by Mick Wall
Phil Carson, in particular, was convinced the band was wrong not to release the ‘Whole Lotta Love’ single in the UK. ‘I went around to see Peter Grant,’ he later recalled, ‘and I tried to say, “Well, I’m the marketing genius around here, you know, and I’m telling you that if you want to sell albums, you’ve got to have a single.” In the end, he convinced me that it shouldn’t come out – in his own subtle way.’ Grant was, he added, ‘really insistent’. As it turned out, G was proved right, with the resultant publicity from not releasing a single helping Led Zeppelin II sell as fast as a single could sell in those days, with repeat orders of between three and five thousand units a day right through the busy Christmas period. After that, said Carson, ‘I could never again say no to Peter Grant.’
Grant’s trepidation about releasing singles in the UK was also based on his shrewd assessment of its chances of success – or lack of. Unlike America, where radio stations were at least fighting to play the track – some FM stations even ignored the single version to play the full-length album version, while still others took to flipping the seven-inch and playing the B-side, ‘Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)’, which proved so popular it eventually got released in its own right as a US single, reaching no. 65 in April 1970 – Grant knew the BBC would be highly unlikely to playlist the song, however short the single version, on their conservative day-time shows. He thought the band would come out of it better by ‘taking a stand’ and not releasing singles, which is exactly what happened.
Led Zeppelin was certainly flying in Britain by then anyway. The previous summer had seen them consolidate their position at home with a short seven-date tour, the highlights of which were the opening date at Birmingham Town Hall on 13 June, which Jones remembers now as ‘one of the first shows in Britain where we’d sold out a big venue and the crowd was all behind us’ and a special occasion for both Plant and Bonham, their first time on stage at a hometown venue they had only experienced before from the other side of the footlights. Then, on 28 June, they appeared on the bill at the inaugural Bath Festival. Promoted by the husband and wife team of Freddy and Wendy Bannister, who had been involved in small club shows in London, Oxford and Bath for many years, the 1969 Bath Festival of Blues, as it was billed, was the first self-consciously ‘rock’ festival in Britain, and would later inspire another local West Country figure, Michael Eavis, to start his own copycat festival: Glastonbury, or ‘son of Bath’ as Eavis originally dubbed it.
Held at the Bath Pavilion Recreation Ground, above Zeppelin on the bill that day were headliners Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and Ten Years After. ‘It went very well,’ recalls Freddy Bannister, ‘one of those wonderful eighty-degree days, everyone had just discovered dope so they were very placid.’ Tickets for the all-day event were priced eighteen shillings and sixpence (approx 92p) and fourteen shillings and sixpence just for the evening (65p). Zeppelin’s fee was just £200. ‘Probably the least they ever got paid for an outdoor event,’ muses Bannister, ‘although Peter Grant did push me up to £500 before they signed the contract.’
However, it was their performance the following night that would cause the biggest splash of the tour: a show-stealing appearance at the finale of the Pop Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall. After short, tastefully restrained sets from Fleetwood Mac and folk quintet Pentangle (featuring two of Jimmy’s favourite guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn), Zeppelin’s noisy, six-song set hit the stage like a hurricane, during which the crowd ‘stormed the stage’ according to Phil Carson, ‘[dancing] in the aisles and the boxes, and screaming so hard that the band did three encores’. Or as the subsequent review in Disc commented: ‘When Led Zeppelin came on and played at a good ten times the volume of everyone else, the audience very nearly freaked completely.’
The first time Carson had seen Zeppelin on stage, he was blown away. When, just after 11.00 pm, the promoters turned on the house lights to signal the end of the evening, people reluctantly began heading toward the exits. But then Robert Plant suddenly returned to the stage and started blowing into his harmonica. Amazed audience members drifted back to their seats and the equally nonplussed promoters turned off the house lights again as one by one the rest of Zeppelin also returned to the stage. Unbeknownst to the organisers, they had arranged for some saxophonists (members of Blodwyn Pig and Liverpool Scene, the two bands that had supported them at the Birmingham Town Hall show) to join them for an extended jam on Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’.
Less than a week later they were back for their third US tour, built around a string of high-profile festival appearances, beginning on 5 July with the open-air Atlanta Pop Festival, followed the next day with an appearance at the famous Newport Jazz Festival, the first time an amplified rock band had been allowed onto the bill since Bob Dylan hijacked the show for a few numbers before being booed off four years before. In stark contrast to the Dylan fiasco, Zeppelin was warmly welcomed and applauded on and off the stage loudly. Grant, for one, would not have allowed them to go on stage had he not been sure of such a reception. This third US tour was all about profile. Nothing, he had decided, was going to stand in the band’s way. He recalled telling them: ‘“Go out there and tear the place apart, take the roof or canvas off. I don’t want to see you afterwards unless you succeed.” That normally got the required response.’
In New York, on 13 July, they made another headline-grabbing appearance at the Schaefer Music Festival at Flushing Meadow’s Singer Bowl, which Cashbox reviewed glowingly, describing Plant as an ‘outstanding candidate for superstardom’. But what most of the 25,000 people there would remember best was the encore section of the show, featuring a mammoth nine-man jam between members of Zeppelin, the Jeff Beck Group, Ten Years After and Jethro Tull. They were in the middle of an extended ‘Jailhouse Rock’ when Bonzo suddenly took over the drums and altered the beat to that of ‘The Stripper’, then began ripping off his own clothes. According to Ten Years After drummer Ric Lee: ‘Bonham, who had been drinking, took off his trousers and underpants. The police saw it and I saw Richard Cole and Peter Grant spotting the police. The number fizzled out and Peter and Richard ran on stage, each grabbing one of Bonzo’s arms and you could see his bare arse disappearing as they carried him off. But they got his trousers on before the police arrived. Grant yelled at him: “What’s wrong with you, John? Are you trying to ruin things for everyone?”’ But then, as Beck later recalled: ‘It was one of those riotous sort of days, everyone’s energy level was 100 per cent and we were throwing things at each other on stage.’ When the guitarist threw a plastic glass of orange juice at Ten Years After mainman Alvin Lee it stuck all over his guitar. ‘It was just one of those animal things. Three English groups at the same place has to add up to trouble.’
Naturally, the fun and games weren’t confined to the stage. Bill Harry, the band’s newly appointed London-based PR who joined the tour for several dates, recalled hanging out after one show with that fast-becoming perennial double-act, Bonzo and Ricardo. After scaring the rest of the hotel guests by dancing on the tables, ‘Richard went to the fridge and took out all the cans of lager, loading them up in a sack. “Let’s go back to Bonzo’s room.” He was dragging this sack like Santa Claus. Then we stopped and looked out to the car park. We could see a bare arse moving up and down and it was one of the group with a girl in a car. We went up to the room and a detective followed us because we had a couple of girls with us. Richard slipped him a few dollars and he vanished. So we went into the room and one of the boys went to say something to one of the girls and he was sick all over her.’
It was a summer full of such vivid moments, culminating for Jones at the Dallas International Pop Festival on 31 August, where they received their largest fee for a single performance yet: $13,000. ‘My wife was there for that one, and I recall that Janis Joplin taught us how to drink tequila with salt and lemon. There was just the three of us in her trailer – memories don’t come much better than that.’
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bsp; One festival appearance they declined to make that summer, however, concerned the now legendary free festival before an estimated 500,000 people that took place at Yasgur’s Farm in Woodstock over the weekend that began on the morning of Friday 15 August, and ended in the early hours of Monday 18 August. Filmed for a 1970 movie and destined to become a sprawling multi-disc live album, Woodstock would go down as the most widely known rock festival in history; a profound moment in music history; the very apex of Sixties rock.
It had originally been announced that Zeppelin would be appearing on the night of 16 August, as would the Jeff Beck Group. In the event neither showed up. Why Grant took it upon himself to unilaterally decide that Zeppelin should pull out has never been fully addressed. The surviving members are vague on the subject, to say the least, but then they weren’t really involved in the decision. On balance, it almost certainly had something to do with money. The thought of playing for free was anathema to someone like Peter Grant. The idea that someone other than the band would also profit from a movie and record album would certainly not have held appeal, either. Looking for assurances, and receiving none, that Zeppelin would get a slice of the pie, it appears G simply took a professional decision and decided to concentrate the band’s attentions on more easily accessible streams of revenue, plumping for a brace of high-paying dates across the border in Canada that weekend instead. Twenty-five years later, Grant confirmed to Dave Lewis that Zeppelin had been asked to appear at Woodstock and that Atlantic was ‘very keen’, as was their US agent Frank Barsalona. For Grant though, ‘At Woodstock we’d have just been another band on the bill.’ Never mind that it might have changed critical perception of them; instead their absence only reinforced the idea of Zeppelin as quintessential outsiders.
The Beck Group would also have reason to view their no-show as a cause for regret. As Rod Stewart, then a rising star in America, says now, ‘If we’d done it, I think we would have stayed together.’ Instead, they broke up almost immediately after it, with Beck insisting to this day that it was the right decision. Stewart was ‘on a power trip’ and the band was ‘disappearing up their bum’. Turning down Woodstock was his way of showing who was boss. Typical Beck, cutting off his nose to spite his face, others might say.
Not for the first or last time, the Led Zeppelin story appeared to be running parallel with more pressing events happening out there in the so-called real world. For in every other respect, 1969 would appear to have been rock’s annus horribilis. A week before Woodstock, on the night of 9 August, as the band enjoyed a twenty-minute standing ovation for their headline show at the 8,500-capacity Anaheim Convention Center in LA, elsewhere in the city several drug-demented members of Charles Manson’s self-styled ‘family’ burst uninvited into a house party at 10050 Cielo Drive, where they shot, stabbed and beat to death seven people, including a heavily pregnant Sharon Tate, actress wife of film director Roman Polanski. A bitterly frustrated musician who had tried and failed for years to get a record deal, despite the patronage of some of the biggest names in the business, including most famously Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, Manson, it transpired, had ordered the slaughter as part of his ‘masterplan’ to incite a race war, convinced that blacks would be blamed for the killings. He reasoned that once America’s black population had won this unlikely conflict, Manson and his followers would take over, seizing the reins of power in America. Equally mind-boggling, Manson claimed to have taken his cue from the hidden meanings of several Beatles songs from the White Album, including ‘Rocky Raccoon’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Piggies’, ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Revolution 9’. The immediate upshot in LA was a massive overnight increase in private gun ownership and an instant reversal of the open-door policy that had existed until then in its lush valleys, certainly among its rock denizens. Suddenly everyone and everything was ultra-uptight. Love and peace was yesterday’s news. Record company executive Lou Adler recalls how ‘the Manson killings just destroyed us…It was a very paranoid time, and the easiest thing to do was to get out of it.’ Not in public, though, but behind locked doors. Suddenly places like the Whisky just emptied. As the LA writer and former groupie Eve Babitz put it: ‘Everything had been so loose and now it could never be loose again.’ Before the Manson murders, ‘a guy with long hair was a brother – now you just didn’t know.’
When, on 6 December, the Stones’ free show at San Francisco’s Altamont race track ended in the death of an eighteen-year-old black fan named Meredith Hunter, stabbed and bludgeoned to death by acid-crazed members of the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels as he pushed his way towards the stage – brandishing a revolver, they claimed – it looked like the game was truly up. Three other people also died at the same show, two as the result of a hit-and-run car accident and one by drowning in an ‘irrigation canal’, but the symbolism of Hunter’s death was impossible to overcome: the moment when the Sixties died crystallised forever as the desperate, brutal and ultimately unnecessary murder of a fan, overexcited by the music his heroes made in a setting that became, in retrospect, the exact photonegative of everything both Woodstock and the Sixties was supposed to represent; the garden despoiled by blood, anger and the unprecedented cost of such alleged freedoms.
Once again, Led Zeppelin appeared to be living in an almost parallel dimension, flying ever higher above the earth just as everyone else appeared to be plummeting towards it in flames. Just as LA, in particular, was experiencing the seemingly self-inflicted psychic wounds of the Manson atrocity, Zeppelin were approaching the zenith of their relationship with the city they would increasingly come to regard as their spiritual home. ‘That period was a major time for us,’ Plant would later tell me. ‘Ramshackle times when the music really was from the other side of the tracks. We often found ourselves in contretemps with the prevailing trend without even realising we had done anything. When we played it really did feel like we inhabited a parallel universe, quite apart from everything else, including the rock world of the times.’
On balance, perhaps there is no irony here, as Zeppelin’s relationship with LA would be so utterly hedonistic and depraved that in many ways it could be argued that they, more than any other artist of the Seventies, came to embody the new, paranoid atmosphere dominating the new sleaze-mired culture of the city. For if 1969 was the year the party turned nasty, Zeppelin were very much the drunken gatecrashers. Infidels storming the castle, daggers clamped between their teeth, intent on rape and pillage; master of the revels.
Certainly Jimmy Page was well on his way to becoming known as a bigger backstage legend amongst the groupie population than even Mick Jagger, not least because of his propensity since his touring days with the Yardbirds for carrying whips and handcuffs in his suitcase. ‘He whipped me and it was great, it was beautiful, real good times,’ claimed one of his conquests from those days. The rest of the band was no less rampant. This was the tour when Peter Grant would famously offer one hotel manager the cash to destroy one of his own guest rooms. ‘The guy smashed the room to smithereens,’ Richard Cole recalls in his book. ‘And he came back, gave us the bill and we paid it [in cash].’ These were the days when televisions routinely flew through windows, followed by refrigerators laden with champagne, young women’s underwear and whatever else came to hand. One Holiday Inn manager looked like he’d spent the night in a haunted house after the band checked out the next morning. ‘Five hundred pounds of whipped cream,’ he jabbered. ‘Who could possibly use that much whipped cream?’ According to Cole: ‘That was the fucking best time of my life. That [tour] was the one. We were hot and on our way up, but no-one was watching too closely. So you could fucking play.’ He added: ‘All the so-called Led Zeppelin depravity took place the first two years in an alcoholic fog. After that we got older and grew out of it. It became a realistic business.’
Well, almost. It was also on that third US tour in 1969 that what later became known as the famous ‘shark’ incident occurred. On 27 July, the band had appeared at the Seattle Pop Festival. Also on
the bill that day were The Doors, who Zeppelin followed on to the stage, plus Chuck Berry, Spirit, Albert Collins, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Ike & Tina Turner, Vanilla Fudge, Bo Diddley and others. With the following day designated a rare day off, the band decided to spend it chilling out at the Edgewater Inn, an ocean-side establishment whose unique selling point was the opportunity it afforded its guests to fish, either by hiring boats or literally dangling a rented fishing rod from the balcony of their room. Returning to the hotel after the show, Cole was in full Ricardo mode as he joined Bonzo on the balcony of his second-floor room, where they sat till dawn, drinking heavily and fishing for sharks. When, by 4.00 am they still hadn’t caught anything, a bored and drunken Bonham had begun pouring champagne over the bait. Almost instantaneously, he thought he had one. ‘Grab the harpoon!’ he yelled at Cole. But after they’d reeled it in amidst much whooping and mayhem, it turned out to be a red snapper. Over the next couple of hours they caught many more: snappers interspersed with a couple of mud sharks, which Cole inventively hung in a closet, threading coat-hangers through their gills.
The next day they were boasting of their exploits to the others. ‘Charles Atlas couldn’t have reeled in a couple of those suckers,’ Bonzo told Plant and Pagey. ‘So what are you going to do with them now?’ asked Robert, holding his nose as he inspected the carnage in Bonham’s room. ‘We’ll find something to do with them,’ said Ricardo. Sure enough, that night they did. Entertaining a roomful of groupies, one of them, a tall, seventeen-year-old redhead named Jackie, idly enquired: ‘Are you guys into bondage?’ Not the sort of question one needed to ask Led Zeppelin but then they’d only just met. ‘I really like being tied up,’ she announced. ‘I really do.’ Jimmy licked his lips; Bonzo hooted, and Cole led the way as everyone lined up to take advantage of this propitious offer, inviting Jackie to strip off and lie naked on the bed, where he tied her hands and feet to the bedposts using rope ordered from room service. Then, with Mark Stein of Vanilla Fudge filming it on his Super 8 camera, Cole inserted the long nose of a dead red snapper fish into the hapless girl’s vagina, followed by the head of a mud shark into her anus. ‘What the hell is that?’ she screamed. ‘I’m putting this red snapper into your red snapper!’ Cole cried jubilantly as the rest of the room fell about laughing. ‘Smile!’ cajoled Stein, getting in close with his whirring camera.