When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  There was a problem almost immediately when it became clear they could no longer use the Yardbirds name. They have always claimed since that the New Yardbirds moniker had simply been made ‘obsolete’ by the excellence of the material the new line-up had now amassed. ‘We realised we were working under false pretences,’ Page would later claim. ‘The thing had quickly gone beyond where the Yardbirds had left off. We all agreed that there was no point in retaining the Yardbirds tag, so…we decided to change the name. It was a fresh beginning for us all.’

  In reality, however, the first Zeppelin album would almost certainly have been the first New Yardbirds album had it not been for the fact that Chris Dreja sent a lawyer’s letter warning them to ‘cease and desist’ on pain of legal action. According to Dreja, the contract McCarty and Relf had signed when agreeing to allow him and Page to continue as the New Yardbirds only covered the Scandinavian dates in September, as they had already been provisionally booked before the group officially split up. When Dreja then discovered that Page was now intent on keeping the name for a fresh round of UK dates in October and November – even a new record deal and album – he railed against the decision and sought legal advice. Forced to find a new name for the group, Page merely shrugged. So confident was he feeling about his new group he later claimed he wouldn’t have cared if it had been called ‘the Vegetables’ or ‘the Potatoes’. Instead, it was Grant who reminded him of Keith Moon’s joke about going down like a Lead Zeppelin. Both men agreed it was a neat idea. Just one further snag: they would have to drop the ‘a’ from Lead. ‘I played around with the letters,’ said Grant, ‘doodling in the office and realised “Led” looked a lot simpler – and it was all that light and heavy irony.’ Page agreed, concerned that otherwise people might mispronounce the name, as in ‘lead guitar’.

  The new name was made official on Monday 14 October – just five days before their first show in London, still billed as the New Yardbirds. In an attempt to try and get the news out quickly, Grant rang round the London music press, managing to get a last-minute news item about the change of name squeezed into the 19 October issue of the weekly Disc magazine, while Page turned up personally at the offices of the biggest-selling music weekly, Melody Maker, then in Fleet Street, where he sat down with Chris Welch to help him pen a lengthier piece. ‘I remember Jimmy looking over my shoulder at my notes and correcting me on the spelling,’ says Welch. ‘I had written “Lead” and he pointed out it was actually “Led”.’ Cajoled into going along to see the Marquee show that Friday night, Welch remembers standing next to ‘a certain drummer from a fairly well-known group whose blushes I’ll spare by not mentioning by name. But I remember he leaned over and said, “Christ, that drummer is so fucking heavy…” This guy more or less gave up drums after that.’

  In the subsequent review, however, the MM still referred to them as ‘the regrouped Yardbirds’, adding that they were ‘very much a heavy group’ and that ‘generally, there seems to be a need for Led Zeppelin to cut down on volume a bit’. Advice they did not heed. Instead, the more people complained of the ‘noise’, the more Grant encouraged Page not to pay any attention, to turn the amps up even more. Keith Altham, then writing for the NME and later publicist for the Stones and The Who, recalled seeing one of the earliest Zeppelin gigs at a pub in London and leaving after the first three numbers because ‘my ears were ringing’. When Grant phoned him the next morning to ask what he thought, Altham was honest and complained ‘they were far too loud’. Grant merely snorted with derision. ‘Well, of course, every time I saw [Grant] after that it was: “Well, my band’s doing quite well, despite what you thought of them”. By which time they had become the biggest band in the world.’

  Playing its last gig with the old name at Liverpool University on Saturday 19 October, the new band performed its first official date as Led Zeppelin six nights later at the University of Surrey in Guildford. It was a low-key occasion. ‘I drove John and Robert to their first engagement as Led Zeppelin in my Jaguar,’ Reg Jones of Bonham’s former group, A Way of Life, would later recall. ‘There was a huge banner outside that read: “Tonight – the Ex-Yardbirds!” Underneath in smaller lettering it said: “Led Zeppelin”. After the gig, I couldn’t start the Jaguar and we all came home on the train.’ Their second official gig as Led Zeppelin occurred the following night at Bristol’s Boxing Club. ‘It was a try-out for their big hype launch,’ remembered Russell Hunter of support act, the Deviants. ‘The audience hated us and despised them. When [they] came on, they got through a number and a half until the fire extinguishers, buckets, bricks and everything was being thrown at them.’

  Undeterred, the band made their London debut as Led Zeppelin with a show at the Middle Earth Club, held at the Roundhouse in London’s Chalk Farm on 9 November, where they earned their highest fee so far, £150, and received their first encore. There were half-a-dozen more dates after that, mainly club and university venues like the Science and Technology College in Manchester (22 November), the student union hall at Sheffield University (23 November), Richmond Athletics Club (29 November) and a return date at the Marquee (10 December). They had been paid their highest fee yet in Manchester – £225 – but picking up decent UK dates was a slog. Grant was having trouble getting top-drawer booking agents along to see the group, and without them it was impossible to consistently get onto the A-list concert circuit. He was also having problems getting them a record deal. Received wisdom tells us now that the Grant masterplan had always been to launch the band first in America. In fact, he spent the weeks between completing the album at Olympic and the start of November when they played their first London show as Led Zeppelin trudging around the major London record labels, trying and failing to land them a deal. Grant would later recall with bitterness being ‘shown the door’ by several major labels before deciding his best chance lay in America. ‘Pye Records laughed me out of their office. I went to see their boss, Louis Benjamin, and asked for an advance. The figure was £17,500. He just said: “You’ve got to be joking”.’ Grant was even more chagrined when he received a similar reaction from Mo Ostin at Warner Bros., who at least knew Page well from all the session work he had done for the label over the years. Still no dice, though.

  Reading the runes, Grant set off for New York in the first week of November 1968, armed with the nine tracks recorded at Olympic, plus some live tracks recorded off the mixing desk at various gigs. In his favour, he knew the name Jimmy Page meant more to the business in America than it ever had at home in Britain, something he’d first been made aware of during a Yardbirds tour. He and Page were strolling down Fifth Avenue one afternoon when a limousine screeched to a halt beside them, ‘and out gets Burt Bacharach – white tuxedo and beautiful woman in the back – and greets Jimmy enthusiastically.’ Bacharach remembered Page from sessions he’d done for him in London in the early Sixties, when the great composer was working on the Casino Royale soundtrack. ‘All the important guys in the US biz knew about Jimmy Page,’ boasted Grant.

  As well as Page’s reputation as a top-flight session muso, the Yardbirds had always been more commercially successful in America – where they had enjoyed five consecutive chart albums – than they were in their homeland. They were also seen as vastly more influential. ‘By the end the Yardbirds were pretty tied in with that whole psychedelic scene in America,’ says Dave Lewis, founding editor since 1979 of Tight But Loose, the ultimate Zeppelin fan mag (and now website) and a man who has spent a lifetime compiling data about the band. ‘They may have meant next to nothing in Britain anymore but in America the Yardbirds were seen as innovators, right behind the Beatles and the Stones. There was clearly huge interest in whatever the members of the band did next.’ The timing of Grant’s visit was also fortuitous. The same month, Cream had completed their final US tour and were now on their way to London to perform their ‘farewell’ show at the Albert Hall, after which Clapton would announce the formation of another ‘supergroup’, Blind Faith with Stevie Winwood. Meanw
hile, Hendrix was enjoying his greatest critical and commercial success with Electric Ladyland; his first album to be recorded and released first in America. Also, in November 1968, Joe Cocker replaced Mary Hopkins’ ‘Those Were the Days’ at no. 1 in the UK charts with his funereal-paced ‘With A Little Help from My Friends’ – featuring Page on scintillating lead guitar. Clearly, for those with eyes and ears to notice, this was a great time for guitar-oriented ‘progressive rock’.

  Where Grant’s managerial instincts proved particularly shrewd was in his targeting of Atlantic Records – the soon-to-be defunct Cream’s US label – as the potential ‘home’ for Page’s new group. He deliberately avoided EMI, the Yardbirds’ label in London, and Epic, their US label, on the grounds that the former had done such a piss-poor job on the Little Games album, and that in the case of the latter, who had always rolled out the red carpet for the Yardbirds, he felt a certain amount of complacency had set in and that they would simply not be able to take the New Yardbirds, or their resultant offshoot, seriously enough. It was important, he felt, to begin with a clean slate. G didn’t want business as usual. G wanted all systems go.

  4

  Going To California

  According to Epic’s then A&R executive in New York, Dick Asher, ‘When we heard that the Yardbirds had split up and Jimmy had formed Led Zeppelin, we naturally assumed that the rights to Page would go automatically to Columbia [Epic’s US parent company].’ This cosy assumption was swiftly disavowed after a meeting with Grant and his American lawyer, Steve Weiss. Presiding over the meeting was Columbia president and legendary record man Clive Davis. ‘It was Clive’s first meeting with Peter Grant,’ Asher recalled, ‘and we talked and talked about all sorts of things. It just went on and on but there was no mention of Led Zeppelin. Finally Clive said, “Well, aren’t we going to talk about Jimmy Page?” Grant replied, “Oh, no, we’ve already signed the Zeppelin to Atlantic”.’ At which point Davis lost his cool and went berserk. ‘We were all stunned,’ said Asher, ‘especially after all we had done for them. It was a horrible, horrible meeting and I’ll never forget it as long as I live.’ Grant didn’t bat on eye, just thanked them for their hospitality and told them he’d see them around, then strode leisurely out of the office with a big smile on his face. He’d been on the receiving end of bad news too many times in the past not to enjoy his moment of triumph.

  Born in South Norwood, a nowhere south London suburb, on 5 April 1935, you were just four when the Second World War broke out. Your mum, Dorothy Louise Grant, had deliberately ‘forgotten’ to put your dad’s name on your birth certificate because your dad, whoever he was, had buggered off long before you were born, and because she was Jewish and he wasn’t. That left you with your mum’s maiden name. You loved your mum and always took care of her, not that it was anybody’s bloody business. You never talked about your childhood, in fact, because yes, seeing as you ask, it was just too bloody painful. You came from nothing, poor, illegitimate, a born bastard, what’s it to you? Later, when Mum got diabetes then had to have her leg amputated, you were there for her. Not that that was anybody’s business, either. When she finally snuffed it, you were going to go to her funeral alone, then at the last minute asked Mickie Most to come with you. You didn’t have many friends but Mickie was one, you supposed.

  You and mum had been together so long, just the two of you, it didn’t seem right now she was gone. The two of you had moved to Battersea just before the war, a two-up, two-down terraced job down by the river. Mum got a job typing for the Church of England Pensions Board. Next thing you knew the Second World War broke out and you were evacuated to the country, six years old and no-one to turn to. The whole school ended up at Charterhouse. Charterhouse! Fuck all to eat but that’s when you began to put on weight, a miserable fat kid missing his mum. The nobs at Charterhouse used to joke that even your name was big. ‘Grant,’ they sniggered, ‘from the thirteenth-century Norman nickname “graund” or “graunt”, doncha know, meaning large, or “a person of remarkable size”.’ Ha fucking ha! Top-hole, old chap! How you fucking hated it there. Bullied and looked-down on by a bunch of toffee-nosed public school cunts. It was at Charterhouse that you really developed your hatred for people like that, the ones for whom fortune came as part of their birthright, not something they’d worked hard for, worked as fucking hard as you would have to. It was at Charterhouse that you’d learned to fight. ‘The scum had arrived from Battersea,’ you’d remember. ‘There used to be great battles and we’d beat them up.’

  You were ten by the time you were finally sent home to London. You didn’t cry when you saw your mum. You didn’t cry and you didn’t moan or complain. You just put the kettle on and made a nice cup of tea while she fussed around you, crying and laughing all at the same time. The next day you went back to your old school and hated it. You planned to leave as soon as you could, get out there and start earning your keep, the man of the house. But Mum told you no, hang on and get an education, get a good job, make something of yourself. Fat chance! The headmaster wrote in your final school report: ‘The boy will never make anything of his life.’ Fucking cunt! You’d show him!

  You were fourteen, no qualifications, no nothing, but Mum didn’t mind. Not really. You’d soon found a job anyway, working as a labourer at a sheet metal factory in Croydon. Christ almighty! A month later you were looking for something else. Something a darn sight bloody easier that getting up at five in the bollocking morning and carrying great big sodding hods of bricks around thank you very fucking much. Sometimes it was like the world after the war was worse than it had been during it. You knew, though, that if you were to amount to anything more than just a glorified skivvy you’d have to use your brain as well as your brawn. You would need to duck and dive. Be ready for anything; which is how you got the job working for fifteen bob a night as a stagehand at the Croydon Empire. The Empire was great. You got all sorts down there. Singers and comedians; ‘revue’ shows like Soldiers in Skirts. Later, when the Empire became a cinema, you were properly cheesed off. But you went out and found something else, like you always did, working for tips as a waiter at Frascati’s in Oxford Street, then as a messenger for Reuters over in Fleet Street.

  You’d always liked music, the good stuff though like Stan Kenton and Ted Heath, the big, noisy, swinging stuff. Rock’n’roll was all right too, for what it was, but it would never beat a good big band jazz orchestra. After working at the 2Is there had been other jobs, like working as the bouncer at Murray’s Cabaret Club, the only geezer amongst all the showgirls. ‘I wasn’t married then,’ you’d recall later, ‘and what with me being the only man around and about forty girls backstage, it was all right.’ Bloody right, mate. Then there was the time you filled in as a minder for Peter Rachman, the slum landlord. Not so bloody nice, but better paid and that’s a fact. You didn’t have to do much anyway, just stand over them and growl. They soon coughed up if they knew what was good for them. And if they didn’t a good chinning soon sorted things out. There was even a job in the movies at last, a small part as one of the sailors in A Night to Remember. You and Kenneth More, if you don’t mind! A right laugh. You took Mum to the pictures to see that one; couldn’t wait to see her face. You thought perhaps it would lead to bigger things but fat chance. Then suddenly out of nowhere you got the job working as a double for Anthony Quinn in The Guns of Navarone. Sweet as a nut, my son. That was when it started to look like it might become steady. There was even a bit of telly work. The dodgy barman in The Saint, even given a couple of lines to do with Roger Moore. Then the pantomime villain in Crackerjack, a walk-on in Dixon of Dock Green and a cowboy in The Benny Hill Show. Nothing very earth-shattering but the dough wasn’t half bad: fifteen quid a day for the film stuff. Less for the telly but there was more of that and it got your face about, who knew where it might lead? Like being a bloody great Macedonian guard in Cleopatra.

  And then you met Don Arden and that was when life changed again…

  Jerry Wexler, the vice-
president of Atlantic Records, didn’t care much for long hair and loud guitars. But he had looked on with a mixture of bafflement and envy these past two years as his partner Ahmet Ertegun took the plaudits – and counted the profits – from the enormous success of Cream, a long-haired loud guitar group from England that Wexler would never have signed. Now Cream was over and Atlantic was in the market for a ‘new Cream’, Wexler wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. So when Peter Grant came to see him at his office at 1841 Broadway, Wexler was all ears. He may not have liked or understood this music but he sure as hell grasped its popularity. As well as Cream, Atlantic was then enjoying huge commercial success with Vanilla Fudge (one of the new breed of ‘heavy’ bands that rarely featured in the Top 10 yet whose albums nevertheless stayed glued to the charts for months) and Iron Butterfly, another pioneer of the latest lugubrious rock sound that had sold more than two million copies of their In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida album since it had been released that spring (becoming the first album in history to be awarded platinum status). The name Led Zeppelin even sounded similar to Iron Butterfly, and, to Wexler’s ears, offered a similar-sounding musical proposition.

  Using the same broad strokes to sell the group to Wexler, Grant argued that Zeppelin would outdo the Butterfly in the US in the same way the Beatles had overtaken the Beach Boys, their Capitol label-mates, back in 1964. What’s more, there would be no further financial outlay, either in terms of production or recording costs. The album was a done deal, ready to go, go, go. Zeppelin, said Grant, delivering the coup-de-grace, would be the successors to Cream. Better still, there would be no farewell tours just as things were getting good, either. Jimmy Page may have been only twenty-four but he was already an old pro with a proven track record of reliability. What’s more, unlike the other old Yardbirds guitarist, Jeff Beck, who Atlantic had missed out on when he chose to stay at Epic and who was now enjoying considerable Stateside success despite being unable to write a tune, Jimmy and his band had songs for days. Just listen to ‘Good Times Bad Times’, urged Grant. Or ‘Dazed and Confused’, or ‘Black Mountain Side’! Fast, slow, acoustic, electric, these kids had the lot! They even had a lead singer so good-looking Grant was tempted to stick a fuck into him himself.