Led Zeppelin, page 11
For the next eighteen months, Peter Grant was known to wrestling enthusiasts as His Royal Highness Count Bruno Alessio of Milan. He’d emerge into the ring, snarling, in a pair of trunks with a cape thrown over his shoulder, egging on the crowd with gestures and insults. According to Ed Bicknell, who managed Dire Straits and became a confidant of Grant, “Peter only had one surefire move in the ring. He told me, ‘I’d simply push over my opponents and fall on them. Those fuckers would never get up.’ ”
Grant’s wrestling prowess was nothing more than an act that he perfected. He decided to pursue theatrics at a higher level. Acting! The pretense and exaggeration appealed to him. He began appearing as an extra on TV series like The Saint and The Benny Hill Show. And from 1958 until 1962, he took bit parts in movies. He played a sailor in A Night to Remember and a Macedonian guard in Cleopatra opposite—far opposite—Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. His appearance as a bellhop in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Lolita lasted no more than a discouraging few seconds, exposing his acting career for what it was: a lark. By the time he served as a stand-in for Anthony Quinn in The Guns of Navarone, he was looking for other work.
It was a catch-as-catch-can lifestyle. “Nobody had any money,” recalled Mickie Most, whose jagged career path paralleled that of Peter Grant. “He was a dreamer, and he hustled.”
One sorry hustle tied him to Peter Rachman, a London slumlord notorious for running prostitution in his derelict flats and overcharging immigrants who had no protection under the law. To evict them, he sent brawny henchmen like Grant to hasten their removal by breaking locks, destroying bathrooms, and employing general intimidation.
In his spare time, Grant hired himself out as a driver, shuttling performers of all stripes to and from the airport. His ace in the hole: a Volkswagen Transporter, known as the VW bus, a spacious passenger van with a panorama of airy windows and an enormous luggage compartment. Thanks to a circuit of American army bases in East Anglia that showcased regular entertainment, there was plenty of work for an operator like Peter Grant. One of his fares was an aging song-and-dance man who’d changed his name from Harry Levy to Don Arden. Arden was transitioning from performing to management and promotion, concentrating on the new crop of teenage acts emerging from the States.
Beginning in the fall of 1962, Arden brought Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, the Everly Brothers, and Sam Cooke to Great Britain and put them on soul-crushing package tours in cinemas and pubs. Arden wound up managing Vincent, who was about as manageable as a category-five tornado. He was an alcoholic with an uncontrollable violent streak who kept a loaded revolver in his carryall, along with knives and whips, and attracted crises the way flame attracted insects. Arden regarded Vincent much like an insect and hired Peter Grant to control him. “Make sure that fucker gets to the shows in one piece,” Arden ordered Grant, “and make sure he stays off the whiskey.”
This was trial by fire for Peter Grant, who learned very quickly, from no less a bully than Don Arden, that management often required a variable mix of supervision and muscle. There were occasions that necessitated keeping an artist in tow while putting the touch—a robust touch—to reluctant or dishonest promoters. “If you intend to be a manager, you’ve got to be strong,” Ed Bicknell says from experience, “and Peter was not averse to banging heads together.” Sometimes more than banging. Later in their association, when Arden was managing the Small Faces and feared Robert Stigwood might lure them away, Arden had Stan Simmons, another extra on Cleopatra, and Grant “introduce Stigwood to the view” of the street below his fourth-floor office while being hung by his ankles from the balcony railing. When a singer named Cal Danger billed himself as “Britain’s Gene Vincent,” Arden and Grant ran his van off the road, pulled out his manager, and roughed him up. Phil Carson, who played bass for Danger, recalls that Grant pushed his way into the van, demanding to know who the other men were seated inside. “ ‘We’re in Cal Danger’s band,’ we said. ‘Oh no, you’re not. Fuck off!’ And that was the end of Britain’s Gene Vincent.”
At some point, Peter Grant retired from the road to become a booking agent for one of Arden’s companies, Anglo American Artists, promoting blues performers such as John Lee Hooker, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Jimmy Reed, and Chuck Berry on double bills with the Animals. With Mickie Most as their producer, Grant became the tour manager of the Animals, who were managed by another rogue, Mike Jeffery. The two friends also collaborated on the Nashville Teens, a pop group from Surrey, with Peter managing and Mickie producing their subsequent hit single “Tobacco Road.”
Eventually, Grant’s relationship with Don Arden deteriorated over commissions owed from tours with the Animals. In typical fashion, Arden just refused to pay up. That gave Peter the impetus to strike out on his own, joining forces with his pal Mickie Most. In 1964, Most opened an outfit called RAK, an umbrella company for various production, management, and publishing interests he’d launched in a short few years’ time. It was unprecedented for a man who seemed to get by more on ambition than on talent. RAK scored unparalleled success, not only with the Animals and the Nashville Teens, but also with Herman’s Hermits, Lulu & the Luvvers, and Donovan, whose records Most produced with a seemingly golden touch.
Peter Grant, by comparison, opted for cheap alloys. His first two efforts—a band called the Flintstones and an all-girl group, She Trinity, failed to catch fire. In 1966, however, things turned up. A treacly novelty record, “Winchester Cathedral,” had become an overnight sensation with its Rudy Vallee–type parody of an old-timey dance band. Nothing more than a grab bag of session musicians, the New Vaudeville Band was long gone by the time the record was released. To cash in on its hit success, a touring group was hastily assembled for a swing through the United States and managed by Grant.
Grant moved into the RAK offices located in the penthouse of a building at 155 Oxford Street, whose tenants were an assortment of rock ’n roll start-ups. The first floor was Chrysalis Agency, which handled bookings for acts including the Yardbirds and would later flourish in its incarnation as a boutique record label for Jethro Tull, Ten Years After, Supertramp, and Blondie. Island Records, soon to succeed with its roster of eclectic bands like Traffic and Free, was on the floor below RAK, with other music publishers and managers scattered throughout.
Sometime in early 1967, Simon Napier-Bell appeared in the RAK offices to arrange for Mickie Most to produce the Yardbirds’ next album. “It was done at Jimmy’s insistence,” says Jim McCarty. Artistically, it was a preposterous pairing. Most was single-minded about making straight-ahead pop hits, while the Yardbirds continued to explore the esoteric fringes of rock ’n roll. Still, Most’s imprimatur might give the Yardbirds the commercial success they craved. It was during this visit that Napier-Bell was overheard whining to the producer about how managing the band was “a bloody nuisance,” especially that troublemaker, Jimmy Page.
Grant, who was sitting at an adjacent desk, replied, “Oh, I’d deal with Jimmy, no problem.”
That was all Napier-Bell needed to hear. He’d continue handling Jeff Beck’s business interests but took the opportunity to unload the Yardbirds onto RAK Management. Without any exchange of formalities aside from a handshake, Peter Grant became their manager.
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Grant and the Yardbirds seemed made for each other. The band inherited a no-nonsense manager who would protect their interests as well as their asses, while Grant wound up with a rock ’n roll cash cow. The Yardbirds had name recognition and enough bookings to last a lifetime, and with Mickie Most as their producer-in-waiting, the heavens seemed to be in alignment.
Peter Grant’s involvement paid off in a promising way. “The first thing we did with him was a tour of Australia,” Jimmy recalled, “and we found that suddenly there was some money being made after all this time.” A subsequent recording session with Mickie Most, on the other hand, proved disastrous.
The Yardbirds’ labels—Columbia in the UK and Epic in America—were clamoring for new product. It had been a long stretch since the band had had an impact on the charts. Their last significant single, “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” never cracked the Top 40. And with a series of tours approaching in the States and Europe, both record companies were eager to capitalize. They wanted hits this time, not progressive blues, not quirky instrumentation, no over, under, or sideways. Just down—down to business. With Mickie at the controls, that was more or less guaranteed.
The sessions were booked to begin on March 5, 1967, at Olympic Studios. The Yardbirds had originally planned to record at Abbey Road and had even laid down some preliminary tracks there at Christmas with Paul Samwell-Smith producing, but the studio was locked down in total isolation, with the Beatles recording what would eventually be Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As Jim McCarty noted, “The future was calling,” but the Yardbirds were mired in the here and now.
In fact, not even the Yardbirds. Mickie Most greeted the band with news that Chris Dreja and Jim McCarty could go home. He was replacing them with session men who were already in the studio. And he had a parcel of songs written especially for the band by Tin Pan Alley pros, the same characters who cranked ’em out for Herman’s Hermits, et al. It didn’t matter that they had no relationship to the Yardbirds’ sound; they were indisputable hits, the kind of homogenous fodder played over the PA system at the supermarket or the airport. As long as the Yardbirds recorded the four hit songs he’d prepared in advance—“Little Games,” a song that had come in over the transom; “Ha Ha Said the Clown,” which had been a hit for Manfred Mann; Harry Nilsson’s “Ten Little Indians”; and “Goodnight Sweet Josephine”—they could fill up the rest of the album with their own wanton stuff.
This was the way Mickie worked. He’d done the same thing a few months earlier for a solo album by Jeff Beck. He’d forced Beck to record two cringeworthy singles—“Hi Ho Silver Lining” and “Love Is Blue,” the latter a recent Eurovision standout—then turned the rest of the session over to the musicians, while he hopscotched between studios, finishing a Donovan album. Jeff, in the meantime, had put together an exciting band that included Ronnie Wood on bass, Nicky Hopkins on piano, Aynsley Dunbar on drums, and singer Rod Stewart, whose voice Mickie absolutely detested. They even managed to dust off “Beck’s Bolero,” the track with Jimmy and Keith Moon on it, for the finished product, entitled Truth, one of the most important albums of the late 1960s.
The Yardbirds weren’t as lucky. Mickie was out of touch with the direction rock ’n roll was taking, paying no attention to advances made by Cream, the Doors, the Byrds, Love, the Beatles’ Revolver, or the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Jefferson Airplane’s trailblazing Surrealistic Pillow, which entered the Top 10 the week before the Yardbirds’ session, made no apparent impression on him. Mickie was more focused on finding a follow-up to “These Boots Are Made for Walking” for Nancy Sinatra, his next project.
Jimmy especially was frustrated. For all his artistry, for all his invention, for all his technical expertise, he was basically taking orders from a hack producer again. “We were conned into those singles,” he said in retrospect. “Mickie Most couldn’t come to terms with albums. It was still only singles that were important to him.” The producer’s whole recording process was anathema to Jimmy. “It was just so bloody rushed,” he continued. “Everything was done in one take.” Jimmy remembered Mickie’s theory about guitar solos he’d imparted years before, on one of the sessions they’d done together. He’d told Jimmy, “They’re something you stick in the middle of the single, where there isn’t any vocal.” He didn’t believe in working on a track until everyone was satisfied they’d gotten it right. When Ian Stewart sat in with the Yardbirds, adding piano to several tracks, Mickie shouted, “Next!” after the first rough take of each. “On half the tracks we didn’t even hear the playbacks,” Jimmy complained.
Once Mickie was gone, however, the inmates took over the asylum. Keeping with the band’s tradition of creating weird sounds, Jimmy produced a violin bow and proceeded to draw it across his guitar strings. It was a technique suggested to him by David McCallum Sr., one of the classically oriented violin session players and father of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s Illya Kuryakin. Jimmy told McCallum he didn’t think using a bow would work. “The bridge of the guitar isn’t arched like it is on a violin or cello,” Jimmy insisted. But the more he thought about it, the more intrigued he became. Actually, Eddie Phillips, the Creation’s amphibious lead guitarist, had been bowing his guitar for years, creating wild phantasmagorias of sound, but Jimmy managed to tame the shrieky, shredding vibrato, giving it breadth and texture, as a counterpoint to the melodic arrangements. He first used it dramatically on “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor,” a number he’d cowritten with Jim McCarty that incorporated tape recordings of the Staten Island Ferry, locomotives, and fireworks; and “White Summer,” an instrumental based on the folk song “She Moves Through the Fair” that he’d retooled to showcase the technique’s disorienting but mesmerizing effect.
The Yardbirds exploited Mickie’s absence to record the dreamy, avant-garde track “Glimpses,” a feverish five-minute “tone poem,” as Jim McCarty describes it, “all in one key, that we experimented with, using old newsreels, children’s voices, chants and bits that Jimmy laid in over the top.” The track relied on tape effects that he’d been refining over the years to create overlapping layers of aural color and imagery. It was evidence that he was coming of age technically, embracing the full spectrum of elements that were coming into vogue and would take the recording process forward into the next decade.
Yet for all Jimmy’s efforts, the hard-edged groove was not enough to rescue the album Little Games from the compromises imposed by Mickie Most. The four fuddy-duddy songs he contributed disrupted any kind of rhythmic flow or coherent sound and left the band’s longtime fans scratching their heads. And the fans weren’t the only ones baffled by the result. “When I heard ‘Goodnight Sweet Josephine,’ ” Jeff Beck said, “I thought, Thank God I left the Yardbirds.”
Little Games was a clear indication that the Yardbirds were coming apart. They’d lost their spark, the impulse to evolve. As a band, it appeared as though they were resting on their laurels, no longer relying on their instincts so much as their name. The music had changed and they hadn’t changed with it. This reality began to sink in during a relentless schedule of tours. Throughout 1967, Peter Grant kept the band tethered to the road, with performances that stretched from Scandinavia to Japan and France, where the Yardbirds name still had plenty of cachet. In between, they detoured repeatedly to the States, whose thriving circuit of clubs, colleges, and ballrooms remained keen to book them, though no longer at the top of the bill. Everywhere they turned, newer, edgier, more innovative groups were making the kind of music that spoke to the times. It was hard for an old-line blues band to compete with the likes of Steppenwolf, Pink Floyd, the Rascals, The Who, Blood Sweat & Tears, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Big Brother & the Holding Company.
Back home in London, the calculus had changed. On November 25, 1966, while the Yardbirds were wrapping up another U.S. tour, a seismic shift was felt at the Bag O’Nails, a rock ’n roll hangout on Kingly Street in Soho. Terry Reid, a teenager with an explosive voice who sang with Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers and had toured the States in 1965 with the Yardbirds, Ike & Tina Turner, and the Rolling Stones, was at the bar drinking a Mateus and Coke when he noticed a procession of familiar faces trickling into the empty club. First Brian Jones, then Eric Clapton, John Mayall, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, Bill Wyman . . . What the fu . . . “Someone tapped me on the shoulder,” Reid recalls. “I turned around, and it was Jimi Hendrix, who I knew from the States. I asked him, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”
“Oh, man, I’m going to get up and play,” he said. “I’m pretty nervous, man. I haven’t really played in London before. Keep your fingers crossed.”
Word was out on the left-handed guitar phenom, and the rock cognoscenti kept streaming in. Eric Burdon, Denny Laine, Donovan, Ray Davies . . . Paul McCartney.
Reid noticed Jimi patching the club’s Hammond organ amp into a stack of Marshalls identical to another stack of Marshalls on the other side of the stage. Two Marshall stacks in a small club. Reid remembers thinking, “Holy shit! This is going to make an impression.”
A few minutes later Jimi ambled onstage while his sidemen, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, slipped behind their instruments. “Hello, everybody,” he whispered into the mic, grinning from ear to ear. “My name is Jimi, and I’d like to play a couple of things for you. The first tune I’m gonna play is a little thing I know is close to your heart. It’s number one on the charts at the moment, a lovely little rockin’ thing.”
Reid racked his brain: What was number one on the charts? And what might be close to his heart?
“It’s a little thing called . . . ‘Wild Thing,’ ” Jimi purred.
Wild Thing! Reid says, “It was the most hated song, and the Troggs were the most hated group.”
Before it had time to sink in, Jimi whipped his hand across the strings of his guitar and made a sound like whur-onnnnnnng, launching into a straight three-chord change, and the entire room went nuts. “All the guitar gods were sitting right in front of the stage, while Jimi tore through solo after solo, playing with his teeth and shit,” Reid recalls. “All the English guitar players saw the future right there. They thought they had it all sewn up, but you never knew what was lurking right around the corner.”
