Led Zeppelin, page 20
A better package, but still no traction in Great Britain. The British press was reluctant to get behind Led Zeppelin, put off, most likely, by news releases of the band’s big American record advance. Talking about money was considered crass, not the way things were done in England. “No one likes people who brag about how much they make,” says Chris Charlesworth, one of the journalists who covered Led Zeppelin for Melody Maker. “It appeared that money was their sole motivation, and it turned the fans and the rock media against them.”
“Peter had miscalculated,” says Phil Carson, Atlantic’s UK general manager. “The country wasn’t ready to entertain a business concept called Superhype.”
Robert agreed. “The conservatism goes into the music as well,” he said at the time. “The musical journalists are still sort of dubious about this sort of music, and they were thinking that it was a flash in the pan, and they didn’t think it had any social relevance.”
Conservatism, however, had little effect on the rock ’n roll lifestyle. Dave Pegg, who had recently become Fairport Convention’s bass player, recalls attending a Led Zeppelin gig on April 8, 1969, at the Cherry Tree, a little pub in Welwyn Garden City, about twenty miles from London. “I got a lift back afterward with Bonzo, who was driving a brand-new gold Jaguar 3.4 saloon,” he recalls. “We pulled up at a service station, and there was an identical one at another pump across the way. It was Robert’s.” Bonzo had also moved his family to a new council flat in Dudley, decked out in incredible style, top to bottom, courtesy of Rackhams, Birmingham’s answer to Harrods.
They were savoring their new prosperity. Despite the lukewarm reception in the UK, the album was putting up extraordinary numbers with abundant airplay in the United States. The cap was off the gusher and money was pouring in, with advances mounting for future appearances there. If Led Zeppelin weren’t received with open arms at home, they would go to where the love was.
[3]
The situation in the States wasn’t all warm and fuzzy.
On March 15, 1969, Rolling Stone, the arbiter of the rock ’n roll scene, published its long-awaited review of the Led Zeppelin album. The band’s pent-up expectations soon turned bilious as certain words and phrases sank in: “weak, unimaginative songs . . . dull . . . redundant . . . much overdone . . . monotonous . . . avalanche of drums and shouting . . .” There were references to “prissy Robert Plant’s howled vocals” and his “shrieks . . . strained and unconvincing shouting.” Bonzo was accused of smashing “his cymbals on every beat.” And Jimmy, while recognized as “an extraordinarily proficient blues guitarist” was hung out as “a very limited producer.” Only John Paul Jones, Led Zeppelin’s enigmatic éminence grise, escaped criticism. Individually, the band members felt savaged by the review, but nothing hurt as much as the critic’s wholesale appraisal. “In their willingness to waste their considerable talent on unworthy material, the Zeppelin has produced an album which is sadly reminiscent of Truth.”
That hurt plenty. Truth was like the too-perfect cousin you were always measured against, a cousin you secretly despised. “That album haunted Jimmy,” says Chris Charlesworth. “It was a masterpiece, a flawed masterpiece, that had beat Zeppelin to the punch by a couple months and was still fresh in everyone’s minds. People always compared Zeppelin’s first album to Truth. And Truth was Jeff’s, which drove Jimmy mad.”
The Rolling Stone review was written by John Mendelssohn, a UCLA student who had answered the magazine’s famous ad: Do you want to contribute? Send us something. His rock gods were The Who, and he’d just fallen in love with the Kinks’ new LP, Village Green Preservation Society, when the Led Zeppelin album arrived in the mail. “I put it on,” he recalls, “and hated every second of it. To my ears, it was so misogynistic and harsh and ugly. Their music, like that of Cream and [Jimi] Hendrix, ceased to be about melody and harmony and became about virtuosity instead. The review didn’t begin to convey how much I hated it.”
Mendelssohn, a musician who went on to work for Warner Bros. Records, was alarmed by what he saw as the changing musical landscape. He mistook it for the loss of melody, when in fact it was something more organic and sociological. The generational gap was opening up. Audiences were getting older, reorienting from adolescent girls screaming at heartthrobs to mixed crowds listening to and appreciating the artistry. Vocal attractions like Herman’s Hermits, the Tremeloes, the Searchers, and the Hollies were giving way to bands who’d developed their creative skills. The Beatles were no longer the lovable mop tops; the White Album, released a few weeks before Led Zeppelin, continued to obliterate that image, dispensing with teenage romanticism and defying all musical currents. Rock ’n roll was growing more complex. Groups like Pink Floyd, Traffic, the Moody Blues, Yes, and Led Zeppelin saw new, subversive possibilities in the form.
Logical as that seemed, it failed to soothe the sting of the Rolling Stone review. “It was galling,” John Paul Jones admitted, “but at the same time you felt it was a shame that they didn’t get it.” He felt the review was spiteful, “total damning stuff.” There did not seem to be any criteria for the critic’s opinion. “If we were crap and they said we were crap, well, fair enough. But we were really good, and we couldn’t understand what the agenda was.”
Peter Grant had his own agenda. He decided to ignore the rock press entirely. He’d spent plenty of time on the road in the United States with the Animals and Jeff Beck and understood that FM radio, the new force on the scene, connected bands directly to the audience, bypassing the reviewers and critics. These stations, it turned out, had far bigger audiences and more influence than the press did. If kids heard Led Zeppelin and saw them in concert, it would be all the convincing they’d need, Grant concluded. “That’s the way big names are made these days,” he said. “Not by press, but by people seeing them and making up their own minds.” Led Zeppelin didn’t need reviews, good or bad. The album was amassing fans without them.
Jimmy was of the same frame of mind as his manager. “We just couldn’t seem to do anything right as far as the critics were concerned,” he said. “At which point I think we all just sort of gave up on the idea of ever pleasing them.”
Rock critics be damned. They were a different generation than the Zeppelin audience, mostly old men in their midtwenties —and jaded—who saw themselves as tastemakers, aesthetes. “The rock press did not like bands who became famous because of FM radio,” says Danny Goldberg, who later handled press for Led Zeppelin and became general manager of their record label. “Their reaction was: ‘If we didn’t discover them, they’re not authentic.’ They saw themselves at the center of defining what was good and what was bad, what was cool and what was not cool. And at that moment in time, Led Zeppelin was not cool.”
Not to the small fraternity of critics, perhaps, but fans thought otherwise. By the time Led Zeppelin returned to America in the spring of 1969 the album was firmly in the Top 20. Before they left for the States, however, there was one last piece of business to take care of.
* * *
• • •
Jimmy called a rehearsal at his Pangbourne boathouse the second week of April 1969. He had a riff he’d been banking for almost a year that could be the foundation for something very special. “I suppose my early love for big intros by rockabilly guitarists was an inspiration,” he theorized, “but as soon as I developed the riff, I knew it was strong enough to drive the entire song, not just open it.” He’d showcased it for the band while they were rehearsing for the first album and everyone agreed it had killer potential—“addictive, like a forbidden thing.”
It was simple, all of five notes. But the way Jimmy phrased it gave it the kind of physical tug that was nothing short of convulsive. It throbbed like an erratic heartbeat. By the time the rest of the instruments barged in, two full measures later, the song wasn’t just cooking, it was boiling over.
He’d asked Robert to take a crack at the lyrics. Robert wasn’t a complete novice in the songwriting department, but his experience was limited. He and Kevyn Gammond had knocked out a throwaway they called “Memory Lane” that the Band of Joy used to play as a way of filling out sets and another number called “The Pill Song.” Oh, the pills we took . . . “Just atrocious,” Gammond recalls. This was different. Jimmy’s riff demanded a lyric that stood up to it and grabbed attention right out of the box.
“I just thought, ‘Well, what am I going to sing?’ ” Robert recalled. For inspiration, he referenced his favorite albums. A beloved Muddy Waters LP yielded up “You Need Love,” the Willie Dixon blues classic recorded in 1952. You’ve got yearnin’, and I got burnin’ . . . That had a nice suggestive rhyme scheme to it. And he zeroed in on another tasty line. Baby way down inside, woman, you need love . . . That could work as well. It was also reminiscent of the Small Faces’ debut album, which Robert had played to death, with “You Need Loving” on it, a souped-up version of Muddy’s original, credited to Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane. Marriott recalled a teenage Robert Plant stationed right in front of the bandstand when the Faces played it at Kidderminster Town Hall. “He used to be at all the Small Faces gigs.” In fact, at one of the Faces’ shows they did with the Yardbirds, Marriott said, “Jimmy Page asked me what that number was we did. . . . I said, ‘It’s a Muddy Waters thing.’ ”
Jimmy wasn’t so clear about its origins. “We did, however, take some liberties,” he admitted. “And Robert was supposed to change the lyrics,” which he did . . . a little bit.
You need coolin’, he began singing, baby I’m not foolin.’ In his mind, that was far enough away from Muddy Waters’s yearnin’/burnin’ narrative so as not to suggest an outright nick. Besides, Robert had something fresh and provocative up his sleeve, a bombshell, actually.
I’m gonna give you every inch of my love.
It wasn’t especially subtle, but it did the trick and would tap into the primal urges of the teenage boys who were Led Zeppelin’s predominant audience at this stage. The moment it captured fired up adolescent fantasies and gave the band an entry into their subconscious. The rest of the lyric “developed in the studio, much of it ad-libbed,” Robert recalled, a miscellany of repetitious droning, exclamatory ooohs, and whoops of orgasmic joy. “Wherever it comes from, it was all about that riff,” Robert said. The riff thrust the song’s impact into new territory.
“Addictive,” as Jimmy had said, “like a forbidden thing.”
Atlantic Records was pleading for another Led Zeppelin album, a follow-up to ride the coattails of the first one before the hoopla died down. This song “sounded strong enough to open our second album,” Jimmy thought, “so I wanted to record it first.”
On April 19, 1969, a week before their second American tour kicked off, the band trooped into Olympic Sound’s Studio A. It was a massive space with a soaring twenty-eight-foot ceiling that was used primarily to record symphony orchestras and film scores. Glyn Johns, still fuming over the screwing he’d taken, was unavailable to engineer the session, so they settled on George Chkiantz, a staff engineer whose credits (Blind Faith, Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love, and the Faces’ “Itchykoo Park”) were indisputable.
The setup, however, was predetermined. “I had this avant-garde master plan for ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and could hear the construction coming together in my head,” Jimmy said. More than anything, he wanted a strong drumbeat to drive the song, “so that every stroke sounded clear and you could really feel them.” He also moved Robert into an isolation booth so his vocals wouldn’t bleed into the rhythm tracks. Robert wasn’t as unsure of himself this time around. “My confidence was building at that time,” he recalled. Since joining the band, he had pushed himself to the front with more authority, both physically and vocally. This song offered him the chance to cut loose and let it all hang out.
They ran it down once to get an overall feel. The song was a monster of thrust and aggression. There was little room to breathe in the interval between verses, with the instruments storming in from every side and Robert gasping and howling away over the top. To give the track expanse, Jimmy had carved out a stretch in the middle to allow an outpouring of discordant sound effects he’d collected on tape to build to apocalyptic proportions. He threw everything available into the mix—a sonic wave sound, explosions, a metal slide with backward echo, assorted traffic noise, Robert feigning the throes of ecstasy, Bonzo’s conga obbligato, and the feedback from an electronic gizmo called a theremin that produced an eerie, surreal sound. “It was an oscillator,” Jimmy explained. “The closer you get to the aerial, the higher the pitch went.” He also monkeyed with his Les Paul Standard. “I detuned it and pulled on the strings for a far-out effect.” The rising coil of sound climaxed in an overheated swell before fireworks burst from Jimmy’s guitar. The tension it released was tremendous, if not exactly genteel.
“Whole Lotta Love” established a new, exciting standard in rock ’n roll. It was loud, delirious, uncontainable, oozing overheated masculinity, with the kind of unforgettable riff that resonated for the ages. It sounded like all the elements of rock ’n roll distilled to the core of its explosive essence. It not only confirmed Led Zeppelin as a musical force, it signaled they were the torchbearers of heavy metal, whether Jimmy was inclined to wear the badge or not.
Chapter Eight
THE NEW NORMAL
[1]
Led Zeppelin was becoming something else.
As the band bulldozed through tour after tour in 1969, its image evolved as a supergroup of a unique order, playing to besotted audiences and behaving as if rules of civility did not apply.
By the end of May, Led Zeppelin’s debut album had achieved gold-record status, lodging on the Billboard charts for a solid fourteen weeks, in the company of such standouts as Blood Sweat & Tears, the cast album of Hair, Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, and the death-defying In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. The album’s success left no doubt that the band had made its presence felt in the United States. They were a staple of FM radio, bookings were pouring in at spiraling prices, and the press, while still suspicious, had no other choice than to cover the phenomenon. Even square, middle-of-the-road Life magazine sent a reporter to follow one of their tours. But the real measure of approval was the audiences. The audiences were out of their heads.
The music took audiences to a place they’d never been before—a place similar to the hysteria-induced level where, years earlier, the Beatles had transported hordes of thirteen-year-old girls. Led Zeppelin’s audiences were different, older . . . somewhat. Mostly boys between the ages of fifteen and twenty thronged the area in front of the stage, where Jimmy and Robert, aided by an army of Marshall stacks, whipped them into delirium. As the Chicago Sun-Times pointed out in its Led Zeppelin coverage, “Never had loudness been so completely pleasurable. It has the power to vibrate your body and dislocate your nervous system. Fight the sound and you’ll have one of the worst headaches on record; move with it and you’ll be completely captivated.”
Loudness was integral to the music. “Rock ’n roll was meant to be played loud,” says Roger Mayer, the electronics guru who invented the fuzz box. In his ongoing work with volume and distortion, he relied on the Fletcher-Munson curves—a set of frequency response curves that human ears use to program the loudness level. “But music doesn’t sound loud unless dynamics”—the variation between the loudest and softest levels—“have an impact on it. In the case of emotional reaction, dynamics are more important than loudness.”
Led Zeppelin had the dynamics angle all worked out. Playing loud, they knew, distorted an audience’s perception. To give the audience an acoustical out-of-body experience, they only had to crank the volume up to twelve. There was nothing clever in that. Adding dynamics—the light-and-shade aspect of Jimmy’s blistering guitar solos and his dramatic body language; Robert’s roller-coaster vocals from caterwauling highs to warm, sensual lows and peacocky exhibitionism; John Paul’s bass pounding out a range of intensities; Bonzo’s ability to contrast bursts of great power with more nuanced shuffles—gave an added structure to their performances that incorporated dynamics of loudness without driving the sound over a cliff.
Led Zeppelin’s second tour of the United States coincided with Jimmy Page’s desire to jump-start a steady pace of recording. “The plan was to capture the energy of the band on the road,” he explained, which meant they’d record “on the run between hotel rooms and the GTOs,” as Robert Plant put it—in whatever city they happened to be appearing in when the mood struck.
When they touched down in Los Angeles on April 30, 1969, the band went directly from the airport to Mystic Sound, the old Del-Fi studios in Hollywood, where Ritchie Valens had recorded “Come On Let’s Go” and “La Bamba” and the Bobby Fuller Four cut “I Fought the Law.”
Mystic Sound was a modest four-track studio that just about accommodated Led Zeppelin’s gargantuan equipment. With only a baffle placed between the double-stacked Marshall amps to absorb sound, they recorded “The Lemon Song” live—laying down the track with everyone playing together in the same cramped, low-ceilinged room. The song was an adaptation of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” that they performed regularly in their shows—fairly straightforward blues dominated by Jimmy’s scathing riff, a high-flying solo, and nimble, jazz-inflected bass runs from John Paul that underpinned the vocals. Robert rewrote the lyrics, co-opting a line from “She Squeezed My Lemon,” a song cut in 1937 by Roosevelt Sykes. Standing in the middle of the studio, using a hand-held microphone, Robert shamelessly belted out, “Squeeze me, babe, until the juice runs down my leg / The way you squeeze my lemon, I’m gonna fall right out of bed.” It was crude, designed to get a rise out of overeager adolescents.
