Led Zeppelin IV

by Barney Hoskyns

  The sunless, often subterranean world of studios wasn’t enough for Page, however. He was tiring of the long hours and factory-line work of pop sessions. “Believe me, a lot of guys would consider that to be the apex—studio work,” Page would say a decade later. “I was doing three studio dates a day, and I was becoming one of those sort of people that I hated.”

  Early in 1966, Page was approached by the Yardbirds, the R&B group that had provided a launching pad for the career of guitar deity Eric Clapton. Now featuring the equally dazzling guitarist Jeff Beck, the Yardbirds needed a replacement for bassist Paul Samwell-Smith. Page, all too aware of the drastic drop in income it would entail, stepped into the breach. It wasn’t long before he was playing guitar rather than bass alongside Beck.

  For an all-too-brief period in the fall of 1966, the two men played and recorded together in the Yardbirds as sparring partners, their intertwined licks heard on the far-out single “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” But the band was never going to be big enough for both of them. “Tensions were rising within the group,” recalls then-manager Simon Napier-Bell. “For Jimmy, the problem was that [the] solos were not his own creation. For Jeff, the problem was that Jimmy was stealing half his applause.”

  When the temperamental Beck quit the Yardbirds in October, Page found himself the lead guitarist in a group veering somewhat unsteadily from blues to pop and back.

  If commercially the Yardbirds were in decline, Page’s new prominence within the group gave him an opportunity not only to experiment as a guitarist but to tour the new psychedelic ballrooms of North America. At San Francisco’s legendary acid palace, the Fillmore, gimmicks such as playing his guitar with a violin bow proved irresistible to the heads of Haight-Ashbury.

  “On ‘Glimpses’ I was doing the bowed guitar thing, and I had tapes panning across the stage on this high-fidelity stereo sampler,” Page says. “It was quite avant-garde stuff for the time.”

  With one foot in the 3-minute, 45-rpm pop era and the other in the new album-oriented world of rock, the Yardbirds were in danger of being left behind by hard-hitting new acts such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience; Eric Clapton’s band, Cream; and even the new Jeff Beck Group. “The Yardbirds were quite powerful within their own right,” Page recalled, “but Mickie Most was really just interested in singles and we were interested in albums.”

  There was one person who believed in the Yardbirds, however, and that was the man-mountain who’d taken over from Simon Napier-Bell as their manager. More accurately, Peter Grant believed in Jimmy Page, whose charisma was obvious from the minute he joined the band. Cool and beautiful in an almost effeminate way, Page looked like a new kind of pop star.

  Napier-Bell had informed Grant that Page was a troublemaker, but Grant respected Page’s financial acumen and resolved to fight for the band in their relationship with their record company. Years later, Grant’s wife, Gloria, half-joked that her husband loved Jimmy more than he loved her.

  “When I started managing the Yardbirds,” Grant recalled, “they were not getting the hit singles but were on the college circuit and underground scene in America. Instead of trying to get played on Top 40 radio, I realized there was another market. We were the first UK act to get booked at places like the Fillmore. The scene was changing.”

  Grant, whose massive 6-foot-3-inch frame belied his early years as a wrestler, had worked in partnership with Mickie Most before striking out on his own as a manager. An intimidating if avuncular figure who’d toured with such rock-and-roll legends as Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, Peter was astute enough to see that a new cult of the guitar hero was blossoming around Clapton, Hendrix, and Beck and that Page could be groomed as the next great gunslinger.

  In the spring of 1968, the Yardbirds agreed to call it a day, with a final tour of the United States to complete. One afternoon before departing in March, Page and Grant drove around London’s West End discussing what the future held. “We were in a traffic jam,” Grant recalled, “and I said to Jimmy, ‘What are you going to do? Do you want to go back to sessions or what?’ ” When Jimmy said he had some ideas for a new group and that he wanted to produce as well as play guitar, Grant said simply, “Let’s do it.”

  The tour wound up in Montgomery, Alabama, in early June of 1968, with Page returning to London on June 15. After honoring a last UK commitment in Luton, the Yardbirds were no more. Uncertain of the right direction in which to go, Page and Peter Grant settled on the concept of “the New Yardbirds,” looking to recruit new members alongside original bassist Chris Dreja.

  The latter’s first choice as a replacement for Relf, Mickie Most protégé Terry Reid, declined the job offer but pointed Page in the direction of a singer he described as “the Wild Man from the Black Country.” Thirteen days after the Yardbirds’ muted last hurrah, Page and Grant drove up to a teacher-training college in Birmingham to watch Robert Plant holler away in Hobstweedle. The band wasn’t to Page’s taste, but Plant’s voice, presence, and sexuality were exactly what he was looking for.

  “Robert was all right,” Page said. “He was singing really well, although it was stuff that I didn’t personally like very much. He was a Moby Grape fanatic, and the group was doing all of those semiobscure West Coast songs.” Jimmy told John Tobler and Stuart Grundy that “it seemed really strange … that somebody that good hadn’t emerged before, but it always seems that at the end of the day, someone who’s good will come through.” He added that it “unnerved” him just to listen to Plant’s “primeval wail,” which had evolved from a Stevie Winwood pastiche to a goosebump-inducing shriek.

  Page’s first impression of Plant was of “a big, rugheaded kern [yokel].” Good-natured and curious, the Black Country boy was woefully unsophisticated compared to Page. Plant, by the same token, was overawed by the guitarist. “You can smell when people have traveled and had their doors opened a little wider than most,” he said. “You could feel that was the deal with Jimmy.”

  Within minutes, the two young men were combing through Page’s vinyl collection, pulling out albums and bonding over shared favorites by an eclectic assortment of artists. “We found we had exactly the same tastes in music,” Plant said a few months later. LPs by Larry Williams, Don and Dewey, Incredible String Band, and Buddy Guy spilled across the floor. They played Muddy Waters’ “You Shook Me” and Joan Baez’s “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.”

  “I had a whole sort of repertoire in my mind of songs that I wanted to put into this new format,” Page claimed in 2005. “[Songs] like ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.’ But it was all going to grow; I was seeing this dynamic. It wasn’t down to one particular thing. It wasn’t just the blues or rock and roll or folk music.”

  What struck Plant straightaway was the intensity of Page’s musical drive—an almost feverish need to realize his musical vision. “I don’t think I’d ever come across a personality like it before,” the singer recalled. “He had a demeanor which you had to adjust to; certainly it wasn’t very casual to start with.”

  Unlike Robert, who’d grown up in the bosom of an extended family and social circle, Jimmy was a born loner, an only child whose immersion in the guitar compensated for his lack of companionship.

  “I was trying to build a band,” Page says. “I knew what way it was going to go. I knew how to put the things in place, and I had a good idea of what style of vocalist I was looking for. The whole personality aspect does come into it, but initially the whole thing is, if you’ve got a bond musically and everyone’s got that mutual respect for each other, it should work … at least for a little while.”

  Page, as it happened, had already been contacted by a bass guitarist—an outstanding musician who, like Page, was tiring of the day-in-day-out grind of London studio work. John Baldwin, who’d changed his name to the more fanciful “John Paul Jones,” spotted a small news item in the music press announcing Page’s intention to form his own band from the ashes of the Yardbirds. On July 19, he telephoned the guitarist to offer his servic
es.

  Page and Jones knew each other and had worked together on several occasions. “I’d heard of Pagey before I heard of Clapton or Beck,” Jones has said of the former studio wunderkind. In addition to sessions they’d played together, Jones had arranged strings on the Yardbirds’ 1967 single “Little Games.”

  By early August 1968, Chris Dreja was out of the “New Yardbirds” picture and Jones had clinched the bass spot in the group. “I jumped at the chance to get him,” Page said. “Musically he’s the best musician of us all. He had a proper training and he has quite brilliant ideas.”

  Jones, whose only experience of playing in a proper gigging band had been with ex-Shadows Jet Harris and Tony Meehan 5 years before, relished the chance to become part of a self-contained rock group. Wry and self-effacing, his personality offered a further contrast to the Page/Plant dynamic. “Jonesy,” commented Plant, “was a bit … not withdrawn, but he stands back a little and shoots the odd little bit of dialogue into the air.”

  The final piece of Page’s jigsaw—the drummer— proved the hardest to slot into place. This time the favored candidate came via Robert Plant. John “Bonzo” Bonham had known the singer for years as a fellow product of the music scene around Birmingham and the midlands. Indeed, he had played in the Band of Joy. “[Robert] knows me off by heart and vice versa,” Bonzo told an early interviewer. “I think that’s why we get on so well.”

  “Jimmy rang me up and says, ‘I saw a drummer last night and this guy plays so good and so loud, we must get him,’ ” Peter Grant recalled. But Bonham, already rated as one of the best drummers in England, was less convinced than John Paul Jones of the new group’s long-term potential. Furthermore, he was earning a decent crust as a drummer-for-hire and had a wife and 2-year-old son to support. That summer found him playing behind American singer-songwriter Tim Rose.

  “When I was asked to join the Yardbirds, I thought they’d been forgotten in England,” Bonham explained later. “[But] I knew Jimmy was a highly respected guitarist, and Robert I’d known for years. So even if it didn’t take off, it was a chance to play in a really good group.”

  On July 31, Jimmy Page and Peter Grant went to see Bonham play with Tim Rose at the Country Club in Hampstead. They instantly recognized that the power of John’s drumming would be a priceless addition to the new band. In the first week of August, Bonham drove down to Pangbourne to meet Page. After a few more days of hesitation—and a flurry of pleading telegrams from Grant—he committed to the group.

  On August 19, Jimmy Page’s “New Yardbirds” convened for their first rehearsal in London’s Chinatown. “We all met in this little room just to see if we could even stand each other,” John Paul Jones remembered. “It was wall-to-wall amplifiers and terrible, all old. Robert had heard I was a sessionman, and he was wondering what was going to turn up—some old bloke with a pipe?”

  “I don’t think Jonesy’s ever worked with anybody like me before,” Plant remarked afterward. “Me not knowing any of the rudiments of music or anything like that, and not really desiring to learn them, but still hitting it off.”

  From the second they started bashing out “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” an old Johnny Burnette Trio rocker that regularly featured in the Yardbirds’ repertoire, the quartet felt like kismet. “Jimmy counted it out and the room just exploded,” Jones recalled. “And we said, ‘Right, we’re on, this is it, this is going to work!’ And we just sort of built it up from there.”

  “I’ve never been so turned on in my life,” declared Robert Plant. “Although we were all steeped in blues and R&B, we found out in the first hour and a half that we had our own identity.” Talking to Joe Smith in the late ’80s, the singer admitted the sound wasn’t pretty. “It wasn’t supposed to be a pretty thing,” he said. “It was just an unleashing of energy. But it felt like it was something I always wanted.”

  Within weeks, the group had pieced together a set list out of old Yardbirds numbers and blues covers. Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More Years” morphed into “How Many More Times.” “Dazed and Confused,” a song Page had discovered on an obscure album by American singer-songwriter Jake Holmes, became an extended epic and a vehicle for neopsychedelic jamming. “ ‘Dazed and Confused’ came from the Yardbirds,” Page recalled. “That was my showcase, show-off bit with the bow.” Playing “Dazed” onstage, Page turned into a satanic Paganini, an evil minstrel with his face obscured behind a curtain of black hair.

  “Bonzo and I were already in the freakout zone after the Band of Joy, so it was quite natural for us to go into long solos and pauses and crescendos,” Robert Plant says. “I mean, I listen to things like “How Many More Times” and it swings, and it’s got all those ’60s bits and pieces that could have come off a Nuggets album. For Jimmy, it was an extension of what he did, and for us, it was an extension of what we did.”

  A 2-week Yardbirds tour of Scandinavia having been booked by Peter Grant back in the summer, the radically remolded group made their live debut at the Gladsaxe Teen Club in Copenhagen on September 7, 1968—exactly 2 months to the day since the Yardbirds had played their swansong set in Luton.

  “It was a tentative start,” according to Robert Plant. “We didn’t have half the recklessness that became, for me, the whole joy of Led Zeppelin.” So powerful was Plant’s voice, however, that when the speakers broke down at the band’s first Stockholm show on September 12, in Page’s words, “you could still hear his voice at the back of the auditorium over the entire group.”

  The band was still known as “the New Yardbirds” when they began 2 weeks of recording at Olympic Studios in Barnes, southwest London, on September 27. With the sessions paid for upfront from Jimmy Page’s savings, work proceeded apace. In all, the band logged little more than 30 hours at Olympic.

  The album remains one of the great debuts in rock history, a magnificent showcase of the group’s strengths. “Everything,” said Robert Plant, “was fitting together into a trademark for us.” The sound of Plant’s voice alone—like Janis Joplin with testosterone—was formidable.

  The opening track, “Good Times, Bad Times,” immediately announced that we were in the presence of power—a new kind of energy pointing forward to the ’70s, to bigger riffs and meatier beats. Bonham’s drumming on the track was astounding, almost funky. “The most stunning thing about it, of course, is Bonzo’s amazing kick drum,” Jimmy Page said. “It’s superhuman when you realize he was not playing with double kick. That’s one kick drum! That’s when people started understanding what he was all about.”

  To flow out of “Good Times, Bad Times” into the mournful folk drama of Anne Briggs’s “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” was equally remarkable. The pathos and pain of Plant’s vocal over Page’s plangent picking, followed by thunderous strumming and drum rolls, was hair-raising.

  “The music was so intense that everything was intense,” Plant recalled of the sessions. “The ambition was intense and the delivery was intense. We all knew that this power was ridiculous from the beginning … so it was very hard to relax, sit down and have a beer and be the guys from the Black Country.”

  The band’s “heavy” side was there in abundance in the viscous blues sludge of “You Shook Me” and the swampy bad-trip dread of “Dazed and Confused,” both riding on the restrained power of the band’s rhythm section.

  “I immediately recognized Bonham’s musicality,” says John Paul Jones. “He kept a really straight groove on slow numbers, mainly because he could. And there aren’t many that can—really. To play slow and groove is one of the hardest things in the world. So it was a joy to just sit back on a beat like ‘You Shook Me’ and just ride it.”

  Inspired by Eric Clapton—and before him by such Chicago masters as Otis Rush, Hubert Sumlin, Elmore James, and Buddy Guy—Page turned the Gibson Les Paul guitar into a cauterizing weapon. The Les Paul, Page told Guitar World’s Steven Rosen, had “a beautiful sustain to it, and I like sustain because it relates to bowed instruments and everything; this
whole area that everyone’s been pushing and experimenting in. When you think about it, it’s mainly sustain.”

  But it wasn’t just fat sustain tones that Page specialized in. On that first album, he created radically different sounds for virtually every track. “When people talk about how good other guitarists are,” Robert Plant told Nigel Williamson, “they’re talking about how they play within the accepted structures of contemporary guitar playing, while Jimmy plays miles outside of it.”

  In “Black Mountain Side,” there was a second outing for Page’s acoustic guitar on the album. An homage of sorts to his folk-guitar idol Bert Jansch (and specifically, the latter’s classic “Black Waterside”), the track was a companion piece to “White Summer,” an instrumental adaptation of the folk traditional “She Moves Through the Fair,” which appeared on the Yardbirds’ Little Games album. Both pieces were in D-A-D-G-A-D tuning and featured the Indian hand drums known as tabla.

  The album’s remaining tracks rounded the set out brilliantly: a reverential reading of Otis Rush’s “I Can’t Quit You, Baby,” a Stooges-esque proto-punk classic in “Communication Breakdown,” the loping, brutish “How Many More Times,” and the choral, organ-graced “Your Time Is Gonna Come.” “We were a completely untried group of people,” Jimmy Page told Ritchie Yorke, “who got together to [make an album] that really had only one ingredient that we were sure of—genuine enthusiasm.”

  If the material had a grab-bag feel, the production was awesomely dense. This was the new sound of hard rock, trampling everything underfoot and leaving ’60s pop for dead.

  “Having worked in the studios for so long as a session player,” Page later recalled, “I had been in so many sessions where the drummer was stuck in a little booth and he would be hitting the drums for all he was worth and it would just sound as though he was hitting a cardboard box. I knew that drums would have to breathe to have that proper sound, to have that ambience. So consequently, we were working on the ambience of everything, of the instruments, all the way through.”