Led Zeppelin, page 32
But Pete Townshend, someone well versed on the subject, knew otherwise. “Whether you snort it or mainline it or take it in your mouth,” said Townshend, who’d managed to wean himself off a steady diet, “it’s addictive, and much more than just psychologically addictive. It’s slower to get to you, but it gets you in the end.”
There was no end in sight for Led Zeppelin. In fact, their coke adventures were just picking up steam.
The tour’s Bigger and Better aspect had other drawbacks. The all-arena itinerary put the band at an even greater remove from the audience. Places like Cobo Arena in Detroit, the Spectrum in Philadelphia, the Montreal Forum, and especially Nassau Coliseum on Long Island were hellholes in which to hear a rock band. No matter how much money an act invested in a quality PA system—and Led Zeppelin’s was state of the art—music reverberated in those concrete monsters, sounding more like a busy construction site than a concert hall. There was no intimacy, no way to appreciate the experience. And no matter how large the venue, it wasn’t large enough to satisfy demand. Scalpers did land-office business in the shadows outside, demanding five or ten times the face value of tickets. At Nassau Coliseum it was reported they got as much as $200 for $8.50 seats in the nosebleed sections.
And bigger was relative when it came to recognition by the press. Night in, night out, Led Zeppelin played their hearts out, but the reviews didn’t reflect the crowds’ reactions. They got trashed by critics in The Gazette (Montreal), The Washington Post, The Bulletin (Philadelphia), Newsday (New York), and The Seattle Times. No review was as harsh, however, as the one filed by the Los Angeles Times’s Robert Hilburn for the June 25, 1972, performance at the Forum. Hilburn, never a Led Zeppelin fan but usually reasonable in his appraisals, considered the band so derivative that he found it “still hard to take them seriously.” In his opinion, their set was “as tedious as ever (largely because their songs are so trivial in every way excepting occasional violent, high-volume outbursts).” It befuddled him that “the audience again seemed delighted.”
Part of the backlash was due to scheduling. Only two nights earlier, the Rolling Stones had played the same Forum to great acclaim. Led Zeppelin had been caught in the Stones’ vapor trail right across the United States. Everywhere they went, everyone they talked to could only gush about the Stones. What was it with that band, John Bonham wanted to know? “It’s the Stones this, the Stones that,” he griped. “It made us feel we were flogging our guts out, and for all the notice we’ve been given we might as well have been playing in Ceylon.” The Stones continued to overshadow Led Zeppelin despite the fact that their latest album—Exile on Main Street, a double album to boot—had no hits on it, other than “Tumbling Dice.”
Musically, Robert said, “they were a long way from where we were going.”
It steamed Jimmy that the press treated Mick Jagger like royalty while barely mentioning him. “Who wants to know that Led Zeppelin broke an attendance record at such-and-such a place when Mick Jagger’s hanging around with Truman Capote?” he complained.
What eluded him was that the Stones were personalities. They courted the press, whereas Led Zeppelin had shunned it. Their former press officer, Bill Harry, had made it clear his job was to keep the press away, and Harry’s successor, BP “Beep” Fallon, would be more of a court jester than someone who had a relationship with serious journalists. Jimmy shunned most interviews, and when he did grant one, he was enigmatic or dismissive. The Stones were a publicity machine; they mixed comfortably with their fans. Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood never passed up photo requests from kids on the street or refused unsolicited handshakes. If a strange kid had reached out a hand to touch Jimmy or Robert, Richard Cole would have broken it.
There was satisfaction in knowing that Led Zeppelin’s albums outsold the Stones’—and not by an insignificant margin. Jimmy was regarded as one of the best rock ’n roll guitarists of all time. Still, the Stones tour dominated the summer newspapers and trades. That damn band made Led Zeppelin insecure, and instead of keeping it to themselves, they brooded and bellyached. Reviewers were “so authoritative,” Jimmy said. Many were “twits.” The press didn’t understand music; critics had it in for them. “They were too busy being messed up with all their preconceived ideas of what they expected to hear and outraged because there wasn’t heavier rock or outraged because there wasn’t enough—they didn’t know what to write.” It was galling.
Instead of sitting for interviews and raising their image on days off, Led Zeppelin retreated into the studio. In New York, they booked time at Electric Lady to continue work on the new LP with in-house engineer Eddie Kramer. Kramer was happier to have them on his turf. Working at Stargroves, while productive, had tested his concentration. “There were all sorts of scenes with Bonzo bursting in the room in the middle of the night,” he said. And Robert had “bagged” the young woman who’d accompanied Eddie to England. At Electric Lady, it was all business. They recorded “Houses of the Holy,” which, as it turned out, would not make the album cut, polished “No Quarter,” left over from Headley Grange, and mixed almost everything from the Stargroves sessions. It was productive and pretty much wrapped things up. All the album needed was a name and a cover.
Once again, it was time to go to war.
Chapter Twelve
A LAW UNTO THEMSELVES
[1]
Rock stars coveted spectacular trappings—the flashiest guitar, the loudest amp, the prettiest chick, the poshest house. Frankly, they were all easy to come by. More elusive, and definitely higher up on the chest-thumping scale, was an outlandish, drop-dead, eye-grabbing album cover.
Album covers had become fashionably hip, a way to flex muscle in the mine-is-bigger-than-yours competition. They stood for so much where sales were concerned. Before MTV, before Saturday Night Live, before Spotify, and before YouTube, a band’s visual media exposure was limited to two or three decent music papers and a handful of sorry-ass TV shows. Bands who traded in being aloof and enigmatic (and bands who refused to release singles—like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd) got incalculable mileage from a sensational album cover. Interesting imagery delivered mystery, and mystery delivered sales. Led Zeppelin had made that clear with the triumph of .
Edgy cover art was a relatively new phenomenon. For years, record companies had kept tight creative control over the jackets. By and large, labels demanded they be illustrated by a photograph of the band, usually poorly shot in a studio setting, with the name of the act and the album in standard block lettering. Visiting a label’s art department in London, one would encounter elderly men—men who’d serviced the great symphony orchestras and opera stars, men who despised rock ’n roll—wearing white lab coats and white gloves, just slapping text on jacket mock-ups. The early Beatles, Stones, and Yardbirds albums are perfect examples.
Peter Blake had changed that landscape. His cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band raised album jackets to an art form. Sgt. Pepper’s unleashed a deluge of extraordinary covers—Andy Warhol’s pop-art banana on the Velvet Underground and Nico’s 1967 debut, the surrealist art on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, and Blind Faith’s controversial cover photo featuring a topless eleven-year-old girl holding a gold-plated model airplane. Perhaps more notable was Warhol’s zipper cover for Sticky Fingers, perfectly expressing the Rolling Stones’ image, as well as the music on the record itself.
Album design was one more aspect of the recording process that artists jockeyed to control. Fortunately for Led Zeppelin, that control was embedded in their contract with Atlantic, giving Jimmy Page the luxury to have the company meet his demands. Of course, labels never gave in without a fight. Jimmy had already gotten a preview of Atlantic’s stubborn resolve in the conflict over . That was a resounding artistic and commercial success, and the game plan for the next release was to outdo it in every way.
Jimmy had his eye on an album cover by Wishbone Ash called Argus that depicted the back of a helmeted warrior gazing out at a misty mountainside. It had been designed by a studio called Hipgnosis, and he liked the sound of that too. The edgy studio, as it turned out, was the brainchild of two former Royal College of Art students, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, who had subsisted since graduation by designing book covers and photographing centerfolds for men’s magazines.
“We happened to be sharing a flat with Syd Barrett, when he was going out of his mind from too much LSD and Pink Floyd was falling apart,” Powell recalls. “The Floyd had a meeting at our apartment, and during the course of it someone said, ‘We have to have a new album cover, and we don’t want the same old shit that the record company insists on.’ David Gilmour immediately turned to Roger Waters and said, ‘Why don’t we give the guys a chance?’ ” Thorgerson and Powell did a mock-up—a gauzy image based on a Marvel Comics Doctor Strange story—and it became the cover for Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets, only the second cover (the first being Sgt. Pepper’s) that EMI sanctioned from an independent design studio.
It was Hipgnosis’s big break and opened the door for their offbeat craftsmanship, designing covers for the Pretty Things, Marc Bolan, and the Rolling Stones, each job earning them a princely $45.
Jimmy called Hipgnosis and said, “I wonder if you’d have a go coming up with some ideas for a Led Zeppelin cover?” He didn’t give them much to go on—the album didn’t have a title and there was no music they could listen to. “You know the kind of image Led Zeppelin has. I’m sure you’ve read about us. Meet us in three weeks.”
On schedule, Powell and Thorgerson trooped up to RAK’s grubby little office on Oxford Street. The entire band showed up, with everyone sitting cross-legged on the floor for the presentation, illustrated by several sketches on bits of cardboard. Powell opened by asking them if they’d read Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. Robert, Jimmy, and John Paul had, and there was a mushroom of approval from Peter Grant, who observed from a distance.
Powell said, “We have an idea about going to Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland and photographing a naked family running up some rocks, being spearheaded by a silver surfer figure, also naked, as if they were heading into outer space from the end of the earth.”
It saluted the conclusion of Childhood’s End, in which all the children of Earth suffer an explosion and are taken up into the heavens. There was some vague mumbo jumbo about the people climbing up rocks symbolizing Led Zeppelin’s trying to attain the unattainable, which appealed to Jimmy in particular.
“It’s a sort of dawn and dusk, this feeling of expectancy,” he mused sometime later, “the children crawling to the top and what there they’re going to find—bags of pollution and shit probably.”
Robert loved the mythology surrounding the causeway, a stretch of underwater land that joined Scotland with Northern Ireland on which giants supposedly walked to get from one coast to the other.
The second idea was even wilder. The Hipgnosis duo explained their desire to visit the plain of Nazca in Peru, a World Heritage site, where enormous symbols that can be seen only from the air—spiders and strange animal shapes several kilometers wide—are gouged out of the earth. “It’d be interesting to go there and bulldoze the ZoSo logo,” Thorgerson proposed. Hearing that, Jimmy percolated with excitement.
They had been kicking both ideas around for several hours without coming to a decision, when Peter Grant heaved himself up and interrupted. “Right, that’s enough,” he said to Powell and Thorgerson. “We’ve got other things to discuss. You decide what to do, whichever idea you feel is best.” Money was no object. “Whatever it costs, just don’t fuck up.”
Led Zeppelin was headed back to Japan for a second tour in October 1972, followed by several gigs in Switzerland as a warm-up to a longer string of European dates. They’d be back in London in six weeks and expected to see a finished cover.
Just don’t fuck up. Coming from a heavy like G, it gave Powell and Thorgerson night sweats.
By process of elimination, the designers chose the causeway locale as being the least likely to get them into trouble. With free rein (and Led Zeppelin’s money), their imaginations ran wild. They sought to create a Lord of the Flies atmosphere with children who looked otherworldly. For their template they used The Midwich Cuckoos, a science-fiction novel about children who all looked identical. A casting call went out for a young blond girl and boy, and soon enough an agency came through with two experienced ad models, seven-year-old Samantha Gates and her five-year-old brother Stefan. Three adults would round out the cast.
Powell met with the Gates children’s parents and assured them there would be no frontal nudity, just from behind. But, he told them, it would be cold and miserable in Northern Ireland in October. The parents were completely okay with it. “It would not be okay today,” Powell acknowledges.
Nor would it have been wise to take such a company to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. “When our team arrived in Belfast,” Powell says, alluding to his wife, the kids, their mother, the makeup artist, and the chaperones, “the car rental company warned me, ‘You are not insured to drive in Northern Ireland. If you get stopped at roadblocks, always have your identification papers handy, and never go anywhere within twenty miles of Belfast, where carjackings are routine.”
Fortunately, the causeway was deserted. The schedule was to get up at four o’clock in the morning, have the kids and adults made up, and get to the rocks for daybreak. Powell and Thorgerson imagined they’d photograph a gorgeous sunrise bursting over the rocks and the sea, but it poured nonstop for the five days they were there. Tom Smith, who would go on to be the makeup artist on Raiders of the Lost Ark, had planned to cover the children in gold paint, coating the Silver Surfer figure in silver paint, with only a skullcap for his wardrobe. But they ran out of gold paint early in the shoot and resorted to spray-painting the kids with automotive paint, to which their mother only reluctantly agreed. The contact sheets betrayed rain in the puddles between the rocks. The three adult models were deemed superfluous and sidelined. Armed border guards arrived to express displeasure with the crew’s careless movements around the area. It was like revisiting the ten plagues, a woeful turn of events.
Just don’t fuck up.
Desperation set in. The only way around the problems was to shoot everything in black-and-white, photograph the children multiple times, then blow up the images, cutting them together to form a collage, hand-tinting it so that it looked like a science-fiction fantasy. The process was tactile and time-consuming. The images had to be sanded so that they were paper-thin in order to create the collage, and the hand-tinting, done on a torpedo boat in the Thames, proved harrowing, a six-week process. Hipgnosis missed Grant’s deadline.
G was pitiless. “Where’s the fucking artwork?” He gave them an ultimatum. “I’ll be arriving at St. Pancras Station tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock. Pick me and Jimmy up and show us the artwork.” The or else was implicit.
The next day, Powell collected Grant and Jimmy outside St. Pancras and was told to drive them across town to Victoria Station. G deposited himself in the passenger seat of Powell’s Mini Cooper, which Powell drove without changing out of second gear, due to Peter’s girth being lodged firmly against the shift.
At Victoria, it took Powell and Jimmy a few minutes to free G from the seat, which caused great laughter. It was five o’clock, in the midst of rush hour, and as Powell popped the trunk to exhibit the artwork, a crowd of commuters gathered round. Grant held it up. “It’s fucking incredible!” he declared. The inside gatefold was a photograph of Dunluce Castle, a sixteenth-century fortress just down the road from the Giant’s Causeway. “That’s the front cover,” Jimmy decided. “I love it.”
Powell was adamant. “No, Jimmy. The other photo is better,” and the crowd broke into applause, endorsing his argument.
What held up release of the album, now entitled Houses of the Holy, was the printing of the cover. Powell—now affectionately nicknamed Po by the band—was sent to oversee the presses in New York. The four-color process there was prehistoric. This was before the days of sophisticated ink-jet printing, and reproducing the multitude of subtle colors on the hand-tinted cover was complicated, ticklish. The record-company plants that manufactured the covers were used to printing photographs of Frank Sinatra and were not always diligent in their handiwork.
“The first load of colors that came off were appalling,” Po recalls.
Jimmy took one look at the result and agreed. “The sky started to look like an advert for Max Factor lipstick,” he said, “and the children looked as if they’d turned purple from the cold.”
Po stopped the presses and demanded they regenerate the covers from scratch based on the original artwork. But such an undertaking would delay the album further, possibly precluding it from being available in time for a massive U.S. tour. Peter Grant, Steve Weiss, even Ahmet Ertegun expressed displeasure—extreme displeasure—about incurring a delay. It could put a lot of income at stake, multimillions of dollars. Admirably, perhaps suicidally, Po stood his ground. “You would not be happy,” he assured the men he described as “sharp people,” heavy hitters.
Ahmet Ertegun, to his credit, ordered that the covers be scrapped at enormous expense and insisted they be reprinted overnight. It was a bottom-line business decision; sales of the first four Led Zeppelin albums accounted for a quarter of the annual sales of the entire Atlantic catalog. The cover rerun wasn’t perfect but satisfied the situation—just not every situation. Once promotional albums were distributed, an uproar arose from radio stations in the American Midwest. The children’s naked bottoms! This was sinful, an affront to moral decency. Bible-thumpers intended to have the album banned. “So we had to put a white band around the center of the cover that said ‘Led Zeppelin’ on it to hide the kids,” Po said. “Truthfully, I thought it added to the mystery.”
