When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  You told yourself it was a good thing. Especially when Andrew Loog Oldham – Andrew Loog Oldham of the Beatles and the Stones! – said you could make it on your own. That you could be the New Jet Harris! And you believed him…almost. Putting out your own record – ‘Baja’ by John Paul Jones. Your new name on the sky blue Pye label. Not exactly an original tune but the part you wrote for it on the six-string Fender bass was. Quite nifty, in fact, even if you did say so yourself. Not quite nifty enough to turn you into the new Jet Harris, though.

  It did introduce you to some important new people, though. Friends of Andrew’s, what he called the Andrew Oldham Orchestra. Little Jimmy Page, Big Jim Sullivan and the rest. All playing easy-listening guff like ‘There Are But Five Rolling Stones’ and ‘365 Rolling Stones (One for Every Day of the Year)’, all having a laugh – and getting paid. Then the LP: 16 Hip Hits. ‘Come on,’ said Andrew, ‘You know classical,’ after the original arranger, Mike Leander, got a better job at Decca, same as Tony. You laughed about it now. ‘I wanted to arrange, Andrew wanted to produce and neither of us was very choosy,’ you would say, sending the whole thing up. But you loved it really. ‘I was allowed to write them nice, interesting little things, especially for woodwinds. We’d always have a couple of oboes or French horns.’ The sort of thing you could play your mum and dad without making them groan too much. A laugh and getting paid, better than being stuck at home anyway. It wasn’t like you saw it in the shops or heard it on the radio or anything.

  Then the Shadows phoned up one day, looking for a replacement for their bassist, Brian ‘Liquorice’ Locking, and suddenly you were ready to chuck the whole thing in and join the Shads, you bet your bloody life you were! But nothing came of that either and that’s when it began properly, picking up session work, well-paid session work, but still just session work, as and when it came up. It was never meant to last long. But it did. It never bloody ended, playing bass or Hammond organ. First there was Herbie Goins and the Night Timers. At least they played something you liked: bit of Tamla Motown, some James Brown, even a couple of ‘originals’ (white versions of let-me-hear-you-say-yeah, but you could dig it). When everybody else was into folk and blues you’d been listening to Otis Redding and jazz. You’d always loved ‘soul’. Live was where Herbie really earned his corn though, the records just there to help sell the tickets really. That was all right too, playing the Hammond on their first single, ‘The Music Played On’, and their next single, too, ‘Number One in Your Heart’ which wasn’t bad at all and actually got played on the radio. Not the proper radio but the pirates, which was still quite good, you know…

  By 1968, as well as a bass player, John Paul Jones was becoming known on the London music scene as a reliable keyboardist and inspired arranger. It began, most spectacularly, with the Mickie Most-produced session for Donovan – the non-doctrinal British version of Bob Dylan – which produced ‘Sunshine Superman’, a No. 1 hit in the US in 1966. ‘The arranger they’d picked really didn’t know about anything,’ Jones recalled. ‘I got the rhythm section together, and we went from there. Arranging and general studio direction were much better than just sitting there and being told what to do.’ ‘Sunshine Superman’ had also been one of Page’s last high-profile sessions before joining the Yardbirds. Hence the story – apocryphal, as it turns out – that still circulates to this day about it being the Donovan session where Jonesy first approached Pagey about the possibility of joining the new band he’d heard on the grapevine that he was starting. ‘We may have discussed something along those lines,’ Jones would later tell me. ‘But I don’t think it was directly about what became Led Zeppelin. More a general sort of, “If you ever decide to do anything group-wise give me a call”, sort of conversation. We were both still young and, I think, equally bored with being in the background. Not because of a craving for the spotlight, more just wanting to express ourselves as musicians. Do our own thing.’

  After that Jones had arranged the orchestral strings on ‘She’s A Rainbow’ from the cod-psychedelic Stones’ album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, though he complained about having to wait around endlessly for them to turn up for the session: ‘I just thought they were unprofessional and boring.’ Presumably not as boring as the two days he spent working at Abbey Road in February 1968, along with the Mike Sammes Singers and a full orchestra, playing bass on and arranging two of the six tracks earmarked for Cliff Richard to sing as potential entries for that year’s Eurovision Song Contest, including such mainstream monstrosities as ‘Shoom Lamma Boom Boom’. By then, however, Jones was used to churning it out for what he calls the ‘bowtie brigade’: Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdink, Petula Clark, Harry Secombe, Des O’Connor…there was apparently no shilling too greasy for the once promising ‘new Jet Harris’ to pocket.

  Jimmy Page found himself in the same boat as the fad for guitar-oriented mainstream pop faded in the mid-Sixties and the fashion for horn-section and/or orchestral-led records took their place. Reaching a new low in his session career, one of the reasons Page surprisingly offered to help the Yardbirds out when Paul Samwell-Smith walked out was because he had recently found himself contributing to a series of recordings intended as background music for supermarkets and hotels. A decade later, Brian Eno would make an ironic virtue out of music for airports, but what Jimmy Page was playing on in 1966 was the real thing. A state of affairs so dispiriting that not even money could balm the creative cuts. Not entirely anyway.

  Little wonder John Paul Jones was also now chafing at the bit to do something different. ‘Slowly going mental’ playing schmaltz during the most exciting, creative time in the history of popular music. Like Page, Jones was desperate to take part in what was going on in London and elsewhere, as epitomised by the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Cream, Hendrix and the rest. Unlike Page, though, he didn’t know how to go about it; thought his chance may already have gone. ‘It’s getting too much,’ he complained to Mo. But he showed no real determination to do anything about it. Even when she replied by showing him the story in Disc & Music Echo saying Jimmy Page was looking for musicians to join him in a new version of the Yardbirds, his first reaction was to dismiss it out of hand. ‘I was fed up with playing sessions and my wife said, “Give him a call.” I said, “Harrumph, it doesn’t sound very good.” But she said, “Give him a call!” So I did, saying, “I hear you need a bass player”, and he said, “Yes, and I’m going to see a singer who knows a drummer” – who turned out to be Robert and John – “I’ll give you a shout when I get back”.’

  Years later, Page would tell of a conversation he’d had with Jones during sessions in June 1968 for Donovan’s The Hurdy Gurdy Man album. ‘I was working at the session and John Paul Jones was looking after the musical arrangements. During a break, he asked me if I could use a bass player in the new group.’ Jones, though, remembers things differently. ‘It’s possible we may have spoken about something like that,’ he said when we discussed it in 2003. But as he was the one who booked the band, he points out that Page wasn’t actually called in for that particular session (the famously hazy guitar parts provided by Alan Parker). If anything, he feels the story is probably based on ‘a vague comment I might have made’ at either the earlier Donovan session for ‘Sunshine Superman’, or more likely, an entirely different session around the same time that he and Page also worked on for the singer Keith De Groot, a rising star in the eyes of producer Reg Tracey who’d put together a suitably stellar band for the recording including Page, Jones, Nicky Hopkins, Albert Lee, Big Jim Sullivan, saxophonist Chris Hughes and drummer Clem Cattini. Sadly for De Groot, the ensuing album, No Introduction Necessary, was a flop. But it was here, perhaps, Jones suggests, that the seed of he and Page working together on something more permanent may have first been planted.

  It wasn’t until prodded by his wife to actually phone Page and confirm his offer of help that the idea suddenly became concrete and Jones spent the next few days waiting impatiently for him to call back. A laconic, slightly prof
essorial figure, even in his early twenties, it wasn’t his style to go overboard about anything. He admitted when we later spoke, though, that he ‘sensed something good might be going on with Jimmy’. He’d played on Yardbirds’ records before; worked with Page in dozens of different contexts. As he said, ‘I wasn’t particularly interested in the blues. I was more interested in Stax, Motown, that sort of thing. But Jimmy promised something a little different from a regular, one-style blues band.’

  ‘I jumped at the chance to get him,’ Page would later recall. ‘Musically he’s the best musician of us all. He had a proper training and he has quite brilliant ideas.’ According to another source, though, Page was also considering Jack Bruce, as well as Ace Kefford, formerly of The Move, who had also recently auditioned for the Jeff Beck Group as bassist/vocalist, in the wake of Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood’s departure for (eventually) the Faces. In fact, Ronnie Wood says now that he, too, had been approached by Page to become the bassist in the New Yardbirds. ‘But I didn’t fancy that at all,’ he grimaces, putting out one cigarette by using it to light another. ‘All that heavy stuff wasn’t my bag at all. I knew where they were going musically because Jim had been to see us [the Jeff Beck Group] loads of times. Taking notes. It was pretty obvious too that they’d probably make it, especially in America where they loved all that. But I’d had my fill with Jeff. And I wanted to play guitar again. Joining Jimmy would have been like playing with Jeff, being stuck on bass. And anyway, there was only ever going to be one guitarist in a group like [Led Zeppelin] – and it wasn’t going to be me.’

  Ironically, when Wood left Beck, one of the latter’s first thoughts was to recruit Jones as his replacement. John had played bass on ‘Beck’s Bolero’ and organ on ‘Old Man River’ – both on Truth, Beck’s first album, also released in 1968. But Jones knew Page was the better long-term bet. Jeff was moody and mercurial. Jimmy was self-confident and reliable. In the end the choice was made for him when Page phoned him back with a firm job offer. One of nature’s born sidemen, John Paul Jones had just landed his dream gig. And not a moment too soon…

  As Page told me, ‘I was absolutely convinced that all that was needed was for us all to get in a room. Cos I knew that the material that I had was really good. It’s nothing that they’d ever really played before. Like Robert hadn’t played anything like the sort of thing that we were gonna be doing, and neither had Bonzo. But I just knew, for example, that with the areas of improvisation, I knew this was going to appeal to them because of the calibre and quality of players. It was only a matter, really, of getting it together. I knew this was gonna work.’

  On Monday 19 August 1968, the day before Plant’s twentieth birthday, a first rehearsal was arranged to take place in a small room below a record shop in Gerrard Street, in London’s Soho. ‘We all met in this little room just to see if we could even stand each other,’ recalled Jones. ‘Robert had heard I was a session man, and he was wondering what was going to turn up – some old bloke with a pipe?’ Plant was actually more concerned about what the seasoned session pro would make of such a studio greenhorn. ‘I don’t think Jonesy [had] ever worked with anybody like me before,’ Plant said, ‘Me not knowing any of the rudiments of music or anything like that, and not really desiring to learn them, but still hitting it off.’

  ‘It was clear that it was going to work from that first rehearsal,’ Jones would tell me. ‘There didn’t seem to be any fixed idea. We just sort of said, “Well, what do you know?” and we ended up playing “Train Kept A-Rollin’”, which had been an old Yardbirds number. Loads of people had done it, in fact. But we ran through it and the effect was immediate. The whole thing was quite stunning. I thought, is it just me or was that really good?’ It wasn’t just Jonesy. ‘It was unforgettable,’ said Jimmy. ‘It was down in what’s now Chinatown. The room was really quite small; just about got our gear in it. And we did “Train…” and I don’t remember the other numbers we did because it was so flipping intense. At the end of it, it was like, “Shit!”, you know? I think everybody just freaked. What it was with Zeppelin was it was like these four individuals, but this collective energy made this fifth element. And that was it. It was there immediately. It was so powerful that I don’t know what we played after that. For me it was just like, “Crikey!” I mean, I’d had moments of elation with groups before, but nothing as intense as that. It was like a thunderbolt, a lightning flash – boosh! Everybody sort of went “Wow”…’

  When Jimmy phoned G the next day to tell him the news, he knew he would have to move fast. If the new line-up was half as good as Page said – and Jimmy wasn’t one for exaggerating, which meant they must be bloody amazing – Grant knew he would have to stake his claim before the cat was out of the bag and Mickie got his hands on it like he had the Jeff Beck Group. Egged on by Page who was utterly determined not to allow Most to try and take control in the studio the way he had with Beck. ‘I’d been an apprentice for years and I’d discovered things that someone like Mickie didn’t have a clue even existed.’ Grant made it his first port of call to tell his former mentor that his services would not be required in the New Yardbirds. In return, Grant would relinquish any control he had in the Jeff Beck Group.

  To Grant’s surprise, Most merely shrugged and wished his partner well. If anything, he was hard pushed to suppress a snigger. With hit singles and now an international hit album in Truth on the way, Mickie was more than happy to be the one holding onto the Jeff Beck Group while Peter threw his energies into whatever prospects the New Yardbirds might have. Displaying the same arrogance that had made him so successful as a music mogul and, ultimately, so limited as a producer, along with his usual breathtaking ability to rewrite history, Most would later refute any suggestion that he had, in fact, missed a trick the day he allowed Peter Grant to walk off with the band that became Led Zeppelin. How could it have been a mistake, he asked, when Beck and the Truth album was such a clear ‘forerunner to Led Zeppelin’. Truth: ‘A great album,’ he declared proudly, ‘which I made.’

  G merely smiled and said nothing, for not to allow Mickie his victory would have been to jeopardise his own, much larger enterprise before it had even got off the ground. Now he had seen what it might entail, he wasn’t about to do that. Let Mickie think and say what he pleased. As long as Peter was free of his tentacles at last, it wouldn’t matter. In the long term, it would be the music that did the talking for Led Zeppelin – Peter Grant would make bloody sure of it.

  Less than three weeks after that first rehearsal, the New Yardbirds played their first gig together at the Teen Club, a school gymnasium in Gladsaxe, Denmark. It was 7 September 1968 – exactly two months to the day since the old Yardbirds had played their last gig in Luton. The tour dates had been in the diary for months before that though. Rather than cancelling them, Jimmy and G saw them as the perfect opportunity to bed-in the new line-up and earn some money. Not that anyone was paying attention. The following night in Britain, the Beatles premiered ‘Hey Jude’ live on the David Frost TV show. The same week, John Peel became the first British DJ to play Joni Mitchell on his Top Gear programme on BBC Radio 1. And while the British pop charts were a typically provincial amalgam of cheesy pop hits (chart-toppers that year included ‘Cinderella Rockafella’ by Esther & Abi Ofarim and ‘Congratulations’ by Cliff Richard, interspersed by more qualitative successes such as the Beatles’ ‘Lady Madonna’ and the Stones’ ‘Jumping Jack Flash’), substantive new albums had already been released that summer by Cream (Wheels Of Fire), Bob Dylan (John Wesley Harding), the Small Faces (Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake), The Band (Music From Big Pink), the Kinks (Village Green Preservation Society), Pink Floyd (Saucerful of Secrets), The Doors (Waiting For The Sun), Fleetwood Mac (Fleetwood Mac), Simon and Garfunkel (Bookends), and – most significant of all from Jimmy Page’s point of view – the Beck Group, whose debut, Truth, had not only picked up rave reviews but was now on its way into the US Top 20. Still to come before year’s end were new, epoch-defining double-albums f
rom the Beatles (The White Album) and Jimi Hendrix (Electric Ladyland), plus the much vaunted debut from Traffic (Mr Fantasy) and the best Stones’ album yet (Beggars Banquet). This was the richly multifaceted backdrop against which Jimmy Page was determined to get his own new music noticed.

  Meanwhile, 1968 was shaping up to be one of the most politically charged years of the decade, scarred by civil unrest, racial strife, student protest and encroaching social breakdown, as symbolised in America by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and then Robert Kennedy, the ensuing bloodbath on the streets of Chicago at that Autumn’s Democratic National Convention, and the ominous arrival in November of Richard Milhouse Nixon as the thirty-seventh president of the United States. In response, Lennon rewrote ‘Revolution’, Jagger gave the world ‘Street Fighting Man’ and even the avowedly apolitical Hendrix was moved to write ‘House Burning Down’. Not that any of this impinged too greatly on the consciousness of the four members of the New Yardbirds as they readied themselves for their first eight-date tour together. They were hardly alone in this. For whatever the history books tell us now of the counter-cultural ‘revolution’ apparently taking place in the mid-Sixties, the end of the decade found British rock still little more than a funhouse populated by weekend rebels whose heroes were far too busy accumulating country mansions, white Rolls-Royces, exotic girlfriends and expensive drugs to care about what was actually going on in the real world, no matter what platitudes they were spouting in their songs. As John Lennon memorably put it in Rolling Stone in 1971, when asked to assess the impact of the Beatles during this period, ‘Nothing happened, except we all dressed up. The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything. It’s exactly the same.’