Led Zeppelin, page 2
The band was loose, lightheaded from the contact high off the crowd, and the well-rehearsed arrangements had lapsed into free-form jams riddled with improvisation. Rhythms and time patterns changed abruptly. “Dazed and Confused” segued into “Shapes of Things,” and Jimmy Page, imitating a hippie Merlin, pulled out a violin bow and sawed it across the strings of his guitar, “getting sound and feedback that was as radical as anyone had heard since [Jimi] Hendrix.” A punchy number called “Pat’s Delight,” featuring an elaborate, five-minute drum solo, saw Bonham, nicknamed Bonzo for good reason, fling away his sticks and play the skins and cymbals with bare hands, egged on by howls of encouragement. The band interrupted its last number, “How Many More Times,” to interject pieces of “Smokestack Lightning,” “Beck’s Bolero,” “For Your Love,” “The Duke of Earl,” and “Over Under Sideways Down” into the mix. “If you don’t want to jump, dance, and smile after hearing this, you must be dead,” the giddy Boston Phoenix critic would marvel.
There was pandemonium at the end of the hour-long set. Led Zeppelin, spent and elated, took several bows and disappeared backstage while the crowd erupted in uncontainable ecstasy. The band celebrated with a round of thirst-quenching Watney’s. A chorus of “More! More! More!” persisted in the ballroom, picking up steam as each minute passed. It was clear they’d have to go out and play again. But—what? They’d exhausted their repertoire. After some deliberation, it was decided they’d play the same set again. What else could they do? It was unheard of. This time they stretched out solos, especially Page’s “White Summer” guitar piece that took great aural liberties with the violin bow. And Plant had the temerity to milk Joan Baez’s “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” for all it was worth in a city that held its hometown sweetheart on the same pedestal as the Madonna. The band gave it everything they had. They looked as though they’d gone through a steam bath. A sweating Page and Bonham had stripped down to their vests, and Plant’s tie-dyed T-shirt was soaked through to his chest.
When they’d finished—again—the reaction turned frightening. Applause gave way to stomping and thrashing. “There were kids actually bashing their heads against the stage,” a dumbstruck John Paul Jones recalled. The hitchhiker was crying. Crying! “Zeppelin was so fucking heavy,” he said, “that I had no other emotional way to react to them.”
“You’ve got to go back,” Don Law implored the band after they’d collapsed backstage.
He had to be kidding. No way they were going to play that set again. It was a miracle they’d gotten away with doing it twice, much less had the stamina to pull it off the way they did. That was it, that was the show. Besides, a few nights later they were due in New York, expected to make their debut there at the vaunted Fillmore East. They had to reserve whatever was left in the tank.
After five minutes of unadulterated bedlam, however, they realized it was hopeless. They had to appease the crowd, if for no other reason than to settle them down. Otherwise they were going to rip that place apart.
“It was in such a state that we had to start throwing ideas around,” said John Paul Jones, “just thinking of songs that we might all know or that some of us knew a part of, and work it from there.”
An hour later, Led Zeppelin had exhausted a full set of cover songs lifted from the set lists of their respective boyhood bands. They just winged them right there onstage, deferring to whichever one of them had a feel for a particular tune. They ripped through a blistering version of “Long Tall Sally”; a couple Eddie Cochran numbers—“Somethin’ Else” and “C’mon Everybody”—which Jimmy Page had performed with Red E. Lewis & the Redcaps; a pair of Beatles favorites, “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Please Please Me”; and a Chuck Berry medley of “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Johnny B. Goode” that gave everyone onstage a chance to solo.
As they staggered into the dressing room, Peter Grant, Zeppelin’s manager, a behemoth of a man, scooped them into a group grizzly-bear hug, lifting them several inches off their feet. The usually scowling Grant, Jones noticed, “was crying, if you can imagine that,” his mouth stretched unnaturally in what the Brits called a nanker. Jimmy Page felt it. He later said that this was the moment—the moment he knew they “were actually going to make it.” John Paul Jones considered that night at the Tea Party “the key Led Zeppelin gig—the one that put everything into focus.” After several months of going through the paces—getting to know each other, choosing material, refining a sound, playing a string of gigs in shitty little halls under abysmal circumstances for what amounted to pocket change—months of uncertainty marked by worry and self-doubt, they’d morphed from a wan flock of New Yardbirds into Led Zeppelin, a powerhouse of a rock ’n roll band.
There was no doubting it. Led Zeppelin had played themselves into hero status in Boston, obliging an otherwise jaded critic to admit, “For four consecutive evenings, they virtually blew an overflow Boston Tea Party crowd clear into the Charles River.”
No one realized it more than the hitchhiker. He staggered out into the night. The music was tighter and had a harder edge than anything he’d heard before, played without mercy at a volume that drilled down into the central nervous system. Man, was it loud! He’d never heard six huge Rickenbacker Transonic amps cranking at peak in that small of a space before. The output had whipped people into a frenzy. And the vocalist, Robert Plant, was a revelation. His delivery took the blues to another level, gave it something darker and dirtier than, say, Mick Jagger’s foppish theatrics. The hitchhiker had a similar role as front man in his own band, and Plant’s magnetism, his flamboyance, had given him ideas. He needed to burnish his image. He’d been thinking of changing his name, for starters. “Steven Tallarico” didn’t quite cut it as a rock god; “Steven Tyler” would have more snap. He couldn’t wait to get back to his bandmates in Sunapee, New Hampshire, where his parents had a cottage. He wanted to share what he’d seen and heard with his guitarist, Joe Perry. They could do something with “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” put their own spin on it, rough it up a bit.
Whatever they decided, it would have to kick ass, because Led Zeppelin had changed the rules of the game. They had done something primal to rock ’n roll. They’d taken its definitive, dynamic beat and supercharged it, turned it inside out, added splenetic distortion, and shot it off in a bold, new direction. The hitchhiker felt it. Hard rock, heavy metal, progressive—fans could call it whatever they liked. Music was about to get a lot more complicated.
Chapter One
A CASE OF THE BLUES
[1]
In the beginning there was the blues. Before jazz, before swing, and long before rock ’n roll, the blues gave voice to African American life in a world of harsh reality. You might be going down to the crossroads to ask the Lord for mercy, making your midnight creep like the backdoor man, or keeping your lamplight trimmed and burning—no matter how it stacked up, brother, you got a case of the blues. You got the blues if you got a woman with the meanest face in town, if you ask for water and your darlin’ give you gas-o-line, and if you’re fixin’ to die. If you got your mojo working, a good twelve-bar blues could cure any number of woes (except, of course, the summertime blues), and in the early 1960s, a generation of postwar British teenagers discovered it was a remedy for the ennui that stifled their very lives.
If the fifties were any indication, they were in for a slog. As a sector of the general public, British teenagers more than deserved to sing the blues. They were a nonentity, classless in a society that prized a stratum of huffy sirs and lords. Teens had no disposable income, zero influence, and little future to look forward to. In most circumstances, they’d wind up in a dead-end job, apprenticed to a factory shop steward, or indentured as a low-level clerk in a lifeless administrative office. Any relief would come from evenings spent in a local pub, getting shitfaced and singing along to moldering World War I–era ditties to blot out the tedium: “Ma, He’s Makin’ Eyes at Me,” “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-Wow,” “Knees Up Mother Brown,” “K-K-Katy, Show Me the Way to Go Home.” God, what a trap! They had to change the tune.
The music being fed to them was an abysmal porridge of torchy music-hall leftovers, orchestral scores, and banal hit-parade crooners that the BBC played with captive indifference. The Beeb’s anesthetizing Two-Way Family Favourites and Housewives’ Choice—the only radio programs where popular music was heard—might throw teens a bone by playing one or two numbers by lightweight crooner Tommy Steele or skiffling Lonnie Donegan, and if a deejay felt unusually charitable, a Hank Williams or Roy Acuff classic. The club scene wasn’t much hipper. For the most part, it attracted a young crowd that jived to a strain called trad—as in traditional—jazz, which was really a rehash of Dixieland played by middle-aged white men, some of whom wore bowler hats.
The Swingin’ Sixties were still years off when, in 1960, trad jazz master Chris Barber ceded the closing half hour of his band’s residency at London’s Marquee Club to an unlikely pair of bluesmen. Alexis Korner and Cyril “Squirrel” Davies were neither Black nor especially world-weary, but their mongrel brand of electrified blues set off sparks among a young, restless audience determined to bust out. They were bored with both the mummery of old-school jazz and the insipid pop of Cliff Richard and Adam Faith. By 1962, Korner, a mediocre guitar player with impeccable taste, and Davies, a hatchet-faced Buckinghamshire bloke who blew the meanest Chicago-style harp, were fronting an outfit they called Blues Incorporated and opened a club to showcase the band in a West London basement directly opposite the Ealing Broadway Tube stop.
The music they played owed its DNA to a concert at St. Pancras Town Hall on October 20, 1958, at which Muddy Waters made his London debut. British audiences were used to a steady cycle of American blues tours featuring folk-blues artists like Big Bill Broonzy, Lonnie Johnson, and Josh White, all of whom accompanied themselves on acoustic guitars. At this show, Muddy had the cheek to plug his Telecaster into an amp. What sacrilege! The audience recoiled at his stinging solo lines. It was the first time they’d ever heard electric blues, and to many it “sounded tough, unpolite . . . often very loud.” People actually booed, the same way Brits would boo Bob Dylan when he “went electric” in 1966. As Muddy cranked the volume incrementally through “Honey Bee,” “Long Distance Call,” “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” and “Louisiana Blues,” he set off a depth charge with his urban take on the blues. It put an end to the genteel trad jazz–blues mash-up and, as one historian noted, “reverberate[d] through the annals of rock for the next fifty years.”
No doubt about it, four years later its tremors still shook the insides of the Ealing Club. Saturday nights there became life-changing affairs.
The sweaty, foul-smelling joint, “sometimes ankle-deep in condensation,” jumped with kids who lived on the fringe, who were curious, who couldn’t fit in anywhere else. The blues had become their canon, and Blues Incorporated their unlikely prophet. The night the club opened to a packed house, March 17, 1962, the unit featured a fluid lineup of ex–jazz musicians that included drummer Charlie Watts and Ian Stewart on piano. Sporadically, amateurs would be plucked out of the crowd and invited to sit in. That night, Alexis Korner spotted a slight, pale bottleneck-slide guitarist he knew as Elmo Lewis and called him up to the stage. Lewis had hitchhiked ninety miles from Cheltenham to snag a chance walk on with Blues Incorporated, and now he whipped admirably through the fade-out solo to Elmore James’s signature “Dust My Broom.” Afterward, Elmo Lewis spotted a friend standing with two gangly teenagers at the back of the club and joined them for a chat.
“Of course, I knew Lewis by his real name, Brian Jones,” the friend, David Williams, recalls, “and I introduced him to Mick and Keith, who were both impressed with his performance.”
These boys were captivated by the blues—perhaps obsessed would be a better word. To find like-minded souls in a vacuum was no small thing. A fantastic amount of musical scuttlebutt got exchanged in the interim. The give-and-take that night went something like this:
“Who are you listening to?”
“I’ve heard this Memphis Slim record, ‘Steppin’ Out,’ with a fantastic guitar solo on it.”
“Who’s on guitar?”
“That’s Matthew Murphy.”
“Jeeeeez, Matthew Murphy!”
The new music scene was happening very fast, with Blues Incorporated as its unstable nucleus. Alumni split off to form equally mutable groups. Not long after nineteen-year-old Mick Jagger appeared as the vocalist with the band, “all lips and ears . . . looking like a ventriloquist’s dummy,” he made off with drummer Charlie Watts. Watts was replaced by Peter “Ginger” Baker, and Jack Bruce stepped in on bass. In the following months John Baldry, Eric Burdon, and Rod Stewart turned up to take their shots at the Ealing Club mic, as did a petrified Eric Clapton, who belted out a credible version of “Roll Over Beethoven,” while staring woodenly at the floor. You never knew who was going to turn up. A seminal night featured Brian Jones’s buddy Paul Pond, singing the blues in his best Oxbridge accent, years before he resurfaced as Manfred Mann’s vocalist, Paul Jones. The club was a cauldron bubbling over with talent.
Saturday nights at the Ealing Club begat Thursday blues nights at the Marquee, a venerable Oxford Street jazz mecca in a cellar below the Academy Cinema that begrudgingly hosted the arrivistes. By the beginning of December 1962, the blues night was pulling in upward of a thousand enthusiasts who chipped away at the Marquee’s button-down legacy. Thursday nights soon begat Monday nights, and the Marquee begat the Flamingo, the 100 Club, Studio 51, Eel Pie Island, the Red Lion in Sutton, the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, the Railway Hotel in Harrow, and the Ricky-Tick in Windsor, as the blues exploded and the scene dug in.
Record albums with obscure material were the purest form of currency. It was nearly impossible to buy a blues album in London at the time. You might stumble over a secondhand specimen in the dusty basement annex of Dobell’s Jazz Shop. If one was fortunate enough to unearth a rare gem—say, Howlin’ Wolf’s 1959 Chess masterpiece, Moanin’ in the Moonlight, with its scorching rendition of “Smokestack Lightning,” or any of the Duke Records imports by Junior Parker, Otis Rush, or Bobby “Blue” Bland—you were the man. What a bond it created. “If one person got a record, everybody had it,” Dave Williams recalls. The album would be passed around, scrutinized, dissected, interpreted, turned inside out, and analyzed until every last nuance had been picked off its vinyl carcass.
That’s what happened when Mick, Keith, and Brian got their hands on a twelve-inch compilation LP called Bluesville Chicago, showcasing five of Vee-Jay Records’ earthiest artists. It may have been Mick who found it at Dobell’s on Charing Cross Road. He haunted that place on Friday afternoons during lunch breaks from classes at the London School of Economics, around the corner. In any case, the album was a gold mine as far as material was concerned, authentic blues that no one else in Britain was doing. With songs like that you could even start a band, which is what the three boys—Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones—decided. It gave them a solid repertoire to work with, and they immediately rehearsed two Eddie Taylor songs—“Bad Boy” and “Ride ’Em On Down”—as well as “I Wish You Would,” “I Ain’t Got You,” and “Don’t Stay Out All Night” courtesy of Billy Boy Arnold.
At the outset, they called themselves the Rollin’ Stones, only a trio, months away from a legitimate bass player and drummer. Their first gig, just a jam really, was in the back room of the Grapes, a pub at the bottom of Sutton High Street. Fifteen people turned up, of whom only three actually paid to get in, and they ran down the five songs, along with “Too Much Monkey Business,” a Chuck Berry number. Unqualified to headline more substantial gigs, they regularly performed with Alexis Korner’s band, playing rudimentary versions of Berry and Bo Diddley B sides.
The Rollin’ Stones, perhaps more than anyone, embodied the new sound of the blues. It wasn’t anything a young band had played before. They’d taken the Chicago style and given it a churlish British spin. Somehow, both in Mick’s punk snarl and the down-and-dirty guitar licks, they locked onto the campy sexual innuendo embedded in the lyrics and laid it bare. The way they played the blues left no doubt what it meant to “look up under the hood and check out the carburetor.” “Whatever it was, it was twisted, amplified and warped beyond any hope of familiarity,” said Jim McCarty, later the drummer for the Yardbirds, who caught one of the Stones’ earliest shows in Richmond, a suburb in the southwest of London. “It was an exhilarating sound, incredibly original.” To McCarty, “It was like seeing a band from Mars.”
Even with a pared-down ensemble, the Stones made it clear they could not be contained. They worked relentlessly on gentrifying the blues, reinterpreting its sound to accommodate a younger, restless, whiter audience. And they weren’t alone. Cyril Davies’s R&B All-Stars, led by vocalist Long John Baldry with Rod Stewart on harmonica, took over Thursday nights at the Marquee, and John Mayall’s Blues Syndicate spread the scene to such venues as Klooks Kleek, Eel Pie Island, and the Fishermen’s Arms. For a generation of British teenagers primed to make their mark, the blues had become a state of mind.
A jolt rattled the community in September 1962, when word began circulating that the gods were amassing . . . in Manchester of all places. If the rumors were true, authentic blues artists—not teenage wannabes but high priests of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago’s South Side—had agreed to appear for one night at the Free Trade Hall on Sunday, October 21. Word went around “like bloody hellfire,” the names mentioned in a reverent hush. John Lee Hooker. Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. T-Bone Walker. Memphis Slim. Willie Dixon. Together, in person, under one roof. The American Folk Blues Festival. As one of the Ealing Club regulars put it: “This was serious shit!”
