Led Zeppelin, page 57
“It’s going to be six album covers,” Po explained to G and Jimmy. “So if you buy one, you need to get the other five.” They loved that aspect. Of course, it meant a lengthy development process, which would delay the release of the album. Yet again.
The bar set was built on a soundstage at Shepperton Studios. “It cost an absolute fortune,” Po makes clear, “maybe $40,000 by today’s standards.” The six different scenes were photographed in black-and-white—each depicting a man in a white suit sitting at a bar taken from a different perspective, and each bearing a brushstroke superimposed over the image. “It was like you were looking inside the bar through a dusty window,” Thorgerson said, “and the smear was where you’d wiped the pane with your sleeve to peer through.” Po took a chemical-reaction detail from children’s coloring books, so that the brushstroke would turn to color when splashed with water, although that wasn’t explained to album buyers; you had to discover it by accident.
When all was said and done, he took a mock-up of the cover to Horselunges in order to secure Peter’s approval to manufacture it. G and [Bad Company’s manager] Clive Coulson were passing a bottle back and forth, drinking absinthe, which Po declined. “Suddenly, they just nodded out,” he says. “I sat there for twenty minutes, paranoid as hell. Cigarettes were burning down that I had to take out of their fingers. I thought, ‘Fuck, they’ve both died.’ I was just getting ready to call for emergency medics when their eyes snapped open. ‘All right, now. Where were we? Carry on!’ ”
Approval was given to produce the album cover, now retitled In Through the Out Door, but not without a gentle reprimand. “Your fucking album cover was so fucking expensive,” Peter grumbled. “Seriously, I could sell Led Zeppelin in a brown paper bag.”
“What a good idea!” Po replied. “Let’s put it in a brown paper bag, a grocer’s bag.” That way, anyone buying the album wouldn’t know which cover they were getting. It was the crowning touch.
Of course, each additional detail delayed the album’s release by weeks, then months. It became clear during the spring of 1979 that the date would have to be pushed back further, perhaps to summer, hopefully before Led Zeppelin’s appearance at Knebworth. But there were no guarantees.
In the meantime, Peter continued to dicker with Freddy Bannister, the promoter of the two Bath Festivals in Led Zeppelin’s past and now the ringmaster of the Knebworth events. G was demanding £1 million for the two performances. Recouping the fee would necessitate selling out both weekend shows, roughly 300,000 people. The Stones held the record with 100,000 ticket sales in 1976, but G argued that Knebworth would be Led Zeppelin’s first UK appearance since 1975 and their first appearance anywhere in two years. That alone guaranteed a record-breaking event. Bannister balked but negotiated an agreement that would automatically trigger the second show and, hence, the entire £1 million fee, if the first weekend generated 145,000 ticket sales. No contract was required by Peter Grant. They sealed the deal with his usual handshake.
They also discussed supporting acts. Jimmy had a wishlist. Melody Maker quoted him as saying, “The lineup we had hoped for was Fairport, Dire Straits, Little Feat, and Joni Mitchell.” Grant threw a few other names into the mix, including Bob Seger, Aerosmith, and Van Morrison. It seems odd that he didn’t give preference to Bad Company, the Pretty Things, Maggie Bell, or Dave Edmunds. Nor was consideration given to the fact that England was in the grip of the punk and new-wave movements. The music scene had undergone an enormous shift since Led Zeppelin last appeared on a stage, with a new generation convinced that pre-1977 bands were old hat—and worse. It might have made good business sense to extend an invitation to the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Ian Dury, or the Jam. No one thought to acknowledge the new direction rock ’n roll was taking. New Musical Express, a torchbearer for everything new, took them to task for the oversight, adding, “The manner in which old superfart Led Zeppelin have consistently presented themselves has made the band’s name synonymous with gratuitous excess.” When it came to the bigger picture, they were out of touch.
And self-indulgent. In June 1979, two months before Knebworth, Led Zeppelin visited the site for a photo session that would appear on the cover of the festival’s official program. It was a beautiful setting—thirty-six acres of verdant English landscape that fed into a bowl where the stage would sit. Knebworth House, one of England’s venerable stately homes, shimmered in the distance. It was easy to envision a sea of young bodies grooving to music under a canopy of stars. Hipgnosis prepared for the shoot by hiring two voluptuous strippers to flank the photographer in the expectation that their presence would relax the band and ensure smiles all around. Jimmy promptly unzipped his fly; not to be shown up, Robert slipped his pants down around his ankles, exposing himself.
In the end, no one was satisfied with the outcome. “Jimmy was moaning about his hair because Richard had driven him up in his Austin-Healy with the top open,” Peter recalled. “Then Bonzo complained the pictures captured his love handles, and they had to be air-brushed out. And the sky was too dull, and we had to overlay a sky scene from a shot of Texas to give it some color.”
Nothing seemed to be working out to everyone’s satisfaction. One by one, the leading supporting acts sent their regrets. Bob Seger, Little Feat, Roxy Music, B.B. King, and Van Morrison all said no. Ed Bicknell, who managed Dire Straits, held his band back, telling them they weren’t ready to play such a gig, but in truth he didn’t want them sharing a stage with Led Zeppelin. “No one,” according to Freddy Banister, the promoter, “wanted to play with Led Zeppelin.” As a result, Bannister was forced to settle for a bill of “middle-weights,” as NME described them: the Marshall Tucker Band, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Todd Rundgren’s Utopia, and a British pub sing-along duo known as Chas and Dave. Fairport Convention, a group that had just been dropped by its record label and were on the brink of disbanding, agreed to step in at the last minute.
The arrangements seemed feeble, disorganized. “Robert didn’t want to do Knebworth, and I could understand why,” said John Paul. “But we really did want to do it, and we thought he’d enjoy it if he did—if we could just get him back out there.”
The rest of the band viewed the gig as a fitting venue at which to make a spectacular comeback, and they weren’t leaving anything to chance. If all went according to plan, it would be the largest audience they’d ever played to, with a new album sitting in stores. They intended to rehearse, really rehearse, to shake off the cobwebs: two weeks at Bray Film Studios, next door to Jimmy’s house in Windsor, and a few warm-up gigs in Copenhagen.
The Bray rehearsals were like all Led Zeppelin run-throughs, a loose sprint through their old standbys, followed by demanding work on new numbers from the Stockholm sessions that included “In the Evening,” “Carouselambra,” “Hot Dog,” and “Wearing and Tearing,” the latter left off In Through the Out Door but under consideration for release as a commemorative Knebworth single.
“I was worried whether we could still gel together,” Jimmy admitted. “Having felt something special towards this band for so long, I still wanted that to be there.” The rehearsal provided him with “a very good feeling.” It reassured him there was plenty left in the tank.
The tune-up in Denmark in late July would serve to tighten the screws. Richard Cole flew ahead to Copenhagen, saddled with “money for drugs,” he explained, “because Jimmy and Bonzo and I needed the fucking gear.” He arranged for a dealer to occupy the hotel room next to his to ensure easy access, laying out this detail in a meeting called by Robert when the band arrived. Jimmy feigned ignorance, lamely denying his dependence on heroin, until Bonzo interrupted. “Don’t be so fucking stupid,” he said. “If there’s no gear, there’s no show!”
The first gig, at the Falkoner Theatre on July 23, 1979, was only sparsely attended. The show started two hours late, a delay attributed to production problems. Jimmy had concocted a special laser effect to cast him in a glittery green pyramid during solos with the bow, but the apparatus was too big and powerful for the venue. So was the PA system; during a sound check, the generator kept blowing. Once Led Zeppelin took to the stage, they went through an elaborate tuning process that eventually morphed into “The Song Remains the Same.” The band was rusty—and it showed.
“For those of us who’d seen the band at their peak, they were more than just rusty,” said journalist Lisa Robinson, whom Swan Song treated to a round-trip ticket on the Concorde to see the performance. “The wit and the wonder weren’t really there.”
“They appeared sloppy and under-rehearsed, bewildered, and lost,” a reporter from NME observed. The solos were perfunctory, endless, the sound muddy. “There was so little feeling inherent in the set, it was like watching a fully-automated factory producing an endless string of chords that neither musicians nor audience cared about.”
Just in case fans got the wrong idea, Melody Maker sent a representative to gin up support for Led Zeppelin, filing a predictably gushy review to shill for Knebworth.
The second show—coincidentally, two years to the day since their last appearance, in Oakland—was somewhat better. “No Quarter” electrified the crowd, and new material like “In the Evening” struck a powerful chord. “Perhaps by Knebworth,” sensed a reporter from Sounds, “it’ll be more than ‘okay.’ ”
The groundwork for Knebworth wasn’t any less rocky. The Marshall Tucker Band dropped out a few days before the concert, replaced at the last minute by the Commander Cody Band (the Airmen were long gone). And ticket sales weren’t as robust as anticipated. Only 115,000 of the 150,000 advance orders were filled. Bannister suggested canceling the second show, but Grant flat-out refused. “This is the biggest fucking band in the world, and we can do two dates,” he insisted. If sales didn’t pick up, he’d renegotiate Led Zeppelin’s fee, but Freddy would have to take his word for it.
The most discouraging news, however, was that the album, In Through the Out Door, would not be ready until sometime after the festival. There were so many elements involved in printing the cover; the process was a manufacturing nightmare. “We had a huge problem with the brown paper bags,” recalls Nick Maria, a salesman for WEA, Swan Song’s distribution company. “With the test pressings, the bags kept ripping, which drove our accounts nuts. The album wasn’t going to be shrink-wrapped, either, so retailers weren’t happy.” In any event, the album’s release was being pushed back. Again. An enormous setback.
Peter wasn’t in any shape to handle the recurring problems. The cocaine had taken a serious toll on him. He wasn’t thinking as sharply as the Peter Grant of old, who would have been on top of each situation. Jack Calmes, the Showco chief in charge of light and sound, and Freddy Bannister recalled a discussion they had with G at Horselunges in preparation for Knebworth. “Peter kept himself going with long lines of cocaine,” Bannister said. Calmes had a similar recollection. “We’d sit there and talk for a while, and then he’d drift off and disappear. Then he finally just drifted off, and I took the car back [to London] the next morning.”
Had Peter been in good health, a different spirit might have prevailed. Knebworth was problematic; it needed a good shot of his expertise, his presence of mind, his infectious enthusiasm, his relentless drive. Knebworth was a homecoming as far as Led Zeppelin was concerned. It was an event to celebrate with friends and family, but the run-up to it wasn’t a smooth operation.
At two o’clock in the morning the night before the festival, Unity MacLean, Swan Song’s artists manager, was awakened by a call from Patricia Page, Jimmy’s mother. It was obvious she’d had a couple drinks and wanted to lodge a complaint: she hadn’t received tickets to Knebworth. “She’d called Jimmy two or three times and he was vague about getting them for her,” MacLean recalled. “I promised her that I’d sort it out.”
An hour later, going on 3:00 a.m., Jimmy was on the phone. “My mother’s not to have tickets for Knebworth,” he said. When Unity pressed him, he became peevish. “You’re not to speak to her. Mind your own business.”
At ten minutes past three, Unity’s phone rang again. “Jimmy just told me what you did,” Peter roared. “You’re fucking fired. You’re fired! You’re fired!”
Unbeknownst to MacLean, she’d waded into a Page family feud. “My parents had split up and they both had different families,” Jimmy explained. In fact, it was a twitchy divorce, loaded with animosity and recriminations—and only his father had a different family.
Later, after tempers cooled down, Jimmy took Unity MacLean aside and said, “My mum and dad can’t be within two hundred feet of each other. I didn’t want them upstaging the band at Knebworth, each ranting and raving at the other.” To establish détente, he gave his father tickets for the first weekend and entertained his mother on weekend two.
Situations like that were the easy fixes. For Led Zeppelin, the heavy lifting lay ahead. So much was riding on their performance. They had a legend to preserve. The British music press was full of insulting stories predicting the band’s imminent demise, saying they were anachronisms, “a behemoth . . . almost a museum piece”—too old, too smug, too passé. Led Zeppelin was out to prove them wrong, to show what they were made of—to take back the mantle as the most exciting band in the world. As Robert Plant was quick to point out, “People may think we’re conventional now, but we are still a law unto ourselves.”
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Even laws unto themselves were occasionally gobsmacked. When the band arrived at Knebworth on August 4, they were stunned by the reception.
“We had to come in by helicopter,” Jimmy recalled, “and you could see this huge sea of people. It was astonishing.”
Observers disagreed about the size of the crowd, but it was enormous, there was no debating that. Robert ventured out onto the grounds in a Jeep and was awestruck by the vibe. The fans were not to be denied. They were a law unto themselves. “People pushed the stone pillars down with the metal gates attached, because they wanted to get in early,” he observed. “Those gates had been there since 1732, and they just pushed them over. It was a phenomenally powerful [sight].” Somehow, Robert had never witnessed firsthand that aspect of the Led Zeppelin phenomenon, the lawlessness and destruction that followed the band from Boston to Detroit, Tampa, Miami, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Greensboro . . . wherever they’d performed.
Another type of vibe was transpiring backstage. Knebworth was a homecoming, a family reunion. Wives, girlfriends, children, and assorted relatives crammed into the VIP area, where a trailer was parked to accommodate the joyful tribe. Mixed in among them were fellow musicians who had come to pay their respects—Mick Ralphs and Boz Burrell represented Bad Company, Chris Squire from Yes, drummer Cozy Powell, the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde. And lurking in the shadows like pledges to a fraternity party were Mick Jones and Topper Headon from the Clash, the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones and Paul Cook, and Steve Nieve from the Attractions. Even J. J. Jackson, the American deejay who’d emceed one of the famous Led Zeppelin debuts at the Boston Tea Party in 1969, turned up. There was a general feeling that this was a show not to be missed, that it should be savored for posterity.
Just to prove they hadn’t lost their mojo, Led Zeppelin went on late. It had been a long and grueling lead-up to the headliner spot on the bill. On a blistering-hot day, the crowd sat attentively, melting under the Hertfordshire sun as the show dragged on and on. The supporting acts, while not transformative, performed respectable, if unexceptional, sets. Led Zeppelin’s appearance turned the festival into an occasion. The reception they received from the crowd was beyond jubilant.
“I was wracked with nerves,” Robert admitted. “It was our first British gig in four years.” The tension was evident in the music. The first three numbers—“The Song Remains the Same,” “Black Dog,” and “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”—sounded perfunctory, awkward. According to Jonesy, whose bass had been mistakenly turned off throughout the medley, “the sound was initially ropey.” Robert had trouble controlling his voice and sang using harmonizer effects, which “changed the vocal delivery too much,” producing high-pitched squeals.
“We played too fast and we played too slow,” Robert said, “and it was like trying to land a plane with one engine.”
On the whole, the performance was solid but uneven. Over the course of three and a half hours, Led Zeppelin showcased moments of single-minded brilliance—and undisciplined excess. “Some of it was breathtaking, some woefully inept.” The critic for NME, a paper whose allegiance had shifted to punk and new wave, gave them credit where credit was due. “At times, they were playing rock ’n roll of such stinging insistence and convulsive perseverance,” he wrote, “it wouldn’t have mattered how old or processed it was.”
The classic haymakers—“Achilles Last Stand,” “Trampled Under Foot,” “Kashmir,” “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Heartbreaker” were exhilarating, full of ruthless power. “Stairway,” naturally, brought down the house. But there were stretches of torpor, where the momentum ground to a halt and self-indulgence took over. Jimmy’s solos, from the Sounds critic’s point of view, “were ill-conceived wanderings and, what’s more, very poorly executed.” There were times he galloped ahead of his rhythm section, other times his fingers couldn’t keep up. Bonzo didn’t swing so much as thrash. And John Paul’s rambling, pseudo-artsy introduction to “No Quarter” continued to stymie forward thrust.
