Led Zeppelin, page 25
Later, at another session in a different studio, Jimmy would add a guitar solo infused with earthy, undulating motion that ripped through the song’s emotional core, adding another layer of sensuality to its already red-hot atmospherics. As a mood setter for the new album, “Since I’ve Been Loving You” made a statement about the strength of Led Zeppelin’s ability to lift the blues out of the ordinary and into exciting new territory.
At Olympic, they also laid down tracks for “That’s the Way” and “Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp,” both of which felt inspired by the Incredible String Band, the cutting-edge Scottish folk-rock band. “The places that the String Band were coming from were places that we loved very much,” Robert acknowledged. “But because I was a blues shouter and Pagey was out of the Yardbirds, we didn’t have that pastoral kick.”
Pastoral was one way to describe it. The Incredible String Band “played the kind of music people liked to sit around and have a joint to,” said Mike Heron, its rhythm guitarist. In Led Zeppelin’s hands, the music turned into the kind people would do a couple lines of cocaine to.
To create that kind of rush, John Paul Jones played the mandolin on “That’s the Way,” with the main breaks contributed by Jimmy on pedal steel guitar. “I couldn’t really play a pedal steel like a pedal-steel player,” he said, “but I could play it like me.” That meant blowing up the folksy feel with a pedal steel that sounded like it was attached to a whipsaw. After almost four and a half minutes of lush, full-throated guitars, the bass roared in, along with the ball-peen beats from a dulcimer, and the song took off into the jet stream that the pedal steel created for it.
They also worked on another song that built its bones on a furious bass line dispatched by Jonesy at a superhuman pace, exaggerating the rhythm of a human heartbeat recorded at 33⅓ rpm but played back on a 78 rpm turntable. There were no lyrics at the outset, but Robert had what Jimmy referred to as an exotic “sort of ‘Bali Ha’i’ melody line” that he’d come up with spontaneously in the studio.
The lyrics materialized two weeks later, on June 22, 1970, during a date Led Zeppelin played in Reykjavík, Iceland, as part of a cultural exchange between the two governments. The land of midnight sun and ice and snow provided instant inspiration. Robert said, “It made you think of Vikings and big ships . . . and John Bonham’s stomach . . . and bang, there it was—‘Immigrant Song.’ ” The song came together on the spot.
The band’s execution of it stands as one of the most arresting and identifiable songs they ever recorded. It opened the album and shockingly so, with a clatter of bass and drums that yielded to a bone-chilling war cry. The rhythm section was unrelenting, practically off its hinges. The vocals were feral. The imagery defied classification. By the time Robert hit the final line—“For peace and trust can win the day / Despite all your losing”—he sounded as if he’d been out in the ice and snow too long.
The band decided to showcase “Immigrant Song” at an upcoming gig on June 28. Instead of heading back to America, album unfinished, they remained in the UK to appear at the loftily titled Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music, a two-day blowout held in a natural amphitheater not unlike the one that hosted Woodstock, on the fringe of Shepton Mallet, a medieval town in Somerset. The year before, when Led Zeppelin had played the festival, they were practically unknown. This time around, they were booked to headline the closing night, on a star-studded bill that included Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, the Moody Blues, the Byrds, the Flock, Santana, Dr. John, Country Joe & the Fish, and Hot Tuna.
Everyone knew what was at stake. The jury was still out on Led Zeppelin in England. Their albums sold well, but few fans had been able to see them perform. There had been no large-scale concerts on home soil, a dearth of interviews, and a moratorium on TV appearances. What’s more, the band had developed a reputation as bread heads who ran off to America to make money rather than entertaining the British fans. A chill had set in. They were going to have to prove themselves at the Bath Festival.
“We knew it was an important gig for us,” Jimmy said, “so we needed to deliver.”
Peter Grant was determined to make the most of the opportunity. “I went down to the site unbeknownst to Freddie Bannister [the promoter] and found out from the [meteorological] office what time the sun was setting.” Grant figured that if Led Zeppelin went on at exactly 8:30 p.m., the natural backdrop would be jaw-droppingly spectacular, especially if he had the crew bring the spotlight up on them with the presto effect of a Houdini illusion. The crowd would be appropriately wowed.
This wasn’t the cozy gathering of a year ago, when twelve thousand fans assembled for the show. Early arrivals had been drifting in all week, sleeping in the field around smoldering campfires. Taking a cue from their Woodstock forebears, thousands of interlopers pulled down the chain-link fences and Bath “suddenly became a free festival” and, to its promoters, “a vision of hell.” By the time the first act went on, on Saturday afternoon, the audience was properly wired—and 150,000 strong.
John Bonham was taking no chances. After a late-Saturday-night bacchanal in Birmingham, he set out for Shepton Mallet at three o’clock in the morning in his new, aerodynamically designed Jensen Interceptor with a case of Dom Pérignon champagne, the bulk of which was consumed en route. John Paul hired a helicopter to land him near the site, then caught a ride to the stage on the back of a Hells Angels chopper, while Jimmy and Robert spent most of the day previewing the opening acts.
The size of the crowd staggered them—it would be the largest they’d ever played to. It was mind-blowing, particularly for Robert Plant, who experienced an epiphany. “I remember standing there thinking: I’ve gone from West Bromwich to this! The whole thing seemed extraordinary to me.”
Before their appearance, Led Zeppelin convened in a giant tepee behind the stage to take the edge off and go over their set.
“They were in great spirits,” says Chris Charlesworth, who had only recently joined the staff of Melody Maker and was on his first assignment, “but you could tell how much was riding on their performance. G more than anyone was pretty wound up, and his anxiety was contagious.”
He was watching the clock. The act on before Led Zeppelin was the Flock, a Chicago-based jazz-rock band that featured a lead violin instead of guitar. At 8:20 they were deep into a jam with no sign they’d be winding down anytime in the next five minutes. Freddy Bannister assured Peter they were almost done, but almost wasn’t soon enough. Peter wanted them off—now!
“Take care of those bastards,” he ordered Richard Cole, now rechristened Ricardo by the crew, who in turn summoned roadie Henry Smith.
“He told us to go right down the line and unplug the Flock’s guitars, which is exactly what I did,” Smith recalls. In midsong! “I don’t think they realized what was going on, but they knew better than to give us a hard time.”
“Hey, we haven’t finished yet, man,” a Flock roadie protested, however meekly.
“Oh, yes you fuckin’ have!” Grant insisted.
Otherwise, it was exactly as G had planned it. The sunset was in full display, with a burst of yellow-orange bleeding across the stage as though someone had colorized a black-and-white movie. Robert, staring out at the sea of humanity, tried the best he could to contain his nerves. “I’d like to say a couple things,” he warbled into the mic as the others were tuning up. “We’ve been playing in America a lot recently, and we really thought, coming back here, we might have a dodgy time.”
Dodgy? He needn’t have worried. When Led Zeppelin burst into their opening number—the hard-charging “Immigrant Song,” albeit unfinished, with lyrics ad-libbed and riddled with gibberish—they took the audience’s perception of rock ’n roll to another riotous level. “Crikey!” thought Chris Charlesworth, watching from just in front of the stage, “Those guys blew my mind. I had never heard anything so loud in my life—and my favorite band up to then was The Who.” Led Zeppelin played at an earsplitting volume two or three times that of the preceding acts. The crowd was part stunned, part delirious. And then they went wild.
Led Zeppelin played their hearts out for nearly three hours, including five encores that incorporated such crowd-pleasers as Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul,” Muddy Waters’s “Long Distance Call,” Big Joe Williams’s “El Paso Blues,” Elvis Presley’s “I Need Your Love Tonight,” Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” Gene Vincent’s “Say Mama,” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
Roy Harper, the esoteric folksinger, who watched from backstage, thought, “There was no way that young people everywhere were not going to be forever attracted to this.”
It was a coming-out party. Led Zeppelin left no doubt that they were the stars of the Bath Festival—and the new stars of rock ’n roll in the UK. In fact, a few short months later, Melody Maker would make it official, naming them Best Group in its annual Readers Poll, ahead of the Beatles, the Stones, The Who, and Pink Floyd.
For all his careful planning, Peter Grant missed most of the thrilling finale. He’d gotten wind that a couple of guys had crawled under the stage with tape equipment and were in the process of recording the show for what most likely would result in a bootleg. Someone needed to put a stop to it right away. “I couldn’t find Freddie Bannister,” he said, “so I thought fuck it, and went and did it myself.” First he threw a bucket of water into the electronics; then he went to work on the perpetrators. “I kicked the shit out of them and all the equipment. I pulled an ax off the wall . . . and did a machete job on the machinery.”
These were the new rules of engagement. For the band, it would be light and shade—achieving dynamic tones in their music that seesawed between thematic motifs, as Jimmy intended it. But the manager’s guideline—perhaps decree would be a better term—was my way or the highway coupled with might makes right. If anyone failed to toe the line, G would take matters into his own hands without regard for either the law or the consequences.
[3]
With another U.S. tour scheduled to kick off on August 10, 1970, it became of prime importance to Led Zeppelin to make headway on the new album. Jimmy recalled how productive he and Robert were, writing in isolation at Bron-Yr-Aur, where there was nothing to distract them. Getting away from it all, recording remotely in an atmosphere conducive to relaxing into the music might inspire the band in the same way. “I didn’t know exactly how the Band recorded their Music from Big Pink album or [Bob Dylan’s] The Basement Tapes, but the rumor was they were done in a house they had rented.”
That suited his sense of sangfroid. “You really do need the facilities where you can take a break for a cup of tea and a wander around the garden,” he said. “Instead of walking into a studio, down a flight of steps into fluorescent lights and opening up the big soundproof door and being surrounded by acoustic tiles.” To Jimmy, studios had a sterile “hospital atmosphere.” They reminded him of those go-go session days. They gave him “studio nerves,” put pressure on him to play the solo of a lifetime each time out.
He asked Peter Grant to look into a place in the country that would be adequate for Led Zeppelin to both live and record for a while. Andy Johns suggested they rent Stargroves, Mick Jagger’s country manor in Hampshire, a sparsely decorated faux château that came outfitted with the Stones’ mobile recording studio.
“How much would that cost?” Jimmy inquired.
Johns had done his homework. “Well, the truck’s about £1,000 a week, and Mick’s house is about £1,000 a week.”
Andy had heard rumors of Jimmy’s legendary penny-pinching—he’d famously charged Robert and Bonzo for a beans-and-toast breakfast they shared at Pangbourne in the getting-acquainted days of the band—but he hadn’t expected such an emphatic reaction.
“I’m not paying Mick Jagger £1,000 a week for some bloody place!” Jimmy huffed. “I’ll find somewhere better than that.”
He meant cheaper. Jimmy was known as “Led Wallet” behind his back for a reason. Peter Grant used to joke, “If you want to kill Jimmy, toss a shilling in front of a speeding bus.”
G turned it over to Willow Morel, whose Organisation Unlimited, staffed by out-of-work actors, “could find you anything you needed,” no questions asked. In a matter of days she came up with Headley Grange, an old “dank and spooky” stone manor dating from the late 1700s, straddling several acres in East Hampshire. Peter Grant was familiar with the area. “I’d been evacuated there in the war,” he recalled.
“It was very Charles Dickens” to Jimmy’s eyes. The place’s provenance as a Victorian workhouse for the poor and insane, along with orphans and illegitimate children, did nothing to enhance its charm. “It was a pretty austere place,” he admitted, “[but] I loved the atmosphere of it. The others got a bit spooked.” Robert and Bonzo were particularly freaked out, but Jimmy dismissed their whining. It all came down to workability for him. “I knew straightaway that the acoustics would be good.”
Jonesy shared his appreciation. “[It] had very large rooms which were very echoey . . . [and] a big stairwell, which was even more echoey.” There were hardwood floors and cupboards galore where amplifiers could be hidden to create a variety of sounds. Musicians could be separated by different rooms or even floors, or stationed outside in the garden. The layout provided for a great ambient recording opportunity—an opportunity, as Jimmy saw it, to do “some amazing hard work—no messing about; a roadie to make beef stew. We eat and sleep and really focus.”
Ultimately, Jimmy ponied up for the Stones’ mobile recording unit. The “studio,” conceived by Ian Stewart with Glyn Johns’s engineering input, was little more than an eight-track console wedged into the narrow side of an RV trailer where the kitchen facilities would normally have been situated. “It can get a bit impersonal,” Andy Johns acknowledged. “[The] ability to monitor a situation isn’t as good as in a proper studio. You end up talking to the band through a closed-circuit camera and a microphone instead of through the studio glass.
That didn’t deter Jimmy. “It seemed ideal,” he said of the setup. “As soon as we thought of an idea we put it down on tape.” The only drawback was keeping the adrenaline in check. “We’d get so excited about an idea that we’d really rush to . . . get it on tape.”
There was no holding back. One of the first numbers they worked on was built on a descending riff Jimmy had written, but developed around a drinking song of Bonzo’s about hitting the pubs.
“He would just get drunk and start singing things,” Jimmy explained. One of Bonzo’s standbys went: “Out on the tiles, I’ve had a pint of bitter / And I’m feeling better ’cause I’m out on the tiles.” Robert took some liberties with the lyric and turned it into a reedy, ear-piercing, ramblin’ song—ramblin’ and lovin’, aided by a torrential outpour of instrumentation at his back. A song like this was, in Robert’s words, “all riffs and rhythm track. I would have to try to weave the vocal in amongst it all, and it was very hard.” The runaway tempo became the song’s main musical force, letting the instruments gallop into the expanded closing passage that provided the only honorable way out. In its earliest form, it was known as “Bathroom Song,” but later adopted Bonzo’s phrase as a more suitable title—suitable, but beyond one’s grasp.
They also took a poke at a traditional folk song of Leadbelly’s called “Gallis Pole.” Jimmy got it off “an old Folkways LP by Fred Gerlach,” an intimate of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. It was Jimmy’s first stab at playing the banjo, which relied heavily on fingerpicking—“going back to the studio days,” he said, a time when he’d developed “a certain amount of technique.” He also overdubbed a six-string acoustic, a twelve-string, and electric guitars. John Paul embellished it with a mandolin flourish that provided a sinister counterpoint to the ghoulish lyric.
The change in tempos offered relief in many ways. “There was no conscious desire along the lines of, ‘Oh, we’ve done Heavy, now we should look at Soft,’ ” said John Paul, reflecting on those sessions and a longer one that followed at Island Studios in London. But after bashing away for several hours, musicians—those who were serious practitioners and played at the top of their craft—got a chance to express themselves in a disarmingly simple but eloquent manner. “The acoustic stuff made Led Zeppelin much more powerful,” Robert realized, “not just a hit machine.”
Be that as it may, Led Zeppelin’s fans expected the hit machine. The new album, titled simply Led Zeppelin III, baffled the legions of faithful when it was released in October 1970. And not just the songs but the cover and inner sleeve, with a rotating cardboard wheel that revealed pop-art images of the band, butterflies, chunks of corn, and assorted gewgaws through peepholes die-cut into the mechanism. It was supposed to “reflect the album’s bucolic ambience by mimicking an annual crop-rotation calendar,” but its critics found the concept silly, “teenybopperish,” as Jimmy described it, more suited to a Partridge Family LP.
The songs were an entirely different matter. The songs were a far cry from the character Led Zeppelin had constructed for itself. For many fans, the mixed marriage of rock and folk was too radical a departure, too jarring, too difficult to appreciate. Light and shade was all well and good, but Robert’s argument that “there are different moods to our music, just the same as people have different moods,” rang hollow. Fans didn’t care about moods; they wanted the kind of music they were accustomed to from their favorite rock ’n roll group.
In the band’s attempt to puncture the myth of Led Zeppelin, they had emasculated it. There was none of the raw energy of “you need coolin’ ” or “squeeze my lemon,” no attack, no Sturm und Drang. Several reviews accused the band of going soft, of losing its backbone. Q, the British rock ’n roll monthly, later called the album “a rickety, erratic affair.” Critics, even those who had sung Led Zeppelin’s praises, found it too contrived, too calculating, too self-indulgent. They mistrusted the band’s intentions. The album was said to lack the intensity or edge that had made its two predecessors such inspired affairs. “I, II, III . . . and Zeppelin Weakens” was the banner across the review in Disc and Music Echo. Rolling Stone, predictably, panned it—Jimmy called it “a definite hatchet job”—as did Creem and Crawdaddy. NME warned that “it remains to be seen how far Zeppelin lovers will go along with what is a pretty drastic change in direction.” Of the major music publications, only Melody Maker, which two weeks earlier had anointed Led Zeppelin as Best Group in its poll, published an unequivocal rave—“Zeppelin III Is Pure Magic”—by Chris Welch, who called LZIII “a much better album than LZII.”
