Led Zeppelin, page 24
That was the new normal—except that nothing in Led Zeppelin’s universe was normal anymore. With the runaway success of the second album, they had catapulted to superstar status, with all the effluvia that such a distinction generated. They were idolized but also hounded—by the press, by fans, by groupies, by anyone wanting a piece of the action. Obligations were overwhelming. The record company pressed them to keep their eye on the prize, to continue writing, to keep up the pace, to produce. The pressures of maintaining a grip, to keep surpassing themselves, could not be overstated: the next gig, the next song, the next album. A breather, a good night’s sleep, became precious commodities. A chance to reconnect with normalcy, if such a state of being existed for them.
Yes, a breather. They needed to get off the road, off the treadmill. It was time to settle a few personal accounts.
Chapter Nine
INTO THE DISTANT PAST
[1]
A breather, a pause, a break, a time-out—Led Zeppelin knew it for what it was: only a segue into yet another North American tour, their fifth in a year and a half. Peter Grant had already booked it, in fact, a month of back-to-back gigs in the spring of 1970, in arenas of ten-thousand-plus seats. And to up the ante, no opening acts, no intermission. “An Evening with Led Zeppelin,” as the dates would be called, meant each night’s heavy lifting was all on the band’s shoulders.
It was a grind, a blur. The shows were big, long, loud, raucous extravaganzas, the travel exhausting, enervating, inhuman.
“I don’t think we can take America again for a while,” John Paul said wearily when it was over, in mid-April 1970. “America definitely unhinges you.”
There had been so many crazy scenes, so many mishaps. It was ominous from day one, when Jimmy’s cherished “Black Beauty,” the Gibson Les Paul Custom, disappeared at an airport in Vancouver. “It never came off the conveyor belt,” said Henry Smith, whose job it was to retrieve it at baggage claim. But that was only a sample of what lay ahead. “We were driven off the road by rednecks in Austin, Texas,” Robert recalled. The band’s limo was grazed by a bullet on the way to their hotel in Dallas in what was obviously a close call. In Pittsburgh, a brawl broke out, causing them to stop the show until the crowd settled down. Two cops in a bathroom at Raleigh’s Dorton Arena were overheard discussing a plan to plant drugs on Led Zeppelin in order to make a bust. Violence erupted outside Miami Beach’s Convention Hall when a thousand would-be gate-crashers attempted to storm the doors. And in Memphis, with a coliseum of fans jumping up and down on the seats after a blistering “Whole Lotta Love,” a nervous promoter held Robert Plant and Peter Grant at gunpoint until Plant went back onstage to calm down the audience.
This wasn’t Norman Rockwell’s America. This was post-Altamont and post–Manson murders, a nation divided by the conflict in Vietnam and less than a few weeks away from one of its darkest days, when the National Guard opened fire on a group of college students at Kent State University in Ohio protesting the bombing of Cambodia. The concert landscape had changed to reflect it. Gone were the days of orderly college shows and respectful audiences who came to listen to the lyrics. Arenas, coliseums, and speedways brought out something else in a crowd, where the sound and fury whipped audiences into a frenzy.
“You see so much that is great, but so much that is terrible—the rush, the hassles, the police, you know,” Robert said. “In some cities it’s so rough that people are scared to come to our concerts.”
Bodyguards were hired, especially in the Deep South, where long-haired rock ’n rollers were eyed like varmints and things got itchy. The number of people carrying guns gave Jimmy the creeps. “It’s just like being back in the Jesse James era,” he observed.
“You’d go into a venue in the South, where kids were up and yelling and screaming and gyrating and out of control—promoters didn’t know how to handle it,” says Henry Smith. “Their security was limited to off-duty cops who always thought a riot was about to break out, and they were quick to overreact, which led to brute force. This was a whole new ball game for everybody. It was a nerve-racking experience.”
No wonder John Paul wanted a break from the States. A different city every night, another hotel room, inedible food, impersonal encounters—“living like an animal for so long.” That tour had taken years off of their lives.
Afterward, the bandmates had scattered like pool balls. Jimmy retired to his “baronial life” in the art-and-antique-filled boathouse with a new girlfriend, Charlotte Martin, an arresting French model and ex-lover of Eric Clapton’s, to whom he’d been introduced by Roger Daltrey. John Paul moved into a recently acquired manor in Hertfordshire, where his wife and three daughters greeted him like Captain Ahab back from a life-sucking voyage at sea. Bonzo and Pat abandoned their tricked-out council flat for a farmhouse surrounded by fifteen acres of land on the outskirts of Birmingham. And Robert, “fed up with humanity in the big cities,” took cover on a working farm he bought for roughly $15,000 in Blakeshall, near Kidderminster, where chickens and goats roamed around a “somewhat derelict farmhouse” and a number of Georgian outbuildings.
Led Zeppelin had earned a dear two months off from the road to recharge and to reconnect with what was important in their lives. Robert, in particular, had a new nine-month-old daughter named Carmen with whom he’d spent less than a few weeks since her birth. He was hardly home a week, however, when he began exchanging calls with Jimmy, who was renovating an estate he had just purchased on the banks of Loch Ness in Scotland. They had ideas for new songs. There was only so much time off one could enjoy before the creative juices started to flow.
Jimmy already had two numbers sketched out—“Immigrant Song” and “Friends”—along with “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” which he called “a work in progress.” He’d also been tinkering with “Tangerine,” a dreamy song that he’d written years earlier for the Yardbirds under the title “Knowing That I’m Losing You” and which they’d taken an abortive stab at in their final 1968 recording session.
But it wasn’t specifically songwriting the two men discussed. “We’d been working solidly and thought it was time to have a holiday, or at least to get some time away from the road,” Jimmy said. He and Robert kicked around the idea of a getaway for just the two of them and their families. A proper holiday meant hotels, but neither Jimmy nor Robert could bear the thought of another hotel stay after the countless places they’d holed up in on tour. “Robert suggested going to this cottage in South Wales that he’d once been to with his parents when he was much younger. He was going on about what a beautiful place it was, and I became pretty keen to go there.” In truth, Jimmy admitted to Robert, “It would do me a lot of good to get out to the countryside.”
South Wales was an annual getaway for the Plant family. Not far from Kidderminster, it was blessed with some of the most breathtaking countryside in the United Kingdom, an abundance of scenic river valleys, ancient forests, the Brecon Beacons, and villages dating to the fourteenth century. As soon as the weather permitted, Robert Plant Sr. celebrated the weekends driving his family south into an exotic kingdom that, to his impressionable teenage son, evoked the setting of a Tolkien fantasy. Misty mountain ranges and turreted castles set the stage for wondrous excursions that stayed with Robert Jr., specifically the family retreat, a remote eighteenth-century cottage called Bron-Yr-Aur (pronounced bron-rahr) near the River Dyfi that belonged to friends of his parents.
“It was a fantastic place in the middle of nowhere with no facilities at all,” he recalled. There was no road leading to it. The only approach for their Jeep was to traverse a bumpy, mostly barren field. Primitive didn’t begin to describe the premises. The cottage was a gnarly stone structure on the side of a hill surrounded by sheep that came right up to the door. There was no bathroom, no electricity, interior lighting only from canisters of butane gas.
Jimmy took one look around and thought, “Oh, we’re here, we’re in nature, we can hear the birds sing, there’s not a car sound, there’s no airplanes, there’s no concert to do. It was just fantastic.”
Fantastic. The same word had come to both Robert and Jimmy to describe their impressions of the super-rustic Bron-Yr-Aur. Would it provide them with the inspiration, as Robert hoped, “to create a pastoral side of Led Zeppelin?” Pastoral? Was that where the Masters of Heavy Metal were headed? Had they forsaken their atomic eruption of sound? With only acoustic guitars and no way to plug in, it was a safe bet any material they came up with would take a softer, gentler approach. “Jimmy was listening to Davy Graham and Bert Jansch and was experimenting with different tunings,” Robert recalled, “and I loved John Fahey.”
“When I first heard that LP [Needle of Death by Bert Jansch], I couldn’t believe it,” Jimmy said. “It was so far ahead of what anyone else was doing.”
It seemed like they were headed somewhere mysterious, into the distant past. Graham, Jansch, and especially Fahey were practitioners of esoteric-sounding versions of traditional roots music that relied on dissonance, layered melodies, and fancy fingerpicking. Jimmy had also been bingeing the Band’s monumental album Music from Big Pink, with its distinctive rugged “country-soul feeling” and origins in a rural setting. The various influences promised to yield intriguing results.
Settling in, however, proved challenging. Despite the far-flung destination, rock stars needed to be attended to, necessities sorted, so a proper entourage was recruited. Richard Cole begged off chaperone duty, instead sending two roadies—a New Zealander, Clive Coulson, and a nomad calling himself Sandy MacGregor, although that certainly wasn’t his name. Maureen, Carmen, and Strider, the family border collie, accompanied Robert, while Jimmy brought Charlotte Martin. Due to the limited sleeping quarters, Robert and Jimmy claimed the two bedrooms, leaving the roadies to carve up the living room couch.
“We collected wood for the open-hearth fire, which heated a range with an oven on either side,” recalled Clive Coulson. “We fetched water from a stream and heated it on the hot plates for washing.” With no electricity, dinner was lit by candles.
Jimmy swore the trip wasn’t designed as a working holiday. “The original plan was to just go [to Wales], hang out, and really appreciate the countryside,” he said.
“So, there we were, up in the mountains with one of the very first Sony cassette recorders and a bunch of Eveready batteries,” Robert recalled, “just sitting, going, ‘Well, what shall we do?’ ”
It was a rhetorical question. When they went for a leisurely afternoon stroll across the windswept fields, they naturally packed the guitars and tape recorder. After an hour or so, they headed back to the cottage. “It was a tiring walk coming down a ravine, and we stopped and sat down,” Jimmy explained. He had an interesting chord pattern he’d been mulling, stimulated by a few hits on a joint they shared. The words started to flow. Robert couldn’t contain himself.
“He sang the first verse straight off,” Jimmy said.
“I don’t know how I’m gonna tell you / I can’t play with you no more . . .”
Then the next verse—and the next. Before long, the song was intact: “The Boy Next Door,” which was eventually retitled “That’s the Way.”
Over the course of a week, bits and pieces of other songs took shape—“Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp,” “I Wanna Be Her Man,” “Another Way to Wales,” “The Rover,” “Poor Tom,” and “Friends,” the latter fronting a chord riff that sounded suspiciously like the opening of Stephen Stills’s exquisite “Carry On,” which Jimmy had heard him play at Crosby, Stills & Nash’s London debut earlier in the year. Jimmy had written “Friends” following a whopper of a fight he’d had with Charlotte. “I went out on a balcony in my house, and suddenly the whole song spilled out, just like that,” he recalled.
Robert composed an ode to his dog: “Walk down the country lanes, I’ll be singin’ a song / I’ll be callin’ your name.”
“Bron-Yr-Aur gave Jimmy and me so much energy,” Robert recalled. “Because we were really close to something. We believed. It was absolutely wonderful, and my heart was so light and happy.”
Overall, they’d amassed a nice little batch of songs to take back—back to civilization—with them. Was it the basis for a new album? That was definitely in the cards. “When we conceived the initial numbers at Bron-Yr-Aur,” Robert said, “we started to see what we wanted this album to do.”
It had started taking shape at Bron-Yr-Aur, and by the time they got home, there was no holding back.
[2]
Jimmy was impatient to record. At the beginning of May 1970, he booked time at Olympic Studios and summoned Robert, John Paul, and Bonzo. But before the first session, Jimmy arranged a meeting in the café just outside of Olympic with his old Epsom buddy Glyn Johns. Johns, by this time, had fortified his rep by engineering heavyweight albums for the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Joe Cocker, Steve Miller, Traffic, Procol Harum, and Spooky Tooth. And despite all the fetid water under the bridge, he was delighted to see Jimmy, pleased with all the success his friend had racked up.
Jimmy didn’t beat around the bush. “What would it take to get you to engineer our next album?” he asked.
“God, you’ve got more fucking front,” Johns laughed. “Why the fuck would I want to do that? I’ll tell you what—why don’t you pay me for the first one, then we’ll talk about it.”
Jimmy broached it circumspectly. “Well, what would you want?”
“What do you think I’d fucking want?” Johns said. “I want the same deal I negotiated in the first place.”
Jimmy was apoplectic. “Yes, but we’re the biggest band in the world now.”
“So fucking what!”
“Well, we could get somebody to do it for—much less.”
Johns stood up and waved Jimmy away. “Well, off you go,” he said. And those were the last words they spoke for the better part of a decade.
Led Zeppelin retreated to the studio under the whip hand of twenty-year-old Andy Johns, almost a carbon copy of his celebrated older brother and a talent on the ascent. There was a different mood, a different frame of reference this time around, unhurried, to be sure, also more laid back, less inclined to be quite so riff-conscious.
“We’ll be recording for the next two weeks, and we are doing a lot of acoustic stuff as well as the heavier side,” Bonzo confided in a Melody Maker column.
The band’s influences rose to the occasion. “We were into Joni Mitchell a lot and listened to a lot of Fairport Convention as well,” recalled John Paul. “There was a lot of music around that was softer.” He mentioned Matthews’ Southern Comfort and Poco among the groups that would have an impact on the recording session. But there was also desire to go far afield, to refuse to play it safe, to make an album that was unlike anything Led Zeppelin had done or sounded like before. “By then we realized that, again, there were no rules.”
Bucking another trend, the songs came together fast. Jimmy and John Paul had always been efficient in the studio, with an eye on the clock, but now Robert and Bonzo picked up the pace.
“As soon as I got a decent sound, off they went,” said Andy Johns. “They would bang out two, three tracks a night sometimes, and it’d go by quite quickly.”
The first bang emanated from a take they did for “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” This song had been around in one form or another since the Albert Hall concert and had been considered as a cut for LZII. In fact, they’d recorded it, but as Jimmy noted, “It didn’t come off.” They’d been unable to capture “the exact dynamics and the overall tension of it,” the dramatic rise and fall inherent to the structure of urban blues. Since then, it had evolved from a straightforward Chicago-style reading to “blues with a rock ’n roll rhythm to the phrasing” that paid its respects to Lee Michaels’s kick-ass version of “Stormy Monday,” complete with a brutal attack of Hammond organ by John Paul, who pumped its bass pedals as if he were putting out a brush fire with his feet.
“It was meant to push the envelope,” Jimmy said. “We were playing in the spirit of the blues, but trying to take it into new dimensions dictated by the mass consciousness of the four players involved.”
Perhaps unconsciously—or not—Robert had lifted the opening verse, almost word for word, from a Moby Grape song called “Never” that was on an album in his record collection. Whatever his inspiration, the brute force of the arrangement allowed him to cut loose in a way that squeezed every last ounce of emotion out of the vocal. His voice clung to the melody like honey to a spoon. The tape operator in the control room witnessed how Robert “lived every line.” The anguish spilled out of him. It was as if he couldn’t contain himself—he had to convince each listener of his sincerity, at the same time begging for understanding.
“I don’t know where it came from,” Robert recalled of the unhinged burst of passion he injected into the performance. “I don’t know whether that was born from the loins of Jimmy or John Paul, but I know that when we reached that point in the song you could get a lump in the throat from being in the middle of it.”
Nevertheless, as convincing and dominant as Robert’s vocal was, Jimmy pushed him to dig deeper as the song rambled toward the fade. “Let’s try the outro chorus again,” he suggested. “Improvise a bit more.”
A year earlier, a comment like that might have been enough to undermine Robert’s confidence, make him doubt his ability to live up to Jimmy’s expectations. Not until these sessions was he able to get past the self-doubt, to find his voice, “to calm it down and have the confidence to sing in a different style.” It had taken him a while to get over “a lot of insecurity and nerves and the ‘I’m a failure’ stuff,” he said. As a singer, he felt he had finally come into his own.
