by Chris Welch
” ‘Ahmet, that was Robert on the horse,’ I told him. ‘Oh, gee, well I nodded off,’ he replied.”
Clifton and Ertegun dashed after Peter Grant who was walking as fast as anyone had ever seen him. He had sped past the two limousines and the white Rolls-Royce and was heading in the direction of his hotel. “What’ll I do?” asked Ahmet. The two men headed down the street, followed by a convoy of cars driven by the dutiful chauffeurs at walking pace. “It was a freezing cold night and we finally caught up with Peter at The Plaza and he was in tears. He said to Ahmet, ‘How could you say that – we worked so hard on this thing …’ Ahmet tried to put his arms around him. He was mortified that he had upset Peter and said, ‘I adored the movie, it’s fantastic!’ But at that moment you could see how much Peter cared about the film.”
Yet Grant appeared less than enamoured of the finished product some years later. “Some of it was okay. But what did we know about making films? If it had been totally hopeless, we would have shelved it. I did enjoy the premieres and meeting all the film media.” His final, damning comment on The Song Remains The Same was that it was “the most expensive home movie ever made.”
Says Peter Clifton: “When they felt I had failed to portray them exactly the way they wanted they complained to Peter Grant who came over to my house in Kensington, into my basement film studio. This was a man I respected but didn’t fear, although I feared what he might do to others. I knew we had made a pact many years before, and remembered that spring morning at his medieval home in Sussex that features on the prologue of my film. That fateful morning Peter signed every page of my script and budget for and on behalf of Led Zeppelin. He said, ‘You are now one of us. You will receive an equal share of the profits.’ We shook hands. I received nothing of course. But the production just about paid my rent for the two and a half years while I turned their three nights at Madison Square Garden into a two-hour 17-minute, award-winning feature film. Peter Grant was a colossal character. He and Jimmy Page had a very special agreement. Peter made me swear that if I was going to make the film, if anything went wrong I must remember that Jimmy was the first man into the lifeboat. But I never heard from any of the members of Led Zeppelin again after the London premiere of the movie in 1978.”
As far as Grant and Zeppelin were concerned, the movie song had ended. But they left behind smouldering resentments among the filmmakers and a few puzzles for movie buffs. Says Peter Clifton: “If you look at the credits they wrote something very interesting. ‘Musical performances were presented live at Madison Square Garden.’ It was somewhat ambiguous because the film was obviously done somewhere else!”
When he was asked about the provenance of the ‘live’ shots of Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden, Peter Grant did admit that they had indeed shot some material at Shepperton studios, recreating the same stage set while the band donned the same clothes they wore at the actual gig. “Yes, we did,” he said. “But we didn’t shout about the fact.”
Clifton reiterated that he used some of the 16mm shots by Massot which he blew up to 35mm. “His biggest mistake was that he shot some stuff on 35mm but he used 400 foot reels, because he was shooting with hand-held cameras. This meant there could only be one three-minute take at a time. And ‘Dazed And Confused’ was 27 minutes long.”
The film ended up costing about £350,000 and, because they wanted total control and ownership, the five Zep partners decided to pick up the tab by borrowing money on personal guarantees from the National Westminster. “So they financed it with their own personal money,” confirms Clifton. “Their chief accountant was there when they searched my house apparently, a woman like something out of a James Bond movie. I felt humiliated. It was a horrible feeling and I felt I didn’t want to be friends with them anymore. I felt they had betrayed my trust. But I never betrayed their trust. It was just that they wanted a film about Led Zeppelin, made by Led Zeppelin and starring Led Zeppelin. So they left my name off the advertising and the posters, which was unbelievably hurtful because the film was so successful. Normally there is a credit for whoever made the film and to leave it off was ridiculous. My role was downplayed because of their unbelievable egos.”
Once Ahmet Ertegun had mended his fences with Peter and reassured him that the film was ‘wonderful’, they were at last able to present it to Warner Brothers. The movie was shown to David Geffen and other executives at another, more successful screening. The project was approved and it was now deemed necessary to hold a high-powered planning meeting attended by all parties, including of course, the man who had made it all happen, Peter Grant. By all accounts the meeting turned into farce.
Clifton: “We had spent all this money to make the movie, so I said to Peter, ‘We’ve got to get the money back so at least the boys can pay off their overdraft.’ I said, ‘You guys will get money from the soundtrack album, but get the money back out of the film straight away because you’ll never see it. These films never make a profit.’”
Clifton advised Warners that Led Zeppelin had to be recompensed for the couple of million dollars they spent making this film, doubling the actual figure. “I did that deal to get them the money to pay off their overdrafts. Ahmet Ertegun approved it, so I showed Warner Bros the film and they said ‘fine’. The deal was quite a big thing. David Geffen and Frank Wells,* the president of Warners, said, ‘Yes, we want it.’ Then they called a meeting with Led Zeppelin, the film-maker – which was me – and all the Warner Brothers distribution people … it was a big meeting at Frank’s office in Los Angeles, which was to take virtually the whole day.”
Clifton turned up at the 11 a.m. meeting, having spent all morning trying to call Peter Grant at his hotel to find out what time he was due and to ask if any of the band were coming. “There was no sign of Led Zeppelin at all when we started the meeting. I could conduct the meeting about the technicalities – how to make the prints, the Dolby situation, etc. Then David Geffen and Frank Wells came in and everyone started looking at their watches and saying, ‘Where’s Peter Grant?’”
Clifton made an excuse and got out of the meeting to make a phone call to Peter’s secretary Carole Browne. “‘Where the fuck is he?’ I asked. I was told he was having a problem with Gloria.”
It turned out Peter was still in London trying to resolve this family matter. Clifton was aghast. “He’s in London? But everybody thinks he’s here to make the deal,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. Richard’s on his way,’ they said.”
Clifton’s heart sank.
“At this stage Richard Cole was completely out of control,” says Clifton. “He turned up at the meeting coked out, armed with bottles of booze and with another of the band’s roadies. The pair of them hadn’t slept for days. And this is Warner Brothers, not some party, right? They sit in a corner and start to mouth obscenities at the meeting. Richard is drinking and making all these inane comments, saying that San Francisco and Los Angeles are too close to release the movie there at the same time, because there’d be an audience spill over. The Americans are saying, ‘Oh my God, where’s Peter Grant?’ I had to stand up and say, ‘Well unfortunately Mr Grant is at a meeting.’ After five or six hours of this, it became nonsensical, but we had to make the decisions without him. Frank Wells pulled me aside and said, ‘Where’s Peter Grant?’ I said, ‘Look mate, I’ve gone through all this for two and a half years. This is how he operates and it’s why he’s so powerful. He just does exactly what he wants …’
“In fact he had just stood up one of the most important meetings in his life for personal reasons. I was really upset and having Richard Cole there – completely off his face – didn’t help. I don’t suppose he even remembers the meeting. But this was supposed to be the culmination of Led Zeppelin’s great career. The movie! The meeting was in February and now Warners told me they wouldn’t release the movie until November. There were tears in my eyes. I said, ‘I’ve worked for four months to get the sound mix finished – night and day – how can you do this to me?’
; “They then explained what they needed to make the film a success. They modelled it on The Exorcist, which they made very difficult to see for the first six weeks. You could only see it in one cinema in New York, then they released it across the country. This was David Geffen’s idea – to make the film talked about. It was also Peter Grant’s idea to make it difficult to see Led Zeppelin, so he was being really consistent when he didn’t turn up at the fucking meeting! But when I saw him again in the last few years of his life, he had changed and become quite humble.”
The long awaited film received its world premiere at Cinema 1 in New York on October 20,1976. The theatre had to be equipped with a special quadraphonic sound system hired from Showco in Dallas, Texas. Richard Cole claims he had to threaten Warner Brothers distributors before they upgraded the system to ensure that the music sounded as good on the soundtrack as it would at a live concert.
Says Peter Clifton: “Obviously it was my idea to put a booster in there because I had done that quite a few times before. The band understood the need for good sound but they didn’t know how to balance the tracks. I had to mark the projectionist’s controls to graph pencil. They needed me at the premiere because I was the only one who really understood the magnetic soundtrack system. Jimmy turned up at New York and told the projectionist to turn the sound up to full volume. If that happened, there would have been terrible phasing on the surround sound and distortion.”
When the West Coast premieres were held in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the sound was less effective – ‘absolutely abysmal’ according to Richard and he recalls that the whole thing embarrassed Jimmy Page. Peter claims this happened because he wasn’t invited to the West Coast premieres, but he did supervise the sound at the London premiere.
The premieres were attended by the members of Led Zeppelin but on the flight over to New York there was an incident in the first-class cabin of the plane after Richard Cole and members of the group had traded insults with Telly Savalas, the Kojak actor, and cutlery was thrown. Later that evening, the night before the premiere, Cole was ejected from Ashleys, the New York club, after having threatened Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth. “He was well out of it and he fancied the girl I was having dinner with,” says Charlesworth. “He was trying it on with her and she didn’t want to know, so I told him to fuck off. He tried to hit me but I ducked. The bouncers saw it all and threw him out. Robert saw it happen too and he was very apologetic to me. After all, I was a friendly journalist. I hadn’t done anything to offend them.”
Charlesworth attended the premiere the next evening and went on to a glitzy party at the Pierre Hotel afterwards. “I saw Richard there. He had a scar on his face that wasn’t there the night before. Robert told me that Peter had heard about the incident in Ashleys and had smashed Cole in the face. Peter always wore all those huge rings with blue enamel so if he hit you it would have been like being hit with a knuckle-duster. It was very intimidating to be around Led Zeppelin in those days.”
Promotional material claimed that the film was “the band’s special way of giving their millions of friends what they have been clamouring for – a personal and private tour of Led Zeppelin. For the first time the world has a front row seat on Led Zeppelin.”
Fans welcomed the film but the critics were less accommodating. Robert Duncan of Circus magazine thought it had been written, produced, directed and edited “by junior college students who had just discovered LSD”. Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone wrote: “It is hard to imagine any other major rock act making a film so guileless and revealing. It is a tribute to their rapaciousness and inconsideration … their sense of themselves merits only contempt.” Despite the incident with Richard Cole, Chris Charlesworth in Melody Maker was more positive and said: “It has been three years in the making but The Song Remains The Same is a classy, and surely enormously successful film.”
Charlesworth: “After my review was published in MM, Robert Plant called me and thanked me and apologised yet again for Richard’s behaviour. I think he thought I’d give the film a bad review just because of what happened.”
Whatever the artistic merits of the movie, Charlesworth was correct in foreseeing its success. It grossed $200,000 in its first week and the double soundtrack album topped the charts and went platinum. It has recouped Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin’s initial investment many times over. Now available on video, it remains one of the most poignant and fascinating artefacts from rock’s golden age, not least because of the famous scene involving Grant backstage.
Peter Clifton is quick to defend the movie. “Every shot was in there for a reason. A lot of people still don’t understand that film. Zeppelin let me get away with quite a lot. I even put the Drake Hotel robbery in there … And there was that lovely sequence which Joe Massot shot, where Peter berates the guy for letting in poster sellers. Peter Grant says ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ eighteen times during that speech. Warner Brothers accepted the film but they said, ‘You are gonna’ have to bleep those words out. Get rid of them.’”
Clifton took the optical print and bleeped just the beginning of each of the offending words with a special pen. When the film was first screened, the words were inaudible and the film was given an appropriate rating. But on every other print the cuss words were retained and came over loud and clear.
This was Clifton’s final legacy to Led Zeppelin and there can be no question that his decision to retain Grant’s foul language added immeasurably to the final film – and to Peter Grant’s legendary status. Whether they were grateful is another matter entirely. “I never did anything wrong,” Clifton says today. “I never cheated them but when we finished the film the band more or less said, ‘We’ve used him up, we’ve done the film. Let’s get rid of him.’ But with Peter there was a sense that we had shared this … thing. It was like a war that we had been through together and he knew I came through for him.”
Joe Massot also went to the premiere The Song Remains The Same in New York. But there was no first-class jet flight into the city, no black Cadillac limo and no magnums of Dom Perignon waiting for him in a plush hotel suite. He had to pay $10 to buy a ticket from a tout (scalper) outside the theatre to see his own movie. As far as he was concerned, whatever Peter Grant said, it was still his movie.
* * *
* Marcel Proust (1871–1922), French novelist and author of À la recherche du temps perdu.
* This is unlikely, given the strenuous efforts made to ensure that the previous band, Flock, departed promptly. In the event, Jefferson Starship appeared much later in the evening and were forced to abandon their set due to rain.
* Aubrey Powell, a celebrated sleeve designer.
* Frank Wells died a few years later climbing Mount Everest.
8
SWAN SONG
“Peter was able to achieve all kinds of things by employing his remarkable persona and that included that terrible stare of his. If he decided to stand up and move a bit too close to you, he could intimidate you with his body language.”
– Swan Song executive Alan Callan
In the midst of the battle to produce The Song Remains The Same Peter Grant had another scheme on his mind. At the same time that he was keeping Zeppelin afloat and placating irate film-makers, he was busy planning a challenging new venture, the group’s very own record label.
During the Seventies the major record labels had a habit of swallowing each other up, a practice that continued apace, until by century’s end there were only a handful of multi-national conglomerates controlling the industry. However there was still room for talent spotting independent labels, and these ‘Indies’ gave sanctuary to many groups and artists whose music might otherwise have beeen overlooked. Another development was the growth of artists’ own labels, widely seen as ‘ego trips’ or simply a means of maximising income from record sales. Such labels were often launched with the best of intentions, by bands that wanted to share their good fortune and boost the aspirations of artists they liked and admired. The Beatles
had set the ball rolling in the late Sixties with Apple Records, about the only aspect of their Apple empire that succeeded. The Stones set up their own label, Rolling Stones Records, distributed through a new deal with Atlantic following their departure from Decca, and Elton John launched his own Rocket Records with a logo inspired by Thomas The Tank Engine. Led Zeppelin unveiled plans for their own label in January 1974, to be called simply Swan Song.
The move followed the expiry of the band’s original five-year contract with Atlantic. Just as The Song Remains The Same had been a Zeppelin production under Grant’s control, so Swan Song would represent another step towards artistic independence, not to mention greater financial control. Jimmy Page came up with the name of the label, having apparently considered several less attractive suggestions, among them Slut, Slag, Eclipse, De Luxe, Stairway and Zeppelin Records.
Peter Grant and Ahmet Ertegun put Swan Song on a sound business footing, with Ertegun’s Atlantic records distributing the new label’s product. Grant called a press conference to announce their plans just a few days after his right-hand man Richard Cole got married, at a ceremony at Caxton Hall, London on January 2,1974. Richard had hoped to be involved in the management of Swan Song, but his ambitions were dashed when other, less volatile characters were appointed to take over the running of the label. Swan Song certainly had a classy image. The logo featured a pair of graceful swans, similar to the protected specimens of West Australian black swans, which swam on the lake at Jimmy’s Plumpstead home. The label design was based on Evening, Fall Of Day, a painting by William Rimner.