The lack of press accessibility had kept the band mysterious, but the mystery cut both ways. What press reports did reach the papers usually centered on a) riots over concert tickets, or b) motorcycles-in-the-hallway-type road behavior. Peter Grant found himself involved in constant crisis management.
(Once introducing himself to Bob Dylan at an L.A. party, Grant offered a warm handshake. “I’m Peter Grant, manager of Led Zeppelin,” he said. Dylan replied, “I don’t come to you with my problems, do I?” It was the only time I’d ever seen Grant at a loss for words.)
The roguish reputation dogged Led Zeppelin for years. In 1972, Elvis Presley wanted to meet the band. Their mutual promoter at the time, Jerry Weintraub, took Page and Plant up to Presley’s Las Vegas hotel suite. For the first few minutes, Elvis ignored them. Page–who had first picked up a guitar after hearing “Baby Let’s Play House” on overseas radio-began to fidget. What was going on ? Did he really want to meet them? Should they say something?
Elvis finally turned to them. “Is it true,” he said, “these stories about you boys on the road?”
Plant answered, “Of course not. We’re family men. I get the most pleasure out of walking the hotel corridors, singing your songs.” Plant offered his best Elvis impersonation. “Treat me like a foooool, treat me mean and cruuuel, but loooooove me….”
For a moment Elvis Presley eyed them both very carefully. Then he burst out laughing. Then his bodyguards burst out laughing. For the next two hours he entertained them in his suite. He had never heard their records, he said, except for when his stepbrother played him ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ “I liked it,” said Presley.
Later, walking down the hallway from the hotel room, Page and Plant congratulated themselves on a two-hour meeting with the King.
“Hey,” came a voice from behind them. Presley had poked his head out the door. “Treat me like foooool….”
The double-lp Physical Graffiti was recorded over several months at Headley Grange. The intention was to make a straight-forward rock album. One song stood out early on. The album was planned to culminate in the hypnotic new track, “Kashmir.” Fifteen years later, all three members point to this song as quintessential Zeppelin, the truest of their many recordings. “It’s all there,” explains John Paul Jones, “all the elements that defined the band…”
The “Kashmir” riff first appeared on Page’s home-studio work tapes. It was first a tuning, an extension of a guitar-cycle that Page had been working on for years. (The same cycle that would produce “White Summer,” “Black Mountain Side,” and the unreleased “Swan-song.”) “The structure of it was strange, weird enough to continue exploring,” remembers Page. Jones had been late for the sessions, and Page used the time to work on the riff with John Bonham. Plant added the middle section and, Jones later added all the string parts.
Originally called “Driving to Kashmir,” the lyrics were inspired by the long drive from Goulimine to Tantan in Southern Morocco, the area once called the Spanish Sahara. “The whole inspiration came from the fact that the road went on and on and on,” Plant explains. “It was a single track road which neatly cut through the desert. Two miles to the East and West were ridges of sandrock. It basically looked like you were driving down a channel, this dilapidated road, and there was seemingly no end to it. ‘Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dreams…’ It’s one of my favorites…that, ‘All My Love’ and ‘In The Light’ and two or three others really were the finest moments. But ‘Kashmir’ in particular. It was so positive, lyrically.
“I remember at the time there were a lot of musicians who were really insensitive about their audiences interpretation of their work. You’d get all this negatively coming out, as if to be mysterious is to be negative, to be dark. Mystery is not about darkness. It’s about intrigue. There’s a fine line in between, of course. Not even a fine line…it’s a gossamer thread.
“How on earth do you want to purport yourself? I believe that it had to be Light. Lyrically, you have to stand by your words! There was a lot of gloom purported by guys who went back and took off their stage-clothes and played golf. And I didn’t want to be one of those guys. I wanted whatever I was saying to represent what I was doing.
“But ‘Kashmir’ was tremendous for the mood. A lot of that was down to Bonzo, what he played. Page and I couldn’t have done it without Bonzo’s thrift. He was a real thrifty player. It was what he didn’t do that made it work….”
There are many successful bands who function like co-workers. They clock-in, clock-out, they exchange cards at Christmas. Thank you, and see you on stage. In my time around them, Led Zeppelin functioned like four very different brothers. It was the kind of closeness that allowed for friendly competition, for privately griping over another member, and for fiercely defending that same person in the next breath. Their comraderie stood in direct opposition to the often-heavy image of Led Zeppelin.
Once on the road, Robert Plant popped into a McDonald’s for lunch. Slowly, the patrons began to recognize him. The room began to tilt towards him. Before long he was surrounded by young fans, and it’s a tribute to his disarming personality that soon they were treating him not as Robert Plant, but as a co-conspirator and a fellow fan of the band.
“Hey, what’s Jimmy Page really like?”
“He’s my mate,” Plant replied simply.
To this day, Page remains an inscrutable presence. He is ethereal, yet extremely forceful. Steely, yet soulful. Jimmy Page is one of the most powerful figures ever to be over-described as ‘fragile.’ One afternoon in Chicago in 1975, Page let the room go dark as the sun set. He quietly, defiantly, described his future.
“To be able to fuse all these styles was always my dream in the early stages,” he said, “but now the composing side of it is just as important. I think it’s time to travel again…it could be a good time for that now. We’ve been in all these hotel rooms, touring. The balance has got to swing exactly the opposite, to the point where you’ve got an instrument and nothing else. I think it’s time to travel, start gaining some really right-in-there experiences. There’s always this time thing. Especially musically. I know what I want to get down and I haven’t much time to do it in. I’ve got a real wanderlust right now. I want to move.”
By July 1975, Zeppelin had accomplished all they’d dreamed of. The world tour had been a smash. Physical Graffiti was a big hit, and all five albums had re-entered the charts. The band had lived in each other’s pockets for years, and their spirit was still strong. Now it was time to travel, to recharge.
Within three weeks Page had flown to Marrakesh to meet up with Plant, who traveling with his wife Maureen. Veering off the tourist paths, Page and Plant rented a Range Rover and drove deep into Morocco. The mission was to discover street music, to soak up the experiences that might enhance the next album. Bob Marley tapes blasting, they traveled through Ovazazatte, Zagora, Tagora, Tafraoute, the Atlas Mountains, moving north through Casablanca and Tangier to meet up with the rest of the band in Montreux, Switzerland.
Page took a brief break, flying to London to check the editing of the “Dazed and Confused” sequence for The Song Remains the Same. (The band had all but decided to shelve the 1973 concert film in favor of something filmed on their upcoming summer tour.) He had planned to catch up with Plant in a few days. Their wanderlust tour wasn’t over yet, and soon they would be gearing up to perform live again.
Bad luck struck when Plant’s car plunged off a cliff on the Greek island of Rhodes. Plant’s wife suffered a fractured skull, and a broken leg and pelvis. Plant fractured his elbow and broke his ankle. They were taken to a small local emergency ward. Just how pervasive was Zeppelin’s popularity? “I was lying there in some pain,” Plant says with understatement, “trying to get cockroaches off the bed and the guy next to me, this drunken soldier, started singing ‘The Ocean’ from Houses of the Holy.”
Plant’s accident would keep the band off the road for two years. The Song Remains the Same, the film and soundtrack, were released to fill the vacuum.
The band is not fond of their only concert recording. After years of revelatory live shows, the concert captured for posterity was achingly average. “As far as the studio recordings went,” says Page, “everyone single one of them has a certain ambiance, certain atmospherics that made them special. When it came to the live shows, we were always trying to move things forward and we certainly weren’t happy leaving them as they were. The songs were always in a state of change. On ‘Song Remains the Same’ you can hear the urgency and not much else. The live shows were an extension of the albums.”
Plant’s accident would thrust the band into their darkest period. For 18 months, it wasn’t known if he’d be able to use his leg again. Plant spent a lengthy period of time drinking beer and “tinkering on the village piano.” Clearly, Zeppelin needed a new album, and needed to feel their ability to make a great one. The plan was to record fast, to push the limits, to paint themselves in a corner and dare themselves to escape.
Rehearsals for Presence began in Malibu, California. It was an odd sight–Led Zeppelin with Robert Plant in a wheelchair. The band soon moved to Munich for the sessions. Every waking hour was spent in the studio, located in the basement of their hotel.
In 1977, Page described the album with a real fervor. “The general urgency and the pent-up whoa was in all of us. The mechanism was perfectly oiled. We started steaming in rehearsals. We did a lot of old rock and roll numbers just to loosen up a bit. ‘For Your Life’ was made up in the studio, right on the spot. I particularly enjoyed the guitar playing on the blues things. The solos never had that coloring before. I was so happy about it…especially since I have to warm up to solo. I get nervous about that kind of guitar playing. Really, very insecure about it. But that’s the way I can really concentrate. I’m usually at my best when I’ really exhausted or under pressure or both. When you’re exhausted all you want to know is what you have to do. The Golden question is why this was done so fast, and why the others take so long. The fact is that this one, we lived all the way through…under circumstances that were extremely frustrating. We weren’t sure about Robert, weren’t sure what was going to happen. Everyone manage to pull it all in…it was great.
If each Zeppelin album was, as Jimmy Page says, a concept album detailing the mental state of the band at the time…then this one was a story of anxiety and frenzy and blues and pain. Presence, he says, is the most important album. It’s a snapshot of a time when the group was stripped of its legendary power. They were running on pure heart and soul.
A dangerous period of inactivity followed Presence. (”You gotta keep your mind active,” said Page at the time, “you can never just ‘go on holiday.’” Plant continued therapy on his ankle. Jones tried farming. Page retreated to Switzerland to produce “Bonzo’s Montreux” with John Bonham. Each member was being asked the same question with alarming frequency–had the band broken up?
The day of gardening would soon come to an end. Plant’s leg improved, and the band held their collective breath when he elected to get up on stage with Bad Company at a New York concert. It was a triumphant evening for Plant. He found he could still move the way he wanted to on a stage. It was a little wobbly, but it would improve. Yellow lights were switched to green. A Led Zeppelin tour was planned for the next year.
Meanwhile, rock had changed. Punk was raging through England, threatening to sweep all the old-time arena-size acts under the carpet. While Page admired the work of the Sex Pistols and the Damned, he was surprised to see that some of the younger musicians had their guns aimed directly for Zeppelin. (Said a member of the Clash: “I don’t even have to listen to their music. Just looking at one of their album covers makes me want to vomit…”) After winning the Melody Maker poll at the outset of 1977, Page had earnestly explained that “Zeppelin is not a nostalgia band.” They rehearsed for two months, carefully assembling the set that would prove it.
The 1977 Zeppelin show was a three-hour tour de force. Page’s guitar blazed, Plant’s soul was on nightly display, Jones and Bonham swung. It was a thunderous break in the two-year silence. For the first time, critics and audiences agreed. This was Zeppelin at their tightest and loosest. The response was overwhelming. As Plant joked on-stage at Madison Square Garden, plucking up some roses left by a fan: “I didn’t know you cared.”
In Los Angeles in 1977, Page gave a particularly stunning description of the Zeppelin alchemy: “The motto of the group is definitely ‘ever onward.’ If there ever is to be a total analysis, it’s that. The fact is that it’s like a chemical fusion…there’s so much ESP involved in it. It sounds pretentious, but it’s true. That’s just what it is. When there are three people playing on stage, instrumentally, and I’m in the middle of a staccato thing, and Bonzo just for some unknown reasons happens to be there doing the same beats on the snare drum…that sort of thing is definitely a form of trans-state…it is sort of communication on that other plane. People get so scientific about it, I experience it every day. There is such a great creative thing there within all of us, you just want to keep going. People really bring it down to earth when they say ‘Have you ever really thought of splitting up?’
But things would never be easy for Led Zeppelin. Tragic news hit as the band was preparing to leave the US at the end of the tour. Plant’s young son Karac had died suddenly from a virus infection. The effect was devastating. Plant disappeared into the country to mend the wounds. His bandmates worried about him, wondered about the future of the group, but within a year Plant had re-emerged with new dedication.
In January of 1978, Zeppelin flew to Stockholm to begin recording a new lp. In Through The Out Door was an album of new sounds and wide style-shifts, odd directions and even the gorgeous Zeppelin ballad “All My Love.” “The whole search is for the unknown,” Page once said. “We’re always looking…”
The band came roaring back to full-power in the summer of 1979. The seventies had been their decade, and they were closing it out in style. In August, two huge appearances at Knebworth had turned out to be emotional affairs for the homeland audiences. The band swept the Melody Maker polls again. “Fool in the rain,” a rare Zeppelin single, was released in December.
After Knebworth, what would be the next step for the biggest band in the world? The answer came that next July as the group stealthily began their first European tour in three years. “Zeppelin Over Europe 80″ opened with little fanfare–it was almost a dream for the Zeppelin faithful. There was playful and generous spirit about the show. (Page had even handled some of the stage introductions himself.) The set opened with “Train Kept A Rollin’,” the first song the band performed together twelve years earlier.
Rehearsals quietly began for an American tour. The group had acquired a new motto for the States, “cut the waffle,” as in no-frills and fewer solos. In early September they announced the US dates with a press release entitled “Led Zeppelin-The Eighties.”
On September 25th, the band was locked in rehearsals at Page’s home. The work was over for the day. John Paul Jones and Zeppelin associate Benjie LeFevre had playfully decided to visit John Bonham’s room “just to watch him sleep.” They found him dead. Bonham had turned the wrong way, accidentally, after a night of drinking. The tragic sight, according to Jones, looked shockingly arbitrary.
The decision to end the band came instantly. In a group this close, the loss was immeasurable. When the three members met in a London hotel room, it was only a matter of wording the statement.
“It was impossible to continue, really,” says Page today. “Especially in light of what we’d done live, stretching and moving the songs this way and that. At that point in time especially, in the early 80’s, there was no way one wanted to even consider taking on another drummer. For someone to ‘learn’ the things Bonham had done…it just wouldn’t have been honest. We had a great respect for each other, and that needed to continue…in life or death.”