by Mick Wall
Over the years, Page and Zeppelin’s appropriation of other artists’ material was to become a longstanding criticism. Rightly so, one might argue, when one considers just how many times they would be accused of the offence over the course of their career. And yet, they are hardly the only ones. David Bowie ripped off the Stones for ‘Rebel Rebel’ the Stones ripped off Bo Diddley for ‘Not Fade Away’ the Beatles ripped off Fats Domino for ‘Lady Madonna’ everybody ripped the Beatles off for something. The Yardbirds were equally guilty. Tracks like ‘Drinking Muddy Water’ – attributed to Dreja, McCarty, Page and Relf – was an obvious rewrite of the Muddy Waters’ tune ‘Rolling and Tumbling’. But then Waters’ version was itself a patchwork of several earlier blues numbers. The same went for the aptly titled ‘Stealing, Stealing’, a song originally by Will Shade’s Memphis Jug Band, but with the Yardbirds again listed as authors.
One could argue that with the folk and blues ‘traditions’ based almost entirely on tunes handed down over generations, with each passing bringing its own unique interpretation, that Page and others are as within their rights to claim authorship of their own interpretations of this material as Muddy Waters, Davy Graham, Willie Dixon, Bert Jansch, Blind Willie Johnson, Robert Johnson and all the other artists Led Zeppelin would knowingly ‘borrow’ from over the years. In the early part of the twentieth century, the legendary ‘patriarch’ of American country music, A.P. Carter, copyrighted dozens of songs written decades before his arrival in the Appalachians, many of which had their origins in ancient Celtic tunes from the British Isles. As a result, to this day a venerable old masterpiece like ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’ is still spuriously credited to Carter.
Similarly, Bob Dylan – widely considered the most groundbreaking and original songwriter of the late twentieth century – accurately described his first album as ‘some stuff I’ve written, some stuff I’ve discovered, some stuff I stole’. In that instance, he was talking mainly about arrangements, such as his ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’, lifted wholesale from Judy Collins’ ‘Maid of Constant Sorrow’. Or, most brazenly, the steal of Dave Van Ronk’s innovative arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun’, which Van Ronk resented hugely. But there are plenty of other examples from his career. ‘Masters of War’ is sung to the tune of ‘Nottamun Town’, which Dylan heard Martin Carthy sing on an early visit to the UK. While ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ derives from the old English folk ballad ‘The Franklin’, and both ‘Girl from the North Country’ and ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ are again based on hearing Carthy’s take on ‘Scarborough Fair’. None of these ever received any due credit on Dylan’s album sleeves. The list goes on: the melody for ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ is from an old anti-slavery song, ‘No More Auction Block’ the melody for ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ comes from a traditional Appalachian tune, ‘Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone’. Even elements of Dylan’s towering reputation as a lyricist can be traced back to certain jumping-off points such as his ‘borrowing’ from the opening lines of the epic ballad ‘Lord Randall’ for his own ‘Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’. John Lennon believed Dylan’s ‘4th Time Around’ to be nothing less than a deliberate parody of ‘Norwegian Wood’. Of course, one might point out at this juncture that Lennon’s ‘All You Need Is Love’ was barely more than a modern re-reading of ‘Three Blind Mice’. But the point holds true: Jimmy Page is hardly the only artist to find ‘inspiration’ from underneath his nose.
Jeff Beck wasn’t above a bit of rule-bending either, of course. No songwriter, and consequently ‘starved of material’, Truth included more than one outright steal. As Beck revealed to Charles Shaar Murray, when discussing the remastered CD version of Truth in 2005, the track ‘Let Me Love You’ – credited on the sleeve to one Jeffrey Rod (i.e. Beck and Stewart) – bears an uncanny resemblance to an earlier Buddy Guy track of almost the same name. ‘We just slowed it down and funked it up a little with a Motown-style tambourine,’ admits Beck. ‘There was a lot of conniving going on back then: change the rhythm, change the angle and it’s yours. We got paid peanuts for what we were doing and I couldn’t give a shit about anybody else.’ Other Jeffrey Rod compositions on Truth included ‘Rock My Plimsoul’ – another ‘slowed-down, funked up’ version, this time of BB King’s ‘Rock Me Baby’ and ‘Blues De Luxe’, based entirely on BB King’s ‘Gambler’s Blues’. Ditto the Jeffrey Rod credit for ‘I’ve Been Drinking’, from the Dinah Washington original ‘Drinking Again’.
As far as Page was concerned, it was all grist for the mill. ‘The thing is they were traditional lyrics and they went back far before a lot of people that one related them to,’ he told writer Dave Schulps in 1977. ‘The riffs we did were totally different, also, from the ones that had come before, apart from something like “You Shook Me” and “I Can’t Quit You”, which were attributed to Willie Dixon.’ More to the point, as he has said more recently, ‘As a musician, I’m only the product of my influences. The fact that I listened to so many various styles of music has a lot to do with the way I play. Which I think set me apart from so many other guitarists of that time.’
Nevertheless, the accusations of plagiarism would have a debilitating effect on Zeppelin’s long-term credibility. It’s one thing to ‘assimilate’ old songs, quite another to claim the credit for having built them from the bottom up. Even today when ‘sampling’ is the norm in the hip-hop world, woe betide any artist who omits to credit the original source. On a purely musical level then, while it would be churlish not to extend Page and Zeppelin the enormous credit they deserve for ‘creating’ epic rock moments like ‘Dazed and Confused’ – and so many others that would follow in a similar vein, from ‘Whole Lotta Love’ to ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ – history has been largely indifferent to their refusal to acknowledge the true originators of these ideas, and indeed their reaping of the huge financial rewards that resulted.
Even Jimmy Page’s novel use of the violin bow – which became for him what the tremolo bar was for Hendrix, or the playing of the guitar behind his back was for Beck, that is to say, his signature gimmick – would eventually be called into question, with critics eager to point out that he wasn’t the first guitarist to use a violin bow. Eddie Phillips, guitarist with The Creation (a mod outfit from London that Page was familiar with, who would climax their set by throwing paint on a canvas backdrop, action-painting style) scraped a violin bow across the fretboard on the group’s two 1966 singles, ‘Painter Man’ and ‘Making Time’. Shel Talmy, who produced those records, and who worked with Page on sessions for the Kinks and The Who, later insisted, ‘Jimmy Page stole the bowing bit of the guitar from Eddie. Eddie was phenomenal.’ There was also Kaleidoscope, a psychedelic five-piece from Pasadena, whose guitarist also embellished certain tunes with a violin bow. Page knew of them too. When I asked him, however, he insisted it was concertmaster violinist David McCallum Snr – father of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. star – who first suggested the idea as the two chatted during a tea break at a session in 1965. As a result, he had first experimented using a violin bow in the Yardbirds, on two tracks on Little Games: ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’ and ‘Glimpses’, the latter becoming an early violin-guitar showcase for him on stage, to be replaced during their final months by ‘Dazed and Confused’.
Ask Page now for his thoughts on the first Zeppelin album and he’ll talk about how it ‘had so many firsts on it, as far as the content goes. Even though we were heavily involved in a sort of progressive blues thing, one of the most important parts was the acoustic input. Things like “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”, which had the flamenco-type bits in it. The drama of it – the light and shade – I don’t think had been touched by anybody. With the acoustic input you had this sort of embryo, which was good.’ But the first Zeppelin album was less a new beginning for Page than a culmination of everything that had gone before. All it really proved was that Zeppelin were great ‘synthesisers’ of existing ideas. That this was accomplished in an era when such n
otions were still considered outside acceptable bounds says something about fortune and the talent to influence it. With Jimmy Page at the helm, Led Zeppelin would have both.
In fact, the real innovations of that first album were in the advanced production techniques Page was able to bring to bear and the sheer weight of musicianship he had assembled to execute them. Being able to produce such power and cohesiveness from a line-up that was barely a month old was extremely impressive; to capture that energy on record, however, little short of astonishing; his previously unknown talent as a producer overshadowing even his dexterity as a guitar player. Not least in his innovative use of backwards echo – an effect that engineer Glyn Johns told him couldn’t be done until Page showed him how – and what Jimmy calls ‘the science of close-miking amps’. That is, not just hanging microphones in front of the band in the studio but draping them at the back as well, of floating them several feet above the drums, allowing the sound to ‘breathe’. Or taking the drummer out of the little booth they were routinely shoved into in those days and allowing him to play along with the rest of the band in the main room. This would lead to a lot of ‘bleeding’ – the background sound of one track echoing in the background of another, particularly when it came to the vocals – but Page was happy to leave that in, treating it as one more ‘effect’ that gave the recording ‘great atmosphere, which is what I was after more than a sterile sort of sound’.
As then star writer at Melody Maker, Chris Welch, recalls: ‘One of the younger writers brought an early pre-release copy of the album into the office and played it on the office stereo – and it just sort of leapt out at you! I’d been a big supporter of Cream, had seen Hendrix and The Who perform several times, but I’d never – never! – heard anything so loud and overpowering coming off a record before. It really did feel like a great leap forward, in terms of the sound you could actually get on a record. And that was just the first track.’ Or as Robert Plant later put it: ‘That was the first time that headphones meant anything to me. What I heard coming back to me over the cans while I was singing was better than the finest chick in all the land. It had so much weight, so much power, it was devastating.’
The material may have been largely derivative, the ‘light and shade’ aspect not nearly so interesting or new as Page still insists – certainly not compared to the multifaceted aspects of the music then being made by the Beatles and the Stones, or even Dylan and The Who, all of whom had alternated between electric and acoustic instrumentation for years, playing not just with light and shade but helping shape the parameters of rock music as a creative genre – but it had never been done with such finesse and know-how, or quite so much determination to succeed at any cost. Indeed, the first Zeppelin album was an almost cynical attempt to outdo its immediate competitors – Hendrix, Clapton, Townshend, and of course the unwitting Beck – while at the same time demonstrating that the man at the back, lurking in the shadows – Page himself – had more up his sleeve than mere conjuring tricks. That this was a rock wizard with incredible mastery over his tools, one who had stood off to one side watching for long enough. Now it was time to do, to be, to overcome. If anyone was going to get credit for that achievement, it was Jimmy Page. When Glyn Johns, who had also worked with the Beatles, the Stones and The Who, and who Page had known since his days as a teenager playing in a local hall in Epsom, asked for a producer’s co-credit, Page gave him short shrift. ‘I said, “No way. I put this band together, I brought them in and directed the whole recording process, I got my own guitar sound – I’ll tell you, you haven’t got a hope in hell”.’
One other omission that, in retrospect, appears glaring is that of any songwriting credit for Robert Plant. It’s since been suggested that Plant was still tied up contractually to CBS and therefore unable to be listed as co-author of any of the material on the first Zeppelin album. However, in reality Plant simply wasn’t contributing anything meaningful, either lyrically or musically, at this stage. ‘I didn’t know what he’d be like yet as a songwriter,’ Page later told me. ‘When I first saw him he was a singer first and foremost. I don’t even know if he had written anything before.’ It was, in fact, said Page, ‘one of the things that still concerned me’ about his new frontman. For the time being, however, what was most important was that the boy could sing, and in that regard there were no doubts whatsoever.
You were ten the first time you saw an electric guitar, watching Sunday Night at the London Palladium on telly when suddenly Buddy Holly and the Crickets came on. You couldn’t take your eyes off Buddy’s Fender Stratocaster, something you’d later describe as ‘an incredible symbol of what I hadn’t got my hands on yet’. Not that you had any chance of getting your hands on one. Instead, you made do with learning how to play the kazoo, the harmonica and the washboard. Mum and Dad laughed, called you a skiffle singer. ‘Hark at little Lonnie Donegan!’ Lonnie was all right, ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’ always went down well at home. But for you it was mainly about Elvis. Not even Mum and Dad could argue about Elvis. It was through Elvis that you eventually discovered everything else. Loving Elvis meant loving all kinds of different music whether you knew it yet or not: blues, rockabilly, skiffle, R&B, on into country-and-western, folk, gospel, bluegrass, then over the hills and far away into Zydeco, vaudeville, Appalachian, jazz, hillbilly, eventually ending up at light opera and mainstream show tunes. Elvis was everything all rolled into one, everything you’d ever dreamed of before you’d even dreamed it. Elvis was King and you were his most faithful subject and one day all this would be yours, you just knew it, staring into the bedroom mirror and flicking your hair…
You were in the fourth year at King Edward VI Grammar School in Stourbridge when you began singing in your first proper group: Andy Long and his Original Jaymen. Well, ‘proper’ in the sense that you actually rehearsed together. Mum and Dad hated it. To them, that sort of scene just didn’t fit in with the life they’d made for you all in Hayley Green. Less to do with Birmingham and the Midlands, or so it liked to think, Hayley Green was the sort of stuck-up little town that aligned itself more with the posh parts of Wales, whose borders were less than eight miles away, or if not there then the gentrified parts of the West Country. Hayley Green didn’t appreciate being reminded of its gritty, working-class Midlands origins and neither did your dad.
Once, Dad – a fully qualified civil engineer and proud of it, also named Robert – went mad and cut the plug off the Dansette after you’d sung along to ‘I Like It Like That’ about seventeen times in a row, standing in front of the mirror willing your hair to grow. The same Dansette him and your mum had given you as a surprise Christmas present when you were twelve. When you opened the lid you’d found a copy of Johnny Burnette’s ‘Dreamin’’ inside, already on the turntable. As you’d later recall, ‘It was a rocky journey with my parents.’ They had tried but ‘they just didn’t understand it at all, any of it. In the beginning, they thought it would pass.’ But of course it didn’t, none of it. It just grew and grew, like your hair. The older you got, the longer it got, the worse the arguments with your dad got. He’d have bloody cut it off like the plug on the Dansette too if he could but you were getting too big for that and Dad would just have to put up with it.
Now that you’d left school though, it was less about rock’n’roll or doo-wop and more about the blues. Mostly, it was about Robert Johnson, the most legendary bluesman of all. It had begun when you’d bought the first ever LP they put together of his original 78s (the one with ‘Preaching Blues’ and ‘Last Fair Deal Gone Down’ on it and the gatefold sleeve with the picture of a sharecropper’s shack on the front) out of money saved up from your paper round. Of course, you weren’t the only English white boy back then to become obsessed with Robert Johnson. Eric Clapton, various Rolling Stones, and of course a certain Jimmy Page were all equally obsessed. But you didn’t find that out until later. ‘I was probably a year or two behind Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, but I went, “This is it!”’
; Back then though, after seeing Sonny Boy at Brum town hall, you’d become more convinced than ever that the straight life wasn’t for you. Nevertheless, after leaving school you had enrolled in the business studies course at Kidderminster College of Further Education – a compromise you’d agreed to with your parents. You weren’t interested in getting a job and they weren’t interested in seeing you just bumming around pretending you were a singer. The only thing Kidderminster was famous for was its carpets. So much so the college even had a Department for Carpet Technology. Bloody hell! Most of your friends had either already left school and started to earn a few bob or gone to Stourbridge Art School, the biggest skive going and the place with all the best-looking birds. You found the whole thing slightly depressing, though you still had your music – music and clothes and the Wolves and Saturday nights out on the town. That was when you really started to think about your singing. Anything to save you from carpets and college and your dad moaning. According to your mate Dave Hill, another bored local lad who would later become the guitarist in Slade, until then you were just another ‘local Mod with very short hair’. It wasn’t until you opened your mouth and started to sing that anyone noticed there might be anything different about you, that anyone really started paying any attention. And that, above all, was what you liked best – attention. You liked it like that and wanted to keep it that way…
With the album safely in the can, Peter Grant was ready to go out and get a deal for the new band. However, experience taught him that it would be a mistake for them to sit back and wait for that to happen. He needed a ‘buzz’ to keep the momentum going, not just from a commercial point of view but a creative one, too. Page was happy to oblige. Inordinately proud of what he had already achieved on his own without any help whatsoever from his former band-mates in the Yardbirds, he couldn’t wait to start showing off the new line-up. And so gigs were arranged – still billed as the New Yardbirds – beginning at the Marquee Club in London, on Friday 18 October, barely a week after recording sessions were completed at Olympic.