Led Zeppelin, page 27
“Jimmy was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and his perversions,” says Jim McCarty, who occasionally roomed with Jimmy when the Yardbirds went abroad. “He had a bag of stuff he’d bring on tour—whips, handcuffs, chains, and the like. There was always talk about hiding in the bathroom and looning in on me if I was in the middle of something with a bird in bed.” On early tours with Led Zeppelin, there were many sexual encounters with underage girls.
Do what thou wilt.
Crowley’s influence on Jimmy wasn’t limited to behavior. He acquired Crowley’s personal deck of tarot cards and ritual robes, as well as an extensive library of the guru’s handwritten manuscripts and autographed first editions. In early 1970, Jimmy had even purchased Crowley’s former residence, Boleskine House, a five-bedroom country estate curtained off by a copse of mature trees on the banks of the Loch Ness in Scotland. It came furnished with a history of what Jimmy called “bad vibes . . . suicides, people carted off to mental hospitals.” A beheading had supposedly taken place in one of the rooms, but he knew with certainty that it was built on the site of “a church that was burned to the ground with the congregation in it.”
For all its thankless charm, Jimmy rarely inhabited Boleskine House. It wasn’t a proper place to take Charlotte Martin in the fall of 1970, especially now that she was expecting their first child. But the Pangbourne boathouse seemed to be under siege by avid Led Zeppelin fans, so Jimmy went house shopping and bought a more remote, secure pad—Plumpton Place, a sixteenth-century manor surrounded by a moat, about ten miles north of Brighton on the East Sussex coast.
“He asked me to find black swans for the moat,” recalls Carole Brown, who was Peter Grant’s assistant. Swans—of course. “I located a keeper who bred the birds by Royal Assent, and we went on his waitlist.”
He also asked Brown “to walk up to Foyles Bookshop in Charing Cross Road to find a book of Old English runes”—Rudolf Koch’s Book of Signs—“because he had an idea for an album cover.”
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• • •
Ideas for songs had started coming toward the end of the last U.S. tour. Jimmy, as always, had been sketching out and filing away bits of riffs that, with input from his mates and enough TLC, would take more interesting shape once they put aside time to write and rehearse. Making an album was a democracy, John Paul Jones explained. “There’s really no format, no set ideas,” he said. “The group’s always played what comes out, and what comes out goes down. If it sounds good to everybody, then it’s played.”
There had been plans to tour England over the holiday season, beginning a month after Led Zeppelin wrapped up their two sold-out shows in New York, but as Bonzo pointed out, “we were drained.” Peter Grant suggested they take the rest of the year off. Grant worried that the soft reaction to LZIII warranted another album, pronto, to restore the band’s two-fisted credibility. The layoff would give Jimmy and Robert plenty of opportunity to write.
In the meantime, Grant decided to take some time off of his own. His weight had ballooned to a stunning twenty-seven stone—roughly 375 pounds—and was contributing to awkward problems he preferred to forgo. His ungainly size now necessitated booking two seats for plane travel—more a personal embarrassment than a matter of cost—and various chairs tended to break under the demands of his bulk. Weight had always been a nuisance to G, but the situation came to a head during the time Led Zeppelin had performed in Hawaii.
“We were in this luxury estate, and there was a VW dune buggy in the driveway,” recalled Clive Coulson’s wife, Sherry. “It had tipped over, and I could see a man trapped inside—and it was G.” It took the roadies considerable time and effort to get it righted while a pinned-down Grant cursed up a storm.
While his band took time off, G booked himself into Enton Hall, a health farm in Sussex where Ian Fleming had shed unwanted pounds and where James Bond visited—the fictional Shrublands in Thunderball.
Before checking in, Grant had a last errand that entailed throwing his weight around.
He’d noticed a front-page article in Melody Maker that set his blood boiling: “A London record distributor said this week that two new Led Zeppelin albums will shortly be in the shops—both unofficial, illegal bootlegs.” The reference was to a double album in the underground pipeline, Led Zeppelin Live on Blueberry Hill, recorded in an elaborate pirate fashion “by radio transmitters that picked up the signal . . . in the hall and transmitted it outside to a mobile recording truck” during the band’s concerts at the Forum in Los Angeles.
Grant was having none of it. He traced the album’s source to the Chancery Lane Record Centre, conveniently located around the corner from the RAK office in London, and staged an unannounced visit with Richard Cole and Mickie Most. As they stepped inside, Richard Cole turned the open sign on the door to closed and sought out the owner, Jeffrey Collins, known around town as “the Bootleg King.”
“Have you got the Led Zeppelin album?” Grant inquired.
Collins, who failed to recognize either Peter or Mickie, offered to make him a tape for half the price of the bootleg.
“Peter got hold of this fellow and threw him against the wall,” Most remembered, then “went behind the counter and smashed up the tape-copying machine.”
As insurance, he “threw the records all over the place and made a bit of a mess,” and confiscated the store’s stock of Blueberry Hill albums. G had always treated bootleggers without mercy. He’d repeatedly warned perpetrators: “I would step on anyone who fucked with my band—personally.” The wholesale distribution of these albums had begun to take a sizable bite out of the band’s income, a bite estimated “between $150,000 and $200,000,” a rather wild exaggeration.
The worst offenders were in Europe. “In Germany, the situation is terrible,” Peter huffed. “There were attempts to record us at every venue we played—cables on the end of broomsticks hanging over hall balconies.” He was determined “to stamp out the bootleggers,” a consequence that he meant to be taken literally.
Led Zeppelin had little or no idea of the details. John Paul and Bonzo had retired to their homes, determined to reap the benefits of the two months off, while Robert and Jimmy went straight back to work. In November 1970, they returned to the little cottage in Wales, Bron-Yr-Aur, to work on songs for the band’s next album. There were no wives, children, or pets this time, just two roadies, Henry Smith and Sandy MacGregor, who kept things humming for the ten-day stretch.
It was a relaxed work atmosphere. Without any distractions, Robert and Jimmy wrote during the days, camped out on the living room couch with a couple of guitars at their disposal and the requisite tape recorder. Occasionally, “for inspiration,” Robert stepped outside with Henry Smith, “to sit in the grass and smoke some hash.” Nights were spent in the nearby village of Machynlleth for dinner and a shower at the Owain Glyndwr Pub, named in honor of the instigator of the Welsh Revolt against Henry IV in 1400. The atmosphere wasn’t just relaxed, it was ideal.
It had taken two and a half years for Jimmy and Robert to establish a comfort level, to find themselves, if not on equal footing, at least a few feet closer to appreciating each other’s uniqueness. The four-year age difference had been something of an obstacle at first. “He was my senior in every respect,” Robert acknowledged, but “by about the eighth song we wrote together, I began to realize that I had something with this guy that was very special. I was no longer just chancing it, so I was feeling better and better all the time.”
Jimmy felt it, too. After their initial visit to Bron-Yr-Aur in April, he said, “It was the first time I really came to know Robert. The songs took us into areas that changed the band.” Now he recognized the value of their partnership. “We were like a marriage,” Jimmy said. “Like Lennon and McCartney.”
Not quite, but they were about to embark on their most intricate creative endeavor.
[2]
Jimmy had been struggling for months with a spellbinding chord progression he’d written at Bron-Yr-Aur on the first visit there, in April—a descending four-measure figure that he continued to work on between tours. He’d been compiling demos for it on a mobile deck installed at his boathouse in Pangbourne, the same deck The Who used to record Live at Leeds.
“I’d been fooling around with my acoustic guitar and came up with different sections, which I married together,” he said. His concept was for a grand mosaic of song knit together from swatches of dramatic, independent movements. “To have a piece with the sort of naked guitar starting off, and then into a thing that would build up,” he fantasized. “Something that would have drums come in at the middle and then build to a huge crescendo. Also, I wanted it to speed up, which is something musicians aren’t supposed to do.” He wasn’t exactly certain how it would progress just yet, but he knew where it was leading—“that there would be this great sort of orgasm at the end.”
The song was still pretty sketchy when the entire band assembled at Island Studios in West London in December 1970. The intro was intact, and so were other variable passages, but the overall structure didn’t hang together. Nevertheless, the band recorded a ragged instrumental version of it on a reference tape—just drums, acoustic guitar, and John Paul playing electric piano, no bass—and decided to continue work on it in the future. The same with a number called “Four Sticks,” which had lost its swing and needed additional work.
One of the problems was the studio itself—it didn’t inspire. “A recording studio is an immediate imposition,” Robert declared. He, like Jimmy, found it too limiting, not inclusive, not inspiring. Some bands, like the Beatles, could enter the studio with absolutely nothing in the development stage and eventually pull an entire album together with collaborative panache. They felt at home there. But Led Zeppelin was less a single creative entity than a collection of musicians performing distinct roles. If Jimmy and Jonesy were busy working on an arrangement, Bonzo and Robert were left out, and they became bored. It wasn’t productive to have them standing around, waiting to play. For Led Zeppelin, studios were fine for putting ideas on tape or refining something that had already been arranged and rehearsed, but when it came to creating the magic, the je ne sais quoi, the band thrived in a more informal atmosphere.
John Paul considered the work at Island Studios productive—up to a point. “We’ve done a good deal, [we’ve] broken the back of it,” he believed at the time. “But rather than waste a lot of studio time thinking of the riffs and the lyrics in the studio, we decided this place in Hampshire was definitely the best place to get the numbers down before we [go back].”
Headley Grange, the manor house in Hampshire where they’d recorded much of Led Zeppelin III, for all its grunge, had a nicer feel than the trappings of a studio. “It seemed ideal,” Jimmy said, summoning the band to meet him there for a month’s stay, beginning just after Christmas 1970. “The idea was to create a comfortable working environment and see what would happen.” And with the Stones’ mobile unit parked out back, fresh from its sessions for Sticky Fingers, Led Zeppelin could “develop material and record it while the idea was still hot.”
John Paul knew Headley Grange was ideal in theory, but he wasn’t thrilled with going back. He thought the place was grim, a dump. “It was cold and damp,” Jones said. “I remember we all ran in when we arrived in a mad scramble to get the driest rooms.”
The place was cavernous, with ten rambling bedrooms on the upper floors, so the free-for-all through the rooms felt more like a game of musical chairs. The rest of the place would never make the pages of Architectural Digest. “There was stuffing coming out of the couch and springs coming out of the bed,” Andy Johns, the engineer, recalled.
“It was so dull,” John Paul said, bemoaning the lack of a pool table or even a local pub, “but that really focused your mind on getting the work done.”
They rehearsed for a week before the mobile unit was pressed into duty. There were plenty of half-finished songs to mull over and a few that materialized spontaneously. During an early jam to loosen up, they worked on “I’m Gonna Be Her Man” and “Down by the Seaside,” the latter of which was begun at Bron-Yr-Aur and assembled imprecisely on the reference tape done at Island Studios. They also tinkered with an early version of “No Quarter,” which they’d actually previewed during their September concert at the Forum in LA.
The first serious number they worked on was based on a clever riff that John Paul Jones introduced. The idea for it had come to him some time ago, on a train ride back from visiting Jimmy at his Pangbourne house, where they’d listened to the Muddy Waters album Electric Mud. “One track is a long, rambling riff,” he said, referring to “Tom Cat,” with its fidgety rhythms, “and I really liked the idea of writing something like that—a riff that would be like a linear journey.” In other words, the riff “didn’t end when you thought it was going to end.” He sketched it out on the back of the train ticket using a number-based notation system that his father had taught him, enabling John Paul to remember it when he got back home. The rest of the guys thought it was definitely worth exploring further.
Jimmy was especially taken with it. “I then suggested that we build a song similar in structure to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Oh Well,’ ” he said. “I wanted to create a call-and-response between Robert’s vocal and the band.”
Trouble was, it was very tricky to pull off. “It was originally all in 3/16 time,” John Paul explained, “but no one could keep up with that.” A 3/16 time signature was more specific to works by classical composers. A second section he introduced “was actually phrased as three 9/8 bars and one 5/8 bar [played] over the straight 4/4 [time], but nobody else could play it.” Even so, they gave it their best shot.
“You know, they just played it, fell about all over the place for about ten minutes in fits of laughter,” Robert recalled, “played it again, burst into some more laughter.”
Robert played it safe. He chose to begin the vocals a cappella, so as not to get tangled up in the web of wonky time signatures. Throwing his head back, he let loose with a deliciously salty line: “Hey hey, mama, said the way you move / Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove.”
That gave the song a nice kick in the ass. But the rest of it never really “fell into place,” like so many of the songs Led Zeppelin recorded. It was a hellish piece to play—stubborn, exacting, but unaccommodating, requiring all of their musical chops, with Bonzo ticking his drumsticks together as a makeshift click track so the others could keep time.
For want of a title to match the inscrutable time signature, they named it simply “Black Dog” after an old Labrador retriever with white whiskers that drifted onto the property and curled up while they played. “It was just a working title that stuck,” according to Jimmy.
“Four Sticks” was another song with convulsive cadences played over a loose, rolling riff that gave the band agita. It wasn’t exactly four sticks, to begin with. “Bonzo was playing with two sticks,” Jimmy recalled, “and the idea was to get this kind of abstract number,” something he’d likened to an Indian raga. They tried approaching it in different ways, but “it didn’t come off.” Bonzo grew especially frustrated.
Jimmy was inclined to call it a day rather than banging their heads against the wall. He knew from experience that frustration crippled the creative process. “If the track isn’t happening and it starts creating a psychological barrier, even after an hour or two, then you should stop and do something else,” he said. “Go to the pub or a restaurant or something. Or play another song.”
Play another song. Bonzo was on board with that—without even cueing the band. He simply started banging out the opening drum riff to Little Richard’s “Keep a-Knockin’ ”—“playing this right-handed open hi-hat with a left-handed shuffle,” according to Grand Funk’s Don Brewer—as a way to expel his vexation. Hitting things always made Bonzo feel better.
To maintain the momentum, Jimmy added a riff he pulled out of his old Chuck Berry–Eddie Cochran bag, which threw the icebreaker into full jam gear. “It actually ground to a halt after about twelve bars, but it was enough to know there was enough of a number there to keep working on it,” he said. To get a sense of the structure, everyone trooped into the truck to hear what it sounded like on tape.
Coincidentally, Ian Stewart had showed up that afternoon to make sure the mobile unit was in tip-top shape. Stu, as he was affectionately called, happened to be an incomparable boogie-woogie piano player— “the most intuitive player I ever heard,” according to Glyn Johns. There was an old, decrepit upright in the house, so Stu joined the jam, spiraling across the keys with a prodigious left hand and a right hand that walloped out two-octave chords before slicing them into fragments.
Robert, who had no time to craft an appropriate lyric, belted out a line that he felt suited the rhythmic foundation. “It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled.” Vocally, he pulled out all the stops. Robert’s full-tilt exuberance made him sound unhinged, and it pulled the others into his manic pace. The song just flowed from there with a unity of attack, and as Jimmy noted, “within fifteen minutes it was virtually complete.”
“Rock and Roll”—or “It’s Been a Long Time,” as it was initially called—was as joyous and uninhibited as anything Led Zeppelin ever recorded. They worked out all the tension that had accrued from their tussle with “Four Sticks” to produce the most spirited and exciting rock song in its most elementary form. At a trim three minutes and forty seconds, it was the kind of riveting performance that would give the fourth album the euphoric thrust it needed.
