“When I was 5 years old,” said Jack White of the White Stripes, “there was a tape at a girl’s house in her basement and “Whole Lotta Love” was on it. And I had rewound it so many times that there was a fuck-up in the tape before the guitar solo. I still think that solo is some of the greatest guitar anyone’s ever played, if not the greatest. Just that little section is so powerful, and it was powerful to me when I was 5 years old. And whenever it comes on the radio now, I still want to rewind that part.”
Most of the riffs on Zeppelin II are blues-rooted— brooding, squalling Les Paul chords overlaid by brighter, glossier licks. But this isn’t the workaday post–John Mayall hippie blues of Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack, or early Fleetwood Mac; it’s down-and-dirty, primeval sex music, blues with what John Bonham called thrutch. “It was still blues-based,” Robert Plant told Nigel Williamson, “but it was a much more carnal approach to the music and quite flamboyant.”
“The Lemon Song” adapted “Killing Floor” by Howlin’ Wolf, most savage of all the bluesmen who migrated north to Chicago. “Whole Lotta Love” was itself a lift from Muddy Waters’s “You Need Love,” whose composer Willie Dixon later received an out-of-court settlement for the song. Dixon also later received money for the album’s closing track “Bring It On Home,” based on a Sonny Boy Williamson song of the same name.
Led Zeppelin’s “reliance” on the blues has many detractors, of course. Like every rock band that emerged from the British blues boom of the ’60s, Zeppelin pilfered riffs from African Americans who’d already been ripped off by their original contracts in the ’40s and ’50s.
It is certainly one of the less attractive aspects of Jimmy Page that he seemed so callously indifferent to the implications of this purloining, often taking song-writing credit where none was merited. Genius may steal where talent borrows, but Page—probably encouraged by Peter Grant, who himself had plenty to gain—was more brazen about it than most.
“I think when Willie Dixon turned on the radio in Chicago 20 years after he wrote his blues, he thought, ‘That’s my song,’ ” Robert Plant said in 1985. “When we ripped it off, I said to Jimmy, ‘Hey, that’s not our song.’ And he said, ‘Shut up and keep walking.’ ”
Page craftily threw this allegation back in Plant’s face in an interview with Guitar World. “Robert was supposed to change the lyrics, and he didn’t always do that,” he said. “[That’s] what brought on most of the grief. They couldn’t get us on the guitar parts of the music, but they nailed us on the lyrics. So anyway, if there is any plagiarism, just blame Robert.”
Blues isn’t all we hear on Led Zeppelin II, of course. Plant himself weighed in with major contributions to “Ramble On” and “Thank You,” the first a Tolkien-inspired beauty that switched brilliantly from acoustic strumming to electric dynamics, the second a heartfelt hymn to his wife, featuring John Paul Jones on organ.
“In the early days, I was writing the lyrics as well as the music, because Robert hadn’t written before,” Jimmy Page recalled. “It took a lot of ribbing and teasing to actually get him into writing, which was funny. And then on the second LP, he wrote the words of “Thank You”—he said, ‘I’d like to have a crack at this and write it for my wife.’ ” Plant claimed that it had “taken a long time, a lot of insecurity and nerves and the ‘I’m a failure’ stuff” to produce the lyrics for the two songs.
“Moby Dick,” meanwhile, showcased the might of John Bonham at a time when drum solos were becoming de rigueur at rock gigs. Bonzo’s playing on Led Zeppelin II in general confirmed that he was an astounding drummer.
“I yell out when I’m playing,” Bonham told Disc in June 1972. “I yell like a bear to give it a boost. I like it to be like a thunderstorm.”
In contrast to the epicene foppishness of Page and Plant, there was something of the bear about Bonzo. Not a teddy bear, mind you, but more a ferocious and probably drunken grizzly. A Birmingham thug possessed of uncanny rhythmic coordination, Bonham was the absolute core of what made Led Zeppelin great.
“He was a great drummer, whether it was a heavy death march or an acoustic thing with small animals cavorting in the meadow,” said Andy Johns, who would soon be engineering for the band. “[He was] a naturally fantastic timekeeper and not a trudge merchant, very creative with sound.”
“[Bonzo] had a lot of input into the riffs we played, more than he was credited for, I’d say,” John Paul Jones reflected. “He would change the whole flavor of a piece, and lots of our numbers would start out with a drum pattern. We’d build a riff around the drums.”
“I’m not trying to be any superstar,” Bonham told Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth in June 1972. “I just do my bit as one-quarter of Led Zeppelin. When I have a solo, I don’t ever imagine drummers around watching me. I don’t try to impress people who play the drums. I play for people. I don’t try to perform the most amazing changes in tempo … it would take away the essence of Jimmy’s guitar and Robert’s voice. John Paul and myself lay down a thick backdrop; that’s what we do.”
In front of a lesser, showier rhythm section, Page and Plant would never have shone so brightly. “You can feel it coming from behind,” Plant told Sounds’s Steve Peacock in June 1971. “The bass and drums suddenly knit together, and it’s like a big handshake between the two and they go off, and Jimmy and I’ll stay doing something else. It’s like a good jigsaw puzzle.”
One of the biggest lies ever told about Led Zeppelin was that their music boiled down to volume and power. When Robert Christgau—“dean of American rock critics”—called Bonham “ham-handed,” you had to wonder what he was listening to. Gene Krupa he may not have been; thoughtless, Bonzo never was. Every fill he played was a little work of art, simple but unique in feel.
“Because it doesn’t swing, [Led Zeppelin’s music] doesn’t set the audience dancing,” the English critic Mick Gold wrote. “It aims for the temples, not the feet, and its total effect is one of stupefaction.”
Doesn’t swing?! Listen to the funky propulsion of “Whole Lotta Love,” to the explosive breaks on “What Is and What Should Never Be,” “Bring It On Home,” and the splendidly lewd “The Lemon Song” and tell me Led Zeppelin doesn’t swing. Thank God the American critic Robert Palmer, writing some years after Gold, noted that after years of crunching hip-hop drum loops, “[Zeppelin’s] lurching beats and staggered rhythms sound a lot different: They swing like mad.”
“You could dance to Led Zeppelin,” says John Paul Jones, who’d been as influenced by Motown maestro James Jamerson as by Chess stalwart Willie Dixon. “Blues wasn’t our only experience of black music. Bonzo and I were both into soul and R&B, and I was into jazz as well.”
In addition to the riffs and “swing” of Led Zeppelin II, the album was a production triumph. If the band’s debut had upped the ante for rock’s new sonic power, Led Zeppelin II left ’60s pop for dead. “The goal was synaesthesia,” Page said. “Creating pictures with sound.”
Critic Ron Ross related such “synaesthesia” to the growing use of “immobilizing” drugs such as marijuana and downers, especially used in conjunction with state-of-the-art headphones. “For many younger teens psychedelic exploration gave way to heavy metal surrender,” Ross wrote. “Page’s approach to producing Zeppelin’s rhythm section seemed to be to create a cavernously resonant bottom with a rock-steady groove that the listener could lay back on like a mattress, while the stereo speakers threw Jimmy’s scintillating solos at him from everywhere at once with piercing psychologically surgical precision.”
“The whole secret of it,” Page said, “is that all you need to do is something that’s got a solid, substantial riff underneath it. We were still doing that but putting interesting, quirky melodies on top of it.”
If Eric Clapton had been “God,” Page’s use of effects—panning, phasing, backward reverb, and the like—made him a sonic sorcerer. In some respects, too, this aural sorcery compensated for his occasional sloppiness, both live and in the studio.
> “As a musician,” Page told Steven Rosen with surprising candor, “I think my greatest achievement has been to create unexpected melodies and harmonies within a rock-and-roll framework. My guitar playing developed because I had that great unit to work with. I don’t really have a technique, as such, when you think of people with technique. But I think it’s harder to come up with fresh ideas, fresh approaches, and a fresh vision.”
For Page, the real goal was to create sonic pictures that moved people, stirring emotion in the listener. His touchstones, significantly, were not ’60s acts such as the Beatles or the Stones but the great blues and rockabilly artists of the preceding decade. He had, after all, learned guitar by playing along to Elvis Presley’s “Baby, Let’s Play House.”
“I still feel that some so-called progressive groups have gone too far with their personalized intellectualization of beat music,” Page told Record Mirror in February 1970. “I don’t want our music complicated by that kind of ego trip—our music is essentially emotional like the old rock stars of the past. It’s difficult to listen to those early Presley records and not feel something. We are not going out to make any kind of moral or political statement. Our music is simply us.”
Harking back to the Sun Records era didn’t alter the fact that, in the words of Donna Gaines, “Led Zeppelin’s grubby, velvet-ruffled sex-bombast slammed us right into the ’70s.” The toppling of the Beatles’ Abbey Road from the No. 1 spot on America’s album chart by Led Zeppelin II was symbolic of the new order that Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham ushered in.
Equally symbolic was Led Zeppelin’s anger at Atlantic’s decision to release “Whole Lotta Love” as a single. The band decided that from then on, it would have no dealings with vinyl at 45 rpm. The ’70s, for them, would be about albums as self-contained wholes, suites of songs rather than ephemeral radio fodder.
“I always thought of the Stones as a pop group who made singles,” Plant said, looking back to the time. “What we said was there’s no point in putting out a single when the album is the statement of the band. It sounds quite pompous now, but underneath it all, that was quite true.”
As if bearing out Plant’s convictions, Zeppelin’s second album stayed on the American charts for months, sustained by the band’s constant touring. Between December 26, 1968, and April 18, 1970, the group played no less than 153 shows, their nightly fee rapidly escalating from $500 to a basic guarantee of $100,000. Peter Grant’s patient strategy had paid off. “We didn’t go to Madison Square Garden straight off,” Grant recalled. “It was gradually built up in all those states like North Carolina. It’s like we built it up into an event. In fact, that was when I came up with that ‘An Evening with Led Zeppelin’ tag. I know it was corny, but it was like the old ’30s stage line. I guess that was a by-product of my days as a 14-year-old stage hand.”
Nothing in the band’s life would ever be the same again. “Playing music is a very sexual act,” Jimmy Page told Disc in April 1972. “But once you earn money, people start assuming things about you and your whole life is changed. You get involved in high finance.”
3
A SOMEWHAT FORGOTTEN PICTURE OF TRUE COMPLETENESS
AT THE DAWN of the ’70s, Led Zeppelin was in pole position. They’d bludgeoned America into submission, stepping into the breach that opened up when Eric Clapton slowed his hand, Jimi Hendrix freed the gypsy funkateer within, and everyone else went solo.
“To begin with, we arrived on the scene at just the right time in America as Cream had disbanded and Hendrix was into other things,” Jimmy Page told Record Mirror in February 1970. “I think our initial success was due to the fact that so many of the good American groups were moving toward softer sounds, which made our heavy rock approach more dramatic.”
Yet the spark had failed to ignite in the band’s own homeland, not least because the British press refused to buy what they perceived as hype. “I think our success in America had an effect on the critique over [here],” said Robert Plant. “It was like, ‘They’ve gone, and who the fuck are they anyway? Oh well, it’s over-blown …’ ”
To rectify this, Peter Grant—who hadn’t helped matters by giving his production company the ironic name Superhype Music, Inc.—set up a short UK tour for the New Year. Kicking off in Bristol and taking in the Plant/Bonham parish of Birmingham, the tour hit London’s venerable Royal Albert Hall on January 9.
“We did some touring in England,” said John Paul Jones, “but it was much harder to get anywhere here because the press wasn’t very interested. So maybe the Albert Hall was the first sort of ‘here we are’ type of show in England. I’ve heard it reported that some of the press thought we were an American band.”
What is fantastic about the Albert Hall footage on DVD is how stark and elemental it is. There are no trippy lights here, no dry-ice clouds or Jaggeresque preening. Just four men, barely more than boys, bound together in intense rhythmic symbiosis, rooted in the most brutal, pulverizing grooves ever devised: “Dazed and Confused,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Communication Breakdown,” “How Many More Times.”
John Paul Jones—a heavy metal monk. John Bonham—all moustache and muscles. Jimmy Page in a sleeveless harlequin sweater. Robert Plant’s pre-Raphaelite face all but obscured behind a flaming mane of hair.
“At the Albert Hall, I was 21, and I was just a Black Country hippie,” the singer says. “I was hanging on for dear life, weaving my way through the three greatest players of their time. It was an absolute shock when I first saw that footage. It’s so disarming—not unnerving but kind of cute and coy, and you see all that sort of naivety and the absolute wonder of what we were doing. And the freshness of it, because the whole sort of stereotypical rock-singer thing hadn’t kicked in for me.”
“The power came from the music,” says John Paul Jones. “You didn’t notice that there wasn’t a set, because the music drew you in. And there wasn’t much leaping about the stage, because everybody was working hard and concentrating. People say to me, ‘You can just see the communication on the stage, and my band doesn’t do that. It’s like we’re all in separate bands.’ Our priority in Led Zeppelin was to make Led Zeppelin sound great, and if that meant playing two notes in a bar and shutting up for a bit, that’s what it took.”
At the end of March 1970, Zeppelin took its empathy and telepathy back to America. It was their fifth US tour in 18 months, and this time it was less of a blast. With the country in the throes of Vietnam-related violence—the Kent State campus shootings were just around the corner—the band was on edge. Peter Grant and road manager Richard Cole got into scrapes with promoters. John Bonham became homesick and restless, taking out his feelings on hotel rooms. A show had to be stopped when a brawl erupted in Pittsburgh. Another promoter pulled a gun on Grant in Memphis. Southern cops hassled the limey longhairs. Plant suffered stage fright. “More than anyone,” wrote Richard Cole, “Robert seemed on the brink of collapse.”
“I don’t think we can take America again for a while,” John Paul Jones remarked on their return. “America definitely unhinges you. The knack is to hinge yourself up again when you get back.”
“We’d toured on the strength of the first album,” says Jimmy Page, “and then we just toured and toured and toured. In between times, we fitted in a small amount of recording at Olympic, where we did part of “Ramble On” and “Whole Lotta Love” and a couple of others, and the rest of Led Zeppelin II was recorded at various times, and finally I mixed it with Eddie Kramer in New York. And then we were touring on the strength of the second album. And finally we had a real break, and it was probably only a couple of months, but to us it seemed an eternity.”
Back in England in the last week of April, Jones and Bonham scuttled back to the safety of their new rock-star homes. Jones had moved into a big house in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, with his wife, Mo, and their two daughters. Bonham had swapped the caravan he’d shared with his wife, Pat, for a farmhouse and 15 acres at West Hagley, outside Birmingham.
But there was no extended rest for the wicked, or at least for the band’s principal songwriters. Apart from any other considerations, Atlantic was owed another album. For a change of scenery, and perhaps inspiration, Plant suggested to Page that they hole up with partners—plus Plant’s baby daughter, Carmen, and dog, Strider—in a remote Welsh cottage called Bron-Yr-Aur (pronounced “Bron-raar”). It was a place Plant had often visited in his boyhood.
“Jimmy and I are going to rent a little cottage near the River Dyfi in Wales,” Robert told Disc in March 1970. “[It’s a place] where we can lock ourselves away for a few weeks just to see what we can come up with when there’s no one else around.”
“Robert had this place that he’d been to with his parents in the past, and he asked if I fancied coming down there,” recalls Page. “I said it would do me a lot of good to get out to the countryside. And what came out on our third album was a reflection of the fact that the pendulum had swung in the total opposite direction from all that Led Zeppelin II live thing and the energy of being on the road. It was like, ‘Oh, we’re here, we’re in nature, we can hear the birds sing, there’s not a car sound, there’s no airplanes, there’s no concert to do.’ It was just fantastic.”
So fantastic that Page and his French girlfriend, Charlotte Martin, conceived their daughter, Scarlet, at Bron-Yr-Aur, not long after he and Plant had been on the long walk that led to the writing of “That’s the Way,” just one of several folkish songs to be included on Led Zeppelin III. The cottage—Page and Plant’s version of the Band’s Big Pink—may also have inspired Page to purchase his own bucolic retreat on the shores of Loch Ness. Boleskine House was the former residence of Satanist magus Aleister Crowley, about whom the guitarist was rather enthusiastic.
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