Led Zeppelin, page 48
“I was just sitting in a wheelchair and getting morose,” he admitted. “It was like: Is this rock ’n roll thing really anything at all?”
The way out of a funk was to rehearse. There was always true joy when the four men made music together. That had never changed. Jimmy’s guitar, John Paul’s bass, Bonzo’s drums, Robert’s vocals created a sound that never failed to produce something good to their ears. The Led Zeppelin magic—it lifted their spirits. But substance abuse had intruded on the enchantment. It affected their personalities, which affected the music. Drugs had Jimmy turned inward. It was never certain that the once-reliable studio musician with the iron work ethic would show up to play.
“We just couldn’t find him,” Jonesy lamented. Nothing remotely stirred at Henry Hall, which remained shuttered. “I wanted to put up this huge banner across the street, saying, ‘Today’s the first day of rehearsals.’ ”
They’d scheduled time at Studio Instrument Rentals, an establishment in Hollywood that had a space in which bands loved to play. John Paul and his roadie drove in from Malibu every night for an eight o’clock session “and waited and waited until finally [after Jimmy joined them] we were all in attendance, by which time it was around two in the morning.” Six hours of sitting around idly, watching TV and smoking, drained Robert and Jonesy of whatever creative enthusiasm they had. It was hard to get anything serious going.
For the brief intervals when they did, however, it felt like old times. Robert kicked things off with snippets of “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Minnie the Moocher.” They warmed up with an old favorite, “Stop Me Talking.”
“You could see Robert and Jimmy connecting,” says Betty Iannaci, who was invited, along with a few friends and roadies, to observe the action from the sidelines. “They seemed to intuit each other, just like when they were onstage, and there was great joy in the process.”
Robert, whose mobility remained negligible, welcomed the opportunity to get into a groove. “I was sitting in an armchair singing,” he recalled, “and I found myself wiggling inside my cast.”
The problem was flow—or the lack thereof. “There just wasn’t a lot of continuous rehearsal,” John Paul complained, “and it was easy to lose interest.”
Nevertheless, they managed to bang a few songs into shape, making enough progress to get them down on tape. But not in Los Angeles, where their allotted number of days was due to expire. They needed to pull up stakes and move on before owing considerable tax to Uncle Sam. There were several good studios available in exile sanctuaries around the globe, one especially that Keith Harwood, their engineer, favored. After some discussion, they packed up and headed to Munich.
Chapter Eighteen
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SPECTRUM
[1]
Eighteen days. That was the extent of time available to Led Zeppelin at Musicland Studios in Munich—eighteen days, from November 3, 1975, until November 21, when the Rolling Stones were booked to finish work on Black and Blue. It was asking a lot, especially without a full complement of songs ready to go. “We went in with nothing really,” Jimmy acknowledged some time later. “We all agreed that we’d go right back to square one. Start with nothing, just a few basic structures and the minimum of rehearsal.” Only the first Led Zeppelin album had been recorded in less time, though Jimmy had worked out much of that one in advance. That wasn’t the case this time around. Jimmy was barely communicative. And with so little time to spare, the usual organic process to making a Led Zeppelin album, with everyone pitching in, was abandoned. John Paul, always an unfailing force in the studio, had little to contribute. Besides, his heart wasn’t in it.
“When we eventually started recording in Munich,” he said, “I just sort of went along with it all.”
Robert was understandably contemplative. “If ever there was a time to quit, this was it, because before we went to Musicland, we didn’t actually know if we’d ever play together again or, if we did stop, just how long we’d have to wait—and whether or not it would ever be the same show we get back together again.”
Commuting wouldn’t be a factor. The studio, owned by Giorgio Moroder, was located in the basement of the Arabella Hotel, where each of the guys had a suite. Even Bonzo, perennially late (even to his brother’s wedding), couldn’t plead traffic delays. But little had changed from the situation in Los Angeles. Jimmy remained locked in his room, a no-show for the first day . . . and the second . . . and the third. “We didn’t see him forever,” says Abe Hoch, who arrived in Munich to help with details. “He was just not awake. He was in a coma.”
Robert had looked forward to recording as a means of occupational therapy. He felt that after “sitting in a fucking chair, pushed everywhere for months and months,” the prospect of making music was invigorating, “so when we did record I got more enthusiastic and that helped me physically.”
But without Jimmy in the mix, Robert lay in bed most of those days, working on lyrics, revising what he had already sketched out in Los Angeles. “The Wheelchair Song” evolved into a paean to his accident.
“What rhymes with ‘Achilles’?” he asked Hoch, torturing the poetics.
Peter Grant recalled, “Robert was behind with his lyrics and apologized to Jonesy, who said: ‘Personally Robert, I’ve never bothered to listen to the lyrics on any of our albums.’ ”
Robert’s cast was about come off, though his leg was still tender, fragile. He was in considerable pain, with medication prescribed to see him through the endeavor.
Others self-medicated in alternative ways. According to Richard Cole, “Bonzo, Jimmy, and I used smack during the daytime hours in Munich, and none of us seemed the worse for it.” That statement might have carried a scrap of weight, if Jimmy were conscious, Bonzo sober, and Cole benign.
“There were enormous frustrations, especially for those of us who weren’t as fucked up as the others,” says Benji Le Fevre.
Robert and Jonesy lived on the other side of that spectrum. They kept each other company during the idle days in Munich. They ventured outside to escape the internal group inertia, but the city lay encrusted beneath an icy winterscape. “The band was splitting between people who could turn up on time for recording sessions and people who couldn’t,” John Paul recalled. “My main memory of that album is pushing Robert around in the wheelchair from beer stand to beer stand.” Otherwise, they just bided their time.
Led Zeppelin’s days at Musicland Studios were dwindling without any action to show for it. With the first week nearly gone, Jimmy suddenly woke up on November 12, 1975. He appeared unannounced in the studio, looking frail and unsteady. “He hadn’t even showered,” says Abe Hoch, who was hanging out in the control room with Keith Harwood. “He just shook his hair out, picked up a guitar, and started to play.”
Word circulated in the suites upstairs. “Pagey’s in the fucking studio!”
Jonesy and Bonzo rushed in like firemen to a blaze. Robert was wheeled in a few minutes later. There was no time to waste. Bonzo’s drums had been set up in the hotel dining room. Even though guests were in the middle of lunch service, Bonzo sat down and started to play—“loud as fuck-all and aggressive”—which cleared the room. As long as Jimmy was of sound mind and body, the goal was to step on the gas and not let up.
“I’d never seen anything like it,” Abe Hoch marvels. “The minute Jimmy started to play, it organically came together. The words all fit to the music—‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine,’ ‘Achilles Last Stand.’ They made it look like a jam, though it was anything but that. The songs came together as if they had practiced for weeks.”
Jimmy was on fire. He never came up for air. Somewhere deep inside he knew he was playing on borrowed time. He had only to look to rock ’n roll for its directory of cocaine and heroin casualties. Still, he maintained cavalierly, “I don’t regret it at all,” referencing his dependence on the drugs, “because when I needed to be focused, I was really focused.” The whole experience, according to Jimmy, was a test of willpower and perseverance. “I mean, that was eighteen hours a day at a real intensity, every day,” he admitted in retrospect. “You just plunge in, and you don’t start thinking about three meals a day.” He characterized the breakneck sessions as “pure anxiety and emotion,” saying, “we didn’t know whether we’d ever be able to play in the same way again.”
With “Achilles Last Stand,” Jimmy said, “it was straight off into the deep end.”
The song was a bildungsroman in which Robert came to terms with his accident and the subsequent emotional growth he experienced as a result—an attempt to forge an identity from muddled feelings. And yet it doesn’t come off at all as woebegone—it’s one of his most buoyant, optimistic lyrics, “about travels and dreams and wishes and positivism.” That would have been conceptual enough, but he embellished it with an account of his travels through Morocco, Greece, Spain, Switzerland, Jersey, and California.
The lyrical texture was spare and elemental, but once Jimmy got his hands on it, a tempest rose out of the guitar, injecting wattage into everything it touched. “I just dove in and built that track piece by piece,” he said. There were dramatic surges of brilliance—and undertows of self-indulgent excess. He attempted to “give the piece a totally new identity by orchestrating the guitars”—an “epic quality,” Jimmy called it. Overdub after overdub was stacked atop the track, each featuring a different effect. “I knew that every guitar overdub had to be very important, very strong within itself to sort of identify each section.” There were no landing points, just six ferocious guitar parts battling for supremacy.
“It’s got quite a pace to it,” Jimmy said, an understatement, to be sure.
The instrumentation facilitated Robert’s sense of journey. “Achilles Last Stand” galloped along for more than ten minutes, shape-shifting, the riffs spurred by countertacking from an eight-string bass that Jonesy fairly lacerated with a pick. The drums underscored each passage with an explosive backbeat. It was “prog rock gone mad,” Robert enthused, “and it was brilliant . . . the music was stunning.”
Robert could hardly wait to put a vocal to it. He rashly insisted on standing, something he hadn’t done with any conviction in four months. Halfway through the take, he tripped over a cable, his foot wrenched out from underneath him. “I put all my weight on it,” he recalled, and—“went down, bang.” The reaction in the studio was swift and immediate. “I’ve never known Jimmy to move so quickly,” Robert said. “He was out of the mixing booth and holding me up, fragile as he might be, within a second.” The fear was strong that Robert had refractured his leg.
The prognosis was more favorable. Nothing a little bed rest wouldn’t cure. “And where it got to a point where I could lower it again off the bed without touching the ground,” he recalled, “I was wheeled to the studio while the others were asleep and did the vocal track all over again, from start to finish.”
“Achilles” satisfied Jimmy’s desire to make “a guitar album.” It was hell-bent, loud, and bombastic, a song that would rattle the bones. Still, it was impossible to resist a good traditional blues. The structure of “Tea for One” had been shaped at SIR in Los Angeles. Jimmy acknowledged it was somewhat derivative—“us looking back at ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You,’ being in a very lonely space at the time and reflecting accordingly.” There was nothing trailblazing about the song. “It was basically a twelve-bar,” he said, “and there were two verses to do as solos on guitar. Suddenly it hit me that everybody has played a blues number, and there are so many musicians whose forte it is, like Eric [Clapton].” A hard act to follow. He felt compelled to avoid the blues clichés, to take it to another level.
Incredibly, he took nine and a half minutes to get there. There was a touch of challenge evident in the execution. The intervals were full of longing, the flourishes graceful and warm, playing off the sentiment of the lyric. “It’s so held back,” Jimmy said of the restraint he exercised. “Seven minutes long [sic], and at no point does it blow out.” The extra effort he put into it lifted his solos from the ordinary, even if they didn’t break any new ground.
“Tea for One” was as easygoing as things would get. It was time to pivot to thunder and lightning. As Jimmy had planned it, the album would have “no acoustic songs, no mellowness or contrasts or changes to other instruments.” Taken as a whole, it would reflect the rootlessness Led Zeppelin felt in their months of tax exile—“a lot of movement and aggression.”
“For Your Life” certainly lived up to that standard. Lean and hypnotic, the rhythm section in the opening measures pulsed dolefully, with just enough movement and aggression to evoke the sneering disenchantment Robert felt toward the “people who come and go” in the band’s road entourage, “usually of the opposite sex.” The funk interlude that punctuated the middle section gave the beat a tart, assertive bite. But the song was held in check until a break before the final verse, when Jimmy played a countermelody to Jonesy’s arching bass figures, letting the guitar spew with peels of sinewy phrasing.
The contrast between the slashing texture and the bitter lyric was the opposite of that in “Royal Orleans.” The band hearkened back to a frisky funk groove but set it on fire, Led Zeppelin style. The song’s rhythmic impulse stuttered in a series of syncopated offbeats against a constant bass line that set the stage for the mischievous tale. Robert rolled out a story that had been tickling the band’s funny bone since their trip to New Orleans earlier that winter. In the retelling it had grown all out of proportion, but as John Paul confessed, “It was a mish-mash of several stories all put together.”
As legend had it, he had picked up a woman at the New Orleans hotel bar, not realizing she was a transvestite. “ ‘Stephanie’ ended up in my room and we rolled a joint or two. I fell asleep and set fire to the hotel room, as you do. And when I woke up, it was full of firemen.” Robert changed the name of the protagonist to “John Cameron,” a musician who had played with Jonesy on the session circuit back in the day, and pounded away at the inside joke, repeating the word whiskers to make his point.
It was hard to take “Royal Orleans” as anything but a parody, considering the thrust of Robert’s vocal. Much like “The Crunge,” from Houses of the Holy, his near-indecipherable delivery was intended as uptown funk but landed more like a slapstick impersonation of James Brown at his earthiest. The song was mostly improvised in the studio, as was “Candy Store Rock,” a tribute to rockabilly, but on steroids. The song raced from verse to verse like a train about to jump the tracks. Jimmy’s hiccupping licks met Bonzo’s incisive, perfectly placed fills head-on, their rhythmic precision rushing everything along with irrepressible force. Robert fired up a sassy, lip-trembling vibrato, aping one of his favorite Elvis impersonators, Ral Donner, exaggerating with great relish. But the overall feel sounded more like novelty and ultimately failed to launch.
“Hots On for Nowhere” was also spontaneous, slapped together in the studio in about an hour one day and fused to peevish lyrics Robert had written earlier in Malibu. A particularly caustic line, about “friends who would give me fuck all,” was aimed at Jimmy and Peter Grant, both of whom he felt had deserted the band in California. The overall result was haphazard but surprisingly joyous, as though the band had agreed to let the listener into an informal jam where they just played to each other, letting it all hang out. There was an unmistakable delight evident in their offhand approach: Jimmy’s slightly unhinged, alternating solos, the scraggly la-la-la refrain. A closer listen, however, revealed a strong ensemble at work, perhaps not making a song for the ages but hitting an uncompromising Zeppelinesque groove.
Throughout the weeklong session, everyone had kept an eye on the clock. “We were under incredible pressure to finish the record,” Jimmy acknowledged. It was no secret Led Zeppelin would have to pack up and move on November 21, when the Stones were due to arrive. Yet they were so close to wrapping everything up. No one wanted to leave with the album unfinished. They needed two days more, maybe three at most. Jimmy swallowed his pride and placed a call to Mick Jagger. “Can I have two days to finish what we’re doing?” he pleaded. Mick, in a charitable mood, granted Jimmy’s request.
“That was the ultimate test of that whole lifestyle,” Jimmy said, alluding to the drugs needed to keep him at the tiller—the tea for the tillerman, so to speak. “The band went away leaving me and Keith Harwood the engineer to do all the overdubs. We had a deal between us: whoever woke up first woke the other up, and we’d continue the studio work.” At least until they passed out again.
At the outset, Jimmy figured on needing three days to put everything in order. “I didn’t think I’d be able to do it in one night,” he admitted. “But I was so into it that my mind was working properly for a change. It sort of crystalized, and everything was just pouring out.” At the end of the first night—a brutal fourteen-hour session—the album was complete.
When the Stones arrived at the Arabella on November 24, 1975, Mick Jagger phoned Jimmy to hear how he’d made out.
“I had a copy of what we’d done, took it to his room, and put it on,” Jimmy recalled.
“Is that what you managed to do over the three weeks?” Mick asked.
Jimmy shook his head. “No, we’ve got a whole album.”
“You mean the basic tracks,” Mick insisted.
“No, we’re done, finished. Thanks for the two days.”
An entire album in thirteen days flat—it reminded Jimmy and the others of making their first record. It was lean and tenacious, unencumbered by the lassitude of trial and error. Less like a studio band than a group with something to prove.
