When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Were these rare texts? ‘Well, at the time he bought an awful lot more because he didn’t have so much. Now he’s got almost all the printed books apart from Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden [1904], which nobody’s got and really is a rare thing. It does exist, there’s a copy in the Warburg Institute, and a bookseller friend of mine had another copy that he sold – it’s in America now. But it really is terribly rare because I think they were all destroyed by the Customs, as opposed to the other two [rare] pieces, which were White Stains – which actually is a moderately common book – and The Bagh-I-Muattar.’

  Tim adds: ‘It didn’t take me very long to realise how serious he was. He was always very charming. But the trouble with him of course was like all these really famous people, he was terribly difficult to get in touch with. And if you’d bought something for £250 in those days you couldn’t really keep it in stock.’ Consequently, ‘I had some very nice things which he didn’t get. Of course he was touring [and] there were no emails or anything like that. The other thing is that being Jimmy and being so rich, and this is true of a lot of rich book collectors, they always have it in the back of their mind that somebody’s put a nought on the price.’

  Page was also fascinated to learn that Tim had visited Boleskine when he was in the army in the Fifties. ‘I was told if I was caught in the grounds [then owner] Captain Fullerton would set the dogs on me.’ Instead, he and a friend ‘climbed the hill behind Boleskine and took photographs. We could see Fullerton and the dogs padding around.’ He later gave the photos to Page. ‘They were only little snapshots but he was so pleased! We were up in the mountain that Crowley used to practise climbing on. But Jimmy said it would be good because they’d changed it so much and he was terribly pleased about it.’

  Gerald Yorke, the epitome of the old-money English gentleman who had worked as Crowley’s secretary for many years, and who later became the Dalai Lama’s emissary, helping bring Tibetan Buddhism to the West, had told Tim that after Fullerton ‘went mad’ and shot himself, ‘it was bought by a young man with a blind wife, a newly married couple. They’d only been in there a month and the husband walked out, leaving the woman wandering around blind. Gerald said, “Oh, it was an Abra-melin demon!” C.R. Cammell told me that that was really the cause of his [Crowley’s] downfall. That he never banished the Abra-melin…that he was halfway through the ritual, and he went off [and] left the demons tramping about. There was a rather good book about a guy that did the Abra-melin ritual and Gerald asked me to get it for him, and I read it and said, “Gerald, this guy’s telling me that on the sand of the temple there were actual hoof marks [of Satan himself].” And Gerald said, “I should bloody well hope there were!”’ He roars with laughter. ‘And then Jimmy bought it. Or it’s roughly that sequence.’ He never visited when Jimmy owned it, though. ‘I did go past once, with some friends, we just drove past, and there was some thought of going in, but my friends weren’t particularly interested. But somebody was telling me there were always strange number plates, he saw “Pan” on one, just a car with ‘Pan’ parked there.’

  He feels that Page may also have been taken advantage of occasionally by those that led him to believe they had more occult knowledge than they actually possessed. For example, he says he ‘didn’t care for Charles [Pace]. I didn’t like him at all. He came into the bookshop that I was working in and he was just a conjuror. He lit a match and put it under his hand. I mean, you know, you put your hand in some stuff before you go out…I was a conjuror as a boy which is why I know about these things. So I thought, no, I don’t like this chap. He was a good artist. A sort of Crowley figure in a way, but I thought…’ He pulls a dismissive face.

  Tim claims he never openly discussed the O.T.O. with Jimmy, though it’s the first thing he asks when I arrive. ‘Are you a member of the Order then?’ Nevertheless, Dave Dickson speculates that it was around the time Page first met characters like Anger, Yorke and d’Arch Smith that he would have been invited to join. ‘In magick what’s supposed to happen is that you meet [someone], almost by chance, in effect by destiny, the person who is going to instruct you.’ Getting anyone to talk about it openly though would be impossible, even if Page wanted them to, says Dickson, because of the four main rules of the O.T.O.: To Know, To Dare, To Will and To Be Silent.

  ‘To Know – you’ve got to study. You’ve got to find out about this stuff before you venture forth. To Dare – you’ve got have the courage to actually put what you know into practice. To Will – you have to have the mental capacity to actually carry it out, which is why you can practise magick and fall foul because your willpower simply isn’t strong enough to resist the temptations. It is effectively a minefield that it’s easy to get blown up on. And To Be Silent – meaning, shut the fuck up. Which is why Page may have mentioned it a few times or given passing reference to it but to my knowledge has never come out and said, okay, this is what I believe, this is my credo, here are my influences. Like I said, it’s one of the rules, To Be Silent…’

  Is there an evangelical aspect to the O.T.O., though? ‘No. The whole object behind the magick is that the adherent finds it on his own, then the idea is that you will meet someone on that journey who can say, right, okay, you need to come along to this group, or whatever, that will further you along that journey. But you’re not gonna find members of the O.T.O. out on the street trying to sign people up. It’s invitation only.’ So Jimmy Page wouldn’t have been trying to spread the word, as it were? ‘Not spreading the word exactly, no. He certainly seems to have deliberately offered some clues though.’

  The reason for which, I would suggest, was more to do with his desire to indicate to the outside world that there was more to Led Zeppelin than meat-hook riffs and phallic imagery; that here was a musical entity created by someone whose reading and interests ranged far beyond the limited confines of the bovine metallists Zeppelin were still then routinely compared to. In which case, it’s a sad irony that attempting to do so in this way only reinforced the idea over many years that Zeppelin had more in common with Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper than, say, Dylan or the Stones. That Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin really were in league with Satan. As Timothy d’Arch Smith says with a wry smile, ‘They always call it black magic, don’t they? It’s what they want to believe…’

  10

  All That Glitters

  For all the band’s public defiance, and the album’s not inconsiderable sales, behind the scenes there was a palpable sense of disappointment when Led Zeppelin III slipped unobtrusively from both the UK and US charts within weeks of topping them; this at a time when Led Zeppelin II was still riding high around the world. Used to fighting fires, Peter Grant moved swiftly to reassure Jimmy Page that certainly no-one at Atlantic was perturbed by this disappointing downturn in events. The album had still sold more than a million copies in the US, and had gone gold (for advance orders of over 100,000) in the UK, the sort of figures they’d have been throwing lavish parties to celebrate a year before. The fact that the second album had sold more than five times that amount in the preceding twelve months was, if anything, a freak result, he argued, not the kind of thing one should expect every time Zeppelin released a new album.

  Nevertheless, there were tensions over at Atlantic’s Broadway offices. Relatively speaking, Led Zeppelin III had been a commercial failure. The feeling – politely disguised in earshot of Page, if not from Grant – was that the band had shot themselves in the foot by releasing something radically different from the winning formula established by their first two albums. In order to appease both sides, Grant suggested the band take the rest of 1970 off. That is, abort their previous plan to tour Britain over the Christmas period – and return instead to the studio to consider their next move. Though he was reluctant to spell it out to Page, Grant knew it was essential the band get another, hopefully more representative, album out as soon as possible. By going into the studio now, he argued, they would be in no rush this time, either. For once, the band would be able
to sit back and take stock, really concentrate on what they were doing. It was time to unveil their masterpiece, he seemed to suggest. So concerned was he with getting the band back on track, Grant had in fact turned down an offer of a million dollars for a New Year’s Eve concert to be performed in Germany but linked by satellite to a large chain of American cinemas. He said no, he later insisted, because ‘I found out that satellite sound can be affected by snowstorms. The promoters couldn’t believe it, but it just wasn’t right for us.’ In reality, he was more concerned for the band’s long-term future as recording artists. Their next album, whatever else it turned out to be, would be make or break, he felt sure. For Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin there was much more than a mere million bucks at stake in whatever they did next; there was their entire future.

  Fortunately for their beleaguered manager, the band bought his argument and returned home for a few weeks off before returning to the studio. Whether they were prepared to admit it or not – and to this day they most decidedly are not – even they were aware that something had to be done to get the mothership firing on all cylinders again. Whichever way they looked at it, it was, in any event, time for them to deliver something really special, if for no other reason than to prove the doubters and cynics wrong. The miracle was that they did just that, coming up with what is now fondly regarded as not just their greatest recorded achievement, but one of the greatest rock albums of all time.

  With a number of tracks already either written or in a state of near-completion, confidence amongst the four was high as they re-entered Island’s Basing Street Studios in December. ‘We had little riffs here and there,’ said Jimmy, ‘certain constructions. And it was a question of really working on it and seeing how things came together. With direction, you know?’ What emerged was a mellow Neil Young-influenced piece titled ‘Down By The Seaside’ the semi-acoustic ‘Poor Tom’ and ‘The Rover’ Jones’ ghostly keyboard piece, ‘No Quarter’ plus a lengthy instrumental track that Page had been tinkering with – no lyrics yet, just a nice chord progression building steadily towards a thrilling crescendo; something that would meld the acoustic and electric sides of Zeppelin into one overriding musical statement. ‘I don’t want to tell you about it in case it doesn’t come off,’ he had teased the NME as far back as April 1970. Using an eight-track studio he’d installed at the Pangbourne boathouse, he had been working on it, off and on, ever since. It was, he told me, ‘pretty much my baby, yeah’. The idea: ‘To have a piece with the sort of naked guitar starting off, and then into a thing that would build up. And actually, this is another one where you bring John Bonham in for effect, you know? Let the thing go by and then bring in the effect.’ He smiled. ‘And that there would be this great sort of orgasm at the end.’

  Having demoed some of their new ideas at Basing Street, in January they returned for two weeks to Headley Grange. They were in for a shock. For all its dilapidations, back in the warm spring Headley had taken on the form of a countryside idyll where they could play at being gentleman rockers, Bonzo donning his gamekeeper’s cap and tweed jacket, striding through the woods on days off, aiming his shotgun at squirrels. Now it was winter, ‘cold and damp,’ remembered Jones. ‘We all ran in when we arrived in a mad scramble to get the driest rooms.’ They were so cold one night Cole ripped a section of the bannister from the stairs and threw it on the large open fire that occupied the lounge. ‘Actually, it had central heating but the boiler probably went back to the 1920s,’ said Jimmy. ‘I remember they tried to get it going and it was just fumes going everywhere, and it was abandoned. We had a fire in the living room and that sort of thing but it was never adequate. I remember actually in my bedroom – at the very top of the stairs – the sheets were wet in there [from the damp]. It’s lucky we didn’t all get bronchitis or pneumonia.’ It’s clear how much he enjoyed the atmosphere though. As engineer Andy Johns later recalled, ‘The rest of us moaned about being cold, but Jimmy was more concerned with creepy noises or flying fucking furniture.’

  After a week spent writing and rehearsing the new material, Ian Stewart (once the piano player in the Stones, now their tour manager) and Andy Johns arrived with the Stones’ mobile truck. Mike leads were run through the windows of the drawing room, its walls soundproofed with glued-on empty egg cartons. All communications between band and truck were conducted via closed-circuit camera and microphone. Not ideal, yet the improvised setting encouraged a freshness and spontaneity to the recording the band had rarely known before. When Stewart unloaded the truck they found his piano in there too. As a result he ended up adding his Johnnie Johnson eighty-eight-key style to a handful of works-in-progress, including what Jimmy called a ‘spontaneous combustion number’ called ‘It’s Been A Long Time’ – later re-titled ‘Rock and Roll’ – and another off-the-peg jam on Richie Valens’ ‘Ooh My Head’, also later re-titled, in Stewart’s honour, ‘Boogie With Stu’.

  Such sweet serendipity surrounded the making of the whole album. Another track – the one which would eventually open side one – based on a cartwheeling riff John Paul Jones had been ‘inspired’ to develop after listening to the similarly shaped ‘Tom Cat’ from Muddy Waters’ 1969 album, Electric Mud (itself aimed squarely at the white rock market), was named simply ‘Black Dog’, partly in punning reference to the source material, but mainly after an old black Labrador that hung around the gardens and kitchen at Headley. ‘He was an old dog,’ recalled Page, ‘you know when they get the white whiskers round the nose?’ When he vanished one night, ‘we all thought he’d been out on the tiles [because] when he got back he was just sleeping all day. And we thought, oh, black dog – cos we just called him black dog – he’s been out on the razzle. And that was it. It just became a standing joke. Every time anyone went in the kitchen he was still flaked out…’

  So what sounds on the surface like a swaggering, psychosexual monster of a song is about being out on the tiles, I asked? ‘No, no, it wasn’t to do with that. It was just a working title that stuck.’ Something Plant, who wrote the lyrics, contradicted when he later described ‘Black Dog’ to Cameron Crowe as a ‘blatant let’s-do-it-in-the-bath-type thing’. Jimmy is adamant, though, adding: ‘Yeah, but you know the sort of subliminal messages that come across in songs. I know that Arthur Lee [of Love] wrote a song after that called “White Dog” cos he was really annoyed at “Black Dog”. He thought that it was…you know, people can take things on board in various ways.’ He saw the black in ‘Black Dog’ as something negative? ‘I guess so. Yeah, negative connotations,’ he smiled and refused to say any more.

  Arthur Lee was not the only one to pick up on the ‘subliminal messages’ – negative or otherwise – of ‘Black Dog’. While musos stroked their beards appreciatively over the peacocking, lugubrious riff – originally all in 3/16 time, smirked Jones, ‘but no-one could keep up with that!’ – and Plant’s accapella vocals, based on Fleetwood Mac’s recent hit, ‘Oh Well’ – for those in the know about Page’s obsession with the occult, it was assumed the title referred to some Baskerville-esque hellhound, a belief underscored by lines like, ‘Eyes that shine, burnin’ red/Dreams of you all through my head…’ But as the writer Erik Davis points out, the burning eyes almost certainly belong to Plant himself, the song demonising not the sexual power of the ‘big-legged woman’ he’s singing about but, as Davis puts it, ‘the male’s own lust, experienced as a possession from within’. By the final verse, unable to ‘get my fill’ the singer settles for a woman who’s ‘gonna hold my hand’.

  Similarly, the track that would come next on the finished album, ‘Rock and Roll’, arrived out of thin air as the band was struggling to record something else. ‘I’ve got a feeling now we were doing “Four Sticks”, or “When the Levee Breaks”,’ Jimmy told me. ‘I’m not quite sure which of the two it was. But it wasn’t anything like the originals…All of a sudden, between a take, John Bonham’s started doing the opening of “Keep A-Knockin’” by Little Richard. And he did that, and where the band would come in
I came in with the riff that you all know. Dead on, straight in – straight in! And so we went through like a twelve-bar and went, hold on, let’s not do what we were doing, let’s do this. And then we worked on it and we had it done in like no time at all.’ It was, said Page, the sort of thing that could only have happened ‘all working together under those circumstances and having the freedom to be able to do that, not having to look at the clock, having the time to work on it when you really felt like you were connected to the work…never knowing quite what was round the corner.’

  Plant’s lyrics, made up as he sang along, referenced the Diamonds, the Monotones and the Drifters as he sought to get a cohesive theme going, while elements of Page’s guitar solo date back to ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’. But you didn’t need to know any of that to pick up on the retro-yet-futuristic feel of a number that looked back while clearly running forward in headlong fashion.

  The short-day/long-night atmosphere of Headley in winter also contributed to the wistful ambience of the two acoustic numbers on the album. The first, ‘The Battle of Evermore’ was something Page and Plant came up with huddled in front of the fireplace one night after the others had crashed out. ‘I remember one night I came downstairs and Jonesy’s mandolin was lying there,’ Jimmy told me. ‘He always had loads of different instruments lying around. I’d never played a mandolin before and I picked it up and started messing around with it, and I came up with all of “The Battle of Evermore”. That would never have happened if we’d just been in a normal studio situation.’

  Plant’s lyric came from an idea he’d first had at Bron-Yr-Aur, based on his immersion in both Lord of the Rings and a military history of the Middle Ages – specifically in the case of the former, his mention of the Ringwraiths. Elsewhere, there were also references to the Battle of Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King, with the ‘Queen of Light’ as Eowyn, the ‘Prince of Peace’ Aragorn, and the ‘dark Lord’ almost certainly Sauron, while ‘the angels of Avalon’ were taken straight from Celtic mythology, in this context the border wars between Albion and its Celtic foes. Or as he told Record Mirror, in March 1972, ‘Albion would have been a good place to be, but that was England before it got messed up. You can live in a fairyland if you read enough books and if you’re interested in as much history as I am – the Dark Ages and all that.’