Led Zeppelin, page 41
Jimmy wasn’t as sorry to see her go as he might have let on. Lori had arranged to have her friend, twenty-one-year-old model Bebe Buell, stay in an adjoining suite next to Jimmy’s. As soon as Lori was out of the picture, Bebe, who had been in a relationship with Todd Rundgren, moved in on Jimmy and accompanied him to Los Angeles.
The flight to LA for the second launch party nearly ended in disaster. A yahoo in the first-class cabin took offense that scruffy-looking characters in jeans—he called them “degenerates”—had the temerity to invade his space. “What do you guys do for a living?” he demanded. The guy was drunk, so they ignored him. Returning sometime later, he descended on Maggie Bell, Lisa Robinson, New York Times music columnist Loraine Alterman, and Atlantic’s PR flak Annie Ivil, who were giggling and camped out around a seat near the front of the plane. “This is a boys-only section,” he sneered menacingly. He thrust his jaw in the direction of Peter Grant. “Who’s this—your pimp?”
G, who had chased a couple Valium with several glasses of champagne, was slow to get up. “Hold on a second,” he said, struggling to his feet. “Mind your mouth in front of these ladies.”
“The guy was on Peter in a flash,” Maggie said, “and he drew a bloody gun.”
“Do you know what this is?” the man asked Peter.
There are various accounts of what happened next, but however the argument resolved, the would-be assailant was met by federal agents and led away in handcuffs once the plane touched down.
Ahmet Ertegun had rented the ballroom of the Hotel Bel-Air for Swan Song’s Los Angeles launch party on May 10. Danny Goldberg had given him a wish list of guests that flummoxed the Atlantic Records president. “Jane Fonda. Warren Beatty. Cary Grant. How the fuck am I going to get people like that to come?” Ahmet wondered. “Zeppelin sells a lot of records, but they are not the Rolling Stones.” The Stones were avid socialites; they loved to hobnob with celebrities, and vice versa. The only people movie stars envied more than other movie stars were rock stars; actors loved being seen in their company. But Led Zeppelin didn’t encourage those kinds of friendships. They kept to themselves. At parties, they closed ranks in the back of VIP sections. They expressed no interest in cultivating relationships with cultural and artistic figures outside the world of music, nor were they political like other musicians and celebrities, who were engaged with the antiwar and civil rights movements. And the band’s reputation preceded them, not just as bad boys—the Stones, of course, were bad boys—but as bad bad boys. A suggestion of violence shadowed them and their management. In the end, Ahmet was able to convince the Stones’ Bill Wyman to show up, along with Bryan Ferry, another Atlantic artist. As far as Hollywood celebrities went, Lloyd Bridges was the sum total.
Maggie Bell had better luck. “I was told I could invite people, so I invited Groucho Marx,” she says. She was “gobsmacked” when the frail, eighty-four-year-old comedian turned up, steered to her table in a fancy wheelchair. When they were introduced, Groucho broke into a croaky rendition of the music-hall ditty “I Belong to Glasgow.”
“Groucho,” Peter Grant interjected, “Maggie is one of the great singers of all time.”
“Fuck that,” Groucho said. “All you girls from Scotland have big tits. Let me see them. Let me give them a squeeze.”
Whether or not Maggie complied is open to debate. But Groucho did rope Ahmet Ertegun into helping him sing “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” from the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, reducing Ahmet to barking out “Hooray, hooray, hooray” and clapping like a trained seal every time Groucho pointed at him.
At least the swans at the Los Angeles party were true to form—and so was Bonzo, who’d been drinking since he woke up that morning. He accosted a writer from Sounds magazine, who was happy to kowtow before the man he considered to be “the greatest drummer in the world.” Unmoved, Bonzo grabbed the writer by the lapels and screamed, “I’ve taken enough shit from you guys in the press, and I’m not taking any more.”
While Bonzo was being sorted out, another scene was developing across the room. Jimmy had arrived with Bebe Buell on his arm at around the same time Lori Mattix wandered in, woozy from a Quaalude she had taken and clearly suffering a case of heartache. “I was devastated she stole my boyfriend,” Lori recalls. “Bebe and I had it out in the bathroom. I got a bloody nose.” When Lori returned to the ballroom, she looked like Carrie at the prom. Her white dress was stained with blood and her mascara had run down her cheeks. “How can you do this to me?” she wailed later that night, throwing herself at Jimmy.
Lori envisions the scene vividly forty-five years later. In a voice filled with melancholy, she says, “Bebe was sitting in my place at the table. It was the end. I’d just turned fifteen.”
[2]
Over the years, Led Zeppelin openly paid tribute to their mentors. They were never reticent about the debt they owed to musical forefathers like Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Rich, James Burton, Alexis Korner . . . The list was extensive. But one name loomed above all others: the King, Elvis. His was the voice of rock ’n roll, the sound that had ignited their earliest imaginations. So the guys were thrown off their stride when G told them they’d been invited to see Elvis perform at the LA Forum on May 11, 1974, and to visit with him afterward in his suite at the Beverly Wilshire.
They were more than starstruck. Elvis had always been something of a mythic figure, not quite real. He’d never toured the UK, never hung out with other musicians, never gave in-depth interviews. He lived in his own bubble world. He was larger than life. He was Elvis. “I can tell you, we were really nervous,” Jimmy recalled of the visit.
It did not get off to an auspicious start, similarly to an awkward Elvis-Beatles get-together in the 1960s. Rock stars, no matter how famous, tended to get tongue-tied in Elvis’s presence, and Led Zeppelin was no exception. The guys hemmed and hawed for a few minutes until Bonzo brought up his classic-car collection. Cars were right up Elvis’s alley. He had a garage full of them back at Graceland. It was a good icebreaker, because Elvis knew practically nothing about Led Zeppelin’s music. He’d heard only “Stairway to Heaven” and that they were notorious roués on the road, which Robert flatly denied, claiming they were all “family men.”
Jimmy mentioned that Robert often sang Elvis numbers at their sound checks, especially “Love Me,” which Robert promptly improvised. “So when we were leaving, after a most illuminating and funny ninety minutes with the guy,” Robert recalled, “I was walking down the corridor. He swung around the door frame, looking quite pleased with himself, and started singing: ‘Treat me like a fool . . .’ ”
Never shy, Robert answered back: “Treat me mean and cruel . . . bu-u-u-t love me.”
It was a thrilling experience, singing a duet with Elvis Presley. But it was also something of a warning, if not a portent. Elvis, for all his exalted godliness, was something of a cultural dinosaur by then, and that same distinction was beginning to breathe down Led Zeppelin’s necks.
Since Jimmy Page first picked up a guitar at the age of twelve, the through line of rock ’n roll had wound from rockabilly to garage band, pop, electric blues, folk rock, psychedelic, glam, and heavy metal. Now another stage of evolution was looming.
The moment The Who kicked over their drum kit and destroyed their instruments onstage, the seeds of unhinged musical anarchy were planted. The roots of the sound lay in the petulant impulses of underground and experimental bands like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, whose songs were unsentimental, often cynical and provocative, occasionally subversive. A handful of chords and stripped-down instrumentation were enough to get the message across.
In 1970, another phase emerged. At the Cincinnati Pop Festival, Iggy Pop, wearing nothing but a pair of ripped jeans and silver lamé gloves, launched into “T.V. Eye,” “smashing his palms together in a kind of frantic, childlike clap,” according to a keen observer, “that makes almost no psychological sense, but there is nonetheless real poetry to it. . . . He’s on the stage, he’s off the stage, he’s barking, he’s curling up.” Perhaps with that performance, a new sound was born.
By 1974, the first stirrings of punk could be felt in downtown New York. Inspired by the anarchic New York Dolls, a new generation of bands would soon lead the charge toward a bare-bones version of rock ’n roll that took the garage-rock sound and stripped it to its studs. Television, Mink DeVille, the Ramones, Suicide, Zolar X. “Punk bands started cropping up who were writing their own songs but taking the Yardbirds’ sound and reducing it to this kind of goony fuzztone clatter,” Lester Bangs famously wrote. It was the antithesis of “Stairway” or “How Many More Times” or “Kashmir”—songs that were developed methodically, with precision, and expanded into long, elaborate riffs or jams. Punk rejected the excesses associated with mainstream rock. Songs were deconstructed—a chord or two sufficed—and were often over before the end of the second verse, collapsing into chaos. They owed nothing to the disciplined studio background of Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, whose refined professionalism and expert musicianship defined their sound. Punk was the opposite of that. Many musicians couldn’t even play their instruments—they merely bashed away with a relentless, forced rhythm, making a noise. The rawness was the point. Anybody could tap into their id and stir up a crowd.
Jimmy couldn’t help but appreciate the spectacle. Punk delivered the same kind of anarchic performance he had experienced the night he decided to join the Yardbirds. It would not have been out of the ordinary to drop by the Mercer Arts Center or CBGB in New York, the earliest epicenters of punk rock culture, and encounter a similar undisciplined display. There was an obvious ancestral link between Robert’s rendition of “The Lemon Song” and Richard Hell’s “Love Comes in Spurts.” But they had little else in common. Punk scraped by in seedy clubs; Led Zeppelin ruled the arenaverse. As they continued to ready their new album, a confrontation with punk was nowhere on their radar.
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Jimmy especially had his hands full. He’d begun working at Olympic Sound in an attempt to give structure to the unfinished album. The eight songs recorded at Headley Grange ran long, way too long. “We had more material than the required forty-odd minutes for one album,” he concluded. All told, it would weigh in at slightly under an hour and a half. Wholesale edits were out of the question; they’d ruin the integrity of the songs.
“We thought, ‘Why not put a double album out?’ ” Robert recalled. There was plenty in the can. “Black Country Woman” and “The Rover” were left over from Houses of the Holy. “Down by the Seaside,” “Night Flight,” and “Boogie with Stu” had been recorded during sessions for the fourth album. Even “Bron-Yr-Aur,” from way back on LZIII, was a finished master that might work. And how cheeky would it be if they included “Houses of the Holy,” which had never made it onto its namesake album? “We had an album-and-a-half of new material,” Jimmy said, “and we figured it was better to stretch out than to leave off.”
There was still plenty of work to be done on it. Sequencing was key; with the addition of material from a range of different sessions, the songs had to have relevance, they had to relate to one another, and the flow had to feel unforced. Many of the new songs required overdubs, effects, and mixing. With Ron Nevison lost to the filming of Tommy, a new engineer, Keith Harwood, was hired, requiring Jimmy to bring him up to speed.
Jimmy had also gotten himself involved with a character named Kenneth Anger, an underground avant-garde filmmaker of some repute whose work blurred the lines between the occult, erotica, the perverse, and the downright loony. Jimmy had seen Anger’s early films, Scorpio Rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother, at a film festival in Kent and knew of his efforts to restore Aleister Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, which made him someone Jimmy was eager to meet.
Anger had a new film in the works—Lucifer Rising—which he’d been preparing since 1969. At the time, it featured a gadabout named Bobby Beausoleil in the title role—until he was found guilty of murder in a Manson-related execution. Still, Jimmy was intrigued, so much so that he agreed to provide music for Anger’s film. “I had a lot of respect for him,” Jimmy said. “As an occultist, he was definitely in the vanguard.”
As a filmmaker? That was another matter. “Jimmy asked me to help him with Lucifer Rising,” recalled Peter Clifton, the director who had taken over what would eventually be called The Song Remains the Same. “We projected the film onto a wall, and I didn’t like it at all. Marianne Faithfull was in it, and it was all devil worship and candles, and I didn’t want to be around that. I said, ‘Jimmy, don’t do it, mate.’ ”
Jimmy couldn’t resist. Anger was deeply involved in the Ordo Templi Orientis, or O.T.O., an occult organization modeled on the Freemasons and dedicated to the practice of magick. Aleister Crowley had joined O.T.O. in 1910 and became its “Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Iona, and all the Britains within the Sanctuary of Gnosis,” a title as windy as its premise.
“I could see that Anger was passionate about Crowley,” Jimmy said. So he struck a deal with Anger to start composing the soundtrack for Lucifer Rising and even agreed to make a cameo appearance in the film, holding the plaster cast of the Stele of Revelation that Po had acquired for him in Egypt.
Meanwhile, Swan Song Records continued to gallop ahead. In June 1974, the label released Bad Company’s debut album and watched it soar up the charts. Its success was spectacular. Raves began piling up. Rolling Stone, normally cool to hard-rock bands, delivered an uncharacteristically generous review. “This is an uncompromising album, reflecting the wills as much as the talents of the participants,” its critic wrote, going on to say, “Bad Company could become a tremendous band.” They had no shortage of hit singles. Deejays zeroed in on “Can’t Get Enough.” Airplay turned it into a number-one hit, and the follow-ups—“Ready For Love,” “Rock Steady,” and “Don’t Let Me Down”—were also strong.
Bad Company’s triumph emboldened the new label. Maybe Swan Song had the magic touch? Thinking they might be on a roll, Peter Grant arranged to have the Pretty Things move into Headley Grange to begin work on an album, hoping the Led Zeppelin–Bad Company alchemy would rub off. The band, however, had a history of rotten luck that continued to dog them from the day they arrived. A $35,000 Bösendorfer grand piano fell off a truck and shattered before the first note of music was played. Other damage was self-inflicted. The old manor house was pillaged; a number of antiques disappeared or were destroyed. And the extravagance of hiring the London Philharmonic sent session costs spiraling into the stratosphere. “In the end,” Phil May said, “Swan Song paid for everything.”
And sometimes the label simply missed the boat. In the late summer of 1974, Harvey Lisberg, who managed Herman’s Hermits, approached Peter with the opportunity to get involved with a band on the upswing. “Peter and I were going to manage Queen,” he says. They’d put out two albums that made considerable noise and knew a breakout was imminent with Sheer Heart Attack, which was already in the can. “We had a meeting in London with all four members and Jim Beach, their lawyer.”
“Fellas, I would love to do it,” Peter claimed to have told them, “but I haven’t got that many hours in the day.”
In fact, Lisberg says, “Negotiations stalled when Peter insisted they record for Swan Song. They were categorically opposed to doing that.”
Queen had slipped through Swan Song’s grasp. Other opportunities came and went as well. “I never wanted to be an empire builder,” Grant confessed. And if actions spoke louder than words, he put up convincing evidence. Often he disappeared for days, remaining incommunicado or refusing to engage. Major decisions were neglected, decisions beyond the scope of Jimmy, Robert, John Paul, or John. The guys loved the idea of signing acts, but they wanted no part of the nuts-and-bolts responsibilities of running a label. Peter was a manager, not a label head. If he didn’t intend to step up to the job, then who?
Danny Goldberg was a capable enough administrator who was plugged in and very well liked. But Danny was a gentle soul, a “club-soda-and-lime guy” devoted to Eastern philosophy, who meditated and had a spiritual guide. He wasn’t enough of a shark, and he lacked front.
Instead, Peter turned to Abe Hoch, who had once worked for Atlantic Records as the director of artist relations in Los Angeles. During a stopover there, G made a pitch: “Do you want to come run our record company?”
Hoch had never run a company, much less been to Europe. “Tell me what it’d entail?” he asked.
“You’ll know,” G said cryptically. “You’ll understand.” He offered to double Abe’s salary and threw in his mews flat in London as housing, which iced the deal.
At the end of summer in 1974, Hoch flew over to London to get the lay of the land. “I walked into the Swan Song offices on King’s Road,” he recalls, “and there was nothing going on. Zero! Absolutely fucking zero.”
As a coworker confirmed, “It was fairly remarkable the amount of nothing that went on there, apart from meeting up with people and going down the pub.”
Abe Hoch was dumbfounded. “There was nothing that would give anyone any indication that they had any idea how to buy, sell, promote, create, develop . . . nothing! There was nothing there!” He called Peter Grant and said, “There. Is. No. Record. Company.”
Peter laughed and said, “I knew you’d know.”
Abe realized the record company consisted only of what Danny Goldberg was doing in New York, some paper shuffling, some public relations. Otherwise, no one was running the show. As far as he was concerned, that could be a good thing—or a bad thing. It depended on how much autonomy he had. If he was fortunate, he could sign important acts and shape Swan Song in his own image.
