Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers Join Forces in New Project
By Rob Andrews, Hit Parader, April 1985
Page, however, stresses the differences between the two bands. "There was only one Led Zeppelin," he said. "Nothing I will do in the future will compete with what was done there. I am proud of what Led Zeppelin accomplished, but those says are gone. My future lies ahead of me, not in my past."
Page Hopes the Past Won't Ruin His Future With the Firm
By Lynn Van Matre, Chicago Tribune, 21 April 1985 (transcribed by Cat on the Led Zeppelin Forum)
At 41, Jimmy Page has spent nearly half of his life in the spotlight --first as a member of influential 60s blues-rock band the Yardbirds, later as one-quarter of the legendary70s supergroup Led Zeppelin, where his innovative instrumental technique established him as one of the premier guitar heroes of that decade. His rock credentials, in short, are the sort that might be expected to afford him a certain amount of musical self-confidence. But when Page and former Bad Company lead vocalist Paul Rodgers first teamed up in a new band called the Firm, confidence took a back seat to another emotion: fear. What if, right in the middle of a Firm song, a restless crowd started calling out for Stairway to Heaven or another Led Zep classic? Or Bad Companys ``Cant Get Enough``?
To be perfectly truthful, I was terrified of that aspect of the whole thing, says Page, who appears with the Firm Wednesday at the Rosemont Horizon. `Both Paul and I had been in pretty big bands, and we both were one- quarter of those bands. Those are very strong identities, something that you cant change. But you don`t want to go out on tour and do things that put you in a nostalgia bracket.
Sure, we`re bound to be in a certain section of the nostalgia bracket, because of what we`ve done in the past. But you don`t want to play on that and say this is all that I`m good for. For us, the only way to counteract that whole problem of numbers from the past was not to rehearse them at all.
As it turned out, shouts for Stairway to Heaven havent proved to be among the Firms problems. Material from the bands self-titled debut album (currently in the Top 20), Rodgers solo efforts and instrumentals from the Page-scored film, Death Wish II, fill up the two hours the band spends on stage. But one show early on in the tour had to be moved to a smaller venue when ticket sales proved sluggish, and the reviews haven`t always been raves --which may be why the normally polite Page showed the tiniest bit of testiness when this interviewer, possibly exhibiting more honesty than sense, noted that she might have to cover Julian Lennon at the Auditorium Theater Wednesday instead of heading out to Rosemont to see the Firm.
The thing is, Julian Lennon will be back, says Page. You mean that you wont be? ``I didnt say that. But he`s younger than I am, isnt he?`` Is the Firm a one-shot deal? ``All I said to you is that you should come and see us, to actually hear what it is that Im trying to do at this point in time.``
Page has let his playing speak for him throughout most of his career. His interviews have been infrequent, and while unfailingly civil--he generously agreed to speak with The Tribune as scheduled despite a bout with laryngitis --he comes across as intelligent but wary. An innocent question about his growing-up days in England, for instance, elicits the reply, Oh, come on, this isn`t the National Enquirer, is it?
Actually, much of Pages past, at least his days with Led Zeppelin, arguably qualifies as topflight tabloid fodder. In addition to the usual rumors of overindulgence in the garden variety fast-lane fripperies--groupies, drugs and alcohol, which eventually did in Zeppelin drummer John Bonham in 1980--the supergroup was widely rumored to be involved in black magic, with Page, who purchased well-known Satanist Aleister Crowleys home in 1970, as the guiding force.
I don`t know what you`re talking about, says Page in reference to the persistent witchcraft rumor (frequently reported as fact). Come on, you work for the press. Surely you don`t believe what you read in it, do you? I`ve never been a black magician in my life. It`s a shame that people print that. They don`t know me, and they expose themselves as being absolute idiots. I find it amusing.
Page is equally adamant about the falsity of another widespread rumor that surfaced after Bonhams death, namely, that Zeppelin was planning to re- form, perhaps as XYZ. ``What really happened was after we lost John we had a meeting and categorically decided--no ifs, buts, maybes--that we could not possibly carry on Led Zeppelin without him,says Page, who describes himself asabsolutely destroyedby Bonham`s death.It would have been an insult to have had another drummer onstage.
Even if we had had three drummers onstage it still wouldn`t have been right. It would have been an insult to what he had put into the band and to him personally. All the rumors you heard about drummers coming in to replace John Bonham were never put around by us. They were started by the business people. It didn`t do any good, though.
Instead, while Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant plunged into a solo project, Page did little until the Death Wish II offer came along.
The director asked if I would like to do it, he says. I had never thought that the opportunity (to do film scores) would come my way. But it was the most perfect thing that could have happened, because at that point I needed the discipline of something like that. I`d like to do another film score sometime, but not for a couple of years.
Pages involvement with Rodgers, with whom he previously had only a ``nodding acquaintance,`` grew out of the Ronnie Lane Action Research into Multiple Sclerosis (ARMS) benefit concerts in 1983. ``I had gotten together with him briefly prior to the ARMS tour,`` says Page. ``Some of our friends had suggested that we get together, and I called him up once out of the blue. At the time, I was just sitting around, really. Well, I was working in the studio, but as far as playing with another musician went, I wasnt doing anything.
Anyway, we got one song together, `Bird on the Wing.` Then, a few months later, the ARMS tour came up, and I really wanted to be part of it. Paul sang on the tour, and we got along pretty well. It was like, well, it would be nice if we could get some vehicle together to go out and play. Then we started talking about how if a compatible rhythm section could be found, and if the music was right, (putting together a group) could be a viable situation. It was sort of step by step.
By the summer of 1984, Page and Rodgers had found the rhythm section in the persons of drummer Chris Slade and bassist/keyboardist Tony Franklin and christened their new group the Firm. While the name has corporate connotations in the U.S., its actually British slang for a group of friends. ``Its a very East End of London sort of expression,says Page.When the boys go out together for a drink and leave the wife or whatever behind, its not unknown to call that group the firm or the old firm.Its unfortunate that the term has a business connotation in the U.S.; it wasn`t meant that way at all.``
One of the best things about the Firm, according to Page, is the musical mutual respect among band members.
Obviously, this is a different band from Led Zeppelin, he says. `I knew Robert (Plant) for many years and we got to know each other very well. This time, its four different sets of personalities getting to know each other. But theres a mutual respect, and I can quite honestly say that each show has been better than the last. You dont get that unless everybody is giving everything that theyve got. It was always that way with Zeppelin, too. But its quite satisfying to see it happening with this band.``
Obviously, this is a different band from Led Zeppelin.
Article on the fall of the Led Zeppelin "empire," Uncut, March 2011, by David Cavanagh
Text
1974, and the world of LED ZEPPELIN is expanding. Their new Swan Song label has signed Bad Company, their office walls are painted red so they "won't show the blood", and their manager is sending dead chickens to his staff. It is, apparently, "like being in Dante's Inferno but having a good time". But as the '70s roll on, the hedonism comes with more and more menace, and the immortals seem fallible. Three decades on, Uncut charts the decline and fall of the Zeppelin empire, and the tragedies that overwhelmed the band…
AT THE END OF OCTOBER 1973, as David Cassidy topped the pop charts and the world reeled from an Arab oil embargo, a little-publicized milestone was reached in rock 'n' roll. Led Zeppelin's five-year contract with Atlantic Records — signed on October 28, 1968 — came up for renegotiation. The most heavyweight, Dionysian, statistic-shattering rock group of the '70s used their bargaining power adeptly. As a condition for staying with Atlantic, they asked to be given their own record label. Atlantic could hardly refuse; Zeppelin accounted for a quarter of its annual sales.
Thus, a band more accustomed to chopping out cocaine in the comfort of a private jet, or riding motorbikes up and down hotel corridors, enthusiastically became record executives and A&R scouts. "This label won't be just Led Zeppelin, that's for sure," Robert Plant promised. "It's an outlet for people we admire and want to help. "They named it Swan Song, after the title of an unreleased composition by Jimmy Page. A swan's dying cry, Page earnestly explained to the label's American vice-president Danny Goldberg, was "one of the most beautiful sounds in the world". Not that anyone was expecting this particular swan to die. Financed and distributed by the mighty Atlantic, the new label would have prestige, lavish budgets and global reach, as well as personal supervision from Zeppelin's much-feared, much-esteemed manager, Peter Grant. "Obviously it will be a winning label, "Phil Carson, an Atlantic executive, enthused. "Peter does have a knack of seeing things coming."
But Grant, for all his managerial acumen, could not have foreseen one thing: that Swan Song would be much more than a label. Between 1974 and 1980, it would be the international facilitator for Zeppelin's debauchery and demolition, their high-stakes business deals, their ruthless entourage and their descent into darkness. "When you ask what Swan Song was like," says the actor and singer Michael Des Barres, whose band Detective signed to the label in 1975, "it was like being in Dante's Inferno but having a good time. It was an elitist, hierarchical place where you were untouchable and immortal. But that's where the darkness comes in, because one day you suddenly stop believing it."
THE KING'S ROAD was in transition when Swan Song opened its London office there in 1974. The city's fashion golden mile, stretching from affluent Sloane Square to the council blocks of World's End, was dotted with boutiques such as Alkasura (where Marc Bolan bought his glitter outfits), Granny Takes A Trip (the onetime psychedelic mecca, rapidly losing its lustre) and Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, a little retro shop run by an odd couple named Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. Swan Song moved into No 484, behind the anonymous façade of a three-storey Victorian terraced house.
There was no glitz, glamour, smoked glass or parquet flooring. "We had the scruffiest offices you've ever seen," says Cynthia Sach, a former Swan Song secretary. "For all their millions, [Zeppelin] didn't spend a penny on doing the place up. It was just somewhere for them to hang their hat." The band's tour manager, Richard Cole, who lived locally, was a regular sight during the week. Telexes clattered and clacked back and forth between London and New York, where Danny Goldberg worked out of the plush Madison Avenue headquarters of Steve Weiss, Zeppelin's attorney. Peter Grant might telephone from his moated Sussex Tudor mansion—the girls at Swan Song kept a Zep album on the turntable just in case, so Grant would hear 'the boys' in the background—or perhaps he would materialise in person, his 25-stone body fee-fi-fo-fumming up the stairs. Jimmy Page would pop in for meetings, invariably looking underfed and trailing the bottoms of his flared jeans behind him. The girls found him charming. So polite! So thin!
"There was no 'eye of newt' or anything," remarks Unity MacLean, who left her job at CBS to become Swan Song's office manager and head of promotions. "Jimmy was a very pleasant, mild-mannered guy. He could be quite a nondescript character. The police picked him up one night and arrested him for stealing Jimmy Page's credit cards." But there was an aura, too, that this waif-like genius seemed to be able to switch on and off, as though he were half-mortal and half-Paganini.
Daniel Treacy, a King's Road teenager who spent a summer working at Swan Song, remembers his first encounter with Page. "Unity had told me not to look at him or speak to him," Treacy says. "He came in, looking very smart in a black frock coat with a scarf. I'm not joking, but it was like an icy cold blast blowing into the room on one of the hottest days of the summer." MacLean judged Page to be "an inquisitive man in awe of his own talent and presence. He was a little bit like quicksilver. Hard to get hold of."
Robert Plant was totally different. He didn't visit the office often, but he was usually in a genial mood and would sit fluffing up his hair in front of a mirror engraved with the name of his beloved football team, Wolverhampton Wanderers. Bassist John Paul Jones was more affable still, and so free of airs and graces that the staff would sometimes not notice he was in the room. But the most popular Zep member at Swan Song was drummer John Bonham, whose deranged behaviour on tour had earned him the nickname 'The Beast'. Cynthia Sach defends him: "Bonzo was lovely. One day he came into the office and asked for a pair of scissors. He got down on his knees and started cutting up the carpet. I said, 'Give me those scissors right now,' and snatched them out of his hand. He said, 'But it's my office!' I said, 'I don't care whose office it is, you're not cutting up the carpet.'"
And then there was Grant. And people's voices tend to go a bit quiet when they talk about Grant. "Did I ever meet Grant? I've probably still got the imprints on my neck," shudders Daniel Treacy. "He was like Shrek meets The Long Good Friday. Unity sent me to cash a cheque for £350 at Swan Song's bank in Mayfair, and I accidentally went to the wrong branch. The cashier refused to give me the money. When I got back to the office, Grant came stomping up the stairs, lifted me up and pinned me to a wall. He goes, 'You've really fucked it up for me and Jimmy, you little bastard.' Then he let go and I slid down the wall. I later found out that half the money was for a dress for Grant's daughter, and the other half was for a bike for Page."
Michael Des Barres was dazzled by Grant, an immense figure who exuded menace, action and power. The scenes in The Song Remains The Same, where Grant plays an Al Capone-style crime lord, were not intended to be a joke. "Peter epitomised '60s gangsterism," Des Barres notes, "and had the natural instinct of a general in the street war of rock 'n' roll. He was the leader. He was the Gangster Commandant." Unity MacLean had the dubious honour of being asked out by Grant on a date. She politely declined, preferring to keep their relationship on a professional footing. The next day, Grant sent her a package in the post. Inside was a dead chicken.
ONE OF THE first artists to sign to Swan Song was Maggie Bell, a razor-voiced Glaswegian blues singer tipped by Grant (who managed her) to become a household name like Janis Joplin. Grant also had high hopes for Bad Company (whom, again, he managed), a band formed by Paul Rodgers (ex-Free) and Mick Ralphs (ex-Mott The Hoople). Grant would be wrong about Bell, but spectacularly right about Bad Company, whose 1974 debut, Bad Co, gave Swan Song its first No 1 album in America. The taste of the champagne was only slightly diluted by the knowledge that Swan Song 'shared' Bad Company with another label, Island, who released their records in Britain. Even so, Bad Company were a Swan Song sensation. They'd begun their US tour as support to The Edgar Winter Group, and ended it as stadium headliners. If this was what it took to run a successful label, Zeppelin were making it look easy.
The other act on the roster was The Pretty Things, chameleonic veterans who could boast a mid-'60s R'n'B pedigree ("Rosalyn"), a pioneering psychedelic rock opera (S.F. Sorrow) and, more worryingly, an industry-wide reputation for being impossible to work with and prone to dire luck. Plant and Page were big fans. The Pretties' Silk Torpedo, one of the strongest albums of their career, became Swan Song's first worldwide synchronized release (in October 1974), an event celebrated with a party at Chislehurst Caves in Kent, featuring magicians, a fire eater, inexhaustible supplies of Kahlúa (Peter Grant's favourite) and women in cages dressed as nuns. The Pretty Things had never had such a welcome.
"We were sick of the business and we'd had a few raw deals," singer Phil May reminisces. "We said to Peter, 'OK, we'll join your label as long as you'll be our manager.' Peter said, 'Fuck off, I've heard you're unmanageable.' But it went well. He'd be there in his big old armchair, and we'd be on the floor smoking dope, with a big pile of coke on the table, and he'd say (holding the phone away from his ear), 'Ahmet [Ertegun, president of Atlantic] wants you to go into the studio.' And we'd say, 'We'd rather go back on the road, Peter. 'So he'd say, 'Ahmet, they ain't going into the studio. They're going on the fucking road.' Slam down the receiver, and that would be the entire conversation."
Silk Torpedo had not been cheap. For one song, the Pretties used the London Philharmonic Orchestra and a large brass band from Wales (who rolled into Abbey Road drunk), while most of the tracks were recorded at Headley Grange, the country house in Hampshire whose remarkable acoustics Zeppelin had exploited on "When The Levee Breaks" and "Rock And Roll". The Pretties arrived to find Headley Grange a shambles. "Bad Company and Zeppelin had been there before us," groans May. "There wasn't a bed with four legs left. There was a Canaletto hanging on the staircase with a big hole punched in it. There were all sorts of things missing." On the first day of recording, the band's bad luck returned to taunt them. May: "A Bosendorfer piano that we'd ordered from Harrods was dropped by the delivery men taking it off the lorry, and smashed to pieces. Our producer, Norman Smith, drove up in a Rolls-Royce and proceeded to walk out of the sessions within the first hour, because we had a song called 'Psychosomatic Boy' and Norman said, 'I'm not doing a song about cripples.' (Laughs) Peter Grant rings up and asks how it's going. I said, 'Well, the piano's in bits and the producer's gone.' He said, 'What do you mean, gone? You've only been there 20 minutes, you cunts. 'After we finally left Headley, we got a memo from Peter addressed to all the groups, saying, 'Could you kindly return the bamboo table with the glass top, the two Chinese duelling pistols, the such-and-such a painting…' I typed out a reply saying, 'Dear Peter, I am very offended by your insulting memo, and unless I receive an apology I will come round and blow your head off with my two Chinese duelling pistols.' In the end Swan Song paid the bill for everything—but it was Zeppelin who did most of the damage."
Swan Song flew the Pretties to LA to promote Silk Torpedo. There, they witnessed Zep-style destruction at first hand. Both bands were booked into the Continental Hyatt House—the infamous 'Riot House'—where the Pretties' drummer Skip Alan buddied up with John Bonham. "Zeppelin have got the top floor and we're underneath," says Alan. "Now, everything you've heard about Zeppelin, if you quadruple it, that's what it was like. Total lunacy. I stayed in Bonzo's room one night, and you know you hear about him breaking up rooms? I'm talking to him and all of a sudden he gets up and starts systematically wrecking all the furniture. All the flat pack wardrobes, he's whacking them down, kicking them and smashing them. Then, when he's flattened everything, he moves it into a big pile in the middle, and phones down to Cole to get him another room. It was unbelievable, really. It was like he felt he had a job to do. 'What time is it?' 'Three o'clock, Bonzo.' 'Better flatten the room, then.'"
May: "Sometimes we would travel to Zeppelin gigs in the limo with Bonham, and you're looking at him thinking, 'He can't possibly do three hours onstage.' None of us would have slept for two nights and we're all fucked. And Robert's got a sore throat, you know, and none of them have been looking after themselves. It's like watching a high-wire act. Will they fall? Then they go out onstage and it's absolute magic."
Alan: "They would get red carpet treatment wherever they went. As soon as they got into a club—say you were in Paris with them—they'd start picking up everything off the table and chucking food around. There'd be Dover soles going all round the restaurant. They were just insane. Cole would always sort out the aggro. He'd drop a few hundred quid to the manager and say, 'Sorry about that, mate.'"
But there was a nasty edge to the anarchy. Bonham had a way of spotting the happiest couple in the restaurant—a man dining innocently with his wife—and throwing a dinner plate at their heads. The plate would smash. The woman would scream. The man would leap to his feet. Zep's on-hand enforcers would very meaningfully tell him to sit down. Bonham would be brought another plate. For those outside the Swan Song bubble, it must have been hard to see how this could be someone's idea of fun.
IN FEBRUARY 1975, Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti became Swan Song's third long-playing release. It was an extravagant, super-confident double album with intricate artwork that had delayed its appearance for some months. A window into Zeppelin's world? Almost literally so. Experimenting with every kind of rock from Eastern to funk to black snake moans ("Kashmir", "Trampled Under Foot", "In My Time Of Dying"), it also entertained the purchaser with tantalising photos of the band in various states of dress (including drag). By revealing only this much and no more, Physical Graffiti added considerably to their mystique. Two million pre-orders ensured it went double platinum before even reaching the shops, at which point all five of Zeppelin's previous albums joined it in the US charts. Another stat to satisfy Grant; another first for rock 'n' roll.
Zeppelin, of course, could achieve these landmarks without any need for publicity. Their deep mistrust of the media had been an important factor in creating their mystery in the first place; but it was still a shock for Unity MacLean, Swan Song's head of promotions, to learn that her job entailed keeping the band out of the music papers, not putting them in. Grant's attitude of "fuck the press" had worked like a charm for Zeppelin, but here came the problem—because Grant's profane aloofness was no help to The Pretty Things (Silk Torpedo had failed to chart in either Britain or America), or to Maggie Bell, whose album Suicide Sal sold only moderately. "Mags was brilliant," says Cynthia Sach. "She should have gone far. But Peter Grant held her back. She was one of the best girl singers in the country, but he bloody wouldn't let her do anything."
Only Bad Company (Straight Shooter) had any degree of success in 1975. It was becoming clear that there were drawbacks when you signed to a label run by Zeppelin and Grant. "It was sometimes difficult," says Richard Cole, "because you had to get five opinions on everything. Anything sent through to the office would have to be sent to Peter, and he'd have to coordinate it with the other four. But two of them lived in Worcestershire and the other two lived in Sussex." And there were no emails or mobile phones. And when Grant's marriage broke up and his wife abandoned him to his isolated moated mansion, the grief-stricken giant began devoting less time to Swan Song and more time to drugs. Swan Song became, as Daniel Treacy puts it, "a ghost town record company". There were no board meetings or new releases. Tumbleweed blew through 484 King's Road for months at a time. Abe Hoch, the label's director of European operations, realised there were no European operations to direct. "I would look out the window, and there was a huge Durex sign outside. I would stare at this sign and think, 'My God, this is an indication of where my life's going.' There was nothing happening. Swan Song had become more illusion than reality."
INSIDIOUSLY, surreptitiously, the darkness had begun to seep in. Page, Bonham and Grant were all on heroin. In Page's case it didn't do a great deal for his weight. In Bonham's, it was helped down with cocaine and enormous quantities of alcohol. The gentleman farmer was increasingly given to irrational displays of rage. "When Bonham got drunk," says Danny Goldberg, "he was unpleasant, belligerent and scary. He was a very strong guy. Jimmy tended to be remote and distant, although when he wanted to be, he could be very nice. But when too much cocaine and heroin is around, it doesn't bring out the best in people." Goldberg avoided cocaine himself, and was nervous about the effect it had on Zeppelin's key personnel. "There was always a certain level of stress any time Zeppelin were around. The stakes always seemed so high."
Unity MacLean knows exactly what Goldberg means. She describes "a pervasive attitude in the office of aggression, frustration and self-destruction. There was always an underlying current of anger. There was a lot of anger in Peter. Paul Rodgers was a very angry man. Clive Coulson [Bad Company's co-manager] was always angry and threatening. There were all these angry people around, looking for a fight. One day they painted the walls in one of the rooms bright red. I was walking past and I said, 'God, that red's a bit overpowering. 'One of them turned to me and said, "Well, it won't show the blood then, will it?' That was the way they all talked. Angry conversations about revenge and violence, and whose head was going to get kicked in."
As an abstract concept, as a state of mind, Swan Song was all-powerful. As a label, however, it made no effort to adapt to the marketplace by scouting new talent. Demo tapes would accumulate in the office, posted by hopeful bands eager to work for Zeppelin, only to be discarded in cardboard boxes and go unheard for years. (One tape was Iron Maiden's. They signed to EMI instead.) "There was an act that I thought we really should have signed," says Abe Hoch. "A guy in Seattle had sent me a tape of two girls from Vancouver, with a note saying, 'One of these girls sings like Robert Plant with more balls.' It was Heart. There was a version of 'Rock And Roll' on the tape, and I wanted to play it to Robert, but he didn't even get past the note. 'Whaat? More balls than me?' So we never signed Heart."
All the same, two new additions came to the roster in 1975-6. One was an established hitmaker—Dave Edmunds, the lightning-fingered Welsh guitarist, who'd been identified as perfect for Swan Song by Plant. The other new signing was Detective, an Anglo-American quintet fronted by the handsome English nobleman Michael Des Barres, whose wife Pamela had had a long-running affair in California with Page. Phil May sniffs, "Detective always seemed like the odd chicken in the nest to me. The others I could understand—Bad Company, Maggie—and then suddenly there's Detective, who didn't really seem to fit."
Oh, but they did. Though they would struggle to get a commercial foothold on either continent, Detective were rock gods in their heads, every bit as rapacious in their drug consumption as Zeppelin. "We were precisely what rock 'n' roll should be," declares Des Barres. "Magic and chaos mingled." Their first album took more than a year to record, was scrapped at least once, and cost a fortune. Des Barres: "It was like if Caligula had a rock band. It was orgiastic, it was laborious, it was spectacular." Producer Jimmy Robinson remembers Page visiting the studio to see how Swan Song's exciting new charges were getting on. Robinson: "He listened to a few tracks and said (very hesitantly), 'Uh, don't you think it sounds a little bit like … us?' Which was hilarious because all Detective wanted to do was sound like Zeppelin. They were a good band, but this was the era when bands would be in the studio with half-a-million-dollar budgets and pounds of blow, thinking to themselves, 'Hey, we're living the dream.'"
Detective was released in April 1977 just as punk swept Britain. Its creators had become obsolete before anyone had even heard them. Detective made another album for Swan Song a year later (It Takes One To Know One), which comes as news to Des Barres, who has no recollection of it whatsoever.
IN ALL THE years that he worked for them, Richard Cole only heard Led Zeppelin talk about money on one occasion: in November 1975, in the bar of Munich's Arabella Hotel, during the recording of their seventh album, Presence. Bonham came down for a drink, buoyed after a conversation with Grant, and casually informed Cole that the members of Zeppelin had all just made €5 million each. Wealthier than their wildest dreams, Zep were now officially tax exiles. And then the bad things started to happen. Tours of America and the Far East had to be cancelled when Plant broke an ankle and an elbow in a car accident on the island of Rhodes. His leg was in a cast for several months, requiring him to sing his vocals on Presence from a wheelchair. Page, in the grip of heroin, somehow got the album over the finishing line in 17 days.
"Presence was pure anxiety and emotion," Page later commented. "We didn't know whether we'd ever be able to play in the same way again. It might have been a very dramatic change, if the worst had happened to Robert." Plant had been warned by doctors that he might never walk again, so Page was not exaggerating the fear. Presence was released in April 1976, to a widespread sense of anticlimax. Disappointment or not, Presence topped the world's charts. In October came the film (and accompanying soundtrack album) The Song Remains The Same, another huge hit, but another disappointment. This time even Page was critical. Bad Company continued to fly the Swan Song flag (Run With The Pack made the US Top 5 in 1976), but The Pretty Things' Savage Eye was unsuccessful and the band were, as Phil May puts it, "staggering around like an elephant that's been shot".
While Zep had been absent from the King's Road, their overthrow had been plotted by a new generation who drank in pubs a mere 200 yards to the east. First renamed Sex (and later Seditionaries), McLaren and Westwood's provocative premises became a centre of operations for punks in England's south-east. At Swan Song, where everyone wore jeans and cowboy boots, eyebrows were raised at the new fashion styles outside their window. "We used to see Jordan [punk fashionista Pamela Rooke] traipsing down the road in her leotard," says Cynthia Sach. "Nothing else, just a leotard." The look of the King's Road changed from hippy casual to safety pins and spiked hair. Yet it's often forgotten that Zeppelin approved of punk at first, and offered an early olive branch. Page and Plant were there when The Damned played The Roxy in January 1977, returning the week after with Bonham. But that was when it all went wrong. It was obvious the punks hated them. Bonham, 28, was humiliated and called an old fart after challenging Rat Scabies to a drumming contest.
"I lived in a King's Road council block and had a band called The Television Personalities," says Daniel Treacy. "We recorded our first single with money I'd saved from my Swan Song job, and we printed up 867 copies, which was all we could afford. Jimmy Page came into the office one day as I was reading about our single in Sounds. He said, 'Got a band, have you? Are you punks?' I explained that we were doing it all ourselves: the recording, the mastering, printing the labels. He was fascinated." Enterprise! Ingenuity! It was just what Swan Song lacked.
But jovial chats with Page were rare in 1977. Abe Hoch was noticing a darker, more paranoid atmosphere around Zeppelin than he was comfortable with. Danny Goldberg had left Swan Song in 1976, detecting a "sour, negative vibe". Michael Des Barres saw an escalation in drug abuse drive a wedge between the members of rock's biggest band. "You start to realise it's bullshit, all the drugs, all the adulation," he sighs. "The myth becomes so fragile, so flimsy and so absurd, that dark things start to happen. And then the fear grows, and friends start to separate from one another, and the creativity is lost. And that's what happened to Led Zeppelin."
In July 1977, the last rays of sunlight in Zeppelin's world were extinguished. An American tour, which saw them perform to an estimated 1.3 million fans in 30 cities, descended into horrific violence. An employee of Bill Graham, the promoter, was beaten unconscious by members of Zeppelin's entourage—including their new 'security coordinator', tough-guy actor John Bindon—and an appalled Graham, who filed a $2 million lawsuit against the band, swore never to book them again. "Bindon was very dangerous," notes Skip Alan of The Pretty Things. "One day we were in a van coming back from lunch. There was me, Robert, Bonzo, Cole and Bindon. We're driving along the King's Road and suddenly Bindon says, 'Who's that cunt looking at?' He opens the door, gets out, smacks some poor guy in the face and gets back in the van again. He was an absolute nutter."
"It has to be said, a lot of the darkness [Zeppelin] brought on themselves," reasons Phil May. "But at the same time, they needed heavy security. They'd go to a club in LA and if they didn't have 18 gorillas around, they wouldn't get a moment's peace. One time when Cole let them go off on their own, and they got in some huge ruckus. Peter Grant went fucking mad. Cole turned up to meet us at LAX [airport] with a big blackeye. That was the way we all used to live. When I look back on it now, I can see why we got a lot of flak."
The nightmare was just beginning. In his hotel room on the US tour, Robert Plant received a phone-call from his wife Maureen, giving him the shocking news that their five-year-old son Karac was dead. "That was a dreadful day. That was a disaster," says Unity MacLean, who manned the phones at Swan Song. "But you've got to weigh up the balance here. It was a freak accident that Robert's little boy died. It wasn't anything to do with a 'curse'. The poor child became dehydrated. It means they can't bounce back. People don't realise how quickly a child can go downhill."
In his book, Stairway To Heaven, Richard Cole writes that everyone in the Swan Song organisation wondered if this was the end of the band. On October3, Page held a radio press conference to rubbish rumours that they were splitting up. No more would be heard of Zeppelin until summer 1979.
A SPECTOR-OBSESSED producer whose career was a curious blend of cult status and commercial nous, Dave Edmunds had a reputation as a studio boffin and recreator of classic'50s rock 'n' roll sounds. He was also, as a co-founder of Rockpile with Nick Lowe, popular with new wave audiences. As Swan Song reeled from crisis to crisis, Edmunds became its ebullient saviour, bouncing up the charts with "Girls Talk" and "Queen Of Hearts". Edmunds remembers Swan Song fondly. "It was heaven from an artistic point of view. Besides the figures involved, which were generous, it freed me from the usual hang-ups that artists have with labels. The boys were interested in what I was doing, but wouldn't interfere. I've been getting royalty cheques every three months for the last 35 years. It's the best deal I ever had."
In August 1979, with "Girls Talk" chiming away in the Top 10, Zeppelin re-emerged after a two-year silence, releasing a new studio album (In Through The Out Door) and headlining two massive outdoor concerts at Knebworth. These should have been triumphant occasions. Instead, Peter Grant picked a fight with the promoter, Freddie Bannister, and the atmosphere backstage was murderous when Zeppelin strolled onstage. While they'd been out of the country, recording at ABBA's studio in Stockholm, John Bindon had burst into the Swan Song office, bleeding and panic-stricken, telling Cynthia Sach that he'd just stabbed John Darke, a renowned London gangster, to death. Could Cynthia phone Zeppelin and ask for their assistance? She most certainly could not.
Grant was now a recluse in Sussex. In October, he attempted (but failed) to suppress the news that a young photographer, Philip Hale, had been found dead at Page's home in Plumpton. An inquest ruled Hale's death as accidental. The following September, as Zeppelin rehearsed for their first US tour in three years, Grant phoned the office and told Unity MacLean to send everyone home. He gave no reason. "I went back to my flat," she recalls, "and my husband said,' Come and have a drink.' He took me to the pub round the corner, sat me down and said,'David Wigg from the Daily Express phoned. He wants to know if it's true that John Bonham died last night.' I couldn't believe it. It still gives me shivers to think of it."
The press were desperate for a Zeppelin comment. But they didn't get one. Bonham had died in bed, aged 32, at Page's home in Windsor after an all-day drinking binge. Not until December would the band release a statement announcing that they were discontinuing. It was left to the NME to wonder rhetorically, "Why do people associated with Led Zeppelin seem to die?" But the question suggested that there was some logical explanation, when there was only chaos, madness and tragedy.
"It all fell apart after Bonzo died," says Dave Edmunds sadly. The Pretty Things had split up. Bad Company were on an extended hiatus. Unity MacLean, pregnant and reluctant to "be around people who seemed hell-bent on destroying themselves," left Swan Song soon afterwards. The label remained active, nominally at least, for a further three years, releasing solo albums by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page among others. But the releases stopped in 1983. Peter Grant died in 1995.
The King's Road is different now. Bistros have replaced boutiques, and the Water Rat pub, where all the Swan Song coke deals were done, is now an Italian restaurant. McLaren & Westwood's shop is a Thai-Vietnamese eatery called Athitaya. There are two houses with the number 484 on their doors. Both have 'To Let' signs, and both are in serious need of a white paint touch-up. One of them has roller blinds pulled down on its first-floor and second-floor windows. Just for a moment, it looks eerily similar to the house on the cover of Physical Graffiti. Nobody answers the bell.
Excerpts from the chapter on Led Zeppelin in Danny Goldberg's 2008 memoir Bumping Into Geniuses
By the time of the fourth album, Robert had been goaded by his father to get some more visibility, and the band hired the elfin Irish PR maestro B. P. Fallon.
Peter said that he thought that contempt for the rock press had worked in the band's favor in the early years but that by 1973 it was time to go the other way—although he wanted to continue their practice of avoiding any TV appearances. The sound on television speakers just couldn't do the band justice, he said, but he wanted them to be much more proactive with the rest of the media. I told him that Led Zeppelin had the reputation of being barbarians on the road. Peter laughed soundlessly and answered in the gentlest version of his deep cockney growl, "Yeah, but we're just mild barbarians."
The next day, all four band members sat diligently in Peter's suite. Despite the fact that Jimmy Page was the musical and business leader of the band, it was Robert Plant who did most of the talking, and he was very clear about what they wanted.
Peter asked me to explain what he bemusedly called "the barbarian thing," and Robert airily reassured me, "Look, we were very young when we first started [excuses, excuses]. We're over all of that now [sure, Jan]."
The members of Zeppelin all had nicknames by which they were known to each other and their intimates. Robert Plant was "Percy," Page, "Pagey," Jones, "Jonesy," and Bonham, "Bonzo." Peter Grant was always almost always referred to as "G."
"Look at all the publicity the Stones got on their last tour!" Robert said, as if this was the most absurd journalistic error imaginable. He wanted mainstream fame, and while the rest of the band were not as forceful in asking for it, they certainly wouldn't mind having it either. "What you are saying," drummer John Bonham said to me earnestly at the end of the meeting, "is that you're going to get us known to people who don't know about us yet."
Despite their affability Zeppelin continued to view the rock press with suspicion. Bonzo spat contempt as he referred to reviewers who had disparaged his famously long drum solos. "Look, if Buddy Rich says I'm shit, then I'm shit, but what the fuck do those wankers know?" Page's choirboy looks and educated articulation masqueraded a deeply paranoid side. He spoke with bitterness about the bad reviews, wondering darkly if some of the critics were not clandestinely in league with Jeff Beck, who had been one of Page's successors as lead guitarist of the Yardbirds, and with whom he had some ill-defined rivalry. His dislike of the press was sufficiently well-known that the New Musical Express's Kent wrote that when I made Zeppelin accessible in 1973, "most of the journalists present seemed so shocked that one of them said: 'My first question to you, Mr. Page, is—why are you giving me this interview in the first place?'"
Notwithstanding such occasionally sweet moments the general atmosphere was one of tension, exacerbated by the huge quantities of cocaine (which, based on some cockney formulation, they referred to as "Charlie"). Both Peter and Bonham thought it amusing to grab civilians such as myself by the balls and ask, "How's your knob?" Sitting next to Peter in the back of a limo was a terrifying experience anytime the car made a sharp right turn and his three-hundred-pound bulk squashed me in an unspoken, and undoubtedly intentional, reminder of our relative power.
The morning after the Atlanta show Peter, in a moment of naive grandiosity, decided that he wanted someone to say that it was the biggest thing that had happened to the city since the filming of Gone With the Wind. I was terrified of disappointing him, so I did not confront him about the contrived nature of his request. I begged Lisa Robinson for a favor, giving her an invented quote from Mayor Sam Massell of Atlanta, who had attended the concert. I figured, accurately, that it was too trivial a concoction for the mayor to deny. Although she had her doubts, Lisa dutifully "quoted" the mayor in a puff piece she wrote for the British weekly Disc and Music Echo, which got me off the hook and immediately endeared her to Peter.
I felt wistful about these gimmicks because I soon learned that, notwithstanding their unrestrained interest in the by-products of rock stardom, the members of the band took their music enormously seriously. Jimmy and Robert personally signed off on every aspect of the sound, lights, and special effects on tours. A sprained finger for Jimmy Page or a stuffed nose for Plant was considered a crisis of epic proportions.
Both Robert and Jimmy balanced their keen sense of macho rock power, sexuality, and traditional blues with a strong emotional connection to the poetic, folkie side of rock and roll. Robert loved the Incredible String Band and Jimmy adored the Fairport Convention, whose lead singer, Sandy Denny, had sung background vocals on Led Zeppelin III. They both idolized Joni Mitchell, whom they had never met, and they had semiserious arguments about which one of them she would be more likely to fancy.
Jonesey was almost completely disengaged from the PR aspect of the band, occasionally making bitter jokes about being one of the "other guys" who did not get the attention that Jimmy and Robert did, but for the most part he was so quiet in band meetings as to seem invisible. But the fact that he was shy did not mean he wasn't paying attention. Many around Led Zeppelin did cocaine, but I did not, having grown away from drugs under the influence of various yogis. Early in my time with the band a fierce roadie offered me a line and I had a moment of anxiety, wondering if I should snort it so as not to come across as remote or judgmental. Jonesy suddenly materialized and gently chided the roadie, "He won't be wanting any of that," and smiled knowingly at me as he passed by.
What Led Zeppelin really cared about was how the tour was covered in England, where their friends and family lived. They freaked if a British music weekly ran a photo from the Rainbow in Hollywood showing the members of the band with their arms around the local L.A. groupies. I couldn't stop photographers in public places, but I was able to create some positive British press. I had originally given access to Lisa Robinson as a favor to her so she could impress her British editor of Disc and Music Echo, which typically had less access to superstars than its weekly London competitors Melody Maker and New Musical Express. However, it turned out that I was a great beneficiary of Lisa's stories. Unlike the typically adversarial and bitchy British rock writers, Lisa wrote positive stories, including whatever clever quotes the guys came up with. In future years she always got first crack at the band when they came to the States.
In the book [Led Zeppelin by Led Zeppelin], there are shots of you with a telescope standing in your lounge, and another next to a gigantic jardinière.
Jimmy Page: Yeah, you can see a few records, and the taste that I had at the time in that second shot. A lot of the furniture that I was buying was Arts and Crafts furniture [from the late 1880s] which, at that time, was literally being thrown out because it wasn't fashionable. You could just pick up really lovely things. That jardinière, though, came back from the flea market in Paris on the plane on the seat next to me because you could do that in those days.
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