Led Zeppelin, page 17
It took some time before Robert cut loose. His singing was a bit tentative during the first day or two. “I was a little bit intimidated by it all,” he acknowledged some time later. “It was like, ‘Do I really belong here?’ ” He sensed he was trying too hard to live up to Jimmy Page’s expectations. He was self-conscious about his voice but also unapologetic. In time, he began to relax, to settle in and become more expressive as the music they were making blossomed and impressed on playback. Robert was only twenty, but he’d studied the blues masters, and his voice took on some of their timbre, evoking the 1950s, the 1940s, and before. Jimmy was certainly satisfied. “[Robert] was performing in a very inspired way,” he thought, “like everyone else in the band.”
“Those guys fed off each other,” Glyn Johns recalls. “They just tore through the set of songs, one right after the other. It was so exciting. I’d never heard a band play that way before.”
They recorded the entire album in thirty-six hours flat, an astonishing pace, even more astonishing given how thorough they were. Everyone was satisfied with the outcome. It was tight, aggressive, sensual, dramatic, and powerful, encompassing everything they’d set out to achieve. The album had a fresh sound, but it was more than that. It claimed new musical territory by narrowing the distance between genres, giving the songs a destabilizing spin, and indicating a direction that rock ’n roll was moving toward.
* * *
• • •
Peter Grant was determined to maintain the band’s energy. To keep them sharp and focused, he booked a short UK tour while he scouted local record companies in hopes of securing a label deal. He was convinced that audiences were eager to embrace these new Yardbirds and that the session tapes provided a sure sales vehicle. As it turned out, he was wrong on both counts.
Only a few dozen people turned up to their first gig at Newcastle’s Mayfair Ballroom on October 4, 1968, just days after the recording session was finished. Those who showed up expressed a common reaction. These aren’t the Yardbirds. The same occurred at the Marquee in London, where they played two weeks later to a half-empty club. No Keith Relf. No “Over Under Sideways Down.” Ed Bicknell happened to be in Peter Grant’s office while the manager was on the phone, trying to lure booking agents to the Marquee so they could see the New Yardbirds, as the band was now billing itself. “I could overhear the response, which was uniformly, ‘Fuck off!’ ” Bicknell attended the show, which he said was “terribly exciting but staggeringly loud—the walls in the fucking place were shaking.” But the crowd consisted of old Yardbirds fans who expected something different, familiar. Even Bicknell thought the name New Yardbirds “sounded a bit tacky.”
A legal snafu forced the issue. A few days later, Grant received a letter from Chris Dreja’s lawyer warning them to cease and desist using the Yardbirds name. According to the document, the agreement giving Jimmy the right to use it extended only through the dates in Scandinavia, which had been booked before the original Yardbirds disbanded. Jimmy, it turned out, didn’t own the name; he only had the right to use it for the duration of that tour.
That was okay with the guys. They’d never been fond of performing as the Yardbirds. They had their own distinctive identity; their music, after all, had little to do with the Yardbirds. A different name would suit them just fine. Jimmy suggested a few feeble alternatives, like “the Mad Dogs” or “the Whoopie Cushion.” Peter reminded him about the business while they were recording “Beck’s Bolero”—how Keith Moon thought a group like theirs would go down like a lead zeppelin. Now, there was a good name, he said, and Jimmy agreed. Lead Zeppelin. But Grant didn’t want any confusion with the pronunciation of lead, as in “You lead, I’ll follow.” So he got rid of the a. “I was doodling in the office, and it just looked better,” he said. Led Zeppelin. It was unconventional, cheeky; it had front.
Led Zeppelin—exactly.
A new name, however, wasn’t a cure for other woes. No matter what they were called, record companies weren’t biting. Peter Grant had offered the band to Louie Benjamin, the managing director of Pye Records. “I asked for—the figure was £17,500,” Grant recalled, “and he said, ‘You’ve got to be joking.’ ” It wasn’t deemed a good fit for the Polygram roster either. Chris Blackwell, who owned Island Records, was prepared to make an offer. Island had space on the floor below the RAK offices, and one afternoon Peter previewed the album for Chris. “I really liked what I heard,” he recalled. Blackwell offered Grant $25,000 per album, a respectable amount, for the world rights excluding the U.S. and Canada, and they shook hands on it, just as Peter had done with Glyn Johns. But U.S. and Canadian rights were the mother lode, where Led Zeppelin stood to cash in—and where Grant was convinced their future lay.
His North American strategy was prompted by a call from Mo Ostin, the head of Warner Bros. Records in Los Angeles. Ostin had heard from Andy “Wipeout” Wickham, a London colleague, that Jimmy Page was forming a new group. All Ostin knew was that Jimmy was a legendary studio guitar player and former member of the Yardbirds—but that was enough to warrant a worldwide deal. “I reached out to the manager, Peter Grant, and told him I wanted to sign them,” Ostin recalled.
With tapes in hand, Peter and Jimmy flew to Los Angeles the last week in November 1968, hoping to score a long-term contract, ignoring the fact that Peter already had a handshake deal with Chris Blackwell. They met Ostin for lunch in a booth at Martoni’s, a record-industry hangout in the shadow of the Capitol Records Tower, where they hammered out terms agreeable to both parties. Everyone was happy and left the restaurant with the understanding that Led Zeppelin was a Warner Bros. Records artist. According to Ostin, “We were in the process of drafting contracts, and somehow [Jerry] Wexler got wind of the group through his lawyer, Stevens Weiss . . . and he convinced Jerry to go after the group.”
Wexler was the master musical partner at Atlantic Records, where Cream had enjoyed their short-lived success. Coincidentally, he was preparing to cut an album with Dusty Springfield in Memphis and was sifting through appropriate material for her. “Twice a week, I would drive out to Jerry’s house in Great Neck, where there was peace and quiet, and we would go through songs with Dusty,” recalls Jerry Greenberg, who at the time headed Atlantic’s promotion department. “Dusty told him that John Paul Jones, her all-time favorite session player, was forming a band with Jimmy Page, and I saw the lightbulb go off in Jerry’s head.”
He knew that artists were often tuned in to something long before word filtered into the corporate suite. He also remembered meeting Jimmy with Bert Berns and had been impressed with the young guitarist’s versatility. Wexler immediately picked up the phone and called Stevens Weiss, who also represented the Young Rascals, Vanilla Fudge, and Dusty and was handling Peter Grant’s artists in the States. “I want this band right now,” Wexler told him. “I don’t even have to hear a note of music.”
Coincidence was on Atlantic’s side. “We arrived on the scene just the right time in America, as Cream had disbanded and Hendrix was into other things,” Jimmy concluded. “So many of the good American groups were moving towards softer sounds, which made our heavy rock approach more dramatic. Atlantic Records were looking for a new heavy rock group to boost, and we were it.”
His and Grant’s subsequent trip to New York coincided with a run on the charts of some of the most celebrated and transformative music in rock ’n roll history. Over the summer of 1968, a series of groundbreaking new albums had been released: Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends, Wheels of Fire by Cream, Otis Redding’s The Dock of the Bay, the Band’s Music from Big Pink, Cheap Thrills by Big Brother & the Holding Company, the Small Faces’ Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, the Steve Miller Band’s Sailor, Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, eponymous debuts by Traffic and Spirit, and Truth by the Jeff Beck Band. There was also plenty of buzz in the air about the imminent release of the new double Beatles album, the Stones’ Beggars Banquet, the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society, and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.
Atlantic Records was keen to expand its reputation as the foremost mainstream R&B label into the domain of white rock ’n roll, based on the company’s recent success with acts like Buffalo Springfield, Cream, the Rascals, Vanilla Fudge, Iron Butterfly, and the Bee Gees. “The blinking warning light was on about R&B—it was coming to the end of its useful life at that point,” says Phil Carson, Atlantic’s UK label manager. “They were looking more seriously at British rock bands.” It stands to reason that for Jerry Wexler, who had produced “Respect,” Aretha Franklin’s masterpiece, as well as most of Wilson Pickett’s hits and key records for Solomon Burke, King Curtis, Esther Phillips, and the Drifters, acquiring a band like Led Zeppelin was a financial distraction. Musically, Wexler’s heart wasn’t in it, but he knew not to look a potential windfall in the mouth. He signed acts according to a philosophy he lived by: “Make sure a band has at least one virtuoso musician in it, because virtuosos don’t play with good musicians, they only play with great musicians.” Eric Clapton was a virtuoso, so were Yes’s Chris Squire and Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills. Wexler put Jimmy Page in the same exalted company.
His meeting with Peter was nothing more than a formality. Wexler made him a sizable offer (more sizable than Mo Ostin’s) on the spot for Led Zeppelin “without knowing anything about their actual prospects,” he said—an understatement, considering he’d never seen them perform or heard a note of their music. “We signed on the strength of Jimmy’s name largely,” Peter Grant recalled. The deal Wexler proposed would give the band “a $75,000 advance for the first year and four one-year options.” With production costs and incentives added, it was worth about $220,000 overall, an eye-popping sum in 1968.
Jimmy threw a potential monkey wrench into the proceedings. If they were going to sign with the label, he wanted to be on Atlantic, not its sister label, Atco. Atco had been created to give the company a pop image at radio stations, to segregate acts like Bobby Darin, Sonny & Cher, and even Cream from Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, and Solomon Burke. So far, Atco was where all of Atlantic’s white groups, aside from the Young Rascals, resided. For Jimmy, it was all about cachet—being the first white UK act on the prestigious red-and-black R&B label. He also demanded complete control of all artistic decisions for Led Zeppelin, including all phases of production, the album cover design, advertising, and image, as well as ownership of the master tapes. He and Peter would also retain all publishing rights to the material under an umbrella company they created called Superhype Music. “And no soundtracks,” Grant chipped in at the last minute. “Atlantic couldn’t have the rights to any Zeppelin film soundtrack.” Incredibly, the record company agreed to everything they asked for.
A few days later, Grant’s lawyer, Steve Weiss, called Jerry Wexler with a mouthwatering proposition. For a paltry $35,000 more, Atlantic could acquire world rights to Led Zeppelin, the rights beyond the U.S. and Canadian territories specified in the original deal. Grant’s pact with Island and Chris Blackwell wasn’t worth the pound of flesh they’d shaken hands with. Wexler, to his credit, took some time to think it over. It would bring Atlantic’s initial stake in the group to $110,000, not an inconsiderable sum in 1968. To offset some of the cost, he asked Polydor, Atlantic’s UK partner, to chip in $20,000 for the British rights, but got turned down flat. So for $35,000 Atlantic underwrote a deal that would ultimately bring a nine-figure return on its original investment.
Feeling giddy and puffed up with triumph, Peter Grant and Steve Weiss made a crosstown appointment with Clive Davis, the newly appointed president of Columbia Records, and his colleague Dick Asher, who oversaw Columbia’s Epic label. Was this a courtesy call—or something more? The Yardbirds, after all, had been signed to Epic in the States. So was Jeff Beck, whose album was firing on all cylinders, and Terry Reid, still under contract to RAK. Word was all over the street about Jimmy Page’s new band. It seemed only likely that it, too, would land at Columbia.
“Our contracts specified that we had not only group but individual recording rights, in case the group broke up,” Dick Asher recalled. “When we heard that the Yardbirds had split up and Jimmy Page had formed Led Zeppelin, we naturally assumed the rights to Page would go automatically to Columbia.”
For Jimmy, signing with either label had never been in the cards. He still had a bad taste in his mouth about a live recording Epic had made with the Yardbirds at the run-down Anderson Theater in New York, their last-ever American gig. Despite the shabby venue, it had been an electrifying performance; the band put everything they had into it for posterity. But Jimmy could tell that “the Epic sound team had no idea how to record us.” He was disgusted by their inadequate setup. “They just draped a few mics around. It was pathetic.” Fortunately, he’d not been a signatory to the Yardbirds’ original contract with Columbia or Epic. By all accounts, he was a free agent.
Peter rather cavalierly dropped that information on Clive Davis, along with the news that he’d already signed Led Zeppelin to Atlantic. “I was surprised, even stunned,” Davis recalls. “I really liked the Yardbirds and was proud of our relationship.” He took it as a slap in the face.
Peter was no longer concerned about whom he alienated, no matter how influential or powerful. He was confident that Led Zeppelin was something extraordinary, the supergroup of supergroups, and they deserved—he demanded—respect. Nothing was going to stand in their way. That meant deploying an extravagance of front, a powerful strain of front that combined attitude with coercion when necessary. Grant was a naturally intimidating man, because of both his size and the strong-arm tactics he’d developed as a bouncer and Don Arden’s enforcer. And he was fearless. He had no problem getting in someone’s face. “If I’m out at a concert and somebody is gonna do something that’s snide to one of my artists,” he said, “I’ll fucking tread on ’em without thinking about it.”
Peter didn’t suffer fools gladly. He had a ferocious stare that could freeze someone in place and a backhand able to send them into orbit. “He didn’t take shit from anybody,” says Phil Carlo, a roadie for Led Zeppelin and later Bad Company, “and you sure didn’t want to fuck with him.” On the other hand, he was charming, an amusing raconteur, and extremely generous—he’d open his wallet for anyone who needed a handout. But that could turn in the blink of an eye. “He was a lovely guy—but absolutely terrifying,” says Michael Des Barres, who encountered him often, much later, during the Swan Song years. In the early days, Atlantic’s Phil Carson tended to tread lightly around him. “There was always an underlying tension that he could break your arm if he wanted to—and people knew that when they talked to him.” Grant knew from experience that the rock ’n roll business had its share of shady characters—grifters, hangers-on, scoundrels, and worse. From the outset, he began to assemble a team to protect his interests and safeguard his band. “If there were problems that needed sorting out, he’d have people who would sort them.”
Their expertise would set an uncompromising tone.
[3]
Peter Grant—or G, as the band now called him—moved quickly to put key pieces into place, a colorful cast of characters whose unorthodox styles would lend a tough-guy approach to the group’s management from then on.
While still in New York, he cemented a partnership with Steve Weiss, the lawyer who had supervised the Atlantic Records deal. Weiss had represented mostly show-business clients in the conservative Madison Avenue firm Steingarten Wideen & Weiss. His top priority in the early sixties was TV talk-show host Jack Paar, but as the culture skewed younger, he refocused his attention solely on pop and rock music clients. Almost overnight, Weiss undertook a makeover of his client list and his image. He grew his hair long and forswore a closetful of Hardy Amies suits for a Carnaby Street wardrobe—still impeccably dressed but in wide-lapel sports coats worn over flowered shirts and ironed bell-bottom jeans. He ditched his late-model Cadillac for a 1957 burgundy-and-tan Rolls-Royce driven by a chauffeur, William, who wore either burgundy or tan uniforms to match the car’s finish. Even Jack Paar was sidelined in favor of Herman’s Hermits, the Young Rascals, the Yardbirds, Vanilla Fudge, and a handful of similar artists on their way up the charts.
How was Steve Weiss able to move into music so effortlessly? Many attributed it to his business relationship with Vanilla Fudge’s manager, Phil Basile, and his entourage. “Phil was a mob guy,” says Carmine Appice, Fudge’s indefatigable drummer. “His crew was the one in the movie Goodfellas. Henry Hill used to come to my house to sell me equipment—Revox tape recorders, color portable TVs, fur coats. ‘Carmine, some stuff fell off a truck.’ They all worked for Phil—and so did Steve Weiss.”
Appice recalls a sit-down with Basile, Weiss, and a few mob heavies who were moving in for a percentage of the bands Steve represented. “They were demanding a ten-percent taste, but somehow they whittled it down to a reasonable one and a half percent, and we had to play for nothing in a big club the mob owned to make up for the difference. Phil and Steve somehow convinced them there was more money to be made going after record companies than bands.”
Their deals with bands adhered to a formula—Basile got 25 percent and Weiss took another 5 percent. For Led Zeppelin, Steve Weiss negotiated a similar deal giving him 5 percent across the board, publishing included, with Peter Grant taking 25 percent. Weiss’s fee bought more than legal advice. An incident in New York put his leverage in perspective. “During a tour in 1967, the Yardbirds were staying at a hotel in Manhattan, with all of the gear in a truck parked outside,” recalls Henry Smith, their roadie at the time and later for Led Zeppelin. “When I woke up the next morning, the truck was gone. Man, I was panicked and called Steve Weiss’s office. An hour later, the truck miraculously reappeared with all the gear, nothing missing.”
