When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Each show was compered by a different DJ – respectively, Johnnie Walker, David ‘Kid’ Jensen, Nicky Horne, Bob Harris and Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman – all then presenters of the best-known rock shows on British radio. After the first show there had been a private get-together at Blake’s Hotel in Kensington where Robert had been in effusive mood, welcoming one and all and acting out scenes from the then recently released Monty Python and the Holy Grail film. Jimmy stayed in his room, ‘discussing occultist theology with two sinister-looking characters,’ recalled Nick Kent, ‘and listening to a tape of murderer Charles Manson singing his creepy self-penned songs.’

  The last of the five nights saw a much more lavish after-show party held in the bowels of Earl’s Court, with pub rockers Dr Feelgood providing the entertainment for guests, including a large Swan Song presence in Maggie Bell, Dave Edmunds and all of Bad Company, plus Nick Lowe arm-in-arm with band PR and self-appointed ‘entertainments manager’ B.P. Fallon, whose handy phial of amyl nitrate and ever-ready supply of cotton wool balls made him the most popular man in the room after the band itself. Later, the party moved on to a more private gathering at Chelsea’s St James Club, where Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood showed up. Though Led Zeppelin didn’t know it yet, this would be the peak. They would go on to headline even larger venues, they would continue to sell many more millions of albums, but in every other respect this was the high watermark of their career; the point at which the mighty Zeppelin, which had soared so high these past six years, would begin its fiery descent.

  Forty-eight hours after the last Earl’s Court show, Robert and Maureen Plant set off on holiday with their two children for Agadir. Three weeks later they were in Marrakech, where Jimmy, Charlotte and their four-year-old daughter Scarlet flew out to meet them. Together they took in a local festival ‘that gave us a little peep into the colour of Moroccan music and the music of the hill tribes,’ said Plant. From there they journeyed thousands of miles by Range Rover down through the Spanish Sahara just as the Spanish-Moroccan war was breaking out. ‘There was a distinct possibility that we could have got very, very lost, going round in circles and taking ages to get out,’ said Plant. ‘It’s such a vast country with no landmarks and no people apart from the odd tent and a camel.’

  A month later, driving up through Casablanca and Tangier, they arrived in Switzerland for a band meeting with Grant at his new base in Montreaux, and to spend a few days hanging out at the Montreaux Jazz Festival, then in full swing. But by the end of July Plant was getting itchy feet again, ‘pining for the sun [and] the happy, haphazard way of life that goes with it.’ It was then the idea of driving down to the Greek island of Rhodes came up. Plant arranged to meet Pretty Things vocalist Phil May and his wife, Electra, who had rented a house on the island from Roger Waters of Pink Floyd. Page, Charlotte and Scarlet followed in a second car, with Maureen’s sister Shirley and her husband. On 3 August, Jimmy briefly left the party to fly to Sicily, to visit Crowley’s old Abbey of Thelema, which Kenneth Anger had told him so much about and that he was now considering buying. The plan was to all meet up again in Paris a couple of days later where they would begin rehearsals for their next US tour, scheduled to begin with two sold-out shows on 23 and 24 August at the 90,000-capacity Oakland Coliseum in San Francisco.

  The next day Maureen was at the wheel of the rented Austin Mini sedan – Robert beside her in the passenger seat, Karac, Carmen and Scarlet in the back – when it skidded and spun off the road, nose-diving over a precipice into a tree. Landing on top of Maureen, the impact shattered Plant’s right ankle and elbow and snapped several bones in his right leg. Looking at Maureen, who was bleeding and unconscious, he thought she was dead; the children were screaming in the back. Fortunately, Charlotte and Shirley, in the next car, were there to summon help but it was still several hours before the family could be taken – via the back of a nearby fruit farmer’s flatbed truck – to the local hospital, where it was discovered that Maureen had suffered a fractured skull, as well as a broken pelvis and leg. Four-year-old Karac had also broken a leg, while six-year-old Carmen had broken her wrist. Scarlet was the only one to escape with just a few cuts and bruises. Maureen had lost a lot of blood but due to a rare blood type could only take Shirley’s blood for immediate transfusion. The process was painfully slow, with only one doctor on duty at the cockroach-ridden Greek hospital. Plant was forced to share a room with a drunken soldier who insisted on singing ‘The Ocean’ (from Houses of the Holy) to him.

  That night a hysterical Charlotte phoned Richard Cole in London, begging him to do something to get everyone home. Cole flew into action, furiously phoning round until he had co-opted two senior physicians – Dr John Baretta, a Harley Street specialist who also acted as medical consultant for the Greek Embassy and spoke fluent Greek, and Dr Mike Lawrence, a prominent orthopaedic surgeon – into journeying with him to Greece immediately. It was still forty-eight hours before they arrived, though, and even then hospital officials refused to release the patients until a police investigation – searching for causes of the crash, specifically drugs – was completed, which might have taken weeks. Again, Cole saved the day, hiring a private ambulance and arranging for two station wagons to be parked at a side entrance, wheeling Robert, Maureen and the children – their IV bottles swinging besides them – down to the getaway cars in the dead of night. Hours later, they were in the sky heading back to London.

  Their return home was delayed still further, however. This time, unbelievably, on the instructions of Swan Song’s accountants, who, in the absence of direct orders from Grant, had insisted Cole delay the plane’s landing by thirty minutes so as to avoid using up a precious day of Plant’s allotted time in the UK. Circling at 15,000 feet, he reflected that while it may have saved Plant thousands of pounds in taxes, ‘I still thought it was more important to save a life.’ When the plane finally touched down, the Plants were transported via waiting ambulances to Guy’s Hospital, where Maureen underwent immediate surgery. It would be several more weeks before she was well enough to leave, while the singer – who was placed in a cast that ran from his hip to his toes – also faced sobering news from the doctors. ‘You probably won’t walk again for six months, maybe more,’ he was told. ‘And there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever recover completely.’ It was debatable who took the news most badly – Plant or Grant. ‘This could be the end of Led Zeppelin,’ G complained to Cole, ‘This might be the end of the line.’

  Page was also devastated by the news. However, like Grant, his main concern was for the future of the band. ‘I was shattered,’ he said. He had ‘always felt,’ though, ‘that no matter what happened, provided he could still play and sing, and even if we could only make albums, that we’d go on forever.’ Plant’s fate, he had no doubt, was tied inextricably to that of the band’s. ‘Just really because the whole aspect of what’s going to come round the corner as far as writing goes is the dark element, the mysterious element. You just don’t know what’s coming. So many good things have come out of that that it would be criminal to interrupt a sort of alchemical process like that.’ He added: ‘There’s a lot of important work to be done yet…’

  To make matters worse, to preserve his new tax-exiled status, Plant would have to be moved out of the country again while his wife was still recuperating in hospital. Temporary accommodation was arranged for him on the island of Jersey – exempt from punitive British tax laws – at the mansion home of millionaire lawyer Dick Christian, who sent a limousine and an ambulance to meet Plant and his mini-entourage of Cole, Zeppelin soundman Benji Le Fevre, and Swan Song PA, Marilyn. Christian kindly offered his guest the use of his Maserati and Jensen Interceptor but a wheelchair-bound Plant would spend the next six weeks moping around the guesthouse, drinking beer and knocking back prescription painkillers. Occasionally he played the piano but mainly he just sat and stared, his mood desperate. ‘I just don’t know whether I’m ever going to be the same on stage again,’ he repeatedly told Cole.

/>   Eventually, it was decided that work was the best therapy. ‘The longer we wait,’ Page, who phoned every few days for progress reports, complained to Cole, ‘the harder it’s gonna be to come back.’ With the band’s ambitious touring plans put on indefinite hold, it was decided to get to work on the next Zeppelin album. By the end of September, Plant, his wheelchair and crutches were being boarded onto a British Airways flight to Los Angeles, where Page was waiting for him in a rented beach house in Malibu Colony. Like a reverse-negative version of their stay at Bron-Yr-Aur five years before, the two planned to write together. There were no peaceful, flower-strewn valleys to enjoy this time, though, just the all-night lights of old LA beckoning them onto the rocks, bewitching narcotic sirens to their hapless shipwrecked mariners.

  Robert’s mood was still predominantly black but hanging out with Jimmy, writing again, he now had good days as well as bad, taking short, therapeutic strolls along the beach with his new cane. There were also trips to see Donovan perform at the Santa Monica Civic, and a catch-up with Paul Rodgers and Boz Burrell from Bad Company. Jimmy also checked out the band Detective, offering them a deal with Swan Song (the group was formed by Michael Des Barres, future husband of Miss Pamela). Meanwhile, Robert turned up at the Renaissance Pleasure Fair in Navato, thirty miles north of San Francisco, carried around in a sedan chair to great applause. However, there was another factor about Plant’s so-called Californian rehabilitation that wasn’t discussed, and was far less helpful, at least in terms of his mental recovery: the plentiful supply of cocaine and heroin that Page’s presence anywhere now demanded. Also staying at the Malibu house was a dismayed Benji Le Fevre, who told Cole they’d nicknamed the place ‘Henry Hall’ – slang for heroin.

  Having used up their backlog of material on Physical Graffiti, with the exception of the riff to the unreleased ‘Walter’s Walk’ which Page now reused to create ‘Hots On For Nowhere’, songs for the new album would have to be built from the ground up. One of the first to take shape was ‘Achilles Last Stand’, the lengthy opus which would eventually open the next album. Built on the sort of strident, all-hands-on-deck guitar figure that Iron Maiden would later build a whole career out of – Page attempting to create something, he said, that reflected ‘the façade of a gothic building with layers of tracery and statues’ – ‘Achilles Last Stand’ also featured the first of a string of intensely autobiographical lyrics Plant now felt compelled to write. Originally nicknamed ‘The Wheelchair Song’, the subject, in this instance, was the enforced exile which had forced the band to become what Page later described as ‘technological gypsies’ and led indirectly, Plant seemed to suggest, to their current malaise – ‘the devil’s in his hole!’ he wailed balefully. Page later described his guitar solo as ‘in the same tradition as the solo from “Stairway to Heaven”.’ In truth, few would now agree but, ‘It is on that level to me,’ he insisted.

  Musically, ‘Tea for One’, the equally lengthy blues showcase which would close the album ‘was us looking back at “Since I’ve Been Loving You”,’ Page told me in 2001, ‘being in a very lonely space at the time and…you know…reflecting accordingly.’ Lyrically, it found Plant metaphorically wringing his hands, the loneliness of his separation from his wife and children – Maureen being still too ill to travel – juxtaposed against the artificial luxury of his drug-fuelled life in Malibu. ‘I was just sitting in that wheelchair and getting morose,’ he recalled. ‘It was like…is this rock’n’roll thing really anything at all?’ But that was as nothing compared to the venom he summoned up in ‘For Your Life’ and ‘Hots On For Nowhere’: the former a vicious attack on the LA lifestyle he’d once eulogised, railing against ‘cocaine-cocaine-cocaine’ in the ‘city of the damned’ the latter directing his anger this time towards both Page and Grant, and their insensitivity to his situation, only concerned for their own futures, as he spits: ‘I’ve got friends who would give me fuck all…’ Seemingly oblivious to Plant’s ire, Page inadvertently colludes in the song’s bitter denouement using the tremelo arm on the Strat he’d loaned from ex-Byrd Gene Parsons to produce a resounding twang in the middle of his solo.

  Naturally, there was also the by now almost obligatory pillaging of the blues for a new cornerstone Zeppelin moment: another Blind Willie Johnson classic from 1928 called ‘It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ – here shortened to ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’. Originally the story of Johnson fretting because his blindness prevented him from reading his Bible, thereby incurring the wrath of God, it became a useful metaphor for Zeppelin’s own fiery descent from heaven, Plant adapting the lyrics to include some revealingly stuttering lines about having ‘a monkey on my back’ embellished by some suitably squalling harmonica. The only truly original parts were the strafing guitar lines Page concocted, again using the borrowed Strat, to which Bonzo would add his most mercilessly cannon-like drum-pummelling since ‘When The Levee Breaks’. Even then, the overall arrangement owed much to Page’s fascination with John Renbourn and his own 1966 version of the same song (which, like Page now, Renbourn would take credit for).

  It wasn’t all bleak, though. ‘Candy Store Rock’ – its genesis traceable back to live performances of ‘Over The Hills And Far Away’ where Page, Jones and Bonham would frequently drift off into a similarly paced improvisation – was a jolly enough romp, Page making a rare recorded return to his rockabilly roots, Plant cheerfully following suit, ‘being Ral Donner,’ as he put it, ‘the guy who wanted to be Elvis’. ‘Royal Orleans’ was another deliberate attempt to lighten the mood, its pleasingly staccato rhythms enlivened by the jokey lyric: ‘When the sun peaked through…he kissed the whiskers, left and right,’ and a jokey reference to talking ‘like Barry White…’

  With most of the material finished by the time Jones and Bonham arrived at the end of the month, the time originally booked at SIR Studios in Hollywood for writing and rehearsal was used mainly to finesse what Page and Plant had already come up with. The work was described by Page as ‘gruelling’ as recently as 2004, because, he said, ‘nobody else really came up with song ideas. It was really up to me to come up with all the riffs, which is probably why [the songs were] guitar-heavy. But I don’t blame anybody. We were all kind of down.’ In fact, neither Jones nor Bonham were given a chance to participate. As Jones told Dave Lewis in 2003: ‘It became apparent that Robert and I seemed to keep a different time sequence to Jimmy. We just couldn’t find him.’ Adding that he ‘drove into SIR Studios every night and waited and waited…I learned all about baseball during that period as the World Series was on and there was not much else to do but watch it.’ Even once recording on the album had begun, ‘I just sort of went along with it all,’ he shrugged. ‘The main memory of that album is pushing Robert around in the wheelchair from beer stand to beer stand. We had a laugh I suppose, but I didn’t enjoy the sessions really. I just tagged along with that one.’

  Hence, the solitary co-writing credit Jones and Bonham receive on the album – for ‘Royal Orleans’. Even when Jones did manage to contribute some solid ideas, such as the bass line he created with his distinctive Alembic eight-string guitar for ‘Achilles Last Stand’ and which he described to Lewis now as ‘an integral part of the song’, it went unacknowledged. ‘What one put into the track wasn’t always reflected in the credits,’ he observed dryly. But it’s clear this was not one of Jones’s favourite Zeppelin albums. In truth, it would rarely become anybody’s favourite Zeppelin album – except for Jimmy Page, who still stubbornly rates it one of their best. As Lewis says now: ‘It was the first album all over again, with Jimmy in total control of everything and hardly anyone else getting a say. That’s why there was no “Boogie With Stu” or “Hats Off To Harper” on that album, no mellotrons, acoustic guitars or keyboards of any kind – no Jonesy! It was all Jimmy. No-one else really got a look in…’

  It wasn’t until the Yardbirds that you really got a chance to put into practice everything you’d learned. Playing with Jeff was a revelation; you really t
hought you’d cracked it – for about five minutes. It could have been even better than the Stones – more solos and trading licks than the two-guitar rhythm thing – but Jeff just lacked…something. Discipline, they’d call it. But it was more than that. He just had something in him – some devil – that seemed to make him want to…mess things up sometimes. It was nuts. He could have been the best but he just didn’t seem to care. Not like you. You cared about every last detail, always wanted it to be the best. Which is another reason why you hated working with Mickie Most so much. You’d be in the studio with the Yardbirds, expecting to change the world, and Mickie would treat it like one of your session gigs. ‘Next!’ he’d say, as soon as you came to the end of a take, without even listening back to it. You told him, ‘I’ve never worked like this in my life,’ not even at sessions. And he didn’t even look at you, just said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and that was it, you went onto the next number.

  No wonder Jeff didn’t give a shit anymore. It was a drag. This was when you were really getting into the Les Paul Black Beauty, a truly remarkable piece of kit. The sort of thing you’d dreamed of as a kid. You liked it so much the first time you saw it on the wall of the guitar shop in Dean Street you’d traded your Gretsch Chet Atkins for it. That was where the fuzz and the feedback came from, the Black Beauty. You’d actually heard Les himself doing it with his trio on ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Time’. He’d done it all on that one – not a foot wrong, from the tone to those fantastic introductory chords to the solo – multi-tracking, feedback, it all went back to the Les Paul Trio! And how long ago was that? Bloody amazing, when you thought about it, but then Les was into Reinhardt, wasn’t he? So what do you expect? Eric was the first to get all that, when he was with the Bluesbreakers. Got himself one of the first Marshall amps and away he bloody well went! Really stirring stuff…