Led Zeppelin FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time (Faq Series)
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• Carter-Lewis and the Southerners: “Your Momma’s Out of Town,” “Somebody Told My Girl,” “Skinnie Minnie,” “Who Told You,” “Sweet and Tender Romance,” “Mama”
• Neil Christian and the Crusaders: “The Road to Love,” “Honey Hush,” “I Like It,” “A Little Bit of Somethin’ Else,” “Get a Load of This”
• Petula Clark: “Downtown”
• Joe Cocker: “With a Little Help from My Friends,” “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Marjorine,” “Just Like a Woman,” “Sandpaper Cadillac”
• Louise Cordet: “Two Lovers”
• Jackie DeShannon: “Don’t Turn Your Back on Me”
• Charles Dickens: “So Much in Love,” “Our Soul Brother”
• Donovan: “Sunshine Superman”
• Val Doonican: “Walk Tall”
• The Everly Brothers: Two Yanks in England
• The Factotums: “Can’t Go Home Anymore My Love”
• Marianne Faithfull: “Come and Stay with Me,” “This Little Bird,” “Summer Nights”
• Chris Farlowe: “Moanin’,” “Out of Time,” “Think,” “Don’t Just Look at Me”
• Fifth Avenue: “Just Like Anyone Would Do,” “The Bells of Rhymney”
• Mickey Finn and the Blue Men: “This Sporting Life,” “Night Comes Down”
• The First Gear: “Gotta Make Their Future Bright,” “The In Crowd,” “A Certain Girl,” “Leave My Kitten Alone”
• Les Fleur de Lys: “Circles,” “So Come On,” “Moondreams,” “Wait for Me”
• Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders: “Hello Josephine,” “Roadrunner”
• Billy Fury: “I’m Lost Without You,” “Nothin’ Shakin’ but the Leaves on the Trees”
• Wayne Gibson and the Dynamic Sounds: “See You Later, Alligator,” “Kelly”
• Bobby Graham: “Zoom, Widge & Wag”
• Johnny Hallyday: “Psychedelic,” “A Tout Casser”
• Jet Harris and Tony Meehan: “Diamonds,” “Hully Gully”
• Herman’s Hermits: “Silhouettes,” “Wonderful World,” “Just a Little Bit Better,” “No Milk Today”
• Brian Howard and the Silhouettes: “The Worryin’ Kind,” “Bald-Headed Woman,” “Come to Me”
• Engelbert Humperdinck: “The Last Waltz”
• Brian Jones: A Degree of Murder (soundtrack)
• Davy Jones and the Lower Third: “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving,” “Baby Loves That Way”
• Tom Jones: “It’s Not Unusual”
• The Kinks: “You Really Got Me,” “Bald-Headed Woman,” “Revenge,” “Long Tall Sally”
• Kathy Kirby: “Dance On,” “Playboy,” “Secret Love,” “You Have to Want to Touch Him,” “Let Me Go Lover,” “The Sweetest Sounds”
• The Lancastrians: “She Was Tall,” “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine,” “The World Keeps Going Round,” “Not the Same Anymore”
• Brenda Lee: “Is It True,” “What I’d Say”
• Leapy Lee: “Little Arrows”
• Lulu: “I’ll Come Running Over,” “Shout,” “Surprise, Surprise,” “Leave a Little Love,” “He Don’t Want Your Love Anymore”
• The Manish Boys: “I Pity the Fool,” “Take My Tip”
• The Marauders: “That’s What I Want,” “Hey, What’d You Say”
• George Martin: “This Boy (Ringo’s Theme)” (A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack)
• The Masterminds: “She Belongs to Me,” “Taken My Love”
• The Scotty McKay Quintet: “Train Kept A-Rollin’”
• The McKinleys: “Sweet and Tender Romance”
• Mickie Most: “The Feminine Look,” “Money Honey,” “That’s Alright,” “Mr. Porter,” “Yes Indeed I Do,” “Sea Cruise,” “It’s a Little Bit Hot”
• The Nashville Teens: “Tobacco Road,” “I Like It Like That”
• Nico: “I’m Not Sayin’,” “The Last Mile”
• The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra: 16 Hip Hits
• The Orchids: “Love Hit Me,” “Don’t Make Me Sad”
• Gregory Phillips: “The Last Mile,” “Please Believe Me,” “Angie”
• The Pickwicks: “Little by Little”
• Brian Poole and the Tremeloes: “Candy Man,” “Three Bells,” “I Want Candy”
• The Primitives: “You Said,” “How Do You Feel,” “Help Me,” “Let Them Tell”
• P. J. Proby: “Hold Me,” “Together”
• Chris Ravel and the Ravers: “I Do,” “Don’t You Dig This Kinda Beat”
• The Redcaps: “Talkin’ ’bout You,” “Come On Girl”
• Cliff Richard: “Time Drags By”
• Chris Sandford: “Not Too Little, Not Too Much,” “I’m Lookin’”
• The Sneekers: “I Just Can’t Go to Sleep,” “Bald-Headed Woman”
• Al Stewart: “Turn into Earth,” Love Chronicles
• Crispian St. Peters: “You Were on My Mind,” “Pied Piper”
• The Talismen: “Castin’ My Spell,” “Masters of War”
• Jimmy Tarbuck: “Someday,” “Wastin’ Time”
• Them: “Baby Please Don’t Go,” “Gloria,” “Here Comes the Night,” “Mystic Eyes”
• Twice as Much: “Sittin’ on a Fence,” “Step Out of Line,” “Baby I Want You”
• Twinkle: “Tommy”
• The Untamed: “I’ll Go Crazy”
• Pat Wayne with the Beachcombers: “Roll Over Beethoven”
• Houston Wells and the Marksmen: “Blowin’ Wild,” “Crazy Dreams”
• The Who: “I Can’t Explain,” “Bald-Headed Woman”
• John Williams: “Dream Cloudburst,” “Early Bird of Morning”
• The Zephyrs: “I Can Tell”
From Seven to Eleven: John Paul Jones as a Session Musician
Like Jimmy Page, the future Led Zeppelin bassist and keyboardist was highly sought in the London studios of the mid-1960s; as it is for Page, a select catalogue of his contributions is difficult to determine. This not only reflects how busy he was over this time (about 1962 to the formation of Zeppelin in 1968), but his range of musical skills. Besides supplying bass lines, Jones was also called to arrange and orchestrate sessions where his actual playing was nowhere to be heard but where his involvement was nonetheless audible. “Arranging and general studio direction were much better than just sitting there being told what to do,” he looked back. “I always thought the bass player’s life was much more interesting in those days, because nobody knew how to write for bass. They used to say, ‘We’ll give you the chord sheet,’ and get on with it. So even on the worst sessions, you could have little runaround.” The sprawling diversity of artists whose paths he crossed as a session man—everyone from Herman’s Hermits and Lulu to Paul Anka and Tom Jones—indicates something of the transitional, cross-generational state of the pop music business before it became dominated in the next decade by youth-oriented rock and its offshoots. The cornier credits also reveal him slipping into a hackdom only membership in Led Zeppelin could redeem. “After a few years of nonstop sessions it got too much,” he told Zeppelin archivist Dave Lewis. “I was making a fortune but I wasn’t enjoying it anymore.” Again, as they had done for Page’s, the combination of overwork and boredom threatened to stale Jones’s talents in the last months before joined the band that would make him famous.
Since Jones did not have the wider stage experience gained by Jimmy Page in the Yardbirds—or for that matter by Robert Plant and John Bonham in various Midlands acts—his concert performances cast him as the quintessential sideman, where he was dependable and well rehearsed but usually inconspicuous. The versatility and reliability Jones acquired from his studio stint were what Page sought when inviting him to join the group, not any flamboyant showmanship. He memorably recalled Plant’s expectations of him being “some old bloke with a pipe” at the first New
Yardbirds jam session, which, though he was scarcely two years older than the young singer, was not far off the mark as an assessment of his professional temperament.
Jones’s low-key role in Led Zeppelin has meant that less research has been made into his early credits, but his presence on some material has been confirmed by him (on his own website) and by others. Because he was employed full-time in studios for several years, many of the gigs have long since slipped his mind, whether he had performed or served as musical director or both, and few of the dates in which he participated resulted in timeless hits. “So many sessions were run-of-the-mill, banal, mundane, very boring, you couldn’t wait to get out of them,” he has confessed. Much of his job entailed conducting other session hands’ own playing, or advising producers on what instruments and instrumentalists to use on particular parts, qualifying him as an all-around (probably not very interested) consultant rather than merely an occasional hired hand. The following names and titles are the best-known fraction of the hundreds or thousands of performers and records John Paul Jones is known to have worked with or worked on.
• Paul Anka
• Burt Bacharach
• Pearl Bailey
• Lionel Bart: “Maggie May”
• Jeff Beck: “Beck’s Bolero,” “You Shook Me,” “Hi Ho Silver Lining,” “Love Is Blue”
• Madeline Bell
• Dave Berry
• Marc Bolan
• The Cherokees: “Land of 1,000 Dances”
• Petula Clark: “Downtown”
• Sammy Davis Jr.
• Donovan: “Mellow Yellow,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” “Sunshine Superman”
• The Downliners Sect: “Rocks in My Bed,” “Waiting in Heaven”
• Marianne Faithfull
• Julie Felix: Changes
• Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders: “A Groovy Kind of Love”
• Freddy and the Dreamers
• Graham Gouldman
• Françoise Hardy
• Herman’s Hermits: “A Kind of Hush,” “No Milk Today” (Accounts differ as to the degree of his involvement with the Hermits. Singer Peter Noone has claimed Jones played bass on most of their repertoire, including hits like “I’m Into Something Good,” while other members have angrily disputed this.)
• Engelbert Humperdinck: Release Me
• Davy Jones and the Lower Third: “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving,” “Can’t Help Thinking About Me”
• Kathy Kirby
• Jay and the Americans
• Tom Jones: “Delilah,” “The Green Green Grass of Home”
• Lulu: “To Sir with Love,” “The Boat That I Row”
• The Magic Lanterns
• The Mighty Avengers: “Blue Turns to Grey”
• Mickie Most
• Billy Nicholls
• Nico
• Des O’Connor
• The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra: 16 Hip Hits
• Carl Perkins
• Peter & Gordon
• P. J. Proby
• Cliff Richard: “Shoom Lamma Boom Boom”
• The Rolling Stones: “She’s a Rainbow”
• Harry Secombe
• Del Shannon
• Dusty Springfield: Dusty…Definitely
• Cat Stevens
• Rod Stewart: “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” b/w “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town”
• Robert Stigwood
• Barry St. John: “Everything I Touch Turns to Tears”
• The Walker Brothers
• Dinah Washington
• Ian Whitcomb: “You Turn Me On”
• The Yardbirds: “Ten Little Indians,” “Little Games,” “Ha Ha Said the Clown”
Timeline
1969
January–February: Led Zeppelin tour the US and Canada.
January 12: Led Zeppelin released.
January 20: Richard Nixon sworn in as US president.
March 2: First flight of Concorde supersonic airliner.
April: Major anti-Vietnam-war demonstrations in US.
May: Led Zeppelin touring North America; recording Led Zeppelin II.
June 22: Judy Garland dies, age 47, London.
July 3: Rolling Stone Brian Jones found dead, age 26.
July–August: Led Zeppelin tour North America.
July 20: Moon landing.
July 30: Edward Kennedy’s companion Mary Jo Kopechne drowns, Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts.
August 9: Savage murders of Sharon Tate household, Los Angeles.
August 15–17: Woodstock music festival.
October–November: Led Zeppelin tour North America.
October 21: Paul McCartney denies rumors of his death.
October 22: Led Zeppelin II released.
November: Anti-war demonstrations in Washington, DC.
December 6: Rolling Stones Altamont concert ends in murder of a fan by Hells Angels.
Movies: Easy Rider; Midnight Cowboy; Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid; The Wild Bunch.
Music: The Beatles, Abbey Road; the Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed; the Who, Tommy; Sly and the Family Stone, Stand!; the Grateful Dead, Live Dead; Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis; Elvis Presley, “Suspicious Minds”; the Supremes, “Someday We’ll Be Together”; B. B. King, “The Thrill Is Gone”; the Archies, “Sugar Sugar.”
5
I’m Gonna Join the Band
The Formation of Led Zeppelin
For Your Love: Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds
Though there is no denying that the foursome eventually known as Led Zeppelin played their first concerts as “the New Yardbirds,” or “the Yardbirds featuring Jimmy Page,” the original Yardbirds’ biggest successes preceded Jimmy Page’s entry into the group. As a quintet, with Eric Clapton on lead guitar, they had made the smash single “For Your Love” in March 1965, and, following Clapton’s replacement by Jeff Beck, they made the hits “Heart Full of Soul,” “Shapes of Things,” and “You’re a Better Man than I,” but the overworked and underpaid band were deteriorating and bassist Paul Samwell-Smith quit in June 1966. Jimmy Page was initially recruited first to take over Samwell-Smith’s bass spot, then to complement Beck on lead guitar while rhythm player Chris Dreja switched to bass; the erratic Beck himself quit for good (just before he would have been fired) after an exhausting American tour in late 1966. From 1967 to the spring of 1968 the four-piece Yardbirds were highlighted by Page’s guitar spots—and they continued to play the hit songs Page never had a hand in making—but Dreja, vocalist Keith Relf, and drummer Jim McCarty had long since tired of the treadmill and consented to Page taking over the rights to the act’s name after their final shows in July 1968. Page had recorded a smattering of new cuts with the Yardbirds (both with and without Jeff Beck), but management woes and public apathy kept “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” “Little Games,” and “Ten Little Indians” from rising beyond the middle levels of the charts. Aside from Page’s presence on lead guitar (though not, significantly, in the studio control booth), the connection between Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds is only a contractual one.
It is true that Jimmy Page’s later work with the Yardbirds explored some of the sonic territory he would eventually chart with Led Zeppelin. Several Yardbirds numbers ended up as part of the Zeppelin oeuvre, including “I’m Confused” and “Think About It” (merged to become “Dazed and Confused”), “Train Kept A-Rollin’” (played live and adapted into “Stroll On” for the Yardbirds’ appearance in the mod 1966 film Blow-Up), Page’s instrumental showpiece “White Summer,” and the abandoned “Knowing That I’m Losing You,” which evolved into “Tangerine.” For that matter, the very first New Yardbirds performances also sounded covers of the older band’s favorites “For Your Love” and “I’m a Man.” By the Yardbirds’ concluding tour of North America Page was stroking his Fender Telecaster with a violin bow and taking longer and more psychedelic solo break
s, clearly headed in the direction he would travel with Led Zeppelin, though perhaps leaving his Yardbird bandmates behind. In 1967–68 it was the Yardbirds themselves who had already become a different band than they had been during the tenures of Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck.
The last incarnation of the Yardbirds had been managed by Peter Grant, who continued as Page’s representative while the guitarist sought to assemble a fresh act. The Yardbirds had been booked for a series of Scandinavian shows in September ’68, so Page was obligated to have some semblance of a set ready to satisfy promoters in Denmark and Sweden. Page and Grant’s intentions following the Yardbirds’ dissolution were to complete that group’s outstanding commitments, then to use them as a springboard for more forays into the North American concert and record market, where opportunities for other electric, improvisational blues performers (like Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and Iron Butterfly) appeared to be good. The two then went about scouting signed and unsigned talent in the few weeks they had. Hearing audition tapes and catching a live performance by singer Robert Plant, Page first invited Plant to join, who in turn recommended his Midlands friend and occasional bandmate, drummer John Bonham; then Page’s own studio colleague John Paul Jones (whose work was already known and respected by the guitarist and Peter Grant) volunteered to step in. During this short stretch vocalists Terry Reid, Chris Farlowe, and Steve Marriott; drummers Aynsley Dunbar, Clem Cattini, Bobby Graham, and Paul Francis; and erstwhile Yardbirds bassist Chris Dreja and the Move’s Ace Kefford were all under consideration for membership. Page also was impressed with Cream bassman Jack Bruce and Jimi Hendrix’s drummer Mitch Mitchell, though neither were likely hires, and Ron Wood, then playing bass with the Jeff Beck Group, claims he was asked by Peter Grant to come aboard the New Yardbirds as either a guitarist or bass player, though this claim remains uncorroborated.
Two points are obvious from this—admittedly rather jumbled—time line. One is how quickly Keith Relf, Jim McCarty, and Chris Dreja were replaced by other players, suggesting Page had no great desire to duplicate any of their stylistic contributions. The other is how soon Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones jelled together: There was no long audition period, and no other combination of musicians ever rehearsed together with prospects of becoming the group now known as Led Zeppelin. Through a