Led Zeppelin, page 12
Jeff Beck’s reaction was indicative of his cronies’. “It was kind of hard to grapple with that fucker,” Beck recalled of his first encounter with Hendrix at the Bag O’Nails. “He hit me like an earthquake. I had to think long and hard about what I did next.”
Jimmy Page heard the story when he got back from the tour. So much incredible music seemed to be flourishing in London while he was off, plugging away on the road. The Yardbirds had been away from home for so long. It had been two years since they’d performed in the UK; the bottom seemed to have fallen out of their following. They’d become forgettable, passé—relics. To say Jimmy sleepwalked through the next year with the Yardbirds would be less than accurate. Playing gigs with the group still excited him. “What we had going, I was willing to do with them, whatever it was,” he volunteered. He did everything in his power to animate the tired, dispirited band, whose individual interests were fracturing. Jimmy could see that Keith Relf and Jim McCarty “just didn’t have their hearts in the music.” While on the road, they had dipped into LSD and become besotted with the flower power and spiritualism that imbued the San Francisco scene; privately, they’d been writing together, trippy, acoustic songs intended to take their careers in a softer, less progressive direction.
Jimmy had his suspicions about the whole West Coast phenomenon. He loved the Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield, who were blessed with formidable musicians, but too many of the emerging bands, he felt, weren’t up to the task. “I went to see Jefferson Airplane,” he recalled, “and they began their set with a bass solo which was absolutely phenomenal . . . and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is going to be just the end of the world when they start!’ And then they began playing, and I couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t keep time, and it was awful.” He had the same reaction to the Doors; they just didn’t swing.
Relf and McCarty were welcome to go that route, but Jimmy was having none of it. Chris Dreja, who was willing to stay the course, “just didn’t seem interested any longer.” He had fallen in love with an American woman he’d met and talked about the possibility of moving to the States to pursue a career in photography. Collectively, the Yardbirds had lost their mojo. It was hard for a gung-ho guitarist to motivate such a vagrant group of guys. The inertia was apparent every time the band reassembled onstage. “I used to say, ‘Come on, let’s make an effort,’ ” Jimmy recalled, “but it had all gone.”
There were still a number of obligations to fulfill—a last U.S. swing through the Midwest and California in June 1968, and an appearance on July 7 at Luton Technical College in the southeast of England. While in America, an offer of $5,000 had come in for the Yardbirds to play the Image Club, a glitzy rock ’n roll venue in Miami Beach. “That was a lot of money,” Peter Grant recalled. The band was split on whether or not to accept it, with Relf and McCarty against playing the gig, Page and Dreja in favor. Inevitably, the debate turned contentious. The upshot was harsher still—to disband, to officially dissolve the entity known as the Yardbirds, necessitating that Grant weigh in. “There was a big row in the Holiday Inn. And I drafted out a letter giving Jimmy the rights to the [Yardbirds] name, which they all signed.”
The end, when it came, seemed unworthy, lamentable. “I didn’t want the Yardbirds to break up,” Jimmy recalled, “but in the end it was too much of a headache.” He thought there was an outside chance that if the band made it clear they were going to carry on, perhaps Keith Relf and Jim McCarty would change their minds and come back. But he soon realized that was a pipe dream.
Perhaps owning the name would allow Jimmy to reform the band with a new, more dynamic cast. In the meantime, he swung back into the session-playing groove that summer, adding an effusion of fireworks to Joe Cocker’s trenchant interpretation of “With a Little Help from My Friends,” the Beatles song that launched his career worldwide, as well as a number of other sessions where he could leave his imprint on otherwise anemic tracks. But a return to session work wasn’t in Jimmy Page’s plans. He’d relished the experience of playing live with a band, the interaction with top-notch musicians, the roar of an audience, the pull of the road.
He explained as much to Peter Grant one afternoon in the summer of 1968, while they were sitting in a traffic jam on Shaftesbury Avenue. Grant was preparing to leave with Jeff Beck on a tour of the States with his band fronted by Rod Stewart to promote the Truth album.
“What are you going to do?” Grant asked Jimmy matter-of-factly, not wanting to press too hard. “Do you want to go back to sessions, or what?”
“I’ve got some ideas,” he answered cryptically.
So much was going through his head at the time. Rock ’n roll seemed to be changing faster than ever. Bands were louder, playing harder, getting weirder. Songs were no longer a compact three minutes; American FM radio had given rock artists license to experiment, to explore, by playing entire sides of albums uninterrupted. Inspiration could take a song anywhere you wanted it to go, make any sound you thought was appropriate—or inappropriate. Guitar solos could stretch on . . . indefinitely, if that’s what a song demanded. For an innovator like Jimmy Page, the potential was intoxicating.
The Yardbirds had hit a musical wall. They’d taken the British blues idiom as far as it could go. Even Cream, which had expanded electric blues with flights of improvisation, was on the verge of calling it a day, with Eric Clapton resolved to pursue his own new horizons. The vanguard was intent on pushing into the unknown.
“When the band folded, I wanted to try something new,” Jimmy said. “I just wanted to carry on rocking.”
More than rocking. He wanted to cut loose. “I certainly had a good idea of the sort of direction I wanted to go in,” he recalled. Ever since the wild session for “Beck’s Bolero,” he’d been nursing an idea for a new band—his band—a band that would give him the freedom to play at the top of his skills. “I knew exactly the style I was after and the sort of musicians I wanted to play with, the sort of powerhouse sound I was really going for.” He envisioned a trio—guitar, bass, and drums—“with the fourth member being the singer and using the voice as an instrument,” he said. “I knew the material I wanted to do as well. I had a game plan for it.”
Jimmy Page had more than enough ideas. It was high time, he decided, to put them into motion.
Chapter Five
THE BLACK COUNTRY
[1]
Voice. It had to start with the voice.
Ever since “Beck’s Bolero,” Jimmy Page had been obsessed with finding a voice—“a really fiery singer,” he said—that could interpret and project the sound that was in his head. The voice had to be powerful, gritty, defiant, a full-throttle juggernaut of fierce conviction able to ride over the roar of the instruments without conceding a decibel. And it had to command center stage. Voice, of course, wasn’t enough by itself. A lead singer also needed presence, a presence full of sexual intensity, to look and move the right way, attitude up the wazoo, the ability to convey everything that rock ’n roll entailed. Once Jimmy found the right voice, the rest, he was convinced, would fall into place.
Stevie Winwood epitomized that voice. It contained all the elements and had a center of gravity that drew everything toward it. He was Ray Charles but also Jerry Lee Lewis. A singer like that would allow Jimmy to delve into every style of music—blues, folk, funk, soul, something even harder and more extreme that was tugging at the margins. Winwood had been a free agent for what seemed like the blink of an eye. The Spencer Davis Group had disbanded in 1967, but by the time Jimmy got serious about putting a band together, only a year later, Stevie had segued into Traffic, where he was happily ensconced. The same went for Steve Marriott, who’d leapfrogged from Small Faces into a band with guitarist Peter Frampton they were calling Humble Pie.
Undaunted, Jimmy turned his attention to another voice that had captivated him. “I was mainly going after Terry Reid,” he said, “who had really impressed me during a Yardbirds tour when Jeff was with me in the band, and we toured with the Stones.” Reid, the opening act on the bill, had the right sound—a booming, soulful, gravel-voiced delivery that had earned him the nickname “Superlungs” and the respect of important allies like Cream and the Hollies. No less an admirer than Aretha Franklin had said, “There are only three things happening in London—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Terry Reid.”
Coincidentally, Reid was signed to RAK for production and management. Graham Nash had referred him to Mickie Most, who had recorded a single with Terry in April 1968 and was in the process of sorting through material for a follow-up album. In the meantime, Reid recalls, “I was doing bread-and-butter gigs up and down England and just waiting to finish up with Cream and go on this big American tour with the Stones.” Peter Grant told Reid that Jimmy wanted to talk to him and arranged a phone call between them.
“I’d love to give it a shot,” Reid told Jimmy after listening to his proposal, “but I’m just going to pop off and do this tour first.”
“No, that won’t work.” Jimmy was adamant. “I’m putting this group together now. Either do it or not.”
Reid was reluctant. He’d been scuffling on the road for nearly three years, since he was fifteen, and finally had the chance to score. A tour with the Stones and the opportunity to do an album with Mickie Most was too attractive to pass up. Still, he kept Jimmy dangling on the hook.
“If I do it,” he proposed, “you’ll have to call Keith [Richards] and tell him I’m not going on tour. And you know Keith—he’ll probably shoot you in the fucking leg.”
“Oh-ho, I’m not doing that!” Jimmy said, scratching Terry Reid off the list of prospective vocalists.
It was just as well, as far as Peter Grant was concerned. “Terry was controlled by his father, who was a very difficult man,” says Carole Brown, Grant’s assistant at the time. Reid’s father was a successful car salesman, a true wheeler-dealer who had stood up to Don Arden. “Both Peter and Mickie loathed dealing with him.”
Before he left with the Stones, Reid did a few small pickup gigs in the provinces, including a date with Tim Rose in Bolton, in the northwest of England. Opening that show was a group called the Band of Joy.
“The lead singer, Robert Plant, was singing along with all the guitar licks, and I thought, ‘I’ll bet someone like Pagey could keep him busy,’ ” Reid recalls. “The drummer, a rough lad, was just crazy. He was trying to pull somebody’s wife, and it all went wrong. A big fight broke out. The husband threw a chair, the drummer ducked, it went through a cantilever window, and the band had to play that gig five times to pay for it.”
The next time Reid was in the RAK office, he told Peter Grant, “I’ve got the rest of Page’s band for you.”
The trouble was, he had no contact information for either of the individuals. “A lot of people knew them,” Reid recalls, “but nobody could find them.”
Peter Grant sent a telegram to an address he had been given. It said:
priority—robert plant. tried phoning you several times. please call if you are interested in joining the yardbirds. peter grant.
“I thought someone was just taking the mick, so I ignored it.” Plant recalled.
Reid sat with Grant one long afternoon, while the manager made phone call after phone call trying to track down the musicians. A couple messages were left at Three Men in a Boat, one of Plant’s local pubs in the Midlands. As the day wore on, Reid excused himself to get a train to Cambridge. He left RAK’s office building, crossed Oxford Street, and practically walked right into Robert Plant. He’d been in London with a buddy, cutting a demo for a manager named Tony Secunda, whose clients included the Moody Blues and the Move. “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about,” Reid said. “Let’s go and have a beer.”
The next day, Reid arranged with Plant to speak with Peter Grant, then put in a call to Jimmy Page to give him an update.
“What does the singer look like?” Jimmy asked.
Reid let out a scurrilous laugh. “He looks a fuckin’ sight better than you do.”
Jimmy hung up on him.
Reid also took it upon himself to speak to the drummer. “Jim’s putting this band together, and I think you and Robert would be great for it.”
“If you’re joking,” John Bonham told him, “I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”
Jimmy wanted to check out the singer as soon as possible. He called Chris Dreja, who was still mulling whether or not to play bass in the new band, and told him about this discovery.
“I went up to Birmingham with Peter and Jimmy to have a look at Robert Plant,” Dreja recalled. On July 20, 1968, Plant was performing at a teachers’ training college in Walsall, in the West Midlands, with a rather unimpressive group called Obs-Tweedle. The audience was practically nonexistent, just a handful of kids who were already pretty tanked up on beer, hardly paying attention to the band. Jimmy wasn’t wild about the music, either. “The group was doing all of those semi-obscure West Coast kind of numbers,” he said, things by Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, and Buffalo Springfield. “The band overplayed, and there was a lot of hubbub and flash.” But . . . the singer! It was impossible to take your eyes off him. He was tall and lanky with skintight jeans and a resplendent halo of hair, which he kept sweeping off his face like a Hollywood ingenue. He moved like an ingenue, too. “He had a distinctive sexual quality,” as Jimmy remembered it, almost feline, androgynous in his gestures but in total command of the stage. And . . . the voice. At times it sounded like an unrefined Stevie Winwood, earthy and uninhibited, but it also soared into a “primeval wail,” which could be unnerving, coming out of the blue as it did. It was the whole package, but it worried Jimmy. “His voice,” he said, “was too great to be undiscovered.” What was he doing in this godforsaken backwater? Why hadn’t he caught on with a top band by now? “I immediately thought there must be something wrong with him personality-wise, or that he had to be impossible to work with.”
Afterward, when they were finally introduced, Jimmy explained the seeds of his new venture, and Plant gave Jimmy a demo he’d done with the Band of Joy—three songs: “Hey Joe,” “For What It’s Worth,” and a Cyril Davies number Robert had rewritten as “Adriatic Seaview”—that they’d recorded at IBC Studios in 1967. “We did the whole thing in just a half an hour,” recalls Kevyn Gammond, who played soaring Hubert Sumlin–style solos on the session. “The engineer just put mics up and said, ‘Okay, play your songs,’ so they all went down in one take.”
That session might have been slapped together, but the result was as uncompromising as anything Led Zeppelin ever recorded. The brutality of the attack was unmistakable. Robert’s delivery was genuinely stirring; it wrung all the tension and excitement out of the material. John Bonham’s adrenaline-fueled drumming was like the finale at the end of a fireworks display; it made the earth move. It sounded like no one else. Listening to the scratchy acetate, Jimmy heard the future. This was close to the sound he’d been dreaming about.
Jimmy admitted to Robert that he’d already made a pitch to Terry Reid, whom Robert admired, but said, “You know, I think we should get together. If you’re interested, come down and spend some time at my place. We’ll go through some sounds and records, see if we’ve got the same idea, if we’re sympathetic, and take it from there.” Jimmy wanted to be sure the chemistry was right. “It was obvious he could sing and had a lot of enthusiasm,” he recalled, “but I wasn’t sure about his potential as a frontman.” Jimmy invited Plant to the house he’d bought in Pangbourne, just west of Reading. “Why don’t you bring some of your favorite records down?” he said.
Dutifully, Robert went through his precious stack of records and chose a selection to play for Jimmy Page: “Joan Baez’s ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’ and ‘Farewell, Angelina,’ Howlin’ Wolf’s rocking chair album, 5000 Spirits by the Incredible String Band,” he recalled. “And my gatefold Robert Johnson album on Philips, which I bought while I was working at Woolworth’s. That was the jewel in the crown.” He stuffed them into a satchel and hopped an express train from Birmingham to Reading, where he connected to a commuter train to cover the remaining short distance to Pangbourne.
Jimmy, now twenty-four, lived just down the hill from the station in a 150-year-old Victorian boathouse plunked behind a pub called the Swan. “It’s very big, with six bedrooms,” he said by way of description. “It has three stories and there are boats downstairs.” The interior was decorated with an array of posh art deco and art nouveau artifacts he’d collected as his fortunes rose, along with paintings, books, model trains, and a tank full of tropical fish. The home’s focal point was a big stained-glass window that overlooked the River Thames. This was a big change from the cell-like childhood bedroom he’d vacated just two years earlier.
Plant was duly impressed. He was only nineteen, he was broke, living in a spare room above a pub in Wolverhampton, at a standstill career-wise, and this place had all the trappings of rock ’n roll success. Also in residence was a “quite sassy American girlfriend” who took his breath away. Jimmy’s hi-fi equipment alone was a pretty swank affair—a mammoth Fisher amplifier with Tannoy speakers, several reel-to-reel tape decks, the kind of setup one expected to see in a full-service recording studio.
It took Jimmy and Robert a while to get comfortable. They were so different in their backgrounds and experience. Robert was unsophisticated, humbled, even awed by his initial brush with the more cosmopolitan, well-traveled, super-successful Jimmy Page. “The way he carried himself was far more cerebral than anything I’d come across before,” Robert admitted.
It was music that finally broke the ice. They talked into the night about Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Buddy, and Eddie, as well as Sonny Boy Williamson, Johnny Burnette, Ben E. King, Otis Clay, and Solomon Burke, whose songs rolled off their tongues. “I looked through his records one day while he was out, and I pulled out a pile to play,” Robert recalled. “Somehow or other, they happened to be the same ones that he was going to play when he got back, to play to me to see whether I liked them.” Jimmy laid on a full banquet: Muddy Waters’s “You Shook Me”; “If I Had a Ribbon Bow,” one of Fairport Convention’s masterpieces; “She Said Yeah” by Larry Williams; “Justine” by Don and Dewey; and their mutual pick, “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.” It was clear that they were on the same wavelength.
