhouse in Glasgow, Trentham Gardens in Stoke-On-Trent, Southampton’s Gaumont Theatre and Preston’s Guild Hall. At times, they played in front of crowds of 800. But this was the end of an era: not only was this the last time Zeppelin played to crowds of this size but it was also, as it transpired, their final UK tour. Their future would be America.
“The most important thing that came out of that tour was that it made Zeppelin one of the biggest groups in Britain,” says BP Fallon, who flew journalists up to Newcastle for the tour’s opening night on November 30. “It’s simply that America is bigger, the ceiling is higher.”
Dave Lewis, author of Five Glorious Nights: Led Zeppelin At Earls Court and editor of the Tight But Loose Zep fanzine, attended the December 1972 show at Alexandra Palace in north london, where Zeppelin unveiled songs from the yet-to-be-released album, including “The Rain Song” and “The Song Remains The Same”.
“I was transfixed,” he says. “But when the album came out it was slated in Rolling Stone and Melody Maker. It dropped away in the UK but it took off in the US, where their audience became bigger and bigger. All the madness around that cemented them. It was the moment they went from being a rock band to an institution. They were enjoying themselves and you can hear it. They were pleased with themselves. Then they went to the US and struck gold.”
As Zeppelin played across Europe — after crowd trouble in France, the band vowed never to return — arrangements were underway for the forthcoming American tour. Mindful of what he perceived as humiliation the previous summer at the hands of the Stones, Peter Grant hired as a publicist the journalist Danny Goldberg. This time, Grant was determined that everybody would know when Zeppelin were in town. He recruited a film crew — an unusual move for Zeppelin, given their reluctance to appear on TV, although one possibly influenced by the Stones, who commissioned Robert Frank to document their 1972 tour. Like the Stones the previous year, Zeppelin ended the tour with three nights at Madison Square Garden, but there were significant differences. The 34-show tour was split into two legs, with a month break between so they could recharge batteries. Grant’s biggest innovation was to book the band into luxury hotels in regional hubs including Miami, New York, Chicago, New Orleans and Los Angeles. From these bases, a private jet took them to and from each gig. This meant no more one-stop nights in regional hotels. No more early morning wake-up calls. No more battling through traffic, airport security and the public to fly to the next city. At first they used a small Falcon Jet, but following a turbulent flight from San Francisco they hired a modified Boeing 720 owned by Bobby Sherman. It was called the Starship, had two bedrooms, a bar, organ, TV and shower, and cost the band $30,000.
Most importantly, concert venues got bigger. Promoter Larry Vaughn of Concerts East had worked with Zeppelin since their first American tour. Back then, things were so ramshackle that Vaughn once stood beneath a sagging stage with tour manager Richard Cole, holding it in place with pieces of wood and willpower. Before the 1973 tour, Vaughn picked venues using the Auto Arena Book, a tome that detailed every venue in America. On the day of each show, he acted as stage manager, arriving at 8am with the sound and light crews. Everything had to be double and triple checked, from catering and security to merchandise. He even announced the band from the stage. Concerts East focused on the northeast, with other concerts promoted by Concerts West, who worked out of Seattle, and local promoters like Bill Graham in San Francisco.
It was a similar story for Rusty Brutsche, co-founder of ShowCo, a Dallas-based company that provided sound equipment. As concerts got bigger, presentation became more important. ShowCo created vast speaker systems, built a lighting rig and introduced pyrotechnics, smoke machines and even a rudimentary laser for the tour, while Brutsche himself mixed every concert — a job made more challenging by the band’s reluctance to do a soundcheck.
“Ian Knight handled the pyro effects,” says Brutsche. “He had flash pots that exploded with a flash and a big plume of smoke, and he fitted a gas line to Bonzo’s gong so he could set the gong on fire at the end of the show. There were two rotating colour-wheel effect units and a big six-foot-diameter mirrorball for ‘Stairway To Heaven’. Zeppelin really helped pioneer the evolution of the touring industry because every tour we would build bigger and better equipment staging and lighting for that tour and they helped us push that evolution.”
As well as navigating the demands of individual band members, Vaughn and Brutsche had to contend with the intimidating triple act of Grant, Cole and Weiss — not always successfully in Vaughn’s case. In The Song Remains The Same, Grant is shown berating a moustached man in the dressing room whom he blames for allowing some bootleg posters to get into the venue. That was Vaughn, who still wonders how a poster seller sneaked into the Baltimore Civic Auditorium only to get caught in the balcony section by Richard Cole and a film crew.
“I walked into a real shitstorm,” laughs Vaughn. “The guy behind me sitting meekly for a change is Steve Weiss. Weiss was a Madison Avenue attorney and could be very rough. When we did a concert, the building would hold an escrow of anything up to £2,500 to pay for any damage. Every morning, the day after the show Weiss was calling us up demanding the escrow back before they even had a chance to inspect the building. He tore us a new asshole every day.
“I had a lot of involvement with Peter Grant. He terrified most of the promoters. He felt everybody was trying to rip them off. His reputation was well earned. I saw him in Rochester backstage beating the snot out of a kid who brought a poster into the venue. I stepped in before the kid wound up in hospital. He had the power that came from managing a supergroup. I saw him years later when he was managing Patti LaBelle and he was a totally different person. But when you are managing a nuclear arsenal you can push your weight around, and he did.”
At their first night — May 4, in Atlanta — Led Zeppelin drew an audience of 50,000. It was “the biggest thing to hit Atlanta since Gone With The Wind”, Peter Grant said, telling Goldberg to attribute the quote to the city mayor. The next day in Tampa, the 56,800 crowd broke the record held by The Beatles for Shea Stadium. Box office earnings were vast, with 90 per cent of the gate going to the band. Every show was accompanied by breathless coverage in the local press. “They had an aura around them,” says Brutsche. “It was amazing how much power they could wield in a city. Their stature was extraordinary and the feeling inside the arena was just electric. There was a level of tension that I never experienced with any other group except Guns N’ Roses.”
On June 2, 50,000 fans descended on San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium. Among them were Dan Cuny, who bonded with his friends over a shared love of British rock: Humble Pie, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, the Faces, Pink Floyd and especially Led Zeppelin. Dan and his friends always liked to be first in line, so they arrived at Kezar Stadium at 10am the day before the concert in Cuny’s older brother’s VW Campervan. Their picture appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Led Freaks”.
“When the doors opened, we rushed to the stage,” says Cuny, who took a camera to the show — he later worked as a photographer for Fantasy Records and Rolling Stone, a career in part inspired by his love of Zeppelin. “Zep didn’t come out until 3.30. They must have been 90 minutes late. About a third of the way through I began to feel nauseous. I went down on one knee and closed my eyes and then I heard Jimmy Page bowing his guitar. Instantly I felt fine. Hearing him bow the guitar — it was something I always wanted to see. They were four phenomenal musicians. Robert looked like a lion on stage, those golden locks of hair, such a stage presence. They were gods.”
Uniquely for the 1973 tour, there were support acts in San Francisco. Roy Harper, The Tubes and Lee Michaels all performed — an eclectic lineup that was typical of a Bill Graham promotion. Harper got into a row with the audience — “They were all talking, but it’s hard to get 50,000 people to shut up” — while Fee Waybill of The Tubes dressed in platform boots and threw white powder [flour] and pills at the audience. The crowd threw it back chanting for Zeppelin, while Graham stood at the wings saving Waybill from arrest by assuring the police these weren’t real drugs.
After their set, The Tubes retired to their trailer, where they were visited by a flustered Graham. “We were told that Led Zeppelin had got into a fight with each other and didn’t want to goon,” says Wayhill. “Bill told us we couldn’t leave our trailer, we couldn’t go to the wings, we couldn’t even look at Led Zeppelin. But they did their set, everybody loved them. We heard every note from inside the trailer. We didn’t see it, but we could certainly hear it.”
When Waybill met John Paul Jones years later, he asked what really happened that afternoon in San Francisco, but Jones politely refused to say. Even for a band as big as Zeppelin had become, some things remained private. Similarly, Roy Harper won’t discuss the robbery that concluded the tour, when $203,000 was stolen from a safe at the Drake Hotel — a crime featured in The Song Remains The Same that’s never been solved. “I have my suspicions but I’m not going to level those,” he says. “Everyone I knew was innocent.”
Vaughn too has suspicions. Before the concerts at Madison Square Garden, he had been ordered by Weiss to tell the venue that the band were shooting a home movie in a bid to avoid the minuscule filming fee — a subterfuge that collapsed when the professional film crew turned up. Yet now the same people were shrugging off the loss of more than $200,000. “Peter didn’t seem that shaken,” he says. “I’d seen him almost kill somebody over a poster, and now he took the theft of $200,000 very calmly. I couldn’t figure it out. Let’s put it this way, it put them on the front page of the Daily News. So either they got ripped off or it was a colossal publicity stunt.”
Robert Plant on the band's long relationship with Hipgnosis
"It was a bit like buying a second-hand car in the back streets of Wolverhampton. You spent a lot of time and cheer and good intention and you may come out with a gem or you might come out with a right old banger. They were like elite surrealistic door-to-door troubadours. The double act was amazing, the good guy and the bad guy: the charming amiable bonhomie of Aubrey and the sharp, snappy, ‘Do I have to deal with this scum musician?’ approach that Storm had. It was marvelous.
"They had a bagful of ideas, and sometimes when things got desperate and we weren't impressed and we started putting our own ideas into it, they'd reach further into the bag and out would come a couple of ideas that unfortunately, once you studied them, you realised Paul McCartney's name was still faintly visible on the artwork. That was always the last desperate move before they had to go away and comeback with something else.
It was all great fun. When we came to do Presence, we got to use all these old photographs from 1950s magazines and replace the objects with some hallowed and incredibly necessary object for human life. It was a great play on the approach, response and juxtaposition of music. In those days you could move stuff around, change things in a very physical way that was quite reassuring, and then you'd create something that you lived with for the rest of your life.
"Po and I could construct things and then we moved things around. The whole In Through The Out Door was pretty cool, this idea of seeing one room from the viewpoint of all the characters in it. It's so over-the-top, the whole idea, but record labels liked the idea, it was pretty trippy.
"We really had carte blanche. We were lucky with Atlantic — our man in the office was very switched on. They got it just as much as we did.
“Later we did Now And Zen. It was very '80s-sounding, sampled Zeppelin. Po and I worked on a cover, shooting some bits in Morocco. I know my way quite well and can speak a bit of Arabic and French, and we were travelling over the Atlas Mountains. The record company were shelling out like fools. Then I saw Po on MTV, saying how he saw clouds and flags and soaring vultures and I thought, 'Fuck me, that's Hipgnosis in full steam.' We made a great video called 'Heaven Knows', which I watch now with great joy recalling the places we went and the good humour.”
Offstage mayhem? Harper recalls that at both the Hyatt in Los Angeles and the Drake in New York, a sort of collective madness took hold. Conventional rules and accepted standards of civilised behaviour did not hold. John Bonham rode a motorcycle up and down the corridor — “We’d get warned to close our doors as he was about to go on a run” — always careful to avoid visiting Playboy models. Harper was “court jester”, part of the team around the band who kept external forces at bay.
“We were all each other’s soundboards and guardians,” he says. “Robert stopped me from lobbing a TV out the window once, which was very good of him. He told me to put it down as he wanted to show me something. We leant out of the ninth-floor window and he pointed at a car and said, ‘See that limo, that’s Elvis’s.’ I have no idea whether it was or not, but the point wasn’t lost. Whether I would have actually done it or not is open to question, but in that kind of a mood, I might have.”
The TV was never thrown, but there were many other wild incidents. There’s a memorable photo from the tour of Harper in a G-string with Plant, who wears a feather boa, black negligee and heels. Harper believes it’s from Bonham’s 25th birthday party, a legendary occasion that took place after the band’s May 31 show at the Forum in LA. “That was a party at the house of a guy who owned a radio station,” says Harper. “We trashed the guy’s house. I don’t know what he thought he was doing inviting Led Zeppelin round to with it. My clothes had to be washed three times. Everybody who came in the front door went straight into the pool courtesy of Richard Cole. Very few people avoided that. Jimmy avoided it. Peter Grant avoided it because there was 20 stone of him, and those who were carrying accoutrements that couldn’t get wet, they avoided it. George Harrison turned up, saw what was happening and ran. He hid in the garden, but there was only so much garden you could hide in. He ended up in the pool.”
It wasn’t always chaos. BP Fallon recalls staying in a hotel in Chicago when a group of female fans tracked down Plant to his hotel suite and burst through the door, only to be confronted by the sight of Fallon and Plant quietly playing Monopoly in face cream. “We’re trying not to laugh so the gunk won’t crack,” says Fallon. “We continue our solemn game of Monopoly… our visitors shuffle about uncomfortably, wondering what the hell had happened to sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. ‘Let’s go,’ one of them says. ‘It wasn’t like this with David Bowie.’”
When Led Zeppelin returned to the UK following the trio of shows at Madison Square Garden, they had irrevocably changed. The band had risen to the challenge posed by The Rolling Stones, setting new parameters of rock'n'roll success. Having played to hundreds of thousands of people, they pocketed around $4 million for their efforts. The Starship, the innovative sound, lighting, pyrotechnics and lasers transformed the touring industry and the publicity propelled Houses Of The Holy into more than 10 million homes.
“The tour set a precedent,” says Dave Lewis. “It meant they could do whatever the hell they liked. After the tour, they didn’t go back on the road for 18 months, and when they did they sold out Earls Court five times. They went back to America in 1975 and every time they went back, more people wanted to see them. It was a golden period.”
Roy Harper still marvels at the musical memories. Arguably, Led Zeppelin would never be as good as they were in 1973. “They were precise,” he says. “Absolute precision. That was down to rehearsal and it was down to musicianship and it was down to attitude and mentality. Somebody like me will stop a song halfway through to have a conversation. That’s my quirkiness. Their quirkiness is that they were spot on every night, even as Jimmy played different solos and interpretations. No night was the same as any other, but they were always on the ball, in key, and rhythmically precise. It amazed me how good they really were.”
Led Zeppelin returned to America in 1975 to tour Physical Graffiti, a double album that contained three songs recorded during the Houses Of The Holy sessions. That wasn’t the only connection to 1973, which acted as a template for 1975, right down to the rehiring of the Starship but with everything — costumes, box office, lighting, lasers and off-stage excesses — bigger, heavier, more magnified. But although it was huge, it couldn’t match the shock and awe of 1973.
“What was the appeal?” asks Kramer. “C’mon, look at the way they looked. They were the best-looking band, they played amazing. They were so dynamic. There was no fucking band in the world that sounded like that. They set the benchmark. Exciting, cool-looking, just awesome and dangerous.”
"Led Zeppelin's Last Waltz" (Rolling Stone, October 25, 2012)
Band opens up about the new film documenting its 2007 reunion
At one point in “Celebration Day,” the new film of Led Zeppelin’s 2007 reunion concert in London, the camera stays long and tight on Jimmy Page’s hands as they execute the introduction to “Stairway to Heaven” on the six-string neck of his double-neck Gibson guitar. It is one of rock’s most iconic riffs, played in full and close-up by the composer, at one of his band’s greatest and most important shows.
“With Led Zeppelin, it has always been that mystique of how the music is done - how it works, why it works,” Page says on the phone from London a couple of weeks before Celebration Day’s worldwide theatrical premiere on October 17th. “The closer you can get in on that and the more lingering it is, the better.”
Celebration Day, which will be commercially released in various audio and visual formats on November 19th, is nothing more or less than Zeppelin’s entire two-hour performance on December 10th, 2007, at London’s O2 Arena. The concert, a benefit and tribute to the late Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun, was the first full Zeppelin show by Page, singer Robert Plant and bassist John Paul Jones since the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980. Bonham’s son, Jason, took his father’s place for the night, which is shown without backstage footage and includes minimal shots of the ecstatic audience.
Instead, director Dick Carruthers - who shot the concert with more than a dozen cameras - provides extended close-ups of the band members in action: Plant in blues-trance moan during “Since I’ve Been Loving You”; Jones threading the folk-rock gallop of “Ramble On” with low-end-countermelodies; everyone turning to Jason in admiration during his volcanic solo at the end of “Rock and Roll.”
Celebration Day is “almost like being onstage with us,” Jones says. “We always had that interaction,” he adds, referring to Zeppelin’s legendary concert prowess in the Seventies. “But nobody could see it, because the lighting wasn’t there.” Before the O2 show, Jones notes, “I remember Dick saying in one of the early meetings, ‘I’m going to need 14 cameras.’ Everybody went ‘What?’ It paid off.”
Page recalls walking offstage after the reunion concert feeling “really high. That’s the truth. It was a serious test, and we passed it, all of us. And we had an extraordinary communion on the stage. That’s alive and well when you see it.” But it was quite a while- Page can’t remember how long - before he saw a rough cut of Carruthers’ footage (“We didn’t rush into the editing suite to have it out for Christmas”).
In fact, Plant and Jones viewed that cut first. “We came away raving,” Jones says. “It was very fitting to the experience. We called Jimmy and said ‘You’ve gotta see this.’”
“The thing about Led Zeppelin was that it was always four musicians at the top of their game, but they could play like a band,” Page says. “Even in the first couple of rehearsal days, running up to the O2, we were playing pretty good. But we really wanted to shine as a band.” He cites the set list’s opening sequence - from the surprise opener, “Good Times Bad Times,” from 1969’s Led Zeppelin, into “Ramble On” and the tortuous crunch of “Black Dog.” “I wanted people to feel, ‘They’re taking this seriously.’
“And I have to tell you, the rehearsals were all quite different,” Page says, “so much in that Zeppelin spirit and character.” To prove it, a deluxe edition of the DVD will include footage from the band’s only full-scale production rehearsal before the O2 concert. “You get the urgency of that night, but also the determination that was in rehearsal.”
Inevitably, Celebration Day has set off more reunion talk. At a London press conference announcing the film, Plant reared about the O2 performance: “To get back in the middle of that music was a spectacular experience.” But he and Page evaded questions about additional shows. When asked if the movie marks the end of Zeppelin, once and for all, Jones - who is busy writing an opera and collaborating with Robyn Hitchcock and the Norwegian group Supersilent - responds, “When I move house, I never look back at the house and go, ‘Oh, that’s the last moment I’ll see there.’ I always move forward.”
“That’s a good answer,” Page says, laughing. But he is more direct. “I think if there had been any more concert to be done, we’d already be talking about them. So I don’t see it.” Celebration Day, he adds, “is a testament to what we did in 2007. There it is.” - David Fricke
"Happier Than Ever - says Zep’s John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham annoyed by rumours of a break-up…." (NME, June 27, 1970)
John Bonham is an incredibly happy person. But if there is one thing that’s apt to annoy Led Zeppelin’s powerhouse drummer and arch-raver, it’s the rumors currently doing the rounds of the group’s impending break-up.
“I want to say here and now, that it’s all utter rubbish,” he emphasized when we met the other day.
“We’re all happier now than we have ever been. And I want everyone to know it.
“At the moment, the four of us are enjoying making our third album, and taking it easy at home in between sessions.
“Just because we are doing it all very quietly, some idiot thinks that we have packed it in, and so all these false rumors start to circulate.”
“Bonzo,” as he is affectionately known in the trade, was very quick to point out, “This can really turn out very nasty. For the kids read it in the music papers and naturally they believe it. That’s bad.”
What was originally intended as a quiet informed chat, turned into close on five hours of continuous raving around London’s West-End.
As it was a hot sticky afternoon, and past closing time, it was decided that we should find comfort in a private hostelry. So it was all down to the Cottage, which as it turned out had already been invaded by others with the same thought.
ICE COLD
Suitably equipped with flagons of ice cold lager, John and I decided to roam down Leitchfield Street, for an uninterrupted chat. As Mike the Camera followed us, John spoke eagerly about the forthcoming Led Zeppelin III album.
“On this album people are going to listen to each one of us. We are all writing so much better than before, and there will be much more inventiveness from the group as a whole.
“This time we are also doing some acoustic tracks apart from the familiar heavier stuff. You know,” he continued, “we’re all much closer than before.
“At this moment, we’ve got ten good tracks laid down, and we have yet to do a couple more. If they turn out O.K. then we’ll stick ‘em on the album. The way things are going it looks as though it’s going to be a long one.
“But, again, it’s only going to be a single album. We are not going to do the expected double-album thing, simply just because most of these are just padded out with studio left-overs. On the Zeppelin’s albums, we only include what we all consider to be our very best material.”
Unfortunately, Bonzo couldn’t give me any songs titles because there aren’t any. It seems they don’t get around to giving their songs their official titles until they are written, recorded and ready for release. Apparently, this is the last formality.
At this precise moment Mike the Camera came up to us and asked John to stop speaking for a few minutes, apparently this altered the structure of the facial muscles and didn’t make for good photographs. With a look of amazement, he obeyed.
After playing at Pop Stars, I then asked him about Lord Sutch and his Heavy Friends album which had been called by many “An unofficial Led Zeppelin album.”
“You must be joking. Sutch is a great bloke, but he used our friendship to sell his album. I’ll give you the full story.
“It started in the middle of last year in Los Angeles,” he began.
“We were in this club enjoying ourselves and so was Dave Sutch. Well, he came over to the table and we started talking about old times.
“During the course of the conversation, Sutch mentioned how he’s been in the business for years but never had the chance to cut an album, and that he really wanted to try and get one out in the States.
“He then asked, Jimmy and myself, if we would do a few backing tracks for him. But on the complete understanding that under no circumstances would he mention our names. As we had a couple of days to spare, we agreed.
“But it now seems as though he really took-us-in. He knew the position we were in, so we did it purely as backing musicians and old friends, NOT as Zeppelin. And this is what we did, we played as session-men and not as we would in our own group.
“When we arrived at the studio, he said he mainly wanted to do souped-up versions of old rock standards. So we said O.K. that sounds fine. What we didn’t know was that when Sutch came to dub on the vocals in our absence, he had re-written entirely different lyrics so that ‘Lucille’ became ‘Thumpin’ Beat’ and Roy Head’s ‘Treat Her Right’ re-appeared as ‘Baby Come Back.’ You’ve only got to play the album to spot where the other songs originated from.
“We didn’t even notice that photographs were being taken during the sessions. Everyone did that album as a special favor to Sutch, and didn’t want any credit. But as it turns out he deliberately used all the people’s names to sell the album.
“So you can believe how amazed we all were when we saw our names in bold type all over the cover.”
With all the false rumors circulating you can certainly discredit any that reach your ears about Zeppelin’s planning to replace Robert Plant with the electioneering Lordship.
John is very proud of Led Zeppelin and it’s achievements and rightly so. As a matter of interest he told me exactly how they came into being.
“Jimmy Page originally asked me to join the Yardbirds. In fact, Jimmy, Robert, John Paul and myself originally played in Scandinavia as the New Yardbirds.
“The group proved to be so good that there and then we all decided to start afresh with a new name. On our return to London Keith Moon came up with the name Led Zeppelin, but nobody would give us a decent booking.
“We were getting offers of £25 a night. So we went to the States for our first tour and that was it.”
Suddenly, a cloudburst cooled the heat of the day so we retired to the Cottage. Once back inside, Bonzo started feeding a handful of tanners into a brightly lit ‘Bally De Luxe Gold Cup” machine.
To yells of delight, Three-Of-A-Kind appeared in the score frames and the grand sum of twelve bob was John’s. But alas, lady-luck did not smile on him because the machine refused to pay up.
After much arguing with the barmaid and a rather odd Lager-swilling woman who kept on shouting and poking her nose in, we left minus John’s winnings.
A Volkswagen Beetle isn’t designed to accommodate six, but we managed it. With the windows rolled down we sped through Soho shouting words of admiration to all the many gorgeous young girls in their flimsy summer dresses.
Arriving at the Coach & Horses we were re-joined by publicist Bill Harry in company with the debonair Stan Webb of Chicken Shack fame and his manager Harry Simmonds.
Suddenly Bonzo spied a poster advertising the appearance of Eric Clapton. So with glasses held high we all posed in front of it as the moment was captured for posterity on film.
ZEPPELIN FILM
On the subject of film, John spoke about the forthcoming Led Zeppelin movie.
“It will probably be an hour long semi-documentary and will include footage from the Royal Albert Hall concert.
“One of the highlight’s of the film will be a sequence featuring my 4-year-old son Jason playing his drums.
“He’s got a completely scaled down replica of my kit, and believe me he can already play them.”
John is very proud of his offspring, and his biggest ambition is to have Jason play on stage with Zeppelin at the Royal Albert Hall. But before that there is their appearance at the Bath Festival.
"To put a complete end to all the break-up rumors, Anyone who goes to Bath will see and hear Led Zeppelin play as they’ve never heard us play before.
“We are really looking forward to that gig. In fact we are quite excited. It’s going to be a fantastic day, I can assure you.”
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