by Chris Welch
Yet there was nothing overtly sentimental about his attitude. Led Zeppelin presented a challenge to his pride; to see if he could make this dynamic new outfit the commercial success they deserved to be. It was his crusade. He had the utmost faith in Jimmy Page and now he brought into play all his accumulated experience, all that streetwise acumen and reserves of pent-up aggression and energy. The reigning moguls of the music business were about to face the deadliest combination since Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker. They would scorn Grant at their peril.
The birth pangs of Led Zeppelin were strangely convoluted, but favoured by fortune. Even before the break-up of The Yardbirds and that casual in-car conversation between Page and Grant, there had been a succession of intriguing omens. During the period when Beck and Page worked together in The Yardbirds, Jimmy wrote and produced a tune called ‘Beck’s Bolero’ which appeared on the B-side of Jeff’s hit single ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’, a track produced by Mickie Most. A star-studded line up was assembled for the recording session that included Beck and Page on guitars, Nicky Hopkins on piano, John Paul Jones on bass and, moonlighting from his regular band The Who, Keith Moon on drums.
Recalled Grant: “It was a jam session really, but it went terrifically well. We ended up using it as the B-side of the single and it also appeared on the Truth (Columbia) album.” This was Jeff Beck’s solo début, featuring Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood, which appeared in August 1968, some six months before the first Led Zeppelin album was released in March 1969. It was later suggested that Zeppelin had in some way plagiarised the style of this Beck album. Indeed, some recall that when Jeff heard the first Zeppelin album, “He was incandescent.”
The charge of ripping off Beck was something that Peter Grant always vehemently denied. “That was rubbish. I produced Truth mainly because Mickie Most wasn’t available and Zeppelin definitely didn’t rip it off.* The only point of contact on the two albums was a cover version of ‘You Shook Me’ done by both acts. When Truth was finished I sent Jimmy a white label copy, because I assumed he’d want to hear what Jeff had done. Some time later Jimmy asked me why I hadn’t told him that Jeff had done ‘You Shook Me’. This was after Led Zeppelin 1 had been recorded. I told him about the white label … and he hadn’t even heard it. Truth was the only album I ever produced. I wasn’t a musician and didn’t profess to know much about music. My main contribution to Zeppelin was marketing and dealing with the business.”
In the wake of the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ session but before he’d recruited Jones, Plant and Bonham, Jimmy had considered the idea of leading a regular group featuring himself, Beck, Moon and ace session pianist Nicky Hopkins. Keith Moon suggested they bring in his Who colleague John Entwistle to play bass instead of John Paul Jones. All these machinations were kept highly secret at the time, as Pete Townshend, The Who’s de facto leader and principal songwriter, would not have relished the idea of losing his star drummer and bassist. There was much discussion about bringing in Steve Winwood as their vocalist, but he was too wrapped up in Traffic. Steve Marriott of The Small Faces was also approached, and according to Jimmy: “He seemed full of glee about it. Then a message came through from the business side of Marriott, which said: ‘How would you like to play guitar with broken fingers? You will be if you don’t stay away from Stevie.’ After that the idea just fell apart. Instead of being more positive about it and looking for another singer, we just let it slip. Then The Who began a tour and The Yardbirds began a tour and that was it.”
In discussing this putative supergroup, Keith Moon had joked that it would go down “like a lead balloon”. John Entwistle agreed, but said it would be “more like a Lead Zeppelin”. It was a name that would hang in the air, slowly sinking into the subconscious of their lead guitarist and his manager. A year or so later, when Jimmy finally put his own band together, he would have preferred to use the more original name but The New Yardbirds had to be used, for contractual reasons. Recalled Grant: “It was Keith who coined the name, although he meant it as ‘Lead Zeppelin’. The phrase just stuck in my mind. I played around with it and changed the spelling to ‘Led’ because otherwise it might sound like ‘lead [as in] you up the garden path’. I suggested it to Jimmy and he said that’s great and he went for it. So I decided to call the band Led Zeppelin.”
Jimmy later said that the name wasn’t really that important and he might as well have called the band ‘The Vegetables’ or ‘The Potatoes’ for all he cared! Early rehearsals brought together Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham musically armed and ready for the first time, although there had been various meetings at Jimmy’s boathouse on the Thames at Pangebourne. John Paul remembers their first jam resulted in instant musical chemistry, although it wasn’t easy to find a tune they could all play.
“We went to a small room in Lisle Street, Soho for the first rehearsal. We set the amps up and not being a rock’n’roll fan at the time, I knew nothing. And so Jimmy said, ‘Well do you know ‘Train Kept A Rollin’ ‘ by The Yardbirds?’ I said, ‘No,’ and so he said, ‘Well it’s a 12-bar with a riff on G’. That was the first thing we ever played. It gelled immediately. And Jimmy is still playing it today!”
In September 1968 The New Yardbirds set off on their début tour of Scandinavia. Accompanied by Grant, the newly constituted quartet unleashed a mighty assault on the unsuspecting Danes and Swedes. All they had to do now was convince a sceptical British public and record industry. Their name seemed to be the biggest problem. Sadly ‘The Yardbirds’ no longer held any cachet. It was an era when fresh pop sensations were occurring daily, and the old group had been away so long they were almost forgotten. As a result Peter found to his chagrin that nobody wanted to book his boys and nobody wanted to sign them to a record label.
Recalled Grant bitterly: “Pye Records laughed me out of their office. I went to see their boss Louis Benjamin and asked for an advance. The figure was £17,500. He just said: ‘You’ve got to be joking.’” He also talked to Mo Ostin at Warner Bros, who at least knew Jimmy from his session work, but was again shown the door.
Even if record executives didn’t know Jimmy Page from Yellow Pages, he was highly regarded by the most hip musicians on the scene. Jimmy’s reputation would, to a large extent, be their salvation. Grant: “Jimmy and I were walking down Sixth Avenue in New York while we were on tour with The Yardbirds. This limo screeches to a halt, backs up and out gets Burt Bacharach, wearing a white tuxedo with a beautiful woman in the back seat. He greets Jimmy enthusiastically, because he remembered him from all those sessions he’d done in London. All the important guys in the USbiz knew about Jimmy Page. It was funny that when I first signed The Yardbirds, Simon Napier-Bell told me to get rid of Jimmy Page because he would be ‘a problem’. When I spoke to Jimmy about that he told me about all the trouble they were having, not getting paid for months of work. I would soon change all that.”
As soon as The New Yardbirds returned from their 10-date Scandinavian tour they went hotfoot into Olympic Studios in Barnes to record their début album, together with the aid of engineer Glyn Johns. The studio by the river in south west London was rapidly becoming the studio of choice among rock’s cognoscenti.
It was taped in just 30 hours and cost just £1,782, including the artwork for the cover. It was an historic piece of work that would have far-reaching consequences for the future of rock music. And yet Jimmy, Robert, John Paul and ‘Bonzo’ Bonham had already participated in an earlier recording session together, before they made the Led Zeppelin album.
They laid down the backing tracks for a P.J. Proby album called Three Week Hero and in the process the hot young band practically blew the singer away, notably on a track called ‘Jim’s Blues’. The record was eventually released on Liberty in 1969 and became a collector’s item. John Paul Jones explained how this came about: “I still had some commitments for recording sessions. There was a guy I knew (Steve Rowland) who was producing Three Week Hero for P.J. Proby. I was committed to do all the arrange
ments and as we were talking about rehearsing I thought it would be a handy source of income for the band for us all to be on the record. I had to book a band anyway, so I thought I’d book everyone I knew. We had Robert on tambourine! That was the first thing we ever did. Everybody thinks we did ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ with Donovan and he seems to remember it differently. But I booked the band and it was myself, Alan Parker and Clem Cattini. Jimmy Page knows he wasn’t on that Donovan session.
“We had begun rehearsing out at Page’s place in Pangebourne, basically to fulfil those Scandinavian dates that The Yardbirds had left over. We’d rehearsed for that tour and the first album was pretty much a recording of the first show, which was why it had so many ‘covers’ on it. That’s all we had ready to play at that time, but the sound and the performance was fantastic. It was old style recording. We just sat there in Olympic with a few screens to cover the amps up and it was a big ‘live’ room, so everything leaked into everything else, which was part of the sound. We did it in about 15 hours with another 15 for mixing, so it was 30 hours in all to make Led Zeppelin.”
John Paul remains fascinated by the primitive way the first album was produced. One of their ideas was to put John Bonham’s drums on a wooden riser, to give them a bigger sound. “I’m sure there is one point where the vocal ‘bleeds’ off one track into another. You could never erase anything properly.
“Robert did some guide vocals in the studio and we couldn’t get rid of them, so we turned them into an effect. That sort of thing happened all the time. I remember there was a Hammond organ in the studio, which I used and I wrote the riff to ‘Good Times Bad Times’. Peter didn’t interfere at all. He had no say about the music. We always thought he deserved to be called ‘executive producer’ of the albums, because he’d cleared a space for us to do what we liked. He dealt with the record companies and trusted us implicitly with the music. That was one of his great strengths, I always thought. There was no pressure to change anything and his only comment was, ‘That sounds great.’”
The artistic freedom that Grant gave his musicians was unique in management terms. John Paul: “That was one of the joys of being in that band. You could do anything you liked. That was our only formula – ‘Do anything you like.’ That was why (a) it worked and (b) it was so pleasurable. We knew that as long as we kept on doing things that pleased us, we knew it would work. That’s why we kept on experimenting and why all the Zeppelin albums have a different feel. We got away with it, every time. If something took our fancy we’d have a go. We all listened to different kinds of music – all the time.”
As well as being endowed with a sense of freedom the new band felt secure in having Peter Grant as their manager. “It was nice to know that everything was taken care of. In return for him staying out of our stuff, we stayed out of his stuff. If he said, ‘I think you should do this,’ we said, ‘Fine, let’s do it.’ We allowed ourselves to be guided by him and we trusted his decisions and he was always right. ‘Don’t release a single,’ he said. ‘Okay, sounds odd, but if you say so, we won’t.’ We left that and the whole touring strategy to him. His idea was to be everywhere – and then nowhere. Just at the point where everyone was going to get fed up with seeing us, we were gone! He was just right, all the time.”
In the beginning, though, Led Zeppelin needed to be everywhere all of the time, and Peter had to grit his teeth, swallow his pride and fight the apathy of the local music business. He knew he had a superb album in the can, a great band raring to go and the support of ‘underground’ blues and rock fans. All he needed was help and encouragement from bookers and A&R men. One eyewitness to the sight and sound of Peter Grant in action during this crucial period was a student from Hull University, who booked the bands for college dances, happened to be in town and met Peter at his office. The booker was Ed Bicknell.
Bicknell, who would go on to become the manager of Dire Straits, would one day become a close friend of his hero, the man who led Zeppelin. But in October 1968, Ed was just an enthusiastic student booker with a fascination for the workings of the music business. During his second college year he had become the secretary of the entertainments committee and he ran all Hull University’s entertainments, including a jazz club and Saturday night dances.
“During that period what became known as progressive rock got underway,” recalls Bicknell. “One of the first bands I booked was The Moody Blues for £100. It was standard in those days that every band played two 45-minute sets. I would put the set times up in the dressing room. I went in and John Lodge came up to me and said, ‘We don’t play two 45-minute sets, we do a concert. The audience will have to sit down.’ And this was a Saturday night in a student union bar. Between the time I’d booked them and the time they came to Hull, they had got rid of Denny Laine, Justin and John Lodge had joined the group and they had recorded The Days Of Future Past and they were going to do a concert based on the album. That was the first time we had a band that weren’t playing for dancing. And to my astonishment 900 students sat down on the floor of the refectory and The Moody Blues played a concert that lasted for an hour and a half. Subsequently we had Pink Floyd and The Who and these were all bands you couldn’t dance to.”
Bicknell made regular visits to London to meet booking agents and in the autumn of 1968 went to the Chrysalis Agency at 155 Oxford Street, where Peter Grant also had his office. “I was in the agency that was run by Kenny Bell and Richard Cowley and this huge figure shuffled into the booking department. I immediately recognised him as Peter Grant. He said, ‘Hello young man. The New Yardbirds are playing at the Marquee tonight. Why don’t you come down and see them?’ He was trying to get the agents to come and see them too. And they were saying things like, ‘Oh, fuck off Peter, we don’t want to come and see your dodgy band.’”
Grant didn’t give up. “Peter kept saying, ‘You should come and see them because Jeff Beck is going to sit in,’” continues Bicknell. “This was the carrot! This was the band that hadn’t quite metamorphosed into Led Zeppelin. Peter had done some sleight of hand whereby the name Yardbirds had been transferred from Relf, McCarty and Dreja into the willing hands of Jimmy Page. It was like a magician’s trick whereby somehow Jimmy ended up owning the name. They were playing the contracted gigs and tidying up.”
On October 15, 1968, the band hitherto known as The New Yardbirds played its first UK shows as Led Zeppelin at Surrey University. There was still some confusion over the name. Three days later, on October 18, the band made their début at the Marquee, at 90 Wardour Street, in central London, but they were billed once again as ‘The New Yardbirds’. The manager of the club, John C. Gee, recalls Grant getting very excited about the gig. “He told me this was going to be a fantastic new group. He really had a lot of faith in them,” says Gee. “But the group was very loud. I thought they were overpoweringly loud for the size of the Marquee. Anyway, the lads received an enthusiastic, but not overwhelming response from the audience.”
Ed Bicknell: “Peter couldn’t get anybody from the agency to go and see them. I was in London on my own so I went down to the Marquee and was astonished to see a queue right down Wardour Street and into Old Compton Street. There must have been 300 people standing in line. So I joined the end of the queue and eventually got in to see this gig. My memory was they didn’t play many songs.
“Jimmy was banging away with the violin bow, so I guess they did ‘Dazed And Confused’ and they did a rock’n’roll medley at the end with some Little Richard and Elvis Presley numbers. On the strength of that I booked them to come up to Hull on a double bill with Jethro Tull, who were the headliners. Jethro Tull got £400 and that was big money. They played in the Mecca ballroom in Hull, as it was too expensive to put them on in the Student Union hall. I still have the contract for the New Yardbirds for £100 and I showed it to Peter years later. Peter had crossed out ‘New Yardbirds’ and written ‘Lead Zeppelin’ and signed it Peter Grant. And then they cancelled. They didn’t do the gig. They went to America instead
.”
It didn’t matter to Ed because Jethro Tull had a hit album with This Was that week, the ballroom was packed and the student promoter did very well on the night. “We actually made money and usually we lost money! But I kept the Zeppelin contract with ‘Lead’ on it, which was how it was originally spelt. Peter told me years later that he was concerned that in America they would pronounce it ‘Le-e-ed Zeppelin’. He knocked out the ‘a’ and rang Pagey up to say, ‘I’ve done it “L-E-D”.’ That’s how the name metamorphosed into that spelling. But what most interested me was that he couldn’t get these hard-bitten agents to go and see his band! But he would have been philosophical about that.”
While Peter was trying to enthuse the bookers, he also had another go at the music press. Keith Altham of the New Musical Express had turned down the chance of an interview with Jimmy Page, but at least he went along to see a show. He shared John Gee’s opinion about their volume levels.
Keith: “When Led Zeppelin first started Peter invited me to the Elephant & Castle to see his band playing one of their first gigs. So I went along and they played about three numbers and they were deafening. Zeppelin was always loud, but in a tiny pub they were overpowering. I lasted the first few numbers and my ears were ringing. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I left. The following morning I got a call from Peter saying: ‘Well, what did you think of my band?’ So I said, ‘To be honest with you Peter, I thought they were far too loud. They’re brilliant musicians but they sound like four guys put together to make a band. It’s all improvised rock without any structure. I can’t see it myself.’