Led Zeppelin on track

By Steve Pilkington

Think about Led Zeppelin and the image coming to mind would be of the band straddling the world as the archetypal 'rock gods', defining the 1970s like no other artist did. Dig deeper though, and there's a lot more to Zeppelin than hard rock and bluster, with folk and blues strongly threading through their catalogue from the very beginning. This book digs into every Led Zeppelin track recorded during their decade-long existence before John Bonham's death brought down the curtain, by way of facts, anecdotes, analysis and a small dose of humour here and there.

   From the likes of ‘Kashmir’, ‘Stairway To Heaven’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and their ilk, which have entered the public consciousness, down to the deeper cuts which only the fans will know, this book covers them all, while also taking a look into the stories behind the often ground breaking cover art, and the way the albums came to be recorded.

    Celebrating the triumphs and the arguable lower points, this is an alternative history of the band, told via the most important element – the music itself – which has influenced so many down the years. The history of led Zeppelin is a wild ride. This book shows you why.

 

Steve Pilkington is a music journalist, editor and broadcaster. He was editor in chief for the Classic Rock Society magazine Rock Society and is now co-administrator of the rock website Velvet Thunder as well as presenting a weekly internet radio show called A Saucerful Of Prog. Before taking on this work full-time, he spent years writing for fanzines and an Internet music review site on a part-time basis. He has recently published books on Deep Purple and Rainbow, The Rolling Stones and Iron Maiden, all for Sonicbond, and has also written the official biography of legendary guitarist Gordon Giltrap. He lives in Wigan, Lancashire, UK.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sonicbond Publishing
• Release date: Aug 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789522198

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Sonicbond Publishing Limited

www.sonicbondpublishing.co.uk

Email: [e-mail]

First Published in the United Kingdom 2021

First Published in the United States 2021

This digital edition 2022

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright Steve Pilkington 2021

ISBN 978-1-78952-151-1

The right of Steve Pilkington to be identified

as the author of this work has been asserted by him

in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Sonicbond Publishing Limited

Printed and bound in England

Graphic design and typesetting: Full Moon Media

Acknowledgements

Thanks as always to Stephen Lambe, who continues to publish my scribbling – gawd bless ‘im!

Thanks to Janet, for being a willing sounding-board, pointing out flaws and generally being an all-round massive help

Thanks to all of the other Zeppelin fans at school in the 1970s, aiding and abetting in my growing infatuation for the band. If they’re reading this, they know who they are!

Of course, the biggest thanks of all must go to Page, Plant, Bonham and Jones – the four elements of that glorious piece of rock and roll alchemy known as Led Zeppelin. Sheer magic.

Finally, thanks through gritted teeth must go to the stranger who I met in a chip shop in North Wales the day after the first Knebworth performance – which I had missed owing to a pre-arranged holiday – only for him to regale my impressionable ears with wondrous tales of just what I had missed. This strengthened my resolve to catch a Zeppelin show ‘next time around’, but we know what happened there...

Contents

Introduction

Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin II

Led Zeppelin III

Led Zeppelin IV (A.K.A ‘Four Symbols’, ‘Untitled’)

Houses Of The Holy

Physical Graffiti

Presence

In Through The Out Door

Coda

Video/DVD, Live Albums, and Reunion Appearances

Appendix One: Whole Lotta Led – Author’s 25-track Zeppelin Playlist

Appendix Two: Led Zeppelin Concert Milestones

Bibliography

Introduction

Mention the name Led Zeppelin to just about anyone with the remotest interest in music, and the image which will probably spring to their minds first, is of the globe-straddling colossus that they became by the mid-’70s – private jet, the whole Rock and Roll nine yards – and also of them as a powerhouse heavy rock machine. The truth, however, as fans know only too well, is that Zeppelin were always a far more multi-faceted entity than that, with a keen intelligence and scholarly side hiding behind Robert Plant’s ‘rock god’ persona, and Jimmy Page’s well-publicised obsession with the occult and the arcane. Musically, there was far more to Zeppelin than ‘heavy’, despite the fact that they were one of the world’s foremost exponents of that particular element. Indeed, as well as their initial blues roots – which never entirely went away – their music has been heavily intertwined with traditional folk and, latterly, the World Music which they encountered on their travels to such exotic locations as Morocco. Led Zeppelin was in a way a sort of ‘all things to all men’, which goes some way to explaining their quite extraordinary success, which defines the 1970’s in a way no other band quite can.

The origins of Led Zeppelin, as is well known, lie in The Yardbirds. In 1968, Jimmy Page found himself as the ‘last man standing’ from the band in which he had replaced Jeff Beck, and with a tour of Scandinavia already booked, he set about recruiting members for a new band, which would initially go out under the name of The New Yardbirds.

Page was born James Patrick Page in Heston, West London in 1944 – later moving to Epsom, Surrey, where he grew up. By 1963, he had already started working as a session guitarist, playing on a dizzying array of recordings over the following few years, but the crucial move came in 1966 when he joined the Yardbirds – originally as bassist, since Jeff Beck was already in the band, but soon switching to second guitarist, as rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja moved over to bass duties. The Beck/Page line-up recorded the single ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’ (on which the bass duties were performed by a pre-Zeppelin John Paul Jones – Page can be heard playing bass on the B-Side, the unremarkable ‘Psycho Daisies’), but Beck left the band in November ‘66 after a dramatic bust-up on the road, when the band were appearing on the ghastly-sounding Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars revue tour. Page took over as sole lead guitarist, and this line-up remained until June 1968, when Keith Relf and Jim McCarty left to form the embryonic original Renaissance line-up, leaving Page and Dreja. The plan was originally to enlist just a new singer and drummer, but Dreja changed his mind and decided to bow out, electing to follow his other passion as a photographer. Significantly, Peter Grant had begun managing the Yardbirds by this time, so he was already in place as the man who would guide Zeppelin’s career from a business perspective.

Page’s initial choices for vocalist were Steve Marriott or Terry Reid. Marriott proved unobtainable, and Reid was forced to turn down the offer, being under contract himself with Mickey Most – a contract which would lead to the less-than-legendary album Bang Bang You’re Terry Reid – a baffling and frankly hopeless title. The world largely agreed, and despite critical acclaim for his later albums, River and Seed of Memory, Reid has remained largely a footnote in rock history, and has surely had many a bout of self-recrimination for the missed opportunity! Instead, he suggested a young singer named Robert Plant, who was currently in a band going by the peculiar name of Obbstweedle. It’s hard to imagine Obbstweedle IV going on to become a massive-selling album, I think it’s fair to say...

Robert Anthony Plant was born in West Bromwich in 1968, from a musical family, including a violin-playing father, and a grandfather who had founded a local brass band. In the late 1950s, the family moved to Halesowen, near Kidderminster, living in a house very close to the Clent Hills – supposedly an inspiration for J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation of Middle Earth. Possibly as a connection to this fact, Plant began immersing himself not only in Tolkien’s fantasy world but also in the rich seam of Celtic and Welsh folklore – all strands which would show up time and again in his lyrics. In 1964, aged sixteen, Plant joined Kidderminster band, The Crawling King Snakes, forming a friendship with the band’s drummer, one John Bonham. He and Bonham both went on to join Band of Joy later, who began to make some waves with support from John Peel, recording a demo, but breaking up after a contract failed to materialise. Obbstweedle awaited, and then the world...

The aforementioned John Henry Bonham was born in 1948 in Redditch, Worcestershire, before moving to Kidderminster, and thus entering the orbit of Plant in the Crawling King Snakes. Apart from his time in that outfit, and also Band of Joy, Bonham did time in a substantial list of Midlands groups, including one called The Nicky James Movement, which also featured not only Roy Wood and Bev Bevan, later of the Move and ELO, but also future Moody Blue Mike Pinder. Another local band called A Way of Life had him forming the rhythm section alongside Dave Pegg of Fairport and Jethro Tull renown. By the time Plant joined up with Page, Bonzo (as he would soon be nicknamed) was playing with Tim Rose – with whom Page saw him perform, and decided he wanted him for his fledgling Zeppelin. In fact, it was a hard sell, because Bonham already had offers from Joe Cocker and Chris Farlowe, and despite a barrage of requests from Page, Plant and Peter Grant, he kept his distance – until he finally gave in and agreed to come to one rehearsal to see if anything developed. His reluctance was largely because he believed the Yardbirds were a spent force, and that the tail-end of their career would lead to nothing. But after playing with Page and Plant for that initial rehearsal, he decided that he preferred the music they could make to that of the more established Cocker or Farlowe, and he signed up accordingly.

By this time, Chris Dreja had taken his decision to step away and become a photographer – a decision which ultimately amounted to, essentially, ‘running away from the circus’. This left one remaining piece of the jigsaw to be found, and it came in the shape of John Paul Jones, born John Baldwin in Sidcup, Kent, in 1946. His mother was a singer, and his father a pianist and noted Big Band arranger, so it was no surprise when the young John developed an early, and somewhat precocious, musical talent, teaching himself piano at the age of six. By the time he was fourteen, he had assumed the position of choirmaster and organist at his local church, earning the money in that way to buy his first bass guitar, having a belief that the electric bass would become an important instrument in popular music. After spending some time playing with ex-Shadow Jet Harris in a band along with Tony Meehan, he entered the world of the session musician, playing with Jimmy Page on several of those engagements, and changed his name to John Paul Jones at the suggestion of Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham – who had himself got the idea from a 1959 film which was called John Paul Jones. By 1966, he had risen to the position of musical director for Mickie Most and Robert Stigwood, contributing string arrangements to a host of artists’ records, including Donovan, Lulu, Herman’s Hermits, Car Stevens, Tom Jones, The Everley Brothers, Marianne Faithfull – and a couple of songs by none other than The Yardbirds! The celebrated string arrangement on the Rolling Stones track ‘She’s A Rainbow’ is courtesy of Jones. By 1968 he had decided that writing up to fifty arrangements a month had long since become a sheer drudge, and he began looking for a group to join – and his wife Maureen, who he had married the year before, pointed him in the direction of an advertisement placed by Page in Disc magazine. He got in touch, offered his services on bass, and unsurprisingly given his experience and also familiarity with Page, was hired to complete the line-up.

The foursome – christened The New Yardbirds for now – had a Scandinavian tour lined up, but before departing for that particular jaunt, they took part in a recording session for the singer P. J. Proby which would see the first occasion that all four putative Zeppelins would appear on the same recording. Proby had become mainly known for the absurd furore that erupted after he split his trousers on stage in England, essentially leaving him run out of town by an angry mob with pitchforks under the still remarkably conservative values of the mid-1960s. Of course, he did himself no favours, as he milked the situation shamelessly by having the seams in his pants weakened so that the same thing would happen again, but then they do say that any publicity is good publicity. In this case that maxim was arguable, as by the time of the Zeppelin-assisted album in question, Three Week Hero, few seemed aware of its release and even fewer bought it. Still, it transpired that it made history, as an unassuming piece with the monumentally dull title of ‘Jim’s Blues’, appearing as the middle of a three-song medley, marked the first song to feature all of Led Zeppelin on it, which is a little like George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law making their debuts together in a non-league outing in front of 30 people before they joined Manchester United.

Following the Scandinavian trek – taking in Denmark, Sweden and Norway in September 1968 – the band returned to the UK to play some more gigs. Around this time, the name of Led Zeppelin had been arrived upon, and although exact accounts differ as to how this came to be suggested, it is generally agreed that Keith Moon was involved in the discussion. It has been widely claimed that there had been some wild talk of Moon and Entwistle leaving The Who and taking up with Page and Beck in a supergroup, and while this, of course, never transpired, the story goes that Moon said the plan would go down like a ‘lead balloon’, prompting Entwistle to jokingly suggest ‘Lead Zeppelin’ as the name. Peter Grant filed this away in his memory banks for later use, taking the wise decision to change the spelling to avoid mispronunciation of it as in ‘lead guitar’.

The first shows in the UK in October 1968 were still under the New Yardbirds name, with Page complaining bitterly that, while they tried to bill the shows as ‘Led Zeppelin’, promoters and venues fearful of dumping the established name still insisted as using the ‘New Yardbirds’ name. The first show they performed under the name Led Zeppelin came at the University of Surrey, in Battersea, on 25 October 1968.

By that time, the recording of the first album had just been completed, and history was waiting.

Led Zeppelin

Personnel:

Robert Plant: vocals, harmonica

Jimmy Page: guitars, backing vocals

John Paul Jones: bass guitar, keyboards, backing vocals

John Bonham: drums, backing vocals

Additional Musicians:

Viram Jasani: tabla on ‘Black Mountain Side’

Produced by Jimmy Page.

Record Label: Atlantic

Recorded September-October 1968.

UK release date: 31 March 1969; US release date: 12 January 1969.

Highest chart places: UK: 6, USA: 10

Running time: 44:56

As soon as the band returned from the short September jaunt over to Scandinavia in New Yardbirds guise, they decamped to Olympic Studios in London to record their debut album. In actual fact, to be strictly accurate, they didn’t so much ‘decamp’ as ‘drop in for the occasional visit’, since despite Grant having booked the studio for three weeks, the entire recording of the album was reportedly accomplished in three days – 27 September, and the third and 15th of October. They were also in the studio on 10 October, but the only track recorded on that day was ‘Baby Come On Home’, which didn’t make the cut for the final album. That was a total of around thirty hours, including the extra track – not a bad effort with which to make history, and an album which cost under £2,000 to make – including the sleeve – and has sold over thirteen million copies to date. A tick in the ‘profit’ column there, then.

There was one small thing missing when they recorded the album: namely, an actual recording contract. Peter Grant was very comfortable with this, however, because he knew what he had. Once the tapes were in his possession, he hopped on a plane to New York and headed straight for the offices of Atlantic Records, who had already expressed an interest. The result was an advance of over $200,000, the highest ever paid to a new artist for their debut album. Considering Robert Plant’s highest weekly wage before this was around £25, this was a life-changing sum, to say the very least! The disappointed party in this whole situation were Columbia/Epic Records, who had the Yardbirds on the label, and were convinced that they would have Zeppelin as a natural continuation, with Page being contracted to them via his previous band. What they failed to realise was that Page had never signed an exclusivity clause with Epic when joining the Yardbirds, and so had no ties. The story goes that Peter Grant went to see Columbia president Clive Davis, and spent some time in his office with him making small talk and chatting about other artists before Davis asked when they were going to discuss the Zeppelin signing. Grant allegedly informed him in a matter-of-fact way that he had already made a deal with Atlantic, and strode out calmly while Davis raged behind him!

The album was released in the United States on 12 January 1969, two months before the UK release at the end of March. This was to tie in with the band’s first US tour, which had begun on 16 December and would run until 15 February. Initial reviews of the record in the US were rather mixed, whereas, in the UK, they were far more positive. Audience reaction over in America was notably more enthusiastic than the press, however, with audiences taking the band to their hearts immediately. This contrasted sharply with the difficulties they had been facing at home, with gigs being promoted under the New Yardbirds name against their wishes, and a general lack of enthusiasm for the new project. Thus began a relationship with the US, which was to last for the entire Zeppelin career.

Album Cover

The front cover of the album – designed by George Hardie, who would go on to work with Hipgnosis, and later be responsible for such iconic covers as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here – was certainly a striking image, but it must be said perhaps a somewhat obvious choice. The photo forming the basis of the cover image, and chosen by Page, was a monochrome photograph of the Hindenburg airship disaster in 1937 in New Jersey, in which 36 people perished, and is a fairly blunt evocation of the band’s name! The photograph, originally taken by Sam Shere, was reproduced by Hardie in ink and then with a printing technique known as mezzotint, which was popular between the 17th and early 19th century, but less commonly used since. The band name and Atlantic logo were printed over the image in turquoise on the initial release but changed to orange within a year, making the turquoise copies a dream for collectors.

The back cover featured a photograph of the four band members reproduced in a soft orange tint – a photograph taken by none other than our heroic new lensman Chris Dreja! It was undeniably a great opportunity handed to him by Page as he embarked on his newly chosen career, but the ‘21 guineas’ which he has oddly reported as being the sum he was paid, does represent the smallest of possible potatoes compared to the reward he would have reaped had he remained as bass player. The rear cover also featured the musician credits and list of songs and songwriter credits – the latter being a subject we shall return to quite frequently!

Note that the small alternative zeppelin image used at the bottom of the back cover (and also on the back of the second album) is a reduced size version of an alternative design that Hardie offered for the front cover. It has been used regularly on posters, T-shirts and the like since.

‘Good Times Bad Times’ (Page/Jones/Bonham)

Opening with a heavy two-chord guitar riff which would be echoed a year later by Black Sabbath on ‘The Wizard’, the first track on the first Zeppelin album may sound like a fairly simplistic song to today’s ears. Casting one’s mind back to the musical climate when it emerged in early 1969, however, reveals it as a supremely effective calling card for the new band. Each of the four members shine in their own ways on the relatively short song, and leave the listener in no doubt as to their individual quality and collective chemistry. Page is concise and disciplined, firing off a twenty-second solo in the middle of the track, and accompanying Plant’s seeming ad-libs in the coda by spraying short lead guitar bursts like crackling electricity. Jones – who came up with the main riff – is not only tight and metronomic anchoring the rhythm section, but also gets in one or two little bass outbursts of his own, to let the listener know he’s there. Plant is very up-front and powerful from the word ‘go’, partly through the means of a clever little production trick, which sees his double-tracked vocals harmonising with himself during the verses and then accompanying himself an octave apart in the chorus. The contrast provided by this is subtle yet striking. Not that it is anything remarkable lyrically – Plant seems at pains to stress that his woman left home ‘with a brown-eyed man’ (though he ‘still don’t seem to care’, he assures us), when the colour of this philandering Lothario’s eyes would seem to be a fairly insignificant detail in the whole scenario...

It is Bonham, however, who perhaps shines the most here. Throughout the song, he punctuates his playing with lightning-fast bass drum triplets (you can hear one clearly about 30 seconds in), which are made all the more remarkable by virtue of the fact that he was playing them with a single bass drum kick pedal, at a speed which would seem almost impossible for the average foot! Interestingly, he actually thought he was copying this trick, while he was actually inventing it – he told Carmine Appice that he took the particular pattern from one that Appice did on Vanilla Fudge’s version of ‘Ticket To Ride’ from their debut album. What he didn’t realise until he spoke with Appice about this later, was that for the Vanilla Fudge track, Appice was using a double-kick bass drum augmented by his drumsticks as well. Bonham heard it, just assumed it to be a fast foot, and played the seemingly impossible. That’s a way to announce yourself to the world.

Note that Plant received no songwriting credits on the initial release of the album, owing to his having an existing contract with CBS at the time.

The song was not often played live, and never after 1970, until the 2007 reunion show at the O2 Arena in London, when the band fittingly decided to open with it.

‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ (Page/Plant/Anne Bredon)

The songwriting credits for this song have a story in themselves, as not for the last time there would be a later revision to the credit. This time, however, Zeppelin were blameless in the situation. Page heard the song initially from a version by Joan Baez on her 1962 album, In Concert, where it was credited merely as ‘Traditional’. Baez had heard it herself sung by a student named Janet Smith and assumed it to be