by George Case
All the Zeppelin members have spoken of how their live gigs were more fulfilling—and in some ways more important—to them than the laborious recording process; even though the shows were ephemeral and the albums are forever, it was on the boards where Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham felt they really earned their pay. “In the first two years of any band, you just work solidly,” Page has said. “If you’re going to make an impact, that’s what you have to do…. In fact, we probably worked for three years straight.” “Live shows were what Led Zeppelin was all about for me,” Jones echoed. “The records were kind of starting points for the live shows.” “We figured the best thing to do was shut the fuck up and play, you know?” Plant shrugged of Led Zeppelin’s response to bad press. Meeting his rock star subjects following their 1970s concerts, Rolling Stone reporter Cameron Crowe recounted what he saw as the performers’ real motivations: “These guys, most of them, seemed to be in it for the feeling they got on stage, and hopefully girls and acclaim after that.” Part of the foursome’s status, then, must rest on their work not as brilliant composers or genius instrumentalists but as energetic touring performers happy to show off for public consumption and hardy enough to keep doing it until their fan base was secure.
Father of the Four Winds: What Peter Grant Did for Led Zeppelin
Manager Peter Grant was the undisputed “fifth member” of the band, and without his fierce loyalty and imposing management strategies Zeppelin could well have wound up as no more than another Jethro Tull, Ten Years After, Savoy Brown, or the Strawbs—a psychedelic, progressive blues or folk act of the late 1960s that could only score occasional success before fragmenting in a welter of shoddy deals, cheap shots, bad scenes, and blown chances. Like a salesman convinced of his own pitch, Grant stuck by Led Zeppelin as his prime client, turning the group from promising newcomers beset by hostile reviews into a very early example of entertainment industry “branding.” It was Grant and Page who designed Led Zeppelin together, as much a corporate enterprise as an artistic one, with Page having only general notions of what the music would be; the important thing they had both learned from years in the industry was that acts had to have control of their own material. Credited as “executive producer” on Led Zeppelin’s ten original albums (the term was taken from film production and has no relevance in the music industry, other than to acknowledge his business oversight), Grant ensured the group stayed a steady and lucrative draw over its working life and beyond. With his heavy hand on the balance sheets, Zeppelin benefited from a consistency that eluded many of their rivals: between 1968 and 1980, the same four members had the same manager; same producer; same record label; same links to the same network of promoters, lawyers, booking agents, and road support; and the same security in knowing that their money and creative endeavors were safely guarded at the front office.
Serious rock management, at the beginning of Led Zeppelin’s career, was still in its early stages. Many artists were guided by people who were hardly more than eager fans with a few inside contacts, like the Beatles’ Brian Epstein or the Rolling Stones’ Andrew Loog Oldham. They were devoted to their charges and sincere in their admiration of the music, but they were blindsided by savvier operators smooth-talking their way into the royalty statements and bank accounts. Other men, like Don Arden or onetime Yardbirds producer Mickie Most, were mostly in the game for themselves, holding on to acts only as long as they were generating hit songs or sold-out venues—once the commissions stopped coming, bands could be dropped in favor of some other, hipper prospect. These were the smarmy types satirized by Pink Floyd (and Zeppelin’s friend Roy Harper) in their “Have a Cigar” from 1975’s Wish You Were Here: “The band is just fantastic, that is really what I think….” The advent of “name” groups with identifiable personnel and styles ran ahead of managerial culture’s traditional tendency to see performing bands as generic, interchangeable, or disposable providers of dance accompaniments and two-minute singles.
Peter Grant was, along with disparate actors like Allen Klein or David Geffen, one of the first in the profession to realize just how huge the market was for rock music, how much single clients could be potentially worth over time, how little audiences (then) needed persuasion via advertisement, and how even small percentages of the take could represent major sums of cash. For this reason Grant had no patience with traditional showbiz payoffs, cut corners, or side deals. All of them, to him, were ruses put out as a means to scoop proceeds from long-haired kids too innocent or stagestruck to know when they were being ripped off. Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, seasoned in the London studio scene, were aware of these pitfalls, but Robert Plant and John Bonham were not, and no one was more aware of crooked bargains and cooked books than Peter Grant. In the long run his instinctive nose for every last legal and financial concession the band was rightfully due made them superstars, but in the short term Zeppelin drew complaints of thuggery and exploitation.
During the 1970s, Grant’s brutal demands for record-breaking advances, cash up front, and nine-tenths of ticket sales per concert alienated some of those he negotiated with. A huge physical presence who on several occasions used the threat of force to get his way, he sometimes seemed to win Led Zeppelin’s earnings out of intimidation more than good faith, and The Book of Rock Lists scoffed at Zeppelin’s claims to be “the Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World”: “They just got more money than anyone else.” Certainly the band was filling arenas and hitting the top of the charts well after their music entitled them to, and a less insistent or single-minded backer than Grant might not have been able to justify their fees to record executives or average punters after 1975. Like John Bonham and Jimmy Page, Grant too became a drug addict, severely curtailing his health and professional aptitude while continuing to feed the very crudity and belligerence middlemen so resented. He still managed Page for a couple of years following Bonham’s death, but had to sit out most of the 1980s while getting clean and never was very active in the industry subsequently (he died of a heart attack in 1995). Current disputes over exorbitant ticket surcharges or monopolized concert promotion are at least partly due to precedents set by him forty years ago. While Peter Grant can take credit for transforming the music business in its most remunerative years—guaranteeing artists the money that had hitherto been frittered away on peripheral players—his tactics and his lifestyle came with decided downsides.
Walking Side by Side: Led Zeppelin’s “Sixth Members”
During the quartet’s life its circle of associates was quite small and few were ever allowed ongoing access to their inner workings. The following individuals are the most likely candidates for honorary membership.
Richard Cole
The band’s original and most notorious road manager, Cole has been a major fount of information on Led Zeppelin’s private life. His reminiscences loom large in Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods; an unauthorized documentary, A to Zeppelin; and he also cowrote a salacious autobiography, Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored. Cole definitely was in on the group’s infamous touring debaucheries, and even his critics admit he was, for most of his stint, a reliable employee who handled the logistics of travel, accommodation, security, and equipment competently. In view of the band’s hectic schedules of 1968–73, this is no small accomplishment. On the other hand, Cole was rarely party to any of the members’ efforts in songwriting and record production, and his relationships with Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones were not overly close; indeed, the surviving members have all but disowned him for his public revelations.
Roy Harper
A quirky English poet and musician who was taken up by Page and Plant following their introduction to him at the Bath Festival in 1970, Harper is actually named in a Zeppelin title, “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper,” although the song itself makes no mention of him. Jimmy Page played on some of Harper’s 1970s records, including Stormcock and Lifemask, and the two made an entire album together in 1985, Whatever Happened to Jugula? Part of th
e group’s entourage in their high-flying heyday, Harper even opened the odd Zeppelin show, offering typically eccentric numbers about cricket and other English in-jokes to baffled American hard rock fans. Admired by some in and out of the group for the perverse anticommercialism of his art but heard by others as a full-fledged nutcase, Harper was nothing if not an original. His involvement with other big names such as Pink Floyd and Kate Bush has made him a curious footnote in the history of British rock music.
B. P. Fallon and Danny Goldberg
Publicists for the group in the 1970s, and both welcomed into the group’s inside circles, the Irish Fallon and the American Goldberg were faced with the challenge of making Led Zeppelin a mainstream act like the Rolling Stones—or, failing that, T. Rex. Goldberg seems to have made further inroads in this than Fallon, although it is also true that Zeppelin’s rise to the rock aristocracy was most accelerated after 1980. Both have granted interviews discussing their connections to the band, and Goldberg, who has since served as a high-level executive for Warner Music, has authored his own memoir, Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business.
Eddie Kramer, Glyn Johns, Andy Johns, George Chkiantz, Keith Harwood
The engineers regularly hired by Page as his studio assistants between 1968 and 1975, these technicians participated in the recording of Led Zeppelin’s most important cuts. Page has said that he deliberately changed engineers with every album—“I didn’t want people to think they were responsible for our sound”—but collectively Page’s old Surrey chum Glyn Johns (Led Zeppelin), Johns’s younger brother Andy (Led Zeppelin II, III, IV), George Chkiantz (Led Zeppelin II, Houses of the Holy, Physical Graffiti), expatriate South African and Hendrix alumnus Eddie Kramer (Led Zeppelin II, Houses of the Holy, Physical Graffiti, The Song Remains the Same), and young Englishman Keith Harwood (Houses of the Holy, Physical Graffiti, Presence) had no little part in realizing Page’s audio conceptualizations. Kramer’s operation of the console while mixing the abstract interlude in “Whole Lotta Love” alone entitles him to special mention in the Zeppelin discography, as do Andy Johns’s experiments in miking Bonham’s drums to send “When the Levee Breaks” off the Richter scale.
Cameron Crowe
Now a Hollywood writer-director, Crowe began as a teenage reporter for Rolling Stone, where his youth and enthusiasm (or fawning, it’s been said) won him appreciative access to such stars as David Bowie, Elton John, and Led Zeppelin. Crowe filed some of the more illuminating interviews with Page and Plant during the 1970s, wrote the liner notes for The Song Remains the Same, and contributed an essay to the booklet accompanying the 1990 Zeppelin box set. His 2000 film Almost Famous was an autobiographical look back at his early career, with the fictional band Stillwater based partly on Zeppelin. Out of his ongoing ties to Page and Plant he has been able to secure use of their music for his cinematic projects, including Almost Famous and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, for which he wrote the screenplay. Crowe was also married to Nancy Wilson of the group Heart, longtime Led Zeppelin admirers.
Steve Weiss, Jerry Weintraub, Frank Barsalona
Zeppelin’s legal and business enablers, these three American heavies were, behind Peter Grant, the key players in constructing the quartet’s financial organization. Weiss was the US entertainment attorney charged with sorting out the fine print of Led Zeppelin’s various deals, including the establishment of Swan Song records. Known to be a very tough negotiator, he is seen silently backing Grant in The Song Remains the Same while the manager lights into a Madison Square Garden employee for selling contraband Zeppelin souvenirs. As head of Premier Talent, booking agent Barsalona is credited with single-handedly reinventing the American rock concert industry, taking a hitherto haphazard and exploitive model driven by local figures and turning it into a nationwide system that treated acts as artists and not commodities; along with his value to Led Zeppelin in the band’s conquest of the American market in their touring heyday of 1969–72, Barsalona also nurtured the careers of such legendary live performers as Bruce Springsteen, U2, and Van Halen. Promoter Jerry Weintraub, who also served for big names including Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and Eric Clapton, ensured Zeppelin’s huge concert grosses of ’73, ’75, and ’77. Weintraub took promotion out of the hands of regional middlemen and into those of his own Concerts West firm, allowing his superstar rosters to retain even more of the gate from their sold-out gigs.
Ahmet Ertegun
The head of Atlantic Records who first signed ex-Yardbird Jimmy Page’s untried new group, Ertegun was known in the music industry as a gracious and farsighted executive, with a previous roster that included Ray Charles,
Jimmy Page and John Bonham lived the decadent rock star life to the fullest—and paid the price.
Courtesy of Duane Roy
Aretha Franklin, and other R&B legends, all of which reflected well on Led Zeppelin. “I made it very clear to them that I wanted to be on Atlantic rather than their rock label, Atco, which had bands like Sonny and Cher and Cream,” Jimmy Page recalled in a Guitar World interview. “I didn’t want to be lumped in with those people—I wanted to be associated with something more classic.” Ertegun and his partner Jerry Wexler’s sincere support of Led Zeppelin from 1969 to 1980 was deeply gratifying to Peter Grant and the four musicians, and he attended many Zeppelin concerts, accompanied them on their touring jets, and made it through the premier screening of The Song Remains the Same (“Who was the guy on the horse?” he asked Peter Grant). The 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion show at London’s O2 arena was held to raise funds for the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund, a charity established after the record man’s death the previous year.
Timeline
Cross the Sea of Years
Led Zeppelin’s Timeline
Many accounts of the band’s working life describe the four musicians existing in a social or cultural vacuum, as if the only thing going on when Led Zeppelin was making music was Zeppelin itself. In fact, while the group was of course popular and busy from 1968 to 1980, they were rarely the biggest story, or even the biggest show business story, of the day. “We all lived in the real world as much as you can,” John Paul Jones looked back in an Uncut interview from 2008. “I mean, it is a bit of a bubble that you travel around in, but we were all pretty well informed.” The timeline running throughout this book, juxtaposing the key events and achievements of Led Zeppelin’s career with the most influential events and achievements in current affairs and the arts, should put things into a wider perspective.
1968
June 5: Robert F. Kennedy assassinated, Los Angeles.
June 5: Jimmy Page retains rights to Yardbirds’ name as the group dissolves.
July: Jimmy Page scouts recruits for the New Yardbirds.
August 19: First New Yardbirds rehearsal of Page, John Paul Jones, Robert Plant, John Bonham.
August 22: Soviet military forces suppress the “Prague Spring” pro-democracy movement in Czechoslovakia.
August 29: Youth protesters and police clash at the Democratic National Convention, Chicago
September 7: First New Yardbirds performance, Gladsaxe, Denmark.
October: Mexico City Olympics; black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos give “Black Power” salute from the podium.
October: Recording Led Zeppelin.
November 6: Richard Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey in a close US election.
December 26: Led Zeppelin begin first tour of the US.
Movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey; Romeo and Juliet; Rosemary’s Baby; Yellow Submarine; I Am Curious (Yellow).
Music: Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland; the Beatles, The Beatles; the Rolling Stones, Beggar’s Banquet; Bob Dylan, John Wesley Harding; Big Brother and the Holding Company, Cheap Thrills; Steppenwolf, “Born to Be Wild”; the Beatles, “Hey Jude”; Marvin Gaye, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”; Cream, “Sunshine of Your Love.”
3
To You I Give This Tune
Led Zeppelin’s Ten Best, Worst, and Mos
t Overlooked Songs
Lists such as the following are of course subjective and usually highly contentious, but given the finite duration of the Zeppelin catalogue (eighty-one studio songs issued between 1969 and 1982, taking up less than ten hours of music), over forty years a pretty secure fan and critical consensus has arisen around the band’s highest, lowest, and least recognized attainments.
The Best
For desert island castaways, condemned prisoners, or others with limited time and space, these ten Zep tracks are the absolute, bare-bones, indispensable crème de la crème. For everyone else, these are a good start.
“Stairway to Heaven”
There is no escaping it, as the song allegedly claims when played backward. Leave aside its reputation as a secret bearer of Satanic messages, as an overplayed FM radio anthem, or as a “we’re not worthy” 1970s cliché, and “Stairway” endures as Led Zeppelin’s crowning marriage of acoustic and electric, light and shade, heavy and soft, power and mystery, hammer and god: their “A Day in the Life,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Layla,” “Hotel California,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Gimme Shelter” rolled into one. A mandatory component in the group’s concerts from 1971 to 1980, a showcase for all four group members at their most polished, and the most popular track on the group’s most popular album, the opus has since found a place atop Led Zeppelin’s oeuvre and near the summit of all rock ’n’ roll artistry. There is room for debate in sorting out many of the band’s most valuable pieces, but the status of “Stairway to Heaven” is off-limits.