Led Zeppelin, page 31
Steve Weiss had encountered similar problems with his client Jimi Hendrix. Bill Graham prided himself on offering Jimi only a ridiculously low flat fee and threw him an insulting $1,500 bonus if he sold out. So Weiss decided to self-promote Jimi’s gigs. “We hired a promoter and paid him a small percentage for promoting the concert,” he recalled. Grant got extra excited when Weiss told him how The Who had been circumventing the sixty-forty split with promoters.
“We’d been doing ten-percent deals in Europe,” says Bill Curbishley, The Who’s manager. “I wasn’t asking promoters for sell-out guarantees, which meant they didn’t have to put up their own money, so we split the box office ninety-ten after expenses. And on that tour The Who made a huge amount more.”
Weiss knew that an arrangement like that only worked for the top acts, “because if you guessed wrong, the artists wouldn’t make as much or might even lose money.” He figured that if it had worked for The Who in Europe, then why not try it with Led Zeppelin on their summer American tour in 1972?
G was beside himself. “Fuck those promoters!” he said. “I’m not giving them forty percent when we’re the ones selling tickets.”
It was easier said than done. Frank Barsalona, the head of Premier Talent and the reputed “most powerful man in the music business,” wouldn’t hear of it. He’d put most of the young rock promoters in business and constantly fed them acts to keep their venues booked. The sixty-forty split was the way he did business so that everyone got a fair piece of the pie. Now Peter Grant wanted a bigger piece, and Barsalona put his foot dow: not seventy-thirty, not eighty-twenty, certainly not ninety-ten. He demanded the split remain sixty-forty, and no one crossed Frank Barsalona.
Mickie Most, who still shared an office with Peter, overheard his argument on the phone. “You don’t have to promote Led Zeppelin,” G argued. “Just announce on the radio that they’re playing at Madison Square [Garden], and an hour later there won’t be a ticket to be had.”
As far as he was concerned, Barsalona and Premier Talent were expendable. To test the waters, Peter ordered Tony Mandich, Atlantic’s West Coast artist relations manager, to call a radio station with the dates of Led Zeppelin’s next tour and information that tickets would go on sale the following Monday at 10:00 a.m. “By eleven o’clock or noon, we got a phone call from the Forum that they’d sold out,” Mandich recalled. The same thing happened after a second show was announced.
That was all the proof Grant needed. From now on, he’d see to booking Led Zeppelin himself—or with someone else willing to work using the ninety-ten split—and the promoters, he believed, would all go along with it. What other choice did they have? Let them gripe. They’d still wind up pocketing plenty of money, but it would be on his terms: take it or leave it.
“We never liked it,” says Don Law, who promoted concerts in the Boston arenas, “but we understood what Grant was up to. If you have the hottest band in the world, you wind up setting the terms.”
As G had figured, the promoters all rolled over. He’d have done the same thing were he in their shoes. “I’d take ten percent of Led Zeppelin,” he bragged. “That’s a lot of money for no risk.”
Premier Talent washed its hands of Led Zeppelin, and with the aid of Concerts West, a new power broker on the scene, the entire summer North American tour was conducted on a ninety-ten split. Thanks to the sold-out, arena-size crowds, fantastic sums of money flowed into the band’s coffers, and mostly in cash; G didn’t accept promoters’ checks. It wasn’t so much a lack of trust as it was avoiding a heavy tax bite. Why leave a paper trail? He merely stuffed the cash into a travel bag and carried it from town to town—hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions. Whatever anyone needed—pocket money, equipment, drugs—a fistful of bills was tendered.
As the money increased, so did the length of the shows, often running in the three-hour-plus vicinity. There were so many favorites to play: “Heartbreaker,” “Rock and Roll,” “Dazed and Confused,” and of course “Stairway.” The “Whole Lotta Love” medley and “Moby Dick” took up an hour between them. And Jimmy’s solos were stretching out as marathon showstoppers. There were times Robert wondered if he’d ever find his way back into a song. When he did, he’d slyly drop in a few bars of his own favorites, like “Hello, Mary Lou,” “Money Honey,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “It’s Your Thing,” “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” even Simon & Garfunkel’s “59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” Loose—everyone was feeling loose.
This was a tour for showcasing much of , but there were new songs that managed to wiggle their way into the set. Led Zeppelin introduced a smattering of songs in various stages of development—“The Ocean,” “Dancing Days,” “The Crunge,” and “Over the Hills and Far Away.” Unbeknownst to most of the fans, since early in the year, the musicians had been working on another new album.
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Jimmy had complained that recording was an uphill slog. “It was probably more painful to get this one out than childbirth,” he said facetiously, and like many mothers who agonized through the ordeal, he was prepared to do it all over again. “My main goal . . . was just to keep rolling,” he said.
Back in February 1972, Led Zeppelin spent a week rehearsing at Ilsington Farmhouse in Dorset, a setting for Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It was owned by Arthur Brown, the singer who’d had the 1968 smash hit “Fire,” and came with a built-in studio called Jabberwocky. Andy Johns had been replaced as engineer by Eddie Kramer, the whip hand of so many Jimi Hendrix sessions and wingman on LZII, who had flown over from the States to oversee the proceedings.
Returning to Headley Grange wasn’t an option. The place was too tatty, too drafty to warrant another stay for young gods. Why skimp on accommodations with so much disposable income? The £1,000 weekly rent at Stargroves, Mick Jagger’s country estate in Hampshire where Sticky Fingers had been recorded, now seemed reasonable, and Led Zeppelin moved there in May 1972, with Jimmy installing himself in Mick’s posh bedroom.
Jimmy came prepared. He’d been recording “bits of taped ideas” in the home studio of his new Plumpton manor and was eager to see them expand and ripen into songs. So much depended on the creative input he received from John Paul, whose versatility often took Jimmy’s fragments in unexpected directions. The same with Robert’s words. In fact, the first thing they worked on at Stargroves was earmarked as an instrumental—Jimmy had even titled it “The Overture” as an intended lead-in to another song—that was retooled to stand on its own once Robert began putting words to it and figured out how to decrease the meter halfway in, so that it fit.
As an overture, it had sweep. It established an album prologue of sorts, filled with fanfare-like elements and grand drama, fitful syncopation, and nifty guitar flourishes that foreshadowed what lay ahead. It built with great urgency, full of pulsating bass, until Robert weighed in, and then the sudden shift in tone, a kind of woozy, hallucinatory digression, contradicted everything that came before and dragged it down as the charged energy drifted into pathos. The two passages seemed disconnected, patched together like an awkward blind date. Robert polished off the lyrics in one sitting, hitting on a much-preferable title when he sang the run-on lines, “California sunlight, sweet Calcutta rain / Honolulu star bright—the song remains the same.”
The song might have worked better had it remained the curtain raiser to Jimmy’s ballad with the working title “Slush,” a tune born in his home studio that arrived practically intact. If “The Song Remains the Same” was inspired as an overture, this was the symphony he intended it to precede. Unlike the full-frontal attack of its predecessor, the poignancy of “Rain Song”—Led Zeppelin’s first straightforward ballad, written with a nod to George Harrison’s “Something”—was bathed in the warmth of lush orchestration and the right amount of understated grace.
Jimmy set the tone with a restrained, almost effortless twelve-string guitar introduction that provided immediate fluency. By the time Robert tiptoed in a few bars later, if only briefly, the inherent suppleness of the piece crystallized, allowing the guitar to introduce a new melodic theme that gave the song a fuller shape. The moment it settled in, John Paul amplified it with the string section of a Mellotron and a contrasting piano figure to build scale and emotion. Here were the two former session masters employing their most inventive skills, commenting on each other’s riffs, returning to earlier themes, expressing them with new shades and voicings. When Robert reappeared, almost four minutes into the piece, he did so delicately at first, as though careful not to intrude, until the music invited him to turn it loose, to liberate the swelling accompaniment with a string of ad-libs and asides. Still, “Rain Song” never soared, never sought to become anything more than a gorgeously orchestrated ballad. After almost seven minutes, the vocals faded and the instrumentation began peeling away—first the piano, then the drums, and finally the Mellotron—before Jimmy’s detuned acoustic guitar returned the song to its humble origins.
“Rain Song” was a departure for Led Zeppelin. Musically, it was epic, in the mode of “Stairway to Heaven” but without “Stairway’s” colorful imagery and savage guitar solos. The song’s reserved tone and orchestral pretensions called to mind the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed more than, say, the sonic experimentation of Pink Floyd’s soon-to-be-released Dark Side of the Moon. It bore none of the familiar Led Zeppelin attributes; it certainly wasn’t riff-laden or metal. Would the fans accept it? No one knew nor cared. The band was determined to explore other sides of its personality.
“It’s time that people heard something about us other than that we were eating women and throwing the bones out the window,” Robert said.
They were leaving those honors to Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Sir Lord Baltimore, bands dependent wholly on distorted guitar riffs and brute force. Led Zeppelin hadn’t entirely given up those impulses. They thrived playing all-out rockers. “The rock ’n roll is in all four of us, and on stage that’s what comes through,” Jimmy explained. But their objectives were constantly shifting.
“There is no place we wouldn’t try and joyfully go,” Robert said.
The joy was on particular display in two songs that emerged from the Stargroves sessions. “D’Yer Mak’er” owed its lineage to the band’s attraction to ska and Caribbean music. Robert, especially, was influenced early by reggae.
“There were Jamaicans all over West Brum where we lived,” says Kevyn Gammond, the guitarist from the Band of Joy who graduated to playing in Jimmy Cliff’s band. “Growing up, Rob and I used to listen to their music in coffee bars like the Casa and the Ivy Bush. We bought their records on West Indian labels like Trojan. We cut our teeth in their clubs in Huddersfield and Smethwick and played to Black Jamaican audiences at the Ridgeway Georgian. ‘D’Yer Mak’er’ comes right out of those days.”
Jimmy saw the song as “a cross between reggae and a Fifties number—‘Poor Little Fool,’ Ben E. King’s things, stuff like that.” But the result was more of a lark than an homage. (Jimmy referred to it as “just a giggle . . . a send-up.”) The track itself was blistering, spurred by Bonzo’s ferocious drum punctuation recorded in the house’s glassed-in conservatory to make it sound “like bombs going off,” as Eddie Kramer noted. Robert’s vocal mimicked the heavily accented beat—“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh / You don’t have to go, oh, oh, oh, oh”—but instead of digging into the rock-steady undertones, the band offered only a derivative calypso beat and ignored the idiom’s stinging political commentary completely. The song’s buoyancy caught the sly Jamaican feel, but it lacked conviction; it wasn’t persuasive enough to succeed.
“The Crunge,” on the other hand, just tried too damn hard. It set out to imitate the driving, funk-infested rhythms of so many James Brown rave-ups. Even a discriminating listener might have mistakenly assumed that Jimmy Nolen, Bootsy Collins, and Clyde Stubblefield contributed the signature backing track. It was all there—the chicken-scratch guitar, the hiccupping bass, the corn-popping drum pattern. But . . . the vocals! Robert explained how the original idea was for him and Bonzo to trash-talk in a barely understandable Black Country patois. That would have put a distinctive stamp on the song. Instead, Robert chose to prattle in a cringeworthy James Brown dialect, an impersonation that bordered on caricature.
Jimmy even nursed the idea of portraying the crunge as a dance, in the tradition of the boogaloo or the funky chicken, and to diagram the steps for it on the album sleeve.
Too many giggles, too many send-ups.
The band grew more serious in its approach to a song held over from the Bron-Yr-Aur period called “Many, Many Times.” It suggested the pastoral Welsh countryside with a traditional folk-style intro that signaled a return to the spare, acoustic musings of LZIII. Robert supported the homespun flavor by singing over Jimmy’s arpeggios with an awkward, amorous expression of vulnerability.
“Hey lady, you got the love I need / Maybe, more than enough.”
The effect was disarming but a smokescreen. A few bars later, sturdy strumming redirected the musical flow, building steadily until the rhythm section leaped in whole hog—power chords, a pulsating bass, cascading drums, the works—demolishing all sentimentality. “The rhythm section on that is exceptional,” Jonesy declared. “There’s a lot of very, very tight, exciting moments.” The song began to rock with significant muscle. In accordance, Robert’s delivery veered into the upper atmosphere and gave the whole thing contour as he leaped contemplatively from line to line. “Many have I loved, and many times been bitten / Many times I’ve gazed upon the open road.” The lyrics revealed Robert at his most introspective. An uncompromising guitar solo completed the quintessential Led Zeppelin touch.
Reassuringly, they had not given up the stance that, at heart, they were a rock ’n roll band. All their sessions were structured to allow for improvisational jams that often laid the groundwork for inventive new songs. At Stargroves, they polished off “Dancing Days,” an uninhibited rocker that juxtaposed strains of Indian influence with a gutsy, combustive guitar riff that tethered the choppy tempos and kept the structure in check. They also laid down versions of “The Rover” and “The Ocean,” both full-fledged riff rockers that hearkened back to “Whole Lotta Love” and “Communication Breakdown.” “Black Country Woman,” necessitating more work at a later date, was recorded outside on the lawn.
Stargroves was made for capturing ambient sound. Eddie Kramer recalled how they utilized every aspect of the house and grounds. “I remember putting a Fender amp in the fireplace and putting a mic in there,” he said. “Jonesy’s bass was in another room. Everybody’s gear was in a different room.” The house had expanse—but little warmth. Jimmy wasn’t satisfied with the sound they were getting, and Robert agreed.
“The sound in the place wasn’t as good, recording-wise, as we’d got in . . . Headley Grange,” he said.
They’d put a lot of very good work on tape, but rather than fighting the limited acoustics, they decided to pack it in and head to Olympic Sound.
There wasn’t enough time, however, to finish the album, their fifth, in order for its release to coincide with their June 1972 tour in the U.S. Several songs still had to be recorded, too many guitar lines needed massaging with overdubs and effects. And Robert disappeared for a while, going home when Maureen gave birth to a son they named Karac, after a legendary Welsh general. By the time he returned, the tour was set to begin.
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With so much more money at stake, the theme of the tour was Bigger and Better. “Everything would be sorted, so that the only thing Led Zeppelin had to worry about was playing music,” according to Phil Carlo. Creature comforts made sense to reduce the demands of travel. Crowded commercial flights seemed counterproductive, so Peter Grant leased a nine-seat Dassault Fan Jet Falcon 20 to give the band privacy and freedom while schlepping from city to city. Cases of chilled champagne—and not just any champagne, but Dom Pérignon—accompanied each leg of the tour. Idling limousines awaited them outside the arenas. Private security replaced overaggressive police forces at gigs. And there was cocaine—they referred to it as “Charlie” or “Peruvian marching powder”—mounds of cocaine.
“Everybody was now doing it,” recalls Phil Carson, “but the worst examples were Peter, Jimmy, and John Bonham.”
Grant loved cocaine and had developed quite an appetite for it. He attributed his taste for it to a prescription following a tooth extraction, but taste turned to insatiable hunger after an incident on May 2, 1972. He had gone to Wales to see Stone the Crows play at Swansea University’s graduation ball. The band remained one of his pet projects, owing in no small part to its soulful singer, Maggie Bell, and her charismatic boyfriend, guitarist Leslie Harvey. The Crows were readying their fourth album, and G wanted to touch base before leaving for America with Led Zeppelin. It was an impressive crowd, not only students but a full array of dignitaries. Les Harvey grabbed the mic to announce the first song and was thrown three feet into the air. When he hit the stage, he was dead, electrocuted by a wire that had been left ungrounded.
“Peter went to pieces,” Maggie Bell recalls. “He broke down crying and found a way to numb the sorrow”—she makes snorting sounds to illustrate her point—“that we all felt over Les’s death.”
From that point on, coke became an essential part of Grant’s wardrobe; he was never without a large plastic bag of it, “perhaps a kilo,” says a stagehand. And he was generous in dispensing it. If you were part of the entourage, even for a short visit, you were invited to have a snort or two, and not just a line but something that resembled a garden hose. He proclaimed himself “the Bionic Hooter,” assuring everyone that cocaine wasn’t addictive.
