When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Later, when the band came to finesse the tracks back at Basing Street, Plant decided he needed another vocalist to act as his foil on the tune. Enter former Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny in a beguiling cameo, her river-clear voice providing the perfect harmonic counterpoint to Plant’s nursery-rhyme melody. ‘It’s really more of a playlet than a song,’ Robert explained. ‘So while I sang the events in the song, Sandy answered back as if she was the pulse of the people on the battlements. Sandy was playing the town crier urging people to throw down their weapons.’

  Zeppelin already enjoyed a certain kinship with Fairport Convention. Their bassist Dave Pegg (a veteran who would go on to play with Pentangle, Nick Drake, John Martyn and many others) was an old mate of Plant’s and Bonham’s from Brum and the days when he played with A Way Of Life; the two bands had also jammed at the Troubadour in LA on Zeppelin’s US tour the summer before. (Fairport were recording a live album there and the jam with Zeppelin was included, the band credited pseudonymously as the Birmingham Water Buffalo Society.) In September, they had also hung out together at the Melody Maker awards, and a month later during their lay-off, Jimmy and Robert had been to check out Sandy’s new group Fotheringay when they opened for Elton John at the Albert Hall. For her part, Denny was knocked sideways by the energy of the session. ‘I left the studio feeling slightly hoarse,’ she told student journalist Barbara Charone in 1973. ‘Having someone out-sing you is a horrible feeling…’

  The other all-acoustic number that sprung from their time at Headley was yet another whose origins lay in Page and Plant’s inspirational stay at Bron-Yr-Aur, yet reflected their shared love and fascination for the place that would, as the Seventies unfolded, become their second home in so many bittersweet ways – ‘Going To California’. On first hearing, an obvious paean to the genius of Joni Mitchell, whose Ladies Of The Canyon album – a cornerstone of the emerging Laurel Canyon ‘folk-rock’ sound exemplified by fellow-travellers such as Crosby Stills & Nash (whose Graham Nash was then her live-in lover), Neil Young (like Mitchell, a displaced Canadian, hypnotised by the bucolic splendour of the canyon that lay, ironically, in the very heart of the sleazy Hollywood glitz that it figuratively and metaphorically looked down on) and ‘Sweet Baby’ James Taylor (a junkie LA troubadour whose saccharine tunes were belied by the impenetrable darkness of his harrowingly autobiographical lyrics) – had completely entranced both Page and Plant. ‘Someone told me there’s a girl out there,’ Robert sang, ‘with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair…’ Or as he later put it: ‘When you’re in love with Joni Mitchell you’ve really got to write about it now and again.’

  Plant’s Tolkien influence was also present on the album’s most overtly pop moment, ‘Misty Mountain Hop’, where the dancing foggy slopes in question are again based on images from Lord of the Rings, the singer appearing to draw allegorical ties between the hippy nation he still saw himself as a devout member of and the mythological eponymous heroes of The Hobbit. In fact, the lyric draws its chief inspiration from a real-life drug bust, either in London or San Francisco, and a consequent desire to flee to a place ‘Over the hills where the spirits fly…’ The insanely catchy guitar motif was another that Page ‘just came up with on the spot’, which Jones developed early one morning at the electric piano as the others slept.

  There was only one track on which the band consistently struggled and which they eventually came close to abandoning completely before a suitably ‘refreshed’ Bonzo came to their rescue, and which they consequently named after him – ‘Four Sticks’. Based on Page’s idea of creating a riff-based song based on a trancelike Indian raga, fluctuating between five- and six-beat meters, the band simply couldn’t nail it until Bonham – returning in the early hours from a night out in London – downed a can of Double Diamond beer then picked up two drumsticks in each hand and laid the track down in just two takes. Jimmy recalled how, ‘We’d tried the number and he’d been playing it in a regular pattern. But we were gonna re-cut it [and] have another go at it. [Bonzo] had been to see Ginger Baker’s Airforce and he came in and he was really hyped about it. He liked Ginger Baker but he was like, “I’ll show him!” And he came in and he picked up the four sticks and that’s it, we just did two takes of it. Because that’s all we could sort of manage. But it’s astonishing what he’s doing. He’d never employed that style of playing before. I can’t even remember what it was called, what the working title was. But it was sure as hell “Four Sticks” after that. Bonzo just took it into another stratosphere.’

  The track everybody still remembers best from that fourth Zeppelin album, though, is ‘Stairway to Heaven’ – ‘the long one’ Page had been tinkering away at for nearly a year before finally taking the band through it at Headley. One of the first songs they actually had a crack at, Robert and Bonzo were sent to the pub the second night while Jimmy sat with Jonesy to write out the music for what would become the final version the band would begin to routine the next day.

  Talking about it in 2001, on the thirtieth anniversary of its release, Jimmy’s face still betrays his obvious pride in what is now regarded as probably Led Zeppelin’s finest recorded moment. ‘When I did studio work, and when John Paul Jones did studio work, the rule was always: you don’t speed up. That was the cardinal sin, to speed up. And I thought, right, we’ll do something that speeds up. But that, seriously, was another thing we always did in Zeppelin. If it started to move in tempo, don’t worry, it’s finding its own tempo. Don’t worry, just all stay together. As long as you’re all together on it, that’s fine.’

  As for the lyrics, written entirely by Plant, ‘Jimmy and I just sat by the fire, it was a remarkable setting,’ he recalled years later. ‘I was holding a pencil and paper, and for some reason I was in a very bad mood. Then all of a sudden my hand was writing out the words, “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold/And she’s buying a stairway to heaven…” I just sat there and looked at the words and then I almost leapt out of my seat.’ The lyrics, he explained, ‘Were a cynical thing about a woman getting everything she wanted without getting anything back.’ Jimmy was pleased, too, that there was ‘a lot of ambiguity implied in that number that wasn’t present before’. In fact, he liked the lyrics so much they became the first ever to be reprinted on a Zeppelin album sleeve, ‘so that people could really concentrate on it’.

  Because he already knew the song was special? ‘Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of stuff on there we knew was special. But “Stairway…” was something that had been really crafted. The lyrics were fantastic. The wonderful thing is that, even with the lyrics in front of you – you know how you listen to something and you might not quite get what the words are but you get your own impression? With this, the lyrics were there but you still got your own impression of what the song was about. And that was really important.’

  More words would come the following day as the band worked their way bit by bit through the song’s epic journey. ‘I have an image of Robert sitting on a radiator,’ recalled Richard Cole. ‘He was working out the words to “Stairway…” while John Paul pulled out a recorder. Whenever they went into pre-recording, John Paul would come down with a carload of instruments, usually different acoustic instruments.’ Things went reasonably smoothly except for Bonzo struggling at first to get the timing right on the twelve-string part before the electric guitar solo. Page recalled how, ‘As we were doing all that, Robert was writing down the lyrics. They just came to him really quickly. He said it was like someone was guiding his hand.’

  Assistant engineer Richard Digby-Smith remembered how: ‘They ran up the stairs for the playback. Sounds wonderful. Bonham says, “That’s it then!” But Pagey’s quiet. He’s a man of few words anyway. His hand’s on his chin, he’s going, “Mmm, hmm” – you never knew what he was thinking. So Bonham looks at him and says, “What’s up?” And Page says he’s convinced that they have a better take in them. Well, Bonham’s not best pleased. “This always happens – we get a great
take and you want to do it again.” They go back down. Bonzo grabs his sticks, huffing, puffing, muttering, “One more take and that’s it.” He waits and waits until his grand entrance and, of course, when the drums come in, if you thought the one before was good this one is just explosive. And when they play it back, Bonham looks at Jimmy like, “you’re always right, you bastard”.’

  The track’s now celebrated crescendo – Page’s goosebumps-inducing guitar solo – was attempted at Headley but after three hours of trying and failing to get it just so, Page finally gave up. Instead, he saved it for when the band were back at Basing Street. Rejecting his favoured Gibson Les Paul, he pulled out the battered old Telecaster that Jeff Beck had given him. Eschewing headphones, preferring to play the backing track back through speakers, as classical music soloists tend to, Digby-Smith recalled in Mojo seeing Page leaning against a speaker as he played, a cigarette stuck between the strings by the tuning peg. ‘I winged that guitar solo, really,’ Page later admitted. ‘When it came to recording it, I warmed up and did three of them. They were all quite different from each other. I did have the first phrase worked out and then there was the link phrase. I did check them before the tape ran. The one we used was definitely the best.’

  What not even Jimmy Page could have known was just how incredibly popular this one track would become. Now one of the best-known, most highly regarded songs in rock history, alongside such comparable cornerstones as the Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’ – whose three-act, beginning, middle and arresting finale structure it draws on – and Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – which, in turn, clearly apes the epic grandiosity of Zeppelin’s slow-build to a guitar-blazing conclusion – ‘Stairway to Heaven’ has become the national anthem of rock; a track whose fame now far exceeds its original context – despite the album itself becoming one of the biggest-selling of all time (second only to the Eagles’ Greatest Hits). At last count, ‘Stairway…’ had been played on American radio alone more than five million times, despite famously never having been released as a single.

  In fact, despite huge pressure from Atlantic to release ‘Stairway…’ as a single in America – to the point where advance promo singles were pressed up for US radio – the only track from the fourth album eventually issued in that format was ‘Black Dog’, an edited version of which was released (with ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ as its B-side) in the US on 2 December, eventually reaching no. 15. ‘“Stairway to Heaven” was never, ever, ever going to be released as a single,’ Jimmy told me earnestly. ‘Australia put it on an EP, with “Going to California” and “The Battle of Evermore” on it. They might have tried to slip out a single as well, but it was too late to do anything about it when we found out. But when [America] said “Stairway…” should be a single, I said absolutely not. The whole thing was we wanted people to hear it in the context of the album. Also, I said it will help the album sell because it’s not a single. One thing I would never have entertained was messing around with that song. I knew that the minute it was a single, the next thing they would want it to be an edited version, and I wasn’t having that, no way.’

  Did Jimmy have any sense at all as he was recording it though that it would become so enormously popular and well known? ‘Well, I knew that it was really good,’ he said with a grin. ‘I knew that it had so many sort of elements being brought in that were really gonna work, I knew it was gonna hold up as a piece of music. But I didn’t…I mean, obviously, I never expected it to…I thought it would make a bit of a splash, so to speak. But, of course, one could have only hoped in your secret dreams that things could last the way that they did. I never really expected that, but I was always fully aware of how good our music was. Because of the way it was played.’

  Is it the best song he’s ever written; the best Zep song ever? ‘It was certainly a milestone along one of the many avenues of Zeppelin, yes.’ Did he wonder how he would ever top it? ‘No, because that was never the intention. That’s definitely not the thing to do if you want to keep creating great stuff. To try and top it would have been like chasing your own tail. There was never meant to be another “Whole Lotta Love” on the third album, nor was there meant to be another “Stairway…” on [the album that followed]. In the context of Zeppelin, they [the record industry] were playing by the old rules, and we weren’t doing that. The albums were meant to sum up where you were at at the time you recorded them.’

  Since its release, however, there have been those who claim that ‘Stairway to Heaven’, like so many previous Zeppelin songs, was more closely based on the work of others. Most notably, a track from Spirit’s eponymous 1968 debut album called ‘Taurus’, a short instrumental which does contain a brief passage that bears a passing resemblance to the opening guitar lines of ‘Stairway…’ Unlike tracks like ‘Dazed and Confused’ or ‘Whole Lotta Love’, where the amount of ‘borrowing’ is clear for all to hear, the case for ‘Stairway…’ being partly lifted from ‘Taurus’ is much weaker. If Page, who was a fan of Spirit – witness Zeppelin’s performance of ‘Fresh Garbage’ from the same Spirit album on their earliest US tours, when the two bands shared bills – was influenced by the guitar chords on ‘Taurus’ what he did with them was the equivalent of taking the wood from a garden shed and building it into a cathedral, which somewhat wipes the slate clean. Equally, claims that Page lifted chords from a song by the Chocolate Watch Band – a band he had also shared a bill with in Yardbirds’ days – called ‘And She’s Lonely’ would seem to miss the point entirely, as do suggestions that ‘Stairway…’ was based, structurally, on ‘Tangerine’. Again even if this were the case, any suggestion that any of these songs in any way prefigured the existence of a landmark musical moment like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is plainly ludicrous. Page was certainly a musical magpie – to put it mildly – and would continue to be so as the years blinked past like the lights of a passing train. And yes, of course ‘Stairway to Heaven’ didn’t just arrive out of thin air. Jimmy once told me, in an interview for the BBC which they later shamefully ‘misplaced’, that for him the antecedents of his most famous musical creation lay in the same ‘She Moved Through The Fair’/‘White Summer’/‘Black Mountainside’ guitar showcase he had already spent years ‘fine tuning’ – but in this instance full credit needs to be given to the creator of what quickly became perhaps the grandest, certainly most affecting musical statement of his generation.

  All that said, for many people the really big moment on what still remains the biggest, most seamlessly complete Zeppelin album, in every sense, was saved till last: ‘When the Levee Breaks’, an old ‘Memphis’ Minnie [McCoy] and ‘Kansas’ Joe McCoy tune the band re-imagined as a hypnotic, blues rock mantra. On paper, another Zeppelin ‘original’ (though uncredited on the album sleeve, the lyrics were originally performed on record by the husband-and-wife McCoy team, documenting the great Mississippi River flood of 1927, where the couple’s manically twinned guitars mimicked the sound of rainwater lashing down) like ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘Bring It On Home’, ‘Lemon Song’ and others before, what Zeppelin did to ‘When the Levee Breaks’ so far exceeded the sonic parameters of the original it did in the end come very close to being an entirely new work – though not quite enough to warrant the misappropriation of the relevant royalties (an omission rectified in recent years with the addition of a co-credit for Memphis Minnie), particularly when it came to the lyrics, where Minnie’s exhortations – ‘Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good/When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move’ – formed the basis for Plant’s own.

  The big difference, in the first instance, was in the titanic drum sound. ‘It was always an electric blues,’ said Jimmy, ‘but I never quite knew that the minute John Bonham had set his drum kit up in the big hall [at Headley] it would sound so fantastic.’ Known as the Minstrels’ Gallery, the hall at Headley, ‘was three storeys high and so it was this big cathedral-like hall. And [Bonham] just started playing this kit that had arrived, and it sounded so fantasti
c we went, hold on, let’s do “…Levee Breaks”. And we tried it and this incredible sound came out…’

  The sound was captured on tape by hanging two ambient Beyer MI60 mikes from the staircase and aiming them at where Bonzo was sitting at his kit, while Andy Johns sat in the mobile truck outside recording the sound through two channels he then compressed using an Italian echo unit called a Binson (belonging to Jimmy that used a steel drum instead of a conventional tape). A separate microphone would normally have been added to record the bass drum but Bonzo’s unamplified kick sound echoing around the great hall was on its own so powerful there was no need. ‘I remember sitting there thinking it sounded utterly amazing,’ recalled Johns. ‘So I ran out of the truck and said, “Bonzo you gotta come in and hear this.” He shouted: “Whoa, that’s it! That’s what I’ve been hearing!” (And what subsequent generations of producers and mixers have been hearing ever since, making it the most sampled drum sound of all.)

  You were doing all right on the Ma Reagan circuit, singing and jumping around, sixteen years old and pulling a few birds. When Mrs Reagan employed you to be the MC at the Oldhill Plaza you even earned a few bob, going on stage in your suit, making all the announcements. One of the best times was introducing Little Stevie Wonder when ‘Fingertips’ was in the charts, they put down their pints and paid attention that night! No, it wasn’t as good as being in the group but nearly, with everyone watching you, listening to what you had to say. Then jumping off and putting on a pair of jeans and a striped T-shirt and becoming a Mod, strutting about, showing off. And you still got to play sometimes.