THE CROW ROAD
It’s almost a bad pub-rock story – a band so good that someone said: “Stone the crows!” when he first saw them, thus supplying their new name. But since it was Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant doing the naming, it’s suddenly much more worthy.
The event took place in Glasgow’s iconic Burns Howff bar and venue in 1969. Up until that gig, the band were called Power – a fitting title for a group that featured the larger-than-life talents of singer Maggie Bell and guitarist Leslie Harvey. A forceful character like Grant was the perfect match for the young couple, who’d made a life plan based on pursuing their musical dreams.
“Saturday afternoons in the Howff were the best time,” Bell recalls. “But it felt like ‘all dressed up and nowhere to go’, because they shut at two o’clock under the local rules. It was just getting to something in there and then the door shut.”
On that particular afternoon, though, the most interesting thing happened after the clock had struck two. “Peter had turned up in this big black limousine – I think it was the Lord Provost’s, because you didn’t get many of them in Glasgow. He’d come to see Leslie; he didn’t know I could sing, because you couldn’t hear me in the
