Much as was the case back in the fifties, this argument was less about music than style. A week before the August show Led Zeppelin turned up for a photocall in the grounds of Knebworth House. Aubrey Powell, who was in charge of visuals, had brought along a stripper to liven up the pictures a little. It was decided she wasn’t needed. Significantly, Page and Plant were both wearing jackets and skinny ties. The skinny tie was the one concession to punk fashion that everybody felt comfortable making. On Led Zeppelin it never looked entirely right. It added to the feeling that 1979 might no longer be their moment. In an interview given to promote the shows Page said he had voted for Margaret Thatcher, who had just been elected the first woman Prime Minister. Here he was speaking as a wealthy man who had achieved the age of thirty-five, which seemed almost exotically ancient to the new generation of would-be stars who wore their age as a badge of moral superiority.
The following Saturday, in the same week that Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall, the record that inaugurated the eighties, was being released, the members of Led Zeppelin were helicoptered into the grounds of Knebworth House. As they descended they could see the lines of old cars queueing to get off the A1, the ex-army tents that had been erected in the car parks and even the pale, shirtless figures of the Led Zeppelin faithful whiling away the day between sets by Todd Rundgren and Commander Cody by drinking warm Newcastle Brown Ale. This is what matters most to groups descending from the air: how it all looks. Did they still have the pull they’d had almost five years earlier? Had everything changed? They really weren’t sure.
I was in the backstage area that day. Somebody from the record company told me ‘they’re sick with nerves’. They were certainly less than professional. Peter Grant was drinking Blue Nun directly from the bottle. Their tour manager Richard Cole confronted the promoter on the day and told him that he would be signing a waiver allowing the whole show to be filmed. In exchange for this he would be paid 5p. They were throwing their weight around to conceal the fact that the band were worried they weren’t ready for such a big performance. Plant in particular was concerned that he might not be able to get through it. He was also the one who was most attuned to what was going on in the world outside Led Zeppelin’s tent.
There had been such a change in manners around music in the two years Led Zeppelin had been away, there had been such a tilt towards brevity and harshness, such a move from the Cavalier to the Puritan, that when they took to the stage they couldn’t help looking almost quaint. Page played the opening riffs of ‘The Song Remains The Same’ on, of all things, a twin-neck guitar, Plant had his shirt slashed to the waist, Bonham had the huge gong hung behind his kit. In the era of the Jam and the Stranglers this looked almost like historical re-enactment.
The show was intermittently impressive. It was over three hours, far too long to be able to hold the attention of more than half of any crowd that has been standing in a field all day. Nobody had yet got to grips with the requirements of playing to such a large group of people. The guys who played those shows had never known what it was like to be a member of the crowd and therefore their stage banter rang hollow. Something had happened in the latter part of the seventies. For a start we had heard the Ramones. There was no going back. Attention spans had got shorter. When Page embarked on his laser-bedecked party piece on the guitar Plant, who according to legend used to spend this part of the act backstage being fellated by a willing helper, remained awkwardly on stage as if he was thinking, like the rest of us, that this sort of entertainment no longer had a reason to be. In later years Plant admitted, ‘I wasn’t as relaxed as I could have been. We maimed the beast for life, but we didn’t kill it. It was good, but only because everybody made it good. There was that sense of event.’
There were ugly scenes in the week between the first gig and the second one. For a start Peter Grant believed the promoter had deceived him about the numbers of tickets sold. He argued that while flying over the site he had been able to ascertain that there were forty thousand more people there than were reflected in the receipts. He further insisted on being paid in cash, which meant a meeting at the promoter’s house with all the curtains drawn as £300,000 – an enormous amount of money now and an inconceivable amount of money then – was counted out. Disgruntled that the tickets for the second show were not selling – it was the middle of the holiday season in the UK – Grant also demanded the promoter turn over all the unsold tickets to him. It was chaos.
In a desperate attempt to increase the interest in the second show the New Barbarians, a band lashed together by Ron Wood to promote his solo record, was added to the bill. The New Barbarians’ key element was Keith Richards, who was so chemically altered on the day that he had to be decanted out of his limo by hand. Discomfited by the idea of being down the bill to anyone, Wood and Richards refused to go on stage until they had been paid. The crowd, by now dead on their feet, were kept waiting until a member of the band’s entourage had taken the £35,000 in cash back to the band’s hotel in London, banked it in the hotel safe and had it fully receipted by the hotel manager. Led Zeppelin returned the compliment by not dropping in on their old friends at all during their time on the site. So much for the brotherhood of rock and roll. There were reckoned to be fifty thousand people there for the second show. This is a respectable number, unless they happen to be occupying a space big enough for twice as many. Led Zeppelin had overreached. In the process they had burned their brand. Neither Grant nor Page was in the land of the humans any longer. It was the last time Led Zeppelin appeared on British soil.
The two key figures in the Led Zeppelin tableau were Plant and Page. Their poses were the ones young men essayed in front of their bedroom mirrors. There they stood, Plant with his cascade of curls, his shirt slashed to the navel, the microphone and its cord flexed across his chest like the foil of a chevalier, everything pointing in the direction of the apex of the hard rock singer’s golden triangle, his crotch; off to one side was Page with his dark mane, his instrument dangled halfway down those impossibly thin legs, the acme of slovenly grandeur. Poses are vital in rock. They are not some optional extra. Poses are what send the pulses of young men racing. There was a splendour about Led Zeppelin’s swagger. It was the apogee of a certain sort of rock dream. None of the hundreds of bands that came after them and tried to adopt the same shape were anything like as convincing. However, like everything else in show business, it was a trick based on confidence. Once Plant no longer believed he could get away with it, once the essential absurdity of it began to dawn on him, once he started to believe the things all those punks were whispering in his ear via the letters pages of the music papers, once he was no longer cocksure, the magic inevitably ebbed away. After all, he was an old man. He was thirty-one.
1979 PLAYLIST
Blondie, ‘Heart Of Glass’
Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Armed Forces
The Knack, Get The Knack
The B-52s, The B-52’s
Michael Jackson, Off The Wall
The Police, Reggatta De Blanc
Fleetwood Mac, Tusk
Pink Floyd, The Wall
The Clash, London Calling
AC/DC, Highway To Hell
8 DECEMBER 1980
NEW YORK CITY
Death by fan
JOHN LENNON HAD not returned to his homeland since leaving it in 1971. In the course of the last decade he and Yoko Ono had steadily adopted the lifestyle of what bankers call high-net-worth individuals. For somebody whose entire life had once been about music Lennon seemed to find it surprisingly easy to live without it. For five years he barely picked up a guitar. For somebody so bright Lennon could also remain remarkably incurious about aspects of the world. It was only when he saw the view of Central Park from the top floor of New York’s famous old Dakota building that he realized such a view could be nourishing for the soul.
John and Yoko had to work hard on the Dakota’s custodians to get permission to take up apartment 72, which was being v
acated by the actor Robert Ryan in 1972, because the building had a rule that it didn’t admit rock stars as residents. With the help of some well-placed sponsors they managed to persuade these worthies that there was nothing of the rock star about the life he and Yoko lived. This was even more the case after their son Sean was born in 1975. In his Lennon biography Philip Norman suggests that the sight of the Dakota may have awakened in Lennon memories of the equally impressive buildings of similar vintage which looked out over the Mersey in his home city. A historian of the building described the top floors as ‘like some strange, gone-to-seed hotel in the British Midlands’.
Like most Englishmen abroad Lennon comforted himself with small pleasures from home. He was compensated for one interview with BBC television with the gift of some difficult-to-find English biscuits. He telephoned his beloved Aunt Mimi, now living on the Isle of Wight, every week. On Sunday evenings he liked to settle down in front of one of the British television dramas presented by Alistair Cooke under the title Masterpiece Theatre. In every respect it was a very comfortable life.
The couple built up their wealth thanks to Yoko’s efforts. Her family came from banking stock and she had none of Lennon’s middle-class squeamishness about accumulating money. The first thing they did was extend their holdings in the Dakota, until they had five apartments, some of which were used as offices for their organization, others to house their many possessions. On one visit Elton John was surprised that Yoko appeared to own more clothes than he did. The main rooms of the apartment they lived in were as sparsely furnished and minimally decorated as the rooms in Tittenhurst Park, their Georgian country house in Berkshire, through which they had floated in the video for ‘Imagine’ back in 1971. Such emptiness is doubly enviable because it hints that just off stage there are suites of rooms stacked to the ceiling with the impedimenta of millionaires. The couple had financial advisers whose words of wisdom they listened to far more than Lennon ever did in the days of the Beatles. They invested in paintings, ancient Egyptian artefacts and even the kind of prize dairy cattle that command six-figure prices.
John’s relationships with the other former members of the Beatles were more cordial than they had been at any stage since the end of the sixties. There had even been a conversation about his taking part in George’s Concert for Bangla Desh back in 1971 but nothing came of it. Paul McCartney would visit occasionally. One of these visits climaxed with an exhibition of slovenliness and grandeur that defines rock-star behaviour. John and Yoko and Paul and Linda finished the evening at Manhattan smart spot Elaine’s where, finding nothing on the menu that they fancied, they sent out for pizza. The cordiality between the two lead Beatles did not in any way diminish their competitiveness. Lennon measured his fortune against McCartney, who had insured himself by buying up valuable music publishing copyrights. When he heard his erstwhile partner was worth $25 million he set Yoko the aim of matching that figure.
McCartney had stayed in the game of writing songs, releasing records and touring, whereas Lennon had stopped putting out anything new after 1974’s Walls And Bridges. The Christmas number one at the end of 1979 was McCartney’s ‘Wonderful Christmastime’, which might have been little more than a potboiler when set against his songs for the Beatles but would make more money than any single song he had written since those days. The record market was bigger in the late seventies, the profits to be made were greater, and John was no longer at the trough. He had the occasional taste, such as when he got a third of the writing credit on ‘Fame’, David Bowie’s first real hit in the United States in 1975, but he knew that he would at some stage have to jump back in to see if he could still do it.
In 1980 he came back from an extended vacation in Bermuda with Sean during which he had written some songs and made some modest demos. The songs were all about his new-found domestic contentment, his delight in spending time bringing up his second son (as opposed to his first son, who had to compete for attention with his career) and his embrace of a role in the family which would one day be widely recognized as that of the new man. When he returned to New York he went into the studio with producer Jack Douglas and some dependable session men to start recording. He put out the word that this would be a genuine collaboration between him and his wife with their lead vocals carefully alternating to prevent buyers leaving one side unplayed. David Geffen, reasoning that a new Lennon album, no matter its quality, would help establish his eponymous label in the marketplace, was the one who agreed.
It came out on 17 November to great anticipation and a reception that was no more than lukewarm. This wasn’t purely because of its subject matter. John Lennon’s recordings once he’d left the Beatles were if anything too often criticized for the overt messages in the lyrics – the shrill solipsism of the primal therapy years, the glib sloganeering of Some Time In New York City and now the somewhat cloying domesticity of Double Fantasy. What’s more telling is the tone of all these records. The qualities they no longer had – humour, playfulness, that sense of the warm friction of equals – provide an idea of what a changed person he was. At the height of the Beatles he alchemized his misery into transcendentally happy-sounding songs like ‘Help!’. The happiness he now genuinely felt resulted in records that were flat, mechanical, and sounded like the most rote products of the American studio system.
On the evening of 8 December 1980, David Geffen was in New York to meet up with John and Yoko. He was experienced enough to know that a few weeks after the album’s release, when there had been enough industry reaction to make it plain that their record wasn’t likely to take the world by storm, his job was to provide reassurance, to point to the fact that the single ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ was showing in the Top Forty and to make noises about the next tranche of reviews being more enthusiastic. Following the meeting John and Yoko got back in their limousine and drove back to the corner of Central Park West and West 72nd Street. They didn’t drive into the courtyard of the building. Although Lennon had more than once remarked that if anybody killed him it would be a fan, he still expected to be able to get around one of the more violent cities on earth without needing a bodyguard. Hence he met his killer, twenty-five-year-old Mark Chapman, for the second time that day, out on the sidewalk. On the first occasion Chapman had got him to sign his copy of Double Fantasy. On the second occasion he fired five shots from a .38 Special revolver into Lennon’s back. He died immediately. He was forty years old.
The news didn’t reach London until the following day, Tuesday the 9th. We were woken up by the radio telling us that John Lennon, ‘the former Beatle’, had been killed in New York. There wasn’t a lot more to add to that – the police said it had been done by ‘a local screwball’ – and in 1980 there were only a limited number of channels for news to travel along. That night there was a tribute on the BBC’s rock programme Whistle Test. Annie Nightingale, the presenter, said something like ‘a lot of us wouldn’t be doing what we are doing now if it hadn’t been for John Lennon’. I sat on the edge of the bath and blubbed, which is not my habit. Her words touched me off because they related to me, not to John Lennon. I haven’t cried about the death of a famous person since. I have come to realize that if we do so what we’re crying for is ourselves, our lost youth, the days of happiness we associate with the person who has died.
The Beatles created a great deal of happiness. The by-product of that process was fame. Fame on a mad, massive and eventually injurious scale. In killing a rock star, the ultimate somebody, Mark Chapman, the ultimate nobody, probably hoped he would cross over. He hoped he might obliterate the distance between his own puny life and the hero’s life that he saw Lennon leading. His action foreshadowed in a uniquely terrible way our increasing desire to put ourselves at the centre of events, when our proper role should be as a spectator or appreciative listener. It underlined just how big rock stars had become and how much some people still expected those rock stars to be able to mend their own broken lives. It wasn’t anything to do with what the rock stars
said or did. It was to do with what people expected of them.
It’s tempting to stop the clock in the second week of December 1980 and indulge in what historians call a counter-factual. What would have happened if John Lennon had got back into the Dakota unharmed and lived through the next day, which was slated to finish with seats for David Bowie in The Elephant Man on Broadway, the day after that, and all the days between then and now?
In the short term Kenny Rogers’ ‘Lady’ might have remained at number one in the USA. The albums of the year would still have been Bruce Springsteen’s The River, Talking Heads’ Remain In Light and Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!!. The editors of Rolling Stone, People, Time, Newsweek, Maclean’s, New York, NME, Melody Maker and hundreds of other titles would not have been engaged in a frantic scramble to remake their feature sections with copious reminiscences and place black borders around their front-cover tributes. A few prestigious publications might not have replaced their disobliging early reviews of Double Fantasy with appreciations more in keeping with the public mood of mourning.
In the medium term there may have been the tour he talked about, which would probably have included a return to the UK for the first time since 1971. The last time he had appeared on a stage, which was at Madison Square Garden in 1974 with Elton John, he had been literally sick with nerves. That was just a cameo. An appearance in his own right in an arena at a time when people’s expectations of a live performance were beginning to be revised upwards would have been a lot more testing.
Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994 Page 22