When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin Read online

  Of course it did. That was what it was all about for a rock monster like Led Zeppelin, feeding on planets and shitting stars. Drugs were their fuel, sex a form of self-expression, music merely the map to the treasure. Think of the Stones, crammed into Keith’s sweaty windowless basement at Villa Nellcote in France in 1972, waiting for him to come to after another three-day mindbender; waiting for him to get enough coke and smack up his nose and in his arm before he is ready to lay down the bones of what will become the greatest Stones album ever made, whatever Mick and his posh new foreign bird thinks. Think of John and George, acid buddies suddenly, united for once against strait-laced Paul and clueless Ringo; high priests labouring devoutly to take the Beatles beyond the yeah-yeah-yeah of their lovable mop-top past and into the infinitely more knowing, vastly more expanded consciousness of Revolver and eventually Sgt. Pepper, the album that transformed the world from black and white into colour. Think of Dylan smoking his weed, swallowing his pills, wearing sunglasses at midnight and vibrating in his chair by the window as he sits up all night at the Chelsea Hotel in New York writing ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ for…her. Or Hendrix tripping on godhead in some beer-sticky London dive full of fag smoke and jealous white males, as The Who and Cream and everyone else who tried to follow him bathed in his comet trail and foolishly tried to hold onto the sparks. Of course the drugs fed into the music of Led Zeppelin. That’s what the drugs were for. That’s what Led Zeppelin was for. That’s what it was all about, right Jimmy? Back then in the Seventies, that bridge-burning, hyper-individualistic era that began in 1968 and burst into a cultural forest-fire that would keep on spreading all the way up to around 1982; after birth control but before AIDS, when suddenly everything seemed possible and nothing was verboten. The flipside of the idealistic, consensual Sixties, the Seventies was the era when doing your own thing and letting it all hang out ceased to be mere slogans and became a birthright. When doing what thou wilt really had become the whole of the law.

  How is someone like Jimmy Page supposed to put all that into words now, though, without everyone pulling a face, or worse still laughing it off? Almost impossible to do back then, it is frankly out of the question now. Even for Robert Plant, who always has an answer for everything, he thinks. Clearly, though, those early days of Zeppelin are just as vivid to Jimmy Page now, in his still smouldering old age, as they were forty years ago, in his death-defying, universe-baiting prime. In his mid-sixties now, you could forgive him for being vague on the details. But he’s not; he’s very precise, in fact. As he has been about everything important he’s done in his career. ‘I knew what I’d been working on in the framework of the Yardbirds,’ he says, drinking his tea, ‘and I knew that I wanted to take that further on – and you can hear all of that on the first [Zeppelin] album.’

  Yes, you can. Not in the material, per se – there was little that was original about that – but in the idea; the methodology; the determination to take over the entire conversation. Recently, though, I’d read that he’d originally had something lighter, more acoustic in mind, then had a change of heart after he saw drummer John Bonham play. An idea encouraged perhaps by his solo appearance in Zeppelin’s earliest days on the Julie Felix TV show, picking elegantly at ‘White Summer’, the acoustic guitar interlude based on legendary folk enigma Davy Graham’s instrumental raga on the Irish melody ‘She Moved Through The Fair’ which was Page’s showcase even back in Yardbirds days and that had one enthralled reviewer comparing him to flamenco guitarist Manitas de Plata.

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ he told me, contemptuous of the notion that Zeppelin might ever have been anything other than what they were. ‘I had a whole sort of repertoire in my mind of songs that I wanted to put into this new format, like “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”, for example. But it wasn’t just the sensitivity of doing an acoustic number, cos it was all gonna grow.’ Zeppelin would not be anything so simple as all-acoustic or all-electric. Zeppelin would not be nailed down. ‘I was seeing all this sort of dynamic. Because my tastes were all-encompassing, musically, it wasn’t down to one particular thing. It wasn’t just the blues, it wasn’t just rock’n’roll. It wasn’t just folk music or classical music. It went all the way through the whole thing.’ Later, when I checked, I discovered he’d said much the same thing to writer Mick Houghton as far back as 1976. ‘I knew exactly the style I was after and the sort of musicians I wanted to play with,’ he’d declared then. ‘I guess it proves that the group was really meant to be, the way it all came together.’ Then again in 1990, when he told Mat Snow in Q: ‘We knew what we were doing: treading down paths that had not been trodden before.’

  So Jimmy Page had the whole thing worked out right from the start, did he? Musically, perhaps he did. Or, as he says now, what he wanted ‘the framework’ to be. However, the manner in which he really put the group together was much more haphazard; much more risky. Luck played a huge part. In fact, at first it appeared Lady Luck was working against him when he realised he couldn’t get any of the people he really wanted in the band interested. Or if they were interested, that something else stood in the way. For example, hindsight tells us that vocalist/guitarist Terry Reid, one of the first people Page approached, was a fool to turn down the chance to join Led Zeppelin. But they weren’t called Led Zeppelin then – they were still just the New Yardbirds, a new name that made the band sound very old. Reid was young, a gunslinger in his own right with, ironically, a solo deal with Mickie Most on the table. What did he want to join the New Yardbirds for?

  Still only nineteen and hotly tipped by the music press as the ‘Pop Star Most Likely To’, Reid had been a star-in-the-making since he was sixteen, when Peter Jay of the Jaywalkers made him his new frontman. Then came Hendrix and Cream and just like everyone else, Terry had wanted to get in on the act too. By February 1968, his pal Graham Nash – who had just left the Hollies to do his own thing in America with two groovy new cats he’d met named David Crosby and Stephen Stills – had talked Mickie Most into signing him. When Jimmy Page came along with his offer to join the New Yardbirds, Reid was already hard at work on the songs that would end up on his Superlungs album – the naff nickname dreamed up for him by Most. How could he turn his back on all that just to try and help refloat a leaky boat like the Yardbirds?

  Page, who’d remembered Reid from a show the Yardbirds had done at the Albert Hall two years before when Terry and the Jaywalkers had been on the bill, was devastated. Especially when Peter Grant told him the reason Terry wouldn’t join was because he’d just been signed as a solo artist by Mickie, who he still shared an Oxford Street office with. Despite his growing trust in G, Jimmy felt cuckolded. ‘You know their two desks faced each other, right?’ he still notes sourly all these years later.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ said Reid, ‘I was doing a gig. I think it was in Buxton with the Band of Joy. I’d seen them before, and I knew Robert Plant and John Bonham. And this time, as I watched them, I thought: “That’s it!” I could hear the whole thing in my head. So the next day I phoned up Jimmy. He said, “What does this singer look like?” I said, “What do you mean, what does he look like? He looks like a Greek god, but what does that matter? I’m talking about how he sings. And his drummer is phenomenal. Check it out!”’

  It was the same for drummer Aynsley Dunbar, a veteran of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and the earliest incarnation of the Jeff Beck Group. As Dunbar says now, ‘I was offered the chance to join the New Yardbirds. They were already talking about going to America – that was the lure, as I’d never been. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I’d done so I’d have ended up in Led Zeppelin. But the Yardbirds was already sort of old news by then, and I had my own band, Retaliation, that had just signed a record deal. I liked the idea of playing with Jimmy because he was like me, very into improvisation, something which Beck couldn’t manage at all – everything he did was always rehearsed right down to the last note. But joining the Yardbirds at that moment would have seemed like a step backwards, not forwar
ds.’

  It wasn’t even the first time Jimmy Page had tried to put together his own group. As far back as the summer of 1966, he had tentatively imagined an outfit of his own with either Small Faces frontman Steve Marriott on vocals and second guitar, or possibly Spencer Davis Group protégé Steve Winwood on vocals and keyboards, along with what Page now calls a ‘super hooligan’ rhythm section comprising The Who’s Keith Moon on drums and John Entwhistle on bass. That had been in May 1966, when he had overseen the session at London’s IBC studios that would produce ‘Beck’s Bolero’ – Jeff Beck’s guitar-enflamed version of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ originally intended to be his first solo single and that Page has consistently insisted over the years that he arranged, played on and produced – ‘Jeff was playing and I was sort of in the control booth. And even though he said he wrote it, I wrote it. Bollocks. I’m playing all the electric and 12-string but it was supposed to be a solo record for him. The slide bits are his and I’m just basically playing’ – and which Beck just as stubbornly flatly denies. ‘No, Jimmy didn’t write that song. We sat down in his front room once, a little, tiny, pokey room, and he was sitting on the arm of a chair and he started playing that Ravel rhythm. And he had a 12-string and it sounded so full, really fat and heavy. And I just played the melody and I went home and worked out the up tempo section.’

  In the end, it hardly mattered. Mickie Most would only release it as the B-side of ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’. Still, the guitarists continued to argue over who did what. The only thing they did later agree on is that the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ line-up could have been the ‘original’ Led Zeppelin. Also present on the session that night were two players Page knew from the sessions’ world: a young pianist named Nicky Hopkins and bassist John Paul Jones. Hopkins was twenty-two, an old head on young shoulders who had started out as a schoolboy in Lord Sutch’s Savages, then played with Cyril Davies’ All Stars, as had Jimmy, which is how they’d first met, before a serious stomach ailment landed Nicky in hospital for eighteen months. Now he was a full-time session guy. Good money, no travelling, easy on the tummy. Later that year the Kinks would immortalise him on the track ‘Session Man’. He was quiet, talented and shy, hardly ever said a word to anyone, just played his part and fucked off like a good boy afterwards. Jonesy wasn’t much of a talker, either. He was all right, though, a good player, sure of himself. Also in his early twenties but an even older veteran of the session scene, it wasn’t the first time he and Pagey had worked together either and it wouldn’t be the last. Within weeks, in fact, he would be brought in at Jimmy’s insistence to arrange the strings on the Yardbirds track, ‘Little Games’ (and later to play bass on the ‘Ten Little Indians’ single).

  The biggest presence at the ‘Bolero’ session, though, was that of Keith Moon, who’d arrived at the studios in Langham Place wearing shades and a Cossack hat – ‘Incognito, dear boy’ – in case anybody saw and recognised him. A get-up which, unsurprisingly, had the reverse effect of making everyone stare at him intently. Moony was pissed off at The Who, fed up with Daltrey’s constant fighting and Townshend’s black moods. John Entwhistle, who’d also promised to turn up then backed out at the last minute, felt the same, Keith said, both boys looking for a way out of the grind of being the background to the Pete and Rog show. Sensing an opportunity, Page laughingly suggested they all team up together: Keith and Jimmy and John and Jeff. (No mention of Jonesy or Nicky, at this stage.) Moony got all excited and even accidentally suggested a name for the new line-up when he joked that it would go down like a lead zeppelin, meaning balloon. (Entwhistle would later swear blind it was he that had suggested the name but it was Moon that Page would later ask for his blessing to use the name.) Smoking cigarettes and speeding out of his head, everyone had laughed at Keith. But Jimmy had liked the idea – even the name – and tucked it away in his back pocket, like he had done a lot of good ideas over the past four years working in studios with frustrated musos.

  Half-Yardbirds, half-Who; pushed in the right direction by boss man Page. All they would need was a good singer. Moony had said Entwhistle could sing but Jimmy was thinking more of Stevie Winwood. Then Traffic started taking off big time and so he thought of Steve Marriott instead. Page had been to quite a few Small Faces gigs and already knew Marriott well, knew he was up for anything. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea: Jimmy, Jeff, Moony and Entwhistle, with Steve Marriott upfront…What a supergroup that would be! Or as he later told the writer, Steve Rosen, ‘It would have been the first of all those sort of bands, like Cream sort of thing. But it didn’t happen…’

  Not surprisingly, the success of the session had given Beck similar ideas, like two mates out for the night spotting and fancying the same bird. Keith Moon, he said, ‘had the most vicious drum sound and the wildest personality. At that point, he wasn’t turning up for Who sessions, so I thought that with a little wheeling and dealing, I could sneak him away.’ To what, though? The Jeff Beck Group was still, at that stage, more wishful thinking than reality, and there was his old pal Pagey, in the control booth, overseeing everything, letting Jeff think it was all his idea. Not that Beck didn’t cotton on to all that. As he said, ‘That was probably the first Led Zeppelin band – not with that name, but that kind of thing.’ Moony, he said, ‘was the only hooligan who could play properly. I thought, “This is it!” You could feel the excitement, not knowing what you were going to play, but just whoosh! It was great and there were all these things going on, but nothing really happened afterwards, because Moony couldn’t leave The Who.’

  This fact alone wasn’t enough to deter Jimmy Page, though, and despite joining the Yardbirds just weeks later – ostensibly as a temporary replacement for bassist Paul Samwell-Smith – he still put feelers out to see if Marriott might be interested in leaving the Small Faces to join forces with him in some new unspecified group project. ‘He was approached,’ Jimmy would later reveal, ‘and seemed to be full of glee about it. A message came from the business side of Marriott, though, which said, “How would you like to play guitar with broken fingers?”’

  As the ‘business side of Marriott’ was Don Arden, the self-proclaimed ‘Al Capone of pop’ and then the most notoriously gangster-like figure in the British music business, such a threat was to be taken seriously. When I asked Arden about this myself, before he succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease in 2007, he merely chuckled. ‘Later on I’d hang fucking Robert Stigwood over a balcony for daring to try and take Stevie Marriott away from me. You think I’d let some little schlemiel from the Yardbirds have him?’ After that, said Page, ‘the idea sort of fell apart. We just said, “Let’s forget about the whole thing, quick.” Instead of being more positive about it and looking for another singer, we just let it slip by. Then The Who began a tour, the Yardbirds began a tour and that was it.’

  The idea was gone but not quite forgotten. Not by Jimmy Page anyway. So much so that when Peter Grant had asked him straight out, as they sat in the car in June 1968, what he was going to do after that final Yardbirds show, he had his answer ready. He was going to find a new singer, Page had said in his quiet but determined voice, find a new rhythm section too if needs be, and lead the band himself. Then he waited to see if G was still listening…

  You are Peter Grant. It is the summer of 1968, you are thirty-three and sick and tired of earning money for other fucking people. In the days when you’d worked for Don Arden, it hadn’t mattered. Don could be a right cunt to work for, always on your case, giving you a hard time, always taking the piss, but at least you’d been paid regular and in cash. No fucking tax or stamp or any of that old codswallop with Don. And you’d learned a lot too. Running around on the road with nutters like Gene and Richard, Chuck and the Everly boys, you’d learned more working for Don than anything you’d done since your two years’ National Service. A lot of lads hated doing Service. You’d hear ’em crying themselves to sleep at night, crying for their mummies, silly little poofs. You’d enjoyed it. Being in the army w
as the first time you’d experienced the feeling of what it was like to belong to a big extended family, and you’d liked it. Liked the discipline, giving and taking orders, everyone knowing where they stood even if it was in a pile of shit. Men being men, doing what they were fucking told. Enjoyed it enough to win promotion to Corporal in the RAOC – that’s the Royal Army Ordinance Corps to you, sonny. Given charge of the dining hall, through which you’d got involved with the NAAFI, putting on shows, organising the tea and the sticky buns, sorting out the entertainment for the troops. ‘A very cushy number,’ you’d smile and say whenever you looked back.

  Years later, you’d be driving through the Midlands one day in your brand new Rolls Royce convertible, being chauffeured by Richard Cole as you sat in the back telling it how it was to Atlantic Records’ chief whip Phil Carson, when, realising suddenly how close you were to an important piece of your past, you decided to take a little detour and show the chaps around your old army barracks. Ordering Cole to swing right through the army camp gates, driving bold as brass past the daft bastard on duty who saluted you, you’d told Cole to park the Rolls next to the little line of huts you and the rest of the lads used to sleep in. You should have bloody well seen the look on their faces as you showed them round. So much better than the ‘dreadful’ holiday camp you’d later worked in, you told them. How, after you’d finished there you’d worked briefly at that Jersey hotel as ‘entertainments manager’, another crap job that didn’t last…