Led Zeppelin FAQ

by George Case

  Lynn Collins

  Collins was named as a Page fling from his Yardbirds gigs in the US (a photograph of her appears in Richard Cole’s Stairway to Heaven) who may have still been around when the Zeppelin rose.

  Bebe Buell

  A Playboy model and girlfriend of guitarist Todd Rundgren, she had a short-lived relationship with Jimmy Page in 1974. She too authored a book of her wild life in the 1970s, Rebel Heart, which also describes her romances with Elvis Costello, Mick Jagger, and Steve Tyler of Aerosmith, who fathered her child, actress Liv Tyler.

  Audrey Hamilton

  A Texan brunette linked to Robert Plant in 1977, Hamilton was reportedly the inspiration for Led Zeppelin’s “Hot Dog.”

  Krissy Wood

  Wife of Ron Wood of the Faces and the Rolling Stones, she was seen off and on with Jimmy Page in the later years of Led Zeppelin after some bizarre partner-swapping at Wood’s English home in 1974 (Ronnie, Wood’s 2007 autobiography, makes no mention of this). Though she also was said to have had relationships with Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and John Lennon, the English Krissy (nee Findlay) was not really a groupie in the conventional camp-following sense. Her participation in the sex-drugs-and-rock-’n’-roll lifestyle, which she shared with Page during his most strung-out years, took its toll. Divorced from Wood in 1978, she died in poverty at age fifty-seven in 2005.

  Linda Aldretti

  Named as an American girlfriend of John Bonham in Pamela Des Barres’s Rock Bottom.

  “Little Rock” Connie Hamzy

  The infamous “Sweet Sweet Connie” of Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band,” and one of the most brazen groupies of her era, Connie Hamzy claimed affairs with both Jimmy Page in 1971 and John Bonham the next year; she later included Arkansas governor Bill Clinton as a notch on her bedpost. She was with Page and Bonham in New Orleans, as Led Zeppelin never performed in Little Rock. Unashamedly promiscuous when it came to visiting rock stars, her other brushes with greatness were Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, Joe Walsh, Carlos Santana, and (by her own estimate) a literal cast of thousands. As with many of the most active groupies, her encounters usually extended only as far as a perfunctory BJ rather than anything more personal. She recorded her accomplishments in a book, Rock Groupie.

  Cynthia “Plaster Caster” Albritton

  Albritton was a mainstay of the Plaster Casters sculptress group, a Chicago trio who made models of rock stars’ erections, taken from life. For the sheer kinkiness of their method, the Plaster Casters received a lot of attention in their day (and recognition in an eponymous Kiss song), though a complete list of their trophies is difficult to come by. The Casters’ most famous sample is of Jimi Hendrix, but at some point around 1969–70, it seems likely that one or more of the men in Led Zeppelin posed for them—see the previous “quite fun” comment by Robert Plant.

  Sable Starr

  Starr was a friend of Lori Mattix who elbowed her way into the Zeppelin circle in 1972, and a reported Page conquest. Born Sable Shields, she went on to longer relationships with Iggy Pop and Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, and died of a brain tumor in 2009 at age fifty-one.

  Morgana Welch

  Slightly older than Lori Mattix and Sable Starr, Morgana frequented the Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip and cited both Robert Plant and the less rakish John Paul Jones as encounters in the early 1970s. Apparently Roy Harper was even in on one session, with more than his hat off. Morgana and her friend Tyla (last name unknown) led the LA Queens, a set of teenage groupies who placed themselves at the center of wherever British rockers congregated—they are immortalized in Zeppelin’s “Sick Again,” from Physical Graffiti. Of the attraction between Led Zeppelin and their Angeleno groupies, “There was definitely a mutual thing happening,” she told Michael Walker in Laurel Canyon. “The California-Girl-blond-hair-suntan was very appealing to them; conversely, the English-dark-hair-never-see-the-sunshine thing was very interesting to us.” Morgana Welch’s own book—were you surprised she has one?—is Hollywood Diaries, published in 2007.

  Queenie

  Known only by her nickname (some sources call her Lynn), Queenie hung out with Lori Mattix and Sable Starr in LA and reputedly was one of Jimmy Page’s groupies in 1972. Other of her special friends are said to have been David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Rod Stewart, and David Johansen of the New York Dolls.

  Michele Overman

  Overman was mentioned in Des Barres’s I’m with the Band as a Robert Plant amour in 1969.

  Catherine James

  A Los Angeles friend of Jimmy Page who was jettisoned for Miss Pamela in 1969 but had occasional rendezvous with the guitarist later, she described her romance with Page and others, including Mick Jagger, Jackson Browne, and Denny Laine of the Moody Blues, in a 2007 book, Dandelion: Memoir of a Free Spirit. “The silhouette of Jimmy cloaked in shimmery velvet, moons and stars, and the haunting, abandoned sound of the bow gliding across his guitar were enchantingly sensual,” she writes. As late as 1995, she accompanied Page to Led Zeppelin’s induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

  Barbara the Butter Queen

  The Butter Queen was known in the 1970s for her liberal use of the dairy product as a lubricant, and mentioned by Robert Plant at a Fort Worth, Texas, concert in ’73. At least one meeting with someone in the Led Zeppelin party may be conjectured, although details are slippery.

  Timeline

  1975

  January–March: Led Zeppelin tour North America.

  February 24: Physical Graffiti released.

  April 30: Saigon falls to North Vietnamese troops.

  May: Led Zeppelin performs five sold-out shows at Earl’s Court, London.

  June 13: Inflation in UK reaches 25 percent.

  August 4: Robert Plant and family injured in car accident, Greece.

  September 27: Parents of comatose Karen Ann Quinlan make court request to disconnect her respirator.

  October 29: New York City in financial crisis.

  November–December: Led Zeppelin record Presence, Munich.

  Movies: Jaws; One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Nashville.

  Music: Aerosmith, Toys in the Attic; Queen, A Night at the Opera; Kiss, Alive!; Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run; Sweet, “Ballroom Blitz”; The Captain and Tennille, “Love Will Keep Us Together”; The Eagles, “One of These Nights.”

  17

  Love Some Other Man Too

  Led Zeppelin as Song Swipers

  Made Me Mad Mad Mad: Zeppelin and Other People’s Songs

  Some of the accusations directed against Led Zeppelin are far-fetched calumnies whose origins, wherever they lie, are well removed from anything the band actually said or did, but the charges of plagiarism are not among them. These go back to the group’s first two albums in 1969 and have multiplied ever after, fed both by full-time critics suspicious of the quartet’s apparently instant fame and by more mature or more knowledgeable listeners recognizing other artists’ lyrics or riffs in Zeppelin material. The “blues thievery” allegations have snowballed until, by today, a disturbing portion of the whole Led Zeppelin catalogue (including their most celebrated work) is said to have been copied without due courtesy from elsewhere. In courts of law and public opinion, the controversy continues.

  Two schools of thought have arisen out of this. The lenient one maintains that any misappropriation of older music by the members of Led Zeppelin was either accidental or inadvertent: something that had always been done, as an accepted and necessary recourse, with long chains of performers commonly putting their personal stamp on traditional work until someone—the “songwriter”—got around to applying for copyright. Delving into an extensive library of folk and blues tunes and updating them with new electronic technology, Led Zeppelin only popularized pieces that had hitherto languished in obscurity, and then were blamed by elitist reviewers for their success. In this reading, Zeppelin was actually the victim of jealous, pedantic, and self-righteous outsiders with cynical, exclusionary agendas
of their own.

  The less sympathetic interpretation holds that the cynicism was Led Zeppelin’s, and Jimmy Page’s in particular. Young and handsome white Englishmen, backed by a major record label and extremely protective management, knowingly lifted words, music, and ideas from middle-aged, vulnerable, or uncommercial acts that lacked the legal means to defend their own intellectual property. That some of the acts were African American added implications of racism to the thievery indictment. Thus Led Zeppelin were guilty of exploitation on two levels: First they ripped off poor black people’s songs, then they took advantage of their middle-class white audience, feeding counterfeit sounds to a ripe market too crass and too gullible to distinguish them from the real thing.

  The truth, as it so often does, lies somewhere in between. Many of Led Zeppelin’s “steals” were discerned only in retrospect, as musicologists or the musicians themselves reexamined the sources of hit tunes and connected them with some lesser-known predecessor the singer or the instrumentalists had only vaguely recalled when laying the tracks down in the studio. “You only get caught when you’re successful—that’s the game,” Robert Plant has shrugged. Sometimes the supposedly plagiarized song was itself a composite of several prior inspirations that had floated around decades before pop music or even recorded sound. In other instances a hurried ad lib was used in lieu of an eventual (it was hoped) substitution, as John Paul Jones explained to Susan Fast: “Songs attributed to all four members were usually worked out in the studio in the ‘writing period’ before recording began…. Robert would sing along lyrics from blues songs that he already knew in order to get a melody and/or phrasing and would rewrite them later (or not!).”

  Both Jones and Jimmy Page have been quick to point to Plant as the main culprit in Zeppelin’s perceived royalty robberies. “I always tried to bring something fresh to anything that I used,” Page claimed to Guitar World’s Brad Tolinski. “I think in most cases you would never know what the original source would be…. So most of the comparisons rest on the lyrics.” Page has added that it was only upon the 1997 release of the group’s BBC Sessions (featuring Zeppelin radio performances from 1969 and 1971) that he discovered that their hard rock run-through of “The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair” took its title and lyrics from a song of some forty years before by Sleepy John Estes (1899–1977). Certainly Plant was prone to using his almost unconscious absorption of blues lines as convenient fodder for his vocals, as detected on “How Many More Times,” “Custard Pie,” “The Lemon Song,” and others, with little regard for verbal coherence; “Misty Mountain Hop” even has a bit of “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” in it, and during the fadeout of “Gallows Pole” he throws in some of the Mother Goose rhyme “See-Saw, Margery Daw.”

  So far, this sounds innocent. For the youthful auditors and spectators of Led Zeppelin’s first performances, Plant’s Mississippi wails and moans would have only signified the band’s genre as “electric blues”—punters could spot their general style but not any specific song from which they were taken. Plenty of other acts of the day were doing something similar, from Cream (“Crossroads”), Hendrix (“Red House”), the Rolling Stones (“Parachute Woman”), and the Beatles (“Yer Blues”) through Canned Heat, the original Fleetwood Mac, and Johnny Winter. These offerings might have been clumsy imitations or coarsened reductions, but to fans they still sounded more authentic than most other pop songs of the decade. (The 2001 film Ghost World has a scene where a country blues nerd is reluctantly taken to see a “blues band,” which turns out to be a group of glam white players screaming how they’ve been “picking cotton all day” between distorted electric guitar solos.) The difficulty emerges when numerous Zeppelin cuts appear to derive not from a distant tradition but recent or even contemporaneous music.

  It may be helpful to point out that none of the Led Zeppelin musicians were considered songwriters when the band formed, and even the Page-Plant composing partnership only took shape after the two had been recording and touring together for some time. In the pop music scene of the late 1960s, independent players who both wrote and performed their own music were still a rarity, albeit an expanding one—for every Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Brian Wilson, or Lennon & McCartney, there were considerably more acts scoring with ready-made tunes by professional tunesmiths or putting their own twists on already popular songs. Robert Plant and John Bonham had paid their dues in what we would call cover bands, doing sets of hip but not overexposed American and British numbers from varying eras, and as session men Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones had been responsible for backing up or enhancing arrangements put before them more or less completed. Led Zeppelin was not initially designed to be a vehicle for original songs—much less deep poetry or provocative political messages—but original sounds, and with the hectic traveling and recording itineraries of their first thirty-six months their scramble for new material was a haphazard one.

  More contentiously, Page and Peter Grant had built Zeppelin around the premise of financial and creative security: “I wanted artistic control in a vice grip,” the guitarist was to remember. Both had seen other acts break down or lose out through sloppy management or careless production, and both were determined not to miss any potential revenues as had the Yardbirds or the one-hit wonders of Page’s many session jobs. Attaching his or his bandmates’ names to a Zeppelin publishing credit may have been no more than a precautionary move—a way to ensure that whatever royalties were earned from their records (whose huge long-term sales they would not have foreseen in ’68 or ’69) were sent to them first. “If something was derived from the blues, I tried to split the credit between band members,” he has added. Robert Plant, for his part, has joked that Page met his objections to Led Zeppelin’s authorship claims with a conspiratorial “Shut up and keep walking.” Again, the motivation behind these seems to be not to deprive others of legitimate income but to assert a legal stake in a given Zeppelin song for the players who had changed or added to whatever framework previously existed.

  Page’s definition of “derived from the blues” is the touchy one. Most major Led Zeppelin plagiarism complaints, including the formally litigated ones, are over electric or country blues songs sourced as far back as four decades or as recently as a few years: “How Many More Times,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “The Lemon Song,” “Bring It On Home,” “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper,” “Custard Pie,” “In My Time of Dying,” and “Nobody’s Fault but Mine.” Page, as producer of the records and filer of songwriting information, either thought the quartet was getting away with something, or was truly ignorant of the various literal and musical components that went into the Zeppelin cuts. Both scenarios are plausible. Jimmy Page was no sucker and known to be tight with his money—why would he give away royalties if no one caught on that he wasn’t entitled to them? However, though Page and Plant were blues fans and collectors of blues records, they were perhaps too young and too busy to be very careful blues scholars. Armchair music historians may piece together the bases of the material well after the fact, but working musicians didn’t have the luxury of transcribing every fragment of lyric or lick down to its inception. Note too that the searing covers of “You Shook Me” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” on Led Zeppelin’s very first album, were from the beginning properly cited as Willie Dixon originals, an unlikely step by people bent on poaching every last dime from black blues singers.

  This is at the heart of the Zeppelin plagiarism issue: What if the provenance of every disputed track was scrupulously referenced? What if “Black Mountain Side” was put down to Bert Jansch, and what if Bobby Parker’s name was attached to “Moby Dick”? In that case, instead of complaining that the hyped pretty boys in Led Zeppelin shamelessly pilfered money from homely but more genuine artists, critics would say either that Zeppelin bastardized others’ work while borrowing their folk or blues credibility with unjustified name-checks, or that Zeppelin foolishly gave away credits to musicians who were at most vaguely responsible for the final results.
It was, and to some extent remains, a no-win situation. In reality, sometimes Page and his mates seemed to be operating out of ignorance or amnesia, other times out of haste, and other times out of sheer chutzpah, none of which make them very attractive but which are neither equally incriminating. The following analyses of the most hotly contested Led Zeppelin tracks—and a few of the least—may at last put the matter in perspective, with the band’s initial composers’ attribution listed alongside a final verdict.

  Led Zeppelin

  Right from the start the accusations flew. Arriving on the scene with an impressive advance from Atlantic Records and led by an ex-Yardbird with a cult following, Zeppelin soon saw their debut record—not just its individual songs but the entire album—dismissed as a mere duplicate of the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth, released in October 1968. Rolling Stone magazine’s review, from a time when its reviews were highly relevant to the youth market, called Led Zeppelin a “twin” of the earlier disc, and elsewhere the album has been dismissed as “recycled Jeff Beck Group.” Beck himself recalled listening with barely controlled fury when Page played him an acetate of the new record: “This is a piss-take, it’s got to be.”

  The Jeff Beck Group’s 1968 album was said by critics to be the obvious model for Led Zeppelin.