Led Zeppelin, page 29
It was a better performance all around, sharper, more exciting. Jimmy had been right. After hearing the playback, Bonzo grudgingly admitted as much.
The ethereal intro synthesized easily enough once they turned their focus to it. John Paul multitracked the recorders over the melody line, which Jimmy, surrounded by baffles, fingerpicked on an acoustic guitar. For two studio pros, it was a morning’s work. There were no charts, as in the old days, but enough intuition and experience to make quick work of it. After that was locked, Jimmy added a twelve-string rhythm figure before picking up his trusty “Dragon” Telecaster, the one Jeff Beck had given him, to lay in the solo.
“I had the first phase worked out, and a link here and there,” Jimmy recalled, “but on the whole that solo was improvised.”
They’d first tried it at Headley Grange, working on it for three or four hours without getting a decent take. In the studio, instead of playing to the rhythm track with headphones, Andy set Jimmy up in front of giant Tannoy monitors to simulate the feel of a live band. The earsplitting playback blasted at him in much the same way a fan heard it, sitting in front of the PA system at an outsize arena.
According to Digby Smith, “He just leaned up against the speakers with his ear virtually pressed against them and rattled out that solo.”
Jimmy played it three times, layering on harmonies, just building them up . . . and up . . . and up . . . until the piece had nowhere else to go.
Except that it still needed a vocal. Robert was sitting at the back of the control room, a yellow pad balanced on his knees, minding his own business.
Andy Johns gave him a friendly nudge. “Robert, it’s your turn to sing,” he said.
“Really?” he responded without looking up, continuing to furiously scribble away. “Well, I’m not finished with the lyrics. Can you play it again?”
After another playback, Robert was ready to go—and he nailed the vocal in two takes.
Led Zeppelin had completed a new album—their fourth in a little more than two years, an astonishing output, considering the seemingly endless, soul-sucking tours that encroached between records. But this one felt different. Everyone agreed. This one felt special, more organic and collaborative. They’d taken their time making it under unbeatable conditions, with an abundance of material to work from—the best of the bunch, whittled down from fourteen to eight. Seven killer songs, and just maybe one masterpiece.
Led Zeppelin IV? Not if Jimmy had anything to do with it. That would give the demon press too much ammunition to continue its remorseless target practice with the band. No, if Jimmy had his way—and Jimmy usually got his way—this album’s title would stupefy the critics and the suits alike, it would beat them at their own game. He had the perfect title for it.
It would be called nothing.
[3]
Not quite nothing. There would be hints as to what the album might be called if someone were to put a title on it—which was not happening.
The cover was given over to a painting of a wizened little character in a bowler hat with a faggot of branches strapped to his back, who looked as though he’d stepped out of a Marcel Pagnol novel. Robert had unearthed it in “a real dingy second-hand shop” in Reading during one of the trips he and Jimmy made to Headley Grange. Jimmy haunted antique shops. He’d developed into an avid collector of twentieth-century decorative arts—art deco, art nouveau, arts and crafts, modernist, Favrile glass, Biedermeier, and ceramics—and he couldn’t pass a gallery without making a pit stop. He’d discovered gems, real treasures, in bric-a-brac places all over the world. But this place—this place was a dump, and the prize was Robert’s.
Sure, why not put this painting on the cover to give those pundits something to think about? It was to be hung on a wall of peeling wallpaper. On the back was a photo of a Midlands high-rise, the contrast of which, according to Jimmy, represented “the old being knocked down, the new buildings going up.” But nothing was to be explained or identified. Spelling it out, he said, “would make the whole thing disappointing on that level of your own personal adventure into the music.” Jimmy had other ideas along the same lines. In a ballsy, defiant contrivance, the band’s name wouldn’t appear on the LP cover—they’d remain anonymous—maybe just a symbol that stood for their name, as Prince would do twenty years later—nor would any record company information appear, just . . . nothing. It would be mysterious and confounding. All of it intrigued and amused the four musicians, but they knew it would be a hard sell to Atlantic Records. Was it “pretty bold,” as a fellow musician proclaimed—or professional suicide?
And what of the inside of the gatefold? More intrigue or artifice, a little chicanery at the suits’ expense? One side of the panel conveyed an arcane pencil illustration entitled View in Half or Varying Light depicting a sinister-looking, hooded figure atop a mountain, holding a lantern and gazing down the slope at the figure of a younger man on bended knee, his arms flung out in supplication. Supposedly, it was drawn by a friend of Jimmy’s named Barrington Coleby, although people close to the band suspect it was one of Jimmy’s art-college projects. In any case, he acknowledged, “It actually comes from the idea from the Tarot card of the Hermit.” For Jimmy, the Hermit was “basically an illustration of a seeker aspiring to the light of truth . . . a symbol of self-reliance and wisdom.”
Eventually, the band decided the album “title” would be represented by four glyphs—or runes, figures used for written language before the introduction of the Latin alphabet—each designating one of the musicians. “We wanted to demonstrate that it was the music that made Zeppelin popular,” Jimmy said. “It had nothing to do with our name or image.” He produced his copy of Koch’s The Book of Signs, the one he’d had Carole Brown buy for him some months earlier, and encouraged the guys to have a look.
“Each of us decided to . . . choose a metaphorical-type symbol [that] somehow would represent each of us individually,” Robert said, “be it a state of mind, an opinion, or something we felt strongly about, or whatever.”
Robert decided to design his own—a feather in a circle, “drawn,” he claimed, “from sacred symbols of the ancient Mu civilization,” which he mistook as history from reading the fictional boyhood adventure The Lost Continent of Mu by Colonel James Churchward. All sorts of interpretations have been ascribed to the symbol. According to Jimmy, “it represents courage to Red Indian tribes.” The Churchward book associated it with Maat, the Egyptian goddess of truth and justice. And sometimes, to paraphrase Freud, a feather in a circle is just a feather in a circle.
John Paul and Bonzo selected their signs from Jimmy’s book. John Paul’s—a circle overlaid with three intersecting almond shapes—“was said to represent a person who is both competent and confident.” At least, that was how Jimmy explained it. But the Koch book classified it as an emblem meant to ward off evil spells. John Paul didn’t care much either way. As with most group decisions, he went along with the flow, intent on not making waves, happy just to play music and create in the studio.
John Bonham’s sign was three circles, what Robert regarded as being “the trilogy—man, woman, and child,” but what others saw clearly as the Ballantine beer logo.
Only Jimmy failed to explain his symbol. He was cagey when asked the meaning of the character that read as “ZoSo.” He insisted it wasn’t a word, wasn’t meant to be pronounced. “It’s just a doodle,” he said, somewhat disingenuously. And when pressed, he drilled down into obfuscation: “My symbol was about invoking and being invocative, and that’s all I’m going to say about it.”
A cottage industry grew up around the interpretation of Jimmy’s stylized sign, with armchair sleuths weighing in on everything from its similarity to Zos, the magical name of Austin Osman Spare, an occultist whose satanic and sexual obsessions rivaled those of Aleister Crowley, to “a graven image of energy, a frozen imprint of physical desire that has a material life of its own.” In fact, the ZoSo symbol had appeared in texts as early as 1557, when a mathematician, Girolamo Cardano, used it in a manuscript entitled De rerum varietate to represent Saturn, the planet that rules Capricorn, which is Jimmy Page’s astrological sign. He did nothing to discourage that interpretation when, for several months in 1971, Jimmy performed in a pair of velvet trousers embroidered with the signs for Capricorn, Scorpio (his ascendant), and Cancer (his moon sign).
Intended meanings, interpretations, and mumbo jumbo aside, the four symbols looked handsome as well as mysterious when lined up together on the album sleeve. And for good measure, a fifth symbol, three triangles with their points all touching, was added to identify Sandy Denny.
“There was a lot of opposition from Atlantic about it being untitled,” Robert recalled.
That was putting it mildly. “The record company was in shock and horror,” says Phil Carson, who recalls sitting in “countless meetings” in an attempt to change the band’s minds.
“I had to go in personally and argue with the record company about it,” Jimmy recalled. He and Peter Grant waved their contract and stood their ground despite demands from Atlantic’s attorney, Mike Mayer, that Led Zeppelin come to their senses, or at the very least allow Atlantic to sticker the album’s shrink-wrapping with the band’s name. At some point, Grant made it clear that they wouldn’t deliver the master tapes until they had Atlantic’s assurance that the cover would be printed exactly as they intended it. He promised Ahmet Ertegun that “the fans were going to find it, with or without a title on it,” and Ertegun reluctantly agreed. Nevertheless, Atlantic put the company’s salesmen on high alert.
Nick Maria, the local rep in northern New Jersey, recalls not batting an eye when the album arrived. “It didn’t matter what was on that cover,” he says. “Everyone knew what it was. FM radio was playing it. Besides, it was revolutionary at the time.”
Trailerloads were coming in from the distributor. Usually, rack jobbers, as the wholesalers were known, took four or five copies of each new album—say, the new Fifth Dimension or Johnny Rivers LPs—for each of the outlets they served. “With Led Zeppelin,” Maria recalls, “we were taking thousands and thousands.”
Led Zeppelin had moved out of the communal bins that mingled Jethro Tull, Creedence, Yes, Nilsson, and Humble Pie albums. They were no longer simply a hit bestselling rock band. There were plenty of those average Joes working the trenches. No, they were now in the rarefied upper reaches, where the muses and deities resided. That much was clear to everyone associated with the music business. With this new album, Led Zeppelin had become a phenomenon.
Chapter Eleven
JUST BOYS HAVING FUN
[1]
Even a phenomenon needed a dose of reality.
John Lennon could chant, “Give me money, that’s what I want,” and the Mothers of Invention could claim, We’re Only in It for the Money, but flaunting fat box-office grosses and hefty sales figures didn’t sit well with folks in England.
Peter Grant had had it up to here with press complaints that painted his band as a bunch of money-grubbing toffs. “Melody Maker and all that lot were saying Zep were getting too big for their boots with their U.S. tours,” he grumbled. Grant figured it would shut the critics up and be a public-relations coup if the band played select dates in small, intimate venues that didn’t involve big paydays. Better yet, they’d play for free.
It would have been impossible to stage Led Zeppelin on the top of a London building, as the Beatles had done, but there were other locales that might do the trick. Two places attracted G’s attention: the Waterloo Station and the Kennington Oval at the Surrey County Cricket Club in South London. Both required permits, which the authorities were loath to grant, and despite the argument that Led Zeppelin would appear unannounced, the applications were rejected.
As an alternative, the band was talked into undertaking a short tour of UK clubs so that they could ostensibly reconnect with their roots. Not only would ticket prices match the 1968 prices, but so would the price of drinks at the bar. It would serve to kill two birds with one stone. The band would get the “money monkey” off their back and at the same time keep their swing in a groove until the new album was released in front of a big U.S. summer tour.
The plan had been to have in stores by late March 1971. On February 9, Jimmy and Andy Johns flew to Los Angles and spent a week mixing the album at Sunset Sound, with its state-of-the-art monitors. To an occultist like Jimmy, the earthquake that greeted their arrival should have been an omen. It turned out the monitors in the studio were as shaky and unpredictable as the tremors that rattled the foundation of their hotel, where, fortunately, no one was injured. If only the mix had fared as well.
“[Jimmy] brought the tapes back and they sounded terrible,” Robert said. The sound they’d heard over the monitors in the LA studio wasn’t true to what was transferred to tape, and when they listened to the playback at Olympic Sound in London, it was a mess, muddy and flat. There was no high end, no treble frequencies. The album had to be completely remixed.
Consequently, the release of had to be postponed, which pleased no one, neither the band nor the record company. G had already booked a series of dates they were calling the Back to the Clubs tour beginning March 5, followed by gigs throughout Europe. Worst-case scenario, Led Zeppelin would play a massive summer tour in the States without new product in the stores, a situation that would cost them millions of dollars.
As it was, the Back to the Clubs tour was already a loss leader. The idea was to charge promoters and fans the same amount as when the band first toured as the New Yardbirds in 1968. “We’re going to restrict prices to twelve bob [shillings] a ticket,” Grant announced with uncharacteristic benevolence.
Jimmy attempted to justify the band’s motivation, saying, “The audiences were becoming bigger and bigger but moving further and further away. They became specks on the horizon and we were losing contact with people—those people who were responsible for lifting us off the ground in the early days.”
It was a noble sentiment but undercut with headaches. Plenty of fans would inevitably be turned away due to space restrictions in clubs—and so would the press. “If they expect red-carpet treatment,” Jimmy warned, “then my advice is don’t bother to come. We’re not playing for the sole benefit of the press or the critics who we all know review most of the shows from the beer tent or the bar!”
Sound was going to be another challenge; an arena-compatible PA might blow out the walls, to say nothing of a few eardrums. But Jimmy chose to look at the upside. “The only major difference,” he said, “is not having to worry about someone leveling a gun at your head as they do in the U.S., so there is less emphasis on security.”
Apparently, he hadn’t seen the itinerary. The tour was set to open in Belfast, where someone leveling a gun at your head was no laughing matter. Rory Gallagher had famously played there on New Year’s Day while bombs were exploding outside the hall. Rock ’n roll bands had avoided playing in Ireland during the rampant sectarian violence that had stretched on for years. Jimmy fretted about going. “The situation’s gotten very bloody over there,” he said, but Grant had thrown caution to the wind. “It was frightening as all-get-out,” says Henry Smith, who drove one of the equipment vans through war-torn streets patrolled by self-styled militias. “I wasn’t used to people walking around with machine guns.”
Richard Cole was uncommonly nervous. “Just hours before our concert in Belfast, there was a confrontation between police and demonstrators about a mile from Ulster Hall, where the band would be performing,” he claimed. According to reports, “a petrol tanker was hijacked, a youth was shot dead, and fire bombs were hurled.”
The gig, however, supplied a priceless measure of peace, a word not commonly used to describe a Led Zeppelin concert. The band shook that Victorian hall with the kind of firepower heard throughout the city, but without any tragic effect. Hearing “Immigrant Song,” “Heartbreaker,” and a particularly trenchant “Dazed and Confused” served as a balm to the so-called Troubles. But the sixth song in the set spun things in an extraordinary direction.
Jimmy strapped on a new, strange-looking guitar, a beast of an instrument with two necks, like Janus, the god of beginnings and endings, and picked out a riff that marked the first-ever performance of “Stairway to Heaven.” For a while it had stumped Jimmy how to reproduce the song onstage. In the studio, he’d begun the intro with his Harmony acoustic guitar, switched to a Fender electric twelve-string for the section that preceded the entry of drums, and played the solo with his Telecaster. There was no way to go through such a hectic instrument change onstage. But he remembered seeing Earl Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson’s guitarist, play a twin-necked model that offered a perfect solution—if only Jimmy could get his hands on one. Unfortunately, Gibson no longer produced them, so he ordered a custom model made of cherry with mahogany necks that weighed in at a lissome thirteen pounds.
Fans watched openmouthed as he used the bottom six strings for the intro and the first verse, then switched to the twelve-string on top, before going back to the six-string for the solo and the twelve-string for the fade. It was a feat of musical prestidigitation, even for a magus like Jimmy Page.
In spite of the stirring milestone, Led Zeppelin was relieved to get out of Belfast. After the last notes were played, they bolted in a limousine heading to Dublin, chugging bottles of Jack Daniel’s to soothe their nerves. By the time they covered the hundred-mile distance, it was well after midnight. Appreciable tension between Robert and John had been brewing all evening. Earlier, following a fifteen-minute drum solo, Robert had made a spectacle of offering Bonzo a banana, which earned him a murderous glare. It was payback of sorts for a nickname that had stuck to Robert like discarded gum. Peter had dubbed him “Percy,” which Bonzo took pleasure in calling him every chance he got. The party line was that the name referred to Percy Thrower, a beloved but fuddy-duddy horticulturist who hosted the long-running TV show Gardeners’ World in the UK, where gardening was a form of religion. In truth, however, it was based on a recent film about a guy who had a transplanted penis that he named Percy. The nickname stuck—and Robert hated it.
