Led Zeppelin, page 19
“Bonzo and I looked at each other during the set and thought, ‘Christ, we’ve got something,’ ” Robert recalled. “That was the first time we realized Led Zeppelin might mean something.”
They weren’t alone. The San Francisco Examiner, reviewing the show, forgave the band for being “awfully loud” and praised it as “as impressive a new British rock group as we’ve ever heard.” Led Zeppelin got similar enthusiastic press bumps in Boston, New York, and Chicago, where “the audience,” according to the Chicago Tribune, “absolutely refused to let the four go” at the end of the show, cheering until they reappeared for encores.
The results were a reassuring start. They accomplished much of what they’d set out to do in the United States. They had come a long way in five short months since their genesis as the New Yardbirds in a fusty Chinatown basement. As Led Zeppelin, they’d established themselves as one of the most promising new groups to emerge in 1969 and showed they could hold their own against the American rock ’n roll juggernaut. But they were heading home to a country that had barely taken notice. Their prospects were depressing—a schedule of less-than-impressive one-nighters at regional halls, remote clubs, even a handful of pubs. With no UK album due out until the middle of March, it seemed as if they were starting from scratch.
[2]
“It was just a joke in England,” said Jimmy Page.
Any momentum Led Zeppelin had gained in the States came to a grinding halt once they touched down at Heathrow. Without a record or an effusion of press, they were just another unknown band trying to fight through the weeds. They were still flying high from news that their album had edged into Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, debuting at ninety and gradually making its way north. But even its release in the States, on January 12, 1969, hadn’t been without mishaps.
The cover posed problems from the start. The band had a built-in, identifiable image in the zeppelin, but applying it raised issues. The designer, George Hardie, who had cut his teeth on Jeff Beck’s Truth album, mocked up a sleeve depicting a zeppelin emerging from an impressionistic motif of clouds and waves. It wasn’t at all what Jimmy had in mind. Instead, he showed Hardie a photograph of the 1937 explosion of the Hindenburg over a naval station in New Jersey—going down like a lead zeppelin, as Keith Moon had originally envisioned it—and asked him to duplicate it as an illustration. That seemed to everyone like an ideal alternative—that is, until word filtered back to Steve Weiss’s office that descendants of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the German industrialist who manufactured the airship, objected to use of the family name. Calling yourself Led Zeppelin was one thing; depicting the Hindenburg disaster only added insult to injury. Jimmy and Peter were having none of it, and Weiss buried the complaint, believing, rightly or wrongly, there was no merit to it.
The album’s production credit . . . not as easy to resolve. Effectively, Glyn Johns was the producer. He and Peter Grant had negotiated a deal and shaken on it in good faith. Both men were satisfied with the terms, which were pretty standard as far as new bands went. True to his word, Glyn rode herd throughout the session, engineering the board, passing judgment on the band’s performance, and delivering the final mix—a mix that he says now, looking back over an extraordinary career, “was one of the best sounding records I’ve ever made.” He wasn’t just proud of the production, he believed it would be instrumental in breaking the band. As the album was being pressed, however, Jimmy had a change of heart.
“I put this band together,” he reckoned. “I brought them in and directed the whole recording process, I got my own guitar sound.” He ordered Grant to renegotiate with Johns.
“Jimmy decided you didn’t produce it—he did,” Peter told Glyn during a subsequent phone call. As it stood now, he’d get a flat fee for his work as the engineer, but the producer’s royalty they’d agreed on was out of the question. In fact, any royalty was out of the question. Johns felt blindsided; he was livid.
“I called Grant a cunt,” he recalls, “and said, ‘Don’t ever fucking ring me again.’ ”
He had good reason to be furious. The album, released in the States on January 12, in the middle of the tour, exceeded all expectations. Johns had known, even when they recorded the album four months earlier, they’d made a record that was “an artistic breakthrough.” Its brilliance lay in the balance between the spontaneous interplay of the ensemble and its overall force. Listening to it was thrilling—and challenging. Some songs had a seductive, engaging allure, while others intended to disturb. What sounded like simple mood changes from track to track altered the character of the record drastically, interweaving acoustic-based textures with hard-charging arrangements that blended blues with soul and progressive rock. It was all there, right in the grooves.
The excitement was evident from the top of Led Zeppelin. “Good Times, Bad Times” was the kind of song that announced to an unsuspecting listener that this band intended to burn down the house. Everything they’d rehearsed seemed to come together in a blaze of efficiency. John Paul plunked himself down behind the Hammond B-3 and composed the opening riff right there in the studio. “The most stunning thing about that track, of course, is Bonzo’s amazing kick drum,” Jimmy concluded. “I think everyone was laying bets that Bonzo was using two bass drums, but he only had one.”
He always threatened to add a second. “He did in fact bring in a double bass drum for rehearsal, and we played a couple songs with it,” John Paul recalled, “but then we hid it when he went for lunch. When he came back, it was gone.”
Nevertheless, it sounded as though the guy had five feet working at the same time. Carmine Appice, who watched Bonzo perform the song any number of times, says, “His right foot repeated sixteenth-note triplets with the first triplet left out, putting a backbeat in it, which nobody was doing in those days.”
Those palpitations created a rhythmic force field with Jimmy’s guitar. For the solo, his Telecaster was wired into an organ’s Leslie speaker, whose baffles gave it a fluttery effect, while John Paul’s bass functioned as a counterweight that pulled at the center like an undertow. And Robert’s voice—it sounded otherworldly, like it was coming out of a pneumatic compressor. A lot of that was due to what session engineers called leakage. Studio A at Olympic was set up for old-style recording, “a big live room” with only a few screens to separate the musicians and the amps. “Robert’s voice was extremely powerful,” Jimmy said, “and as a result, would [bleed into] some of the other tracks” during the process. Jimmy was loath to clean it up, however, feeling it would destroy the ambience.
If one were bracing for a killer follow-up, something that drew and expanded on the power of the opening number, the transition was unsettling. Jimmy’s fetching fingerpicking intro to “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” on a Gibson J-200 he had borrowed from Big Jim Sullivan suggested a dip into the homespun folk heritage embraced by Pentangle or Fairport Convention. After all, Joan Baez practically owned the song, delivering it in straightforward operatic fashion on her classic In Concert album, which held pride of place in every college student’s record collection. Robert approached the song as if he were dead serious about honoring her version—at least through the first verse, at which point the band’s scurrilous intentions took over.
Between stanzas, the arrangement fairly exploded in an outburst that stripped away the folksy pretensions to reveal an unhinged instrumental attack—not so much light and shade as fire and brimstone. Robert mowed right over the lyrics, soaring into octaves Joan Baez only dreamed about. His rip-snorting vocal gave the band a sound that struck a raw emotional chord.
The way to underscore their virtuosity was to reinterpret a textbook blues song and to knock it sideways. It seemed like a no-brainer to reimagine “You Shook Me.” It was a Willie Dixon song they’d taken off a Muddy Waters Chess EP that Jimmy had dissected note for note in his adolescence. In a larger sense, it was a showstopper for a singer. Robert’s delivery injected robust sexual overtones, which gave extra pull to the already steamy interplay with Jimmy’s tart little fills.
John Paul Jones admitted this was one area in which he felt out of his depth. “I wasn’t used to this style of playing urban blues,” he said. “However, Bonzo and I quickly developed a way of playing that allowed us all sorts of improvisational freedom.”
Jimmy came up with a dramatic idea for a way to end the song. He remembered an effect he’d convinced Mickie Most to use on the Yardbirds’ recording of “Ten Little Indians.” It involved turning the tape over and employing echo, then turning it over yet again to make the track sound like it was going backward. He called it backward echo and instructed Glyn Johns to add it to the mix.
“Jimmy, it can’t be done,” Johns supposedly responded. Jimmy insisted, and they argued back and forth until he says he screamed, “Push the bloody faders up!” at which point the effect worked perfectly. Whether that version of the facts is accurate or further evidence by Jimmy to support his grab of a producer’s credit, the effect did justice to the stylish ending.
“Dazed and Confused” was an adaptation of the Jake Holmes song, which Jimmy had heard him sing in New York during a 1967 Yardbirds tour. Jim McCarty recalled their attraction to it for “the way the lyrics hung in isolation above the music” and the “wide open spaces in which Jimmy could frolic,” both of which were underscored in Led Zeppelin’s interpretation. The song was a free-for-all as far as soloing went. “It was played live in the studio with cues and nods,” Jimmy recalled, so that each member of the group got a chance to step out and shine. There were few sounds more memorable than John Paul’s walking bass that lumbered along ominously like Lenny in Of Mice and Men, with the guitar doubling an octave above it. The accompanying beat Bonzo provided was a feat of tremendous power. And Jimmy contributed “everything but the kitchen sink,” as he recalled it—a tone bender for distortion, a wah-wah pedal, and his formidable violin bow, which he sawed across the strings to create “an orchestra of otherworldly textures and sonic dread.”
The extended church-organ intro Jonesy played on “Your Time Is Gonna Come”—two Hammond-100 tracks with a layer of vibrato—deceptively gilded the surface of the bitter, mean-spirited lyric that Robert spat out, the accusation and reprisal of a scorned lover. Judged against “Good Times, Bad Times” and “Communication Breakdown,” the song didn’t substitute much in the way of intensity for what it lacked in imagination and charm. Robert’s delivery was almost flat, too self-conscious, and it paled against the more delicious bonbons that made side 1 such an irresistible gift. The taunting refrain, nothing more than a vamping of the title, was one of the few times throughout Led Zeppelin’s career that the band provided its own background vocals. “The problem was singing them,” Jonesy noted, “because neither Jimmy nor I would consider ourselves singers.”
“Black Mountain Side,” an acoustic guitar showpiece of Jimmy’s, provided a kinder, gentler interlude to the potency of heavier rockers. The guitar’s steely arpeggios sounded elaborate; his playing seemed effortless, if a bit breathless. The song galloped along as if there were a posse on Jimmy’s tail. Be that as it may, he did his best Bert Jansch–John Fahey imitation, weaving themes of traditional folk, bluegrass, elements of raga, and blues in an expansive open-D tuning—the same tuning he’d used on “White Summer” with the Yardbirds—accompanied by an Indian tabla, a pair of small hand drums that sufficed for percussion. “Black Mountain Side” was a nifty little rest stop along the way, but it basically set the table for one of the band’s most durable anthems.
“The idea of ‘Communication Breakdown,’ ” according to Jimmy, “was to have a really raw, hard-hitting number.” He’d played on dozens of explosive rave-ups during his stint with the Yardbirds, but nothing that came before had alluded to this kind of power. It was physical, enormous. It blasted the album wide open.
The performance, more than anything, defined the sound of Led Zeppelin—rip-roaring, propulsive, feral, uncompromising. It whiplashed from one chord to another, the drums supplying a merciless tommy-gun effect. The musicians sounded as if they weren’t in control of their instruments—a supernatural force had taken over and wired them directly into an atom smasher. The wanton playing unleashed a swivel-eyed Robert Plant. His singing, or loose approximation thereof, was downright frightening. “I was caught up with the power and excitement of it,” he said. “I was floundering in the middle of a very open, free-form extended rock ’n roll thing.” He fairly screamed the lyrics, as if he were tied to the stake with flames licking the soles of his feet. By the time he howled the last line of the chorus—“Having a nervous breakdown / drive me insane”—a listener was pretty much nodding in sympathy.
More than anything, “Communication Breakdown” foreshadowed the dawn of heavy metal. It’s the template for everything that came after in the genre, from Black Sabbath to Iron Maiden to Metallica to Mötley Crüe. Heavy metal. William Burroughs first used the expression to identify the junkies in his apocalyptic 1961 novel The Soft Machine, and in 1968 Steppenwolf gave it a musical shout-out in “Born to Be Wild.” Jimmy Page considered heavy metal an epithet; he hated to be identified with it. While he conceded that Led Zeppelin was “basically a hard rock group,” he called heavy metal a “bastard term” and said, “I can’t relate that to us because the thing that comes to mind when people say ‘heavy metal’ is riff-bashing,” which he refused to acknowledge as a tendency of Led Zeppelin.
Nevertheless, the riff-bashing in “Communication Breakdown”—and again in “How Many More Times”—injected a sustained burst of energy that critic Lester Bangs later described as a “bone-rattling sound,” the stimulus that drove a listener to thrash back and forth to the beat.
The album’s final two songs were almost anticlimactic by comparison. “I Can’t Quit You Baby” was a slow-burning adaptation of the Willie Dixon classic he’d written for Otis Rush, which married what the Stones and the Yardbirds had hot-wired to the blues with an infusion of monster amps and Bonzo’s macho beat. If rock ’n roll was an expression of the sex act, Bonzo made the earth move, a feat that tweaked even the weakest songs. As for the sloppy guitar solo, “There are mistakes in it . . . some wrong notes. . . . The timing just seems off,” Jimmy admitted.
“How Many More Times,” on the other hand, was an extended jam that seemed to go off the rails over its convoluted eight-minute stretch. The song was a pastiche of leftover Yardbirds fragments, with rudiments from Robert’s Band of Joy and several identifiable nicks of Howlin’ Wolf’s “No Place to Go.” As a showcase for each band member’s improvisational exploits, it was the kind of number that benefited from the drama of live performance as opposed to flying about, this way and that, on a record.
The album contained decidedly more highs than lows. Glyn Johns remembers listening to a test pressing and thinking Led Zeppelin had made “a landmark in rock ’n roll history, taking [the music] to another level altogether.” Flushed with excitement, he took the acetate to a preproduction meeting for the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus TV show. “Jimmy’s put this band together,” he told Mick Jagger during a break. “You’ve got to listen to this.” Mick played a few bars and removed it from the turntable. “He didn’t like it at all,” Johns recalls. A few nights later, he was leaving Apple, where he’d been working on the Let It Be session. “George [Harrison] and I lived in the same direction, and I said, ‘On your way home, let’s pop around to Olympic. You’ve got to hear this record Jimmy’s done. It’s absolutely amazing.’ ” It was around ten o’clock at night when the two men settled into Studio A, where Johns had made the album. “I got a protection copy of the master that was stored in the basement and played it for George, start to finish. It wasn’t that he just didn’t get it—he thought it was awful.”
Jeff Beck proved eminently more receptive. He’d loved the band when he first saw them perform live back in December 1968 at the Bridge Country Club in Canterbury. “It was just amazing, blew the house down, blew everybody away,” he recalled. Peter Grant played the acetate for him later that month at the Americana Hotel in New York when he was delivering the master tapes to Atlantic. For some odd reason, the first cut Jeff heard was “You Shook Me,” and he assumed it was an outtake done as a tribute to him, considering it was his band’s signature song and the knockout version of it was on Truth. He asked Grant, “OK, now where’s the album?”
Peter replied, “This is the fucking album, you’re listening to it.”
Beck was stunned, beside himself. “You’re joking,” he cried. “We’ve done that song just three months ago, on Truth.”
In fact, John Paul Jones had added organ fills to the track on Truth and must have known it was the same song. Jeff found it incredible that John Paul hadn’t mentioned it to Jimmy before Led Zeppelin went ahead and recorded its version. Meanwhile, Jeff knew that Jimmy had heard Truth long before the Zep session. Peter had given him an advance copy of it, although he disingenuously insisted that Jimmy never actually listened to it. That may have been so, but he’d certainly seen the Jeff Beck Group perform “You Shook Me” innumerable times on their tour of the States.
In his defense, Jimmy insisted, “It was a total freak accident.” He considered the two versions as different as day and night. Beck’s version playful, bluesy; Zeppelin’s sultry and darker. “I didn’t know he’d recorded it until our album was already done.”
It was a recurrence of the one-upmanship they’d undertaken while playing together in the Yardbirds, a competitive upstaging the two musicians had engaged in since they were teenagers in Surrey. Dueling guitar virtuosos jockeying for the lead in the race to fame. Jeff realized he was fading down the stretch. A more dazzling, more inventive guitar player than Jimmy, he fronted a band that didn’t measure up to his brilliance and couldn’t go the distance. Led Zeppelin, Jeff knew, was on its way to something special. “It was just a much better package than what I had,” he concluded.
