Led Zeppelin, page 61
Aubrey Powell remembers being consulted on the album cover design but says, “Nobody’s heart was in any of it. It was difficult getting any input out of Jimmy or Robert.” Jimmy had come up with a title, Early Days and Latter Days, but Jonesy had come up with a better one: Coda, the passage in music that brings the piece to an end. Po suggested something simple and respectful. He created a graphic using an image that mimicked the circular water irrigation systems that could be seen when flying over the Mojave Desert in California. And for the outer sleeve, an introspective look back on the history of Led Zeppelin, with a montage of photographs, thirty in all.
The idea was to release it in the summer of 1982, but it was held until November so as not to interfere with Pictures at Eleven, Robert’s first solo album, the final issue on the Swan Song label. Coda crept in on little cat feet with littler fanfare and even less support. Even case-hardened music critics hadn’t the heart to administer a eulogy. Most of the magazines ignored Coda. Only NME, now the grand master of snark, delivered the coup de grâce. Led Zeppelin’s “graveyard status seems assured when you hear this record and realize that there is nothing on it you want to recall,” the reviewer concluded, referring to the album as “this sackcloth.” The article, lacking any subtlety, held Led Zeppelin “largely responsible for the terrible state of American rock.”
A breather. Led Zeppelin, what was left of the band, needed a breather. They couldn’t fight the tide; they were all too sensitive. No one felt up to defending the unloved album. It was unwarranted, undignified. Above all, it seemed necessary to get the specter of Led Zeppelin out of their systems.
Jimmy, Robert, and Jonesy were used to layoffs, and each man went to ground in order to recover and reflect. Jimmy kept busy working on a soundtrack for Death Wish II, a movie that eventually lived up to its name. But he remained in the grip of drug addiction, and at the 1982 ARMS charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall, he looked to one observer “like a walking skeleton.” As far as playing went, he was careful to only put his toe in the water: a jam here, a jam there. In December 1981, he waded in the shallow end with Chris Squire and Alan White, both of Yes, in a venture called XYZ. Robert was invited to sing, but he lasted only one rehearsal, unable to commit in the wake of Bonzo’s death.
Robert was better off on his own. “I did nothing for as long as was respectful to Bonzo,” he said. “I cut my hair off, and I never played or listened to a Zeppelin record for two years.” His solo effort, Pictures at Eleven, was received warmly, if with a degree of reserve. In 1984, beginning to feel the old pull, he put out a five-song EP called The Honeydrippers: Volume One, a miscellany of Ahmet Ertegun’s favorite songs, R&B covers that included “I Got a Woman,” “Sea of Love,” and “Rockin’ at Midnight,” with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page handling guitars.
John Paul Jones had a rougher go of it. “I never worried that I’d have to get a real job, but it was kind of hard in the Eighties,” he said. He attempted to branch out, scoring films. “But everybody was saying, ‘He’s a rock bass player. What does he know about scoring?’ ” The same thing happened with Jonesy’s reentry into the studio. “When I first decided to try and get some work, nobody took me seriously at first. It was like, ‘Now wait a minute! I’m a professional musician and an arranger and a producer.’ ” He’d been central to more sessions than most working musicians. He put in a bid to produce John Hiatt’s new album, but the record company disputed his “relevance.” It frustrated him; he wanted to get back to work.
The three men, however, hadn’t played together in any serious way since the last Led Zeppelin concert in Berlin. They’d made guest appearances for Robert’s solo The Principle of Moments tour in London and Bristol, but there were no real plans for a reunion of any kind.
Rumblings started in the spring of 1985. Bob Geldof, the lead singer for the Boomtown Rats, was organizing a benefit concert on July 13, 1985, called Live Aid to raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief. He viewed it as a “global jukebox” that would be held simultaneously at Wembley in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, as well as at satellite venues in Canada, the Soviet Union, Japan, Australia, Yugoslavia, and Germany. Robert very quickly offered to appear, as he was on tour in Detroit the night before the benefit and would have no trouble getting to Philadelphia. Jimmy did too, but with a separate band he was forming called the Firm. Geldof wanted something splashier, and what could be splashier than a Led Zeppelin reunion?
“I called Jimmy and said, ‘Let’s do it,’ ” Robert recalled, but he instantly regretted it. Getting together with Jimmy, he reasoned, “would be like meeting a former wife and going to bed—and not making love. It’s impossible, just not appropriate anymore.”
No one had invited John Paul Jones for a threesome. For some reason, they didn’t seem to fit him into the picture. It was assumed that Paul Martinez, from Robert’s touring band, would handle bass chores at Live Aid. When word got back to Jonesy, he laid down the law. “I had to say to them, ‘If it’s Zeppelin, and you’re going to be doing Zeppelin songs, hi, I’m still here, and I wouldn’t mind being part of it.’ ” The way he saw it, “I had to barge my way into Live Aid.”
As far as drummers went, the situation was unique. They invited Tony Thompson, who played with Chic and Power Station, to sit in with the band. But replacing Bonzo required two drummers. No less a candidate than Phil Collins agreed to shore up the percussion. He was appearing with his band on the London stage earlier in the day but would hop on the Concorde and then helicopter to Philadelphia to appear with Led Zeppelin as well.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan when Robert announced that he had no intention of singing “Stairway to Heaven.” Jimmy was irate. “I fucking knew this would happen,” he fumed. “Isn’t it ridiculous? I’ve got to play this stupid fucking game with him, and of course he’ll end up doing it.”
“The next day, while Queen was onstage, we got together for rehearsal at the Warehouse Studios in Philadelphia,” says Phil Carlo, who was working as Jimmy’s road manager at the time. “I remember watching Freddie Mercury on TV with Robert, who turned to me and said, ‘Fucking hell, how are we going to top that?’ ”
There was only one way, and he knew it. “Stairway” became the centerpiece of their set.
Jimmy was visibly nervous. He had been studying the performances of the bands who preceded them earlier in the day—Santana, Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Hall and Oates, and Mick Jagger—marveling at the tightness of their sets. “John Paul Jones arrived virtually the same day as the show, and we had about an hour’s rehearsal,” he said. “That sounds a bit of a kamikaze stunt, really, when you think of how well rehearsed everybody else was.”
Phil Collins landed in Philadelphia in the nick of time to play his own short set as the sun set over the open-air stadium. After finishing his signature “In the Air Tonight,” he pulled the mic close and said, “I’d like to introduce some friends of mine. Would you welcome Mr. Robert Plant, Mr. Jimmy Page, Mr. John Paul Jones . . .”
The stadium erupted in cheers as a curtain folded back and the remnants of Led Zeppelin bounded onto the stage. The intro to “Rock and Roll” sent a jolt through the overwrought crowd. It should have been a smash to end all smashes. It should have been. But Robert’s voice was shot—he realized he “had nothing left at all”—and Jimmy’s guitar was horribly out of tune, and the monitors were feeding back, causing all sorts of problems. “The whole thing ran away with itself, and it was almost too much of an emotional thing for me,” Jimmy said. Emotions aside, he knew they just didn’t cut it. “We were awful,” Robert said. “Seventeen years, and we still can’t get it right.”
Worse, perhaps, Phil Collins, flailing away, couldn’t keep proper time. He’d been sent a tape of the material but hadn’t had the chance to practice it. “After the second number, Jim leaned toward me and said, ‘Turn his fucking mic off!’ ” recalls Phil Carlo.
Somehow, they salvaged the set with a sentimental version of “Stairway to Heaven” that produced the kind of arm-swaying, Bic-lighter tribute that Jimmy had always dreaded. And afterward they played the game, giving interviews that acknowledged how great it felt to play together again. But Robert changed his tune as soon as the lights were turned off.
“What I hated about Led Zeppelin came right back,” he said. “It was like some kind of aimless dog trying to bite its tail. . . . It being such a special day, for me to stand there and do probably one of the worst performances I’ve ever done in my life seemed to contradict my very being, my reason to be, as an entertainer, as a musician.” Small wonder that the group refused to allow their performance to appear on the Live Aid DVD package released in 2004.
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The magic of Led Zeppelin, however, was too strong to deny—or maybe just a fraught relationship that was impossible to end. John Paul Jones was reluctant to put it all behind. He suggested that “it might be nice to have a bit of a blow again.”
Six months later, in January 1986, he, Robert, and Jimmy met secretly in a village hall near Bath in an attempt to make new music together. The band toyed with a new configuration. Jonesy moved to keyboards, ceding the bass to Robert, with Tony Thompson of Power Station on drums. And like all fraught relationships, it started off smoothly. “Two or three things were quite promising,” Robert admitted, “a sort of cross between David Byrne and Hüsker Dü.” But old grievances soon rose to the surface. Everything Jimmy did grated on Robert’s nerves, nothing more so than waiting endlessly while he changed the batteries on his wah-wah pedal every other song. It was only a matter of time until things soured.
One evening, after a particularly exasperating rehearsal, the situation came to a head. “What I recall,” John Paul said, “is Robert and I getting drunk in the hotel, and Robert questioning what we were doing.”
“Nobody wants to hear that old stuff again,” he complained.
Jonesy couldn’t have agreed less. “Everybody is waiting for it to happen,” he insisted.
Fate eventually intervened. On the way home from the next rehearsal, Tony Thompson suffered injuries in an auto accident that confined him to a hospital bed. Without a drummer, and with a nagging lack of enthusiasm, plans for a comeback soon disintegrated. Everyone went his own way.
Over the years, there were other couplings—invitations to play on each other’s albums, at various charity events, a guest appearance here, a guest appearance there, a few uninspired duets that resulted in lackluster projects. They reconvened in May 1988 to play at a fortieth-anniversary tribute to Atlantic Records, again at the wedding of Bonzo’s son, Jason, in April 1990, and for a third time in September 1995, when Led Zeppelin was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But unlike The Who, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, the Police, even the unfailingly estranged Simon & Garfunkel, all of whom pulled off successful comeback tours, all the king’s horses and men couldn’t put Led Zeppelin back together again.
“There might have been a couple of occasions where we could have got it back together,” Jimmy lamented, “but I just presented scenario after scenario to him and Robert wasn’t interested. He just didn’t want to know. He said he doesn’t want to sing Led Zeppelin numbers.”
Their last performance together was on December 10, 2007, at a charity event at London’s twenty-thousand-seat O2 Arena honoring Ahmet Ertegun, the undisputed “Record Man” and Led Zeppelin godfather, who had died the previous December. Led Zeppelin volunteered to play their first full solo concert in three decades—their first ever without Peter Grant, who had suffered a fatal heart attack in November 1995 at the age of sixty—to benefit an education fund in Ertegun’s name. There were plenty of naysayers who shuddered at the thought. The ghost of Live Aid was still fresh in people’s minds, and word from the road wasn’t encouraging. There were reports that fifty-nine-year-old Robert’s voice was shot, that Jimmy, now sixty-three, was showboating with various bands. Still, twenty million fans from fifty countries applied for tickets in a lottery.
This time they recruited a drummer with incomparable chops. Jason Bonham, at forty, wasn’t his father, but he was pretty damn close. He’d learned at the feet of the master. He’d paid his dues, drumming with a half dozen bands, including a demanding stint with Foreigner. And he knew the songs inside and out, even his father’s nuances, from listening to umpteen bootlegs.
The concert at the O2 in London was standing room only, with tickets from the touts going for $1,000 a pop. The arena fairly percolated with expectation. When Led Zeppelin appeared—on time and in tune—it was a bit of a shock. The quintessential bad boys appeared to have grown up. Robert’s face was drawn with middle age, Jimmy had put on some much-improved weight, and Jonesy, at sixty-one, looked ready for a yacht outing. But looks were deceiving. The sound that ripped across the arena was stunning, vicious, a reminder of the sheer power of the group’s by-now-classic work, still selling three decades later. “Good Times, Bad Times,” appropriately, the first song on their first album, packed the kind of punch that had shell-shocked unsuspecting fans in the late sixties and seventies. “Heard from the floor, the group sounded hard and coherent,” The New Yorker reported, “and close to the stage the sound was fierce.”
The set was an anthology of well-conceived gems. “Ramble On,” “Black Dog,” “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” “No Quarter” . . . There was no time between numbers to catch one’s breath.
“There was a kind of loud serenity about Led Zeppelin’s set. It was well-rehearsed,” The New York Times confirmed. “Some of the top of [Robert’s] voice has gone,” but “he was authoritative . . . dignified.” Jimmy’s riffs were “enormous, nasty, glorious.” And John Paul was “thoroughly in the pocket . . . keeping that same far-behind-the-beat groove.” There were also kind words for Jason Bonham—“an expert in his father’s beats, an encyclopedia of all their variations.”
The hits, as the saying went, kept on coming. “Dazed and Confused,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “The Song Remains the Same,” “Misty Mountain Hop” . . .
There was none of the communication breakdown that had riddled so many shows. Robert and Jimmy functioned on a common wavelength. They intuited each other, set each other up, fed off each other’s energy.
They played assuredly, even gracefully. The historically frosty press saw fit to sing praise. “Plant’s voice was rich and strong, and the mingling of Page’s guitar with Jones’s keyboards was thrilling.” There was no place to take cover during the riveting, unsparing wrap-up: “Kashmir,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Rock and Roll,” one right after the other.
“If there were skeptics tonight, Led Zeppelin silenced them,” NME proclaimed, while Forbes, hardly a bastion of rock ’n roll advocacy, said, “They delivered the best show that ever was.”
The sound was huge, and so was the legacy. Yes, this was a band with some miles on it—a certain heaviness that hearkened back to the blues origins of the music itself, weary, troubled, but defiant. The toll of time—the drugs, the drama, the tragedy, the clash of personalities—fed the music for once instead of hindering it. Pure talent and intensity shone through.
There were other attempts to reunite, none more attractive than a $90 million offer for the band to return to the road. While Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones waited for Robert Plant’s decision to participate, they prepared with Jason Bonham on drums and a temporary vocalist—none other than Steven Tyler, who presumably didn’t have to hitchhike to rehearsals. But in the end, Robert refused to get involved. He was finished, and so was the band.
The O2 concert was it: one final appraisal to remind the world of a band that left its mark. Led Zeppelin had finally earned the reviews they’d chased for almost forty years.
Jimmy Page flashes his new Grazioso, sitting in with the Presidents, 1958. “We thought he was a bit too young to join us.” Left to right: Jimmy, Tony Busson, Martin Cowtan, Eric Archer
Taking the lead with Red E. Lewis & the Red Caps. Left to right: John “Jumbo” Spicer, Red E. Lewis, Jimmy Rook, Jimmy Page
Jimmy, before the dragon suit was finished, with Carter-Lewis and the Southerners, 1964
John Paul Jones in an early publicity shot during his days as a session master
The last incarnation of the Yardbirds. Left to right: Jeff Beck, Jim McCarty, Chris Dreja, Jimmy Page, Keith Relf
Jimmy and Jeff Beck tune up backstage at Staples High School, Westport, Connecticut.
Mr. Superlungs, Terry Reid. The lead singer was a plant.
The Band of Joy in a soulful pose, January 1968. Left to right: Kevyn Gammond, Robert Plant, John Bonham, Chris Brown, Paul Lockey
The one and only Willie Dixon
Cyril “Squirrel” Davies and Alexis Korner at the Ealing Jazz Club, 1962. That’s a teenage Charlie Watts on the drums behind them.
Glyn Johns, denied his Zep producer’s credit, managed to eke out a living as producer extraordinaire.
