Led Zeppelin FAQ

by George Case

  Sunshine Superman: Led Zeppelin and Donovan

  Donovan Leitch, the English minstrel responsible for the 1968 hit “Sunshine Superman” as well as flower-power classics “Jennifer Juniper,” “Wear Your Love Like Heaven,” and “Mellow Yellow,” has often claimed that Led Zeppelin was a direct by-product of his own studio dates. Most recently he has put forward the story in a 2005 autobiography, The Hurdy Gurdy Man, suggesting that all the future members of Led Zeppelin but Robert Plant provided the backing tracks for “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” This seems to be another case of intentional amnesia: Busy pros Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones had worked for Donovan on “Sunshine Superman” and other material, and it may well have been at a session for the eventual album titled Hurdy Gurdy Man that Page and Jones first mentioned working together in a full-time band (though it would not have been the occasion of their first meeting), but John Bonham was not a studio drummer and did not work with either Page or Jones prior to the formation of Led Zeppelin. Moreover, the guitarist on the “Hurdy Gurdy Man” cut has been variously identified as Alan Parker, Allan Holdsworth, or an Ollie Halsall, not Jimmy Page. In the 1960s the popular Donovan was close to other luminaries like the Beatles and Bob Dylan, but his recollections of being the catalyst for Zeppelin are either deliberately exaggerated or chemically confused. It’s possible, too, that Page and Jones had earlier talked of future plans while in the studio for Keith De Groot’s No Introduction Necessary, released in 1968. Page, Jones, Bonham and Plant did provide backing together in sessions for P. J. Proby’s Three Week Hero just before their initial Scandinavian shows as the New Yardbirds.

  Ain’t Disclosin’ No Names: The Origins and Significance of “Led Zeppelin”

  Given that stages are usually elevated from the floor of any theater, show people of all varieties have always sought to “go over” with their audiences, meaning to hold the attention of the people sitting out from and below them; for a play, song, or joke to “fall flat” is to have the performance receive no enthusiasm from whoever has come to watch, metaphorically tumbling down from the musician or actor on the boards to some humiliating space in front of the first row. In an idiom that seems to have originated somewhere in the early twentieth century, any presentation or speech that receives a welcome reception has “gone over.” From this, a mocking opposite arose: something floated in hopes of applause or approval but which gets none has “gone over like a lead balloon.”

  In 1966, Jimmy Page, then one of London’s most in-demand session guitarists, participated in a recording date with his friend Jeff Beck, guitarist for the Yardbirds, along with session bassist John Paul Jones, Keith Moon, drummer for the up-and-coming Who, and keyboardist Nicky Hopkins. Though the lineup was only an ad hoc one that produced the lone instrumental “Beck’s Bolero” (eventually included on Beck’s 1968 album Truth), the musicians enjoyed working together. Page and Beck especially liked collaborating with the frenetic Moon and knew he and his partner in the Who’s rhythm section, thunderous bass player John Entwistle, were each dissatisfied with their roles in that quartet. Excited by expectations of making “super hooligan music” together, Beck, Page, Moon, and Entwistle casually discussed forming a permanent band. Nothing came of it, especially as their preferred singer, Steve Marriott of the Small Faces, was managed by a hard-nosed and very protective Don Arden (“How would you like a group with no fingers, boys?” he threatened), but Moon and Entwistle were each said to have remarked ironically that their union would “go down like a lead zeppelin.” “Keith and I decided we’d go off and form a band with Richard Cole, who used to be our chauffeur,” Entwistle was to remember in Geoffrey Giuliano’s Pete Townshend biography, Behind Blue Eyes (Cole, of course, became Led Zeppelin’s road manager). “A big band making much more money than the Who could ever make… I’d designed a cover of an R-101 zeppelin going down in flames. I was gonna do it in black and white, very subtle.” Two years later, Page resurrected the quip and the picture when naming his new group.

  It says much about Led Zeppelin’s influence that the word zeppelin today is probably more likely to summon images of long-haired rock stars than of German dirigibles, but in the late 1960s the original zeppelins were still a fearsome living memory in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the United States. Devised and championed by an aristocrat of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the vast lighter-than-air craft were in the early twentieth century the state of the art in aeronautics, first deployed as passenger carriers and then recruited into the military for reconnaissance and, later, bombing (each of the count’s airships were numbered by the designation Luftschiff Zeppelin, hence LZ 1, LZ 2, and so on). During World War I more than five hundred Britons were killed in zeppelin air raids, and more than a thousand injured. German bombs and rockets caused even more British fatalities in World War II, leaving a grudging, vengeful respect for Teutonic militarism that was still current in 1968. Of course, the airships were borne aloft by very flammable hydrogen gas, making them spectacularly vulnerable to accidents or British gunfire, and the giants were finally outmoded by the late 1930s when airplanes proved speedier and safer. The Nazi zeppelin Hindenburg exploded and burned in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937, following a transatlantic flight; photographs and newsreels of the disaster captured its awesome horror for posterity. “Going down like

  Led Zeppelin shortly after their ascension in the fall of 1968.

  Courtesy of Robert Rodriguez

  a lead zeppelin,” then, invoked not merely an embarrassing flop but a kind of holocaust, a cataclysm that destroyed performer and spectator alike.

  Jimmy Page and his manager Peter Grant had already rejected “Mad Dogs” and “Whoopee Cushion” as names for Page’s nascent band, although Page later claimed he would have christened it as casually as “the Vegetables” or “the Potatoes,” such was his preoccupation with the group’s sound. But in 1968 there was already a trend

  The Beck-Page incarnation of the Yardbirds lasted only a few months in late 1966.

  Courtesy of Robert Rodriguez

  for rock groups (most of them American) billed with incongruous, oxymoronic juxtapositions: Moby Grape, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, Soft Machine, the Electric Prunes, Pink Floyd, the Jefferson Airplane, and notably Iron Butterfly, whose droning “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” had been a huge underground hit. As well, the literal senselessness of all these terms would have carried a druggy resonance for their target audiences of the late 1960s. The final touch was to modify the adjective, subtracting the a from Lead to avoid mispronunciation. “I played around with the letters,” remembered Peter Grant, “doodling in the office and realized that ‘Led’ looked a lot simpler.” Though most readers would have got the pun soon enough, the intentional misspelling was a blunt, brutal sneer at phonetic niceties, which had a huge impact on pop linguistics in years to come, culminating in the likes of Def Leppard, Megadeth, Ratt, Mötley Crüe, the Geto Boys, Ludacris, Boyz II Men, and their unlettered brethren. For an offhand aside meant to be self-deprecating, “Led Zeppelin” has proven one of the most memorable and effective show business titles of all time.

  6

  When the Guitars Play

  Led Zeppelin’s Key Musical Instruments

  How Much There Is to Know: Guitars, Basses, Drums, Keyboards, and Other Gear

  A band that made musical virtuosity so much a part of its spectacle—epic guitar solos, superhuman drum marathons, tasty keyboard excursions—was bound to have its equipment heavily scrutinized by listeners and aspiring players, wondering just what made performers like Jimmy Page, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones so good. The visual appeal of Page’s double-neck guitar or Bonham’s see-through drums is as much a part of the Led Zeppelin attraction as any song, album cover, or personal reputation; no self-respecting Zeppelin tribute band would today take the stage without at least a Les Paul, a Fender Jazz bass, or a Ludwig kit.

  It’s often forgotten, however, that the Led Zeppelin band members considered themselves a working
act with little time to fuss over what tools they did their jobs with. Jimmy Page’s summary of purchasing his 1959 Gibson Les Paul from Joe Walsh in 1969 has been a simple “It just seemed like a good touring guitar,” and he has characterized his early lineup of instruments and accessories as “basically whatever we could afford at that time.” He has also said his main consideration in picking Marshall amplifiers was their “state-of-the-art reliability. They were really good for going out on the road.” Likewise, John Paul Jones told Guitar Player magazine in 2003 that John Bonham would “sit down on horrible kits that hardly sounded better than the cases they came in, and he still sounded like John Bonham.” Led Zeppelin III engineer Terry Manning has confirmed, “As nostalgic, vintage, or mythological as it may seem to people now to have worked in these supposedly golden days with all that vintage gear, it just wasn’t thought of in that way at that time. We just used what we had and did the best we could.” Notwithstanding the claims of advertisers and the scholarship of curators, all the great instrumentalists in pop music considered their axes to be mere vehicles for their art; logging the make and model of each implement could be left to someone else. The research and debate expended over the provenance of Led Zeppelin’s guitars, basses, keyboards, amplifiers, effects, and drums have far outstripped whatever research and debate went into selecting them in the first place. Referring only occasionally to the hazy memories of their owners and custodians, collectors and archivists have arrived at a complete inventory of the instruments played by the group from 1968 to 1980. From a musical standpoint, here are Led Zeppelin’s most valuable pieces of equipment.

  Jimmy Page

  Page began Led Zeppelin’s onslaught with a 1959 Fender Telecaster, acquired around 1965 as a gift from Jeff Beck. He’d used this guitar in the Yardbirds, then on the Led Zeppelin LP and for the band’s live sets up to the spring of 1969. This Tele began its life white but was given an op-art paint job by Page while a Yardbird, then scraped down sometime in 1967 and decorated with a psychedelic dragon. It was also the source of the soaring “Stairway to Heaven” guitar solo. The Telecaster was retired after a friend of Page’s repainted it yet again, affecting its wiring, although Page managed to save the neck and attach it to another Fender, a brown 1953 Telecaster. That guitar was equipped with a B-bender device, a push-button effect that allowed the player to get pedal-style tremolo effects with the B string alone; Page took it out for Led Zeppelin’s appearances in ’77, ’79, and ’80. Another Tele, this one a cream-colored ’66, was taken on the 1980 European tour.

  In April of ’69 Page bought a 1959 Gibson Les Paul for $500 from Joe Walsh. Until the late 1960s, Gibson solid-body electrics, with their humbucking pickups that produced a lower, thicker sound than those of the bright Fender line, were something of a second choice among rock ’n’ roll guitarists. It was ex-Yardbird Eric Clapton who revived the Gibson brand as a member of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (Les Pauls were discontinued by the company between 1961 and 1969), demonstrating the effectiveness of a Les Paul when plugged into an overdriven amplifier: suddenly the round tones made by the pickups became the sustained, stinging notes that virtually defined hard rock and its descendants from then on. Page first told Walsh, “I’m quite happy with my Telecaster,” but after trying it out he was converted—“[T]he Les Paul was so gorgeous and easy to play.” Guitar hero Page won even more public attention for Les Pauls in the following decade. The Walsh instrument went through much wear and tear during

  Jimmy Page’s various instruments, such as his Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck, have become stars in their own right.

  Author’s Collection

  the next few years but remained Page’s “Number One” electric guitar over his Zeppelin career and beyond. The guitar was customized with a neck shave to ease playability while Walsh owned it (which erased its serial number); Page himself fitted the Number One with Grover tuning heads shortly after taking it on, and commissioned electronic modifications on it well after 1980. Because it lacks an accurate registration stamp some buffs debate whether Number One is a 1959 or ’58 issue, but most Gibson experts cite it as a ’59.

  A second Les Paul, this one a definite 1959, was purchased by Page in 1973 and used onstage for Zeppelin’s ’75 tour. “Number Two,” serial number 91703, was nearly identical to Walsh’s sunburst Les Paul and is sometimes assumed to have been interchangeable with it, but the Number One has seen considerably more stage time. A 1969 or ’70 Gibson Les Paul, painted crimson, was also employed during Page’s Zeppelin tenure, and a 1950s Les Paul, also made over in red, was brought out on the ’77 tour. A fifth Les Paul owned by Page was in fact his first, a three-pickup Custom “Black Beauty” that he used on his studio work in the 1960s, and at Led Zeppelin’s 1970 Royal Albert Hall show, but the guitar was stolen in transit between the US and Canada later that year. It hasn’t been seen since. Given that all Page’s electrics were maintained and given spot repairs by him, members of the road crew, or local servicemen, the confusion around which exact axe he was wielding at any one time is understandable. In retrospect it’s obvious that the guitarist’s main concern was having at least one functioning guitar on hand for every show or studio date, regardless of which one it was or to what cosmetic work it might be subject. Photographs from the Zeppelin years show him playing his quintet of Les Pauls for different performances in different settings (Number Two was tuned to DADGAD for “Kashmir” in 1975), although the Walsh Gibson was his most favored. Number One and Number Two are still in his possession.

  The guitar most casual fans would associate with Jimmy Page is his custom-made Gibson EDS 1275 double-neck, serial number 911117, acquired in early 1971. Gibson had made a number of double-neck models in different configurations, but their weight and price made them little more than novelties; Page requested the company specially build him a twelve- and six-string instrument on which he could play “Stairway to Heaven” (the original recording of which utilized four guitars) in concert. It also carried an undeniable aesthetic quality, especially as it was associated by spectators mostly with “Stairway” and other anthems such as “The Rain Song” and “The Song Remains the Same.” This guitar too is still owned by Page, and its value has been appraised at £50,000.

  For songs played with a slide or in open tunings, Page used a low-cost Danelectro 3021 electric—or rather, selected components of two married together. This odd and distinctly homely guitar was seen onstage while he performed “White Summer / Black Mountain Side,” “In My Time of Dying,” and, in 1977 and after, “Kashmir.” A 1964 Lake Placid Blue Fender Stratocaster, bought by Page in 1975, was played at Zeppelin’s Earl’s Court, Knebworth, and 1980 European concerts, and on songs from Presence (“For Your Life”) and In Through the Out Door (“In the Evening”). A Fender XII twelve-string electric chimed through studio renditions of “Stairway to Heaven,” “When the Levee Breaks,” “The Song Remains the Same,” and possibly “Thank You.”

  Page’s acoustic arsenal was smaller but still eclectic. Most Led Zeppelin sit-down sets were played on a Martin D-28, although he also owned and used a Harmony Sovereign (this was also likely used for the intro to “Stairway”), a lute-shaped Giannini Craviola, and borrowed from session colleague Jim Sullivan a Gibson J-200 for “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” and “Black Mountain Side” on the group’s first record. Gibson A-2 and A-4 mandolins were on hand for recording and live performances of “The Battle of Evermore.” A Vega banjo was plunked through “Gallows Pole,” while a Fender 800 pedal steel can be heard warbling in “Your Time Is Gonna Come” and “Tangerine.”

  Though he tried several varieties of guitar amplifiers during Led Zeppelin’s busy working nights of 1968 and 1969, including Rickenbackers, Voxes, Hiwatts, and Oranges, Jimmy Page seemed to settle on Marshall units for stage shows from about 1972 to this day. All of Page’s amps were modified and customized by the manufacturers or outside electricians—Page himself was no techie—with the guitarist’s key issue being
the consistency of their gain (distortion) and the endurance of their tubes over many nights of being trucked to and from venues and played at high volume. Page again brought a number of amp models to the studios, including Marshalls, although a smallish Supro Coronado supplied the killer crunch of Led Zeppelin, where its twelve-inch speaker projected a bigger sound onto tape than a larger amp’s set to a lower volume.

  Page was among the first rock ’n’ roll guitarists to base his sound around outboard effects such as fuzz, echo, and wah-wah. As a session man in the 1960s he’d asked electronics whiz Roger Mayer to alter or scratch-build some devices for him, but once in Zeppelin he stuck with a Sola Sound Tonebender distortion footswitch pedal, a range of Vox wah pedals (including the popular Cry Baby), a Maestro Echoplex, and later an MXR Phase box. Of these, the Tonebender probably had the biggest impact on Led Zeppelin’s sound. Compared to the highly specialized delay and distortion gadgets and entire digital rigs available to musicians today, all of these were primitive tools that Page was plainly trying out and choosing in a hit-or-miss fashion (especially given the unpredictable acoustics of concert sites). “All I had to really work with was an overdrive pedal, a wah-wah, an Echoplex, and what was on my guitar,” he admitted in a 2007 Guitar World interview. “It wasn’t a lot, and I had to create the entire range of sounds found on the first five Zeppelin albums.” Though Page has long had a relationship with the Gibson guitar firm and licensed several “signature” replicas of his most famous guitars, he has never endorsed or been tied to any single effects product. The one non-guitar accessory specifically identified with Page was his Sonic Wave theremin, an updated, compact version of the futuristic 1920s antenna instrument that produced musical notes and interplanetary sounds by the player manipulating his hands around it; Page’s theremin was run through an Orange amp and the Echoplex in concert, where it made the freaky timbres of “Dazed and Confused,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “No Quarter.” Page has also said that he took old violin bows to use on his guitar for live settings, where a single rendition of “Dazed and Confused” was enough to leave a bow useless. “[N]ew violin bows are expensive, so what we would do is buy a bunch of warped ones and take them on the road.”