Robert Plant: A Life (10 page)

The village of Pangbourne was a rural retreat for well-off Londoners to escape to and Page had found himself a charming boathouse on the river. A new Bentley was parked in the driveway. Out back a flight of steps led down to a mooring and the water. Inside the house Page had installed a large aquarium and filled the place with antiques he had picked up on his travels.

This had all been paid for with the money he had earned from the Yardbirds and years of session work before that. For Plant it was a vision of what success looked like. Yet it also made clear to him that, here and now, he and Page would not be meeting as equals.

“I was taken aback when Jimmy asked me to his house,” Plant told me. “I mean, the Yardbirds had cut some serious shapes at one point and obviously they were working in America. Then I met Jimmy and he was so charismatic. His contacts were phenomenal.”

Four years older than Plant, Page was born in the London suburb of Heston, five months before the end of the war in Europe. An only child, he had been a keen athlete at school, a promising hurdler, but nothing else mattered to him once he heard Elvis on the radio. He got his first guitar, a Spanish acoustic, at the age of twelve, teaching himself to play by copping licks off James Burton, Elvis’s guitarist.

In his teens Page joined his first band, Neil Christian and the Crusaders, doing one-night stands around the country, bashing out rock ’n’ roll covers. Upon leaving school he enrolled at an art college in Surrey. Most nights he headed into London’s West End with his guitar and began getting up with the house bands at clubs such as the Marquee and Crawdaddy. This led him on to the session circuit, where he flourished, since he was a fast learner and versatile, too, as proficient with ornate acoustic melodies as stinging electric leads.

The session jobs came thick and fast. He played on the Who’s “I Can’t Explain” and the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” singles, but also with Burt Bacharach and on advertising jingles. In 1965 the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham hired him as staff producer at his new record label, Immediate, for which the Small Faces and Fleetwood Mac recorded. He joined the Yardbirds as bassist the following year, switching to guitar when Jeff Beck, whom Page had known since school, upped and left. He toured the U.S., storing up knowledge and being shaped by all he heard.

Kim Fowley, the veteran American producer and hustler, recalls Page running into him in Los Angeles on one of these first visits. “I was having breakfast one morning at the Hyatt House Hotel on Sunset Strip when in he comes, Mister boyish, dressed in crushed velvet. He spotted me, and came and sat down. He told me he’d just had the most insane, disturbing experience.

“A well-known singer-songwriter of the time, a pretty blonde, had asked him over to her house. When he got there, she’d detained him. He said she’d used restraints. I asked if he meant handcuffs and he said yes, but also whips—for three days and nights. He said it was scary but also fun. They say there’s always an incident that triggers later behavior. I contend that this was it for Jimmy Page. Because being in control—that became his deal.”

Plant stayed at Page’s house for a week. The time was spent sizing each other up and rifling through Page’s record collection to find shared touchstones. An immediate chord was struck when Plant alighted on Joan Baez’s version of “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” written by Anne Bredon in the ’50s. A delighted Page told him that he had marked the song out for his new band, something they could electrify.

Yet in most other respects the two of them were very different. Page was reserved and withdrawn, Plant outgoing and cocksure. Plant had left home at seventeen and been scuffling on the fringes of the music business ever since. Page lived with his parents till he was twenty-four, and had them nurture and encourage his passion. For as long as Plant had scrapped, Page had been at the heart of the action.

Before Plant left he played Page his old Band of Joy demos. Page had not yet found a drummer and Plant suggested he check out John Bonham. On the evening of July 31, 1968 Page and Grant trooped along to a club in Hampstead, north London, to see Bonham drum with Tim Rose. Bonham’s playing was ridiculously loud but also fast and dextrous, so one might miss the great skill behind the thunder. Page, however, had a keen ear and was sold.

Bonham was less taken with the idea of throwing in his lot with Page. He and his wife Pat were still living in a caravan behind his parents’ house. The couple now had a two-year-old son, Jason, and Bonham was indebted to his father. He was getting a steady income from Rose, not to mention the fact that Pat was of a mind that anything involving her husband’s big, daft mate Robert Plant was bound to end in financial ruin.

Plant was nonetheless dispatched to work on his friend, although Bonham was finally swung by a visit from Page and Grant, and their offer of more money than Rose was paying. Plant now had a familiar face along for the ride, someone to hold on to should the going get rough. He opened a bank account, depositing £35, his first rewards from this latest band.

A week before his twentieth birthday he and Bonham returned to London for rehearsals. That summer there were portents in the air for them. Both of the other mercurial guitarists who had been Yardbirds, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, had put out new records. Clapton’s Cream released
Wheels of Fire
, their third, a sprawling double album that was shot through with fiery blues but also burdened by excess and over-indulgence. Beck debuted his Jeff Beck Group on
Truth
, with Rod Stewart on vocals, coming up with a sound that was also steeped in the blues, but heavy and portentous. Yet Cream would not survive the year and Beck’s group were no more built to last. As a result there would be a clear run for what Page had in mind.

Arriving at a poky rehearsal room beneath a record shop on Gerard Street in London’s Soho, Plant and Bonham met their other new band mate. Like Page, John Paul Jones was an only child. Born in 1946 into a musical family in Sidcup, Kent, he was also in a touring band by the time he was a teenager, playing bass guitar for the ex-Shadows duo, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan. He, too, had gone on to do sessions, which is where he and Page had first crossed paths.

Jones was accomplished on both bass and keyboards but gifted as an arranger as well. He had scored the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow” single and “Sunshine Superman” for the Scottish folk singer Donovan, a U.S. Number One in 1966. Again like Page, Jones was an introvert, although there was something still more enigmatic about him, as though he kept a part of himself locked away at all times.

This, then, was the band. Two diffident southern Englanders with experience beyond their years, two garrulous lads from the Midlands as green as they were driven. To begin with, Page called them the New Yardbirds, since it afforded them both instant recognition and the opportunity to take on some bookings left over from his old group.

The reaction in Britain to them was lukewarm at best. The weekly music paper
NME
named their singer “Bob Plante,” and in Plant’s own neck of the woods John Ogden at the
Express & Star
newspaper was even less engaged.

“I don’t think I even wrote about it,” he says. “I thought the Yardbirds were old hat. It seemed to me like another bloody lost cause for him.”

The four of them knew differently. This much had been clear from that initial rehearsal. They had thrown themselves into “Train Kept A-Rollin’,” a staple of the Yardbirds’ live sets, and the force of their collective sound had shocked them. It became more apparent still during the first gigs they did together that September. These were club dates in Denmark and Sweden, 40-minute sets a night, the songs hand-picked by Page: blues covers, tracks he had done with the Yardbirds, and an ominous-sounding dirge called “Dazed and Confused” he had begun messing around with during the end days of that band.

Each of them understood, no words needing to be spoken, that this was a band apart. It was as if they had captured lightning in a bottle.

“Straight away, we could see the power of it,” Page told me, years later. “It was a very intense thing. Was it extreme for the time? Good God, yes. The use and employment of electric and acoustic guitars—that hadn’t been done by anyone—or the shaping of the songs. There was something alchemical between the four of us that was totally unique.”

Plant nodded, adding his own rejoinder: “We were really good and we didn’t fuck about.”

Still buzzing from their short Scandinavian excursion and having been together for just a few weeks, the band trooped into London’s Olympic Studios on September 27 to record their debut album. Based in Barnes, on the south-west edge of the capital, Olympic was a small, eight-track studio housed in an old music hall. The Rolling Stones had used it that same summer to record
Beggars Banquet
.

As he would do on all their albums Page was producing the sessions, assisted by the in-house engineer Glyn Johns. Plant’s studio experience, like Bonham’s, was limited, so much so that he had to be told to use headphones. Despite this he gave off his usual aura of self-confidence.

Phill Brown was then a teenage apprentice at Olympic. “Glyn Johns was using down-time at the studio for them,” he recalls. “He’d bring them in at weekends, when no one else was using the place, and that’s how they made the record. I met Robert and Jimmy. Robert was very striking. He seemed sort of god-like. As a band they definitely had a vibe to them. They were very focused and full-on. Arrogant isn’t the word but they were self-contained and sure of themselves.”

Page, however, was the band’s undisputed leader. Since there was no record deal at this point he was funding the sessions out of his own pocket and kept a forensic eye on costs. Plant moaned to Kevyn Gammond, his friend back home, about Page charging him for a plate of beans on toast he had ordered for lunch one day.

Page did not ease up on this control in the studio, where he took the major role in creating and molding the songs, although he often tapped into Jones’s arranging skills (Plant, still under contract to CBS, was not permitted writing credits). In his soft-spoken manner Page directed the others, Plant and Bonham in particular. The pair were both then on wages, no more than hired hands. The singer seemed carefree but he feared being replaced at any moment and so was compliant. Bonham was more bullish. It was left to Grant to step in and set the drummer right. “Do what this man says,” he instructed him, “or fuck off,” as Charles Cross reports in
Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller than Our Souls
.

“I wanted artistic control in a viselike grip,” Page told the writer Brad Tolinski, “because I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the band. That first record sounded so good because I had gotten so much experience in the recording studio. I knew precisely what I was after and how to get it.”

Such was Page’s attention to detail and the work ethic he instilled, recording was completed in just thirty hours’ studio time. The sessions had cost a mere £1,782, the shrewdest investment Page would make. Long before the album came out the band that made it had become Led Zeppelin. This dated back to when Page first proposed forming a group to the Who’s rhythm section, Keith Moon telling him it would go down like a “lead balloon.”

For the record’s cover Page chose a screenprint of a burning airship. The stark, explosive nature of the image was fitting.
Led Zeppelin
was a trailblazing album. Perfect it was not—the material was too much of a mess for it to be that, and not all of it flew. Yet when it took to the air its power seemed almost elemental, Page’s guitar strafing the grunge of “Dazed and Confused,” Bonham filling pockets of space on “Good Times, Bad Times” with dazzling flourishes, the revved-up rush of “Communication Breakdown” and the rousing “Your Time Is Gonna Come.” In moments such as these, Zeppelin soared.

Plant shone on “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” the song that first bonded him to Page. Here it embodied the sense of light and shade that Page intended to be at the band’s core—winsome acoustic passages giving way to full-bore rock, Plant riding the currents of both. Less convincing were two Willie Dixon covers, “You Shook Me” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” Plant as overwrought in his reading of the old bluesman as the band were leaden. He was otherwise somewhat constrained, suggesting little of the wild abandon he had shown with Alexis Korner just months earlier.

Grant began shopping the album to record labels in the U.K. The offices of Island Records were on a floor below his own on London’s Oxford Street, and he pressed a copy upon the label’s founder, Chris Blackwell. Birmingham-born drummer Mike Kellie was then a member of blues-rockers Spooky Tooth and signed to Island.

“We went in to see Chris one day and he handed me this record, telling me there were a couple of guys on it that I knew,” Kellie recalls. “I had no idea who they might be but I took it with me. Those were the days of getting it together in the country and we were living on a farm out in Berkshire. We went back there and put the record straight on.

“Our singer, Mike Harrison, and I had the same reaction to it. We wanted to be in that band. It was the best of everything we’d heard and all we aspired to be. It was only later that I found out it was Robert and Bonzo. To me, Robert sounded just like Steve Marriott on that first record, when Marriott was at his very best.”

The general reaction to the band continued to be more muted. Grant could not negotiate a deal for them in the U.K., and they often met with unresponsive audiences during their first gigs around the country that October and November. If this put Page’s nose out of joint, it was nothing Plant was unused to.

“When I opened up shows for Gene Vincent and the Walker Brothers in the town halls, I was playing to thirty-five people,” he told me. “And that was the zenith of all opportunity. Bonzo and I couldn’t even get in to some of the first gigs we did because we didn’t have a tie on. The fact that we kicked up a gear and got bigger audiences, that was just an act of God.”

More specifically, it was the act of Grant turning his attentions toward the U.S. that did it for Zeppelin. The Yardbirds still had enough currency there to open doors for him, and when he flew out to New York he was also blessed with good fortune and opportune timing.