Robert Plant: A Life (17 page)

“I mean, talk about self-indulgent bollocks,” says LeFevre, laughing. “Robert, the director and I went up into the hills and . . . it was just completely mad. If you’re going to do a film, then someone’s got to be in charge and have the end result in mind. Not, ‘Well, I think my bit will be like this,’ and, ‘OK, I’m going to do this then.’ ”

Massot showed the band a rough cut of the film at the beginning of 1974. It seemed to them an incoherent mess and Page ordered him fired. An Australian filmmaker, Peter Clifton, was parachuted in. Since most of the original concert footage was unusable, Clifton had to persuade Grant and Zeppelin to reshoot it. This was finally done on a sound stage at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, with the band miming to the Madison Square Garden soundtrack.

“Being a cynical bastard, the thing I love about the film is that you can spot Bonzo being twenty pounds heavier in some shots,” says LeFevre. “Because we did the takes at Shepperton almost two years later and he was the size of a house by then.”

This débâcle did not dampen their hubris. Zeppelin’s deal with Atlantic Records was due for renewal, and Grant and Page were now set upon establishing the band’s own boutique label as part of any future agreement. The multimillion dollar contract they subsequently signed with Ahmet Ertegun duly included the provision for Zeppelin to form Swan Song.

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones had set a precedent for superstar acts having their own vanity labels, with varying degrees of failure. The Beatles’ Apple had proved to be a hopeless basket case, while Rolling Stones Records would have just three acts: the reggae musician Peter Tosh, a Cuban band called Kracker, which only managed one single, and the Stones themselves. Swan Song, Grant and Page insisted, would be different.

To begin with, at least, things looked promising. Three acts were soon signed, all managed by Grant. These were Bad Company, formed from the ashes of Free by singer Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke, a Scottish singer named Maggie Bell, and the Pretty Things, a London band that had been knocking around since the early ’60s. Within months Bad Company’s début album topped the charts in the U.S.

Swan Song opened a plush suite of offices in Manhattan, Grant installing Danny Goldberg as its manager. At the beginning of May Grant and the band flew to America to attend two launch parties for their label, one in New York and the other in L.A. The night after the L.A. bash, on May 11, they went to see Elvis Presley at the Forum.

Zeppelin and Elvis were now sharing a promoter in the U.S., Jerry Weintraub. He set up a meeting between the two parties, which took place after the Forum show in Elvis’s penthouse hotel suite.

“Robert was the one who’d mimed to all his records but it was Bonham who engaged with Elvis more than anyone,” says Cole. “He was talking about cars with him. And Peter sat on Elvis’s dad by mistake. He didn’t see his father on a chair and he flopped down on top of him.

“Elvis was lovely, very gracious. It was like meeting God. When he stood up, everyone in the room stood up. He walked us out to the elevator and Robert started singing with him: ‘Treat me like a fool, treat me mean and cruel.’ When you’re listening to him as a fourteen-year-old, the last thing you’d ever think is that you’d be in Elvis’s hotel room and getting pissed with him.”

It was the Swan Song office in London that better suggested what lay in store. Sited on the King’s Road and opposite a pub, it was decked out with second-hand furniture and was as grubby looking as the building that housed it. Abe Hoch, who had worked at both Atlantic and Motown, was brought in from America to run it. This was easier said than done, given the disorder and chaos that soon reigned there.

Page had already absented himself. The guitarist had bought a new London home—a gothic edifice called the Tower House, built in the 1870s in Holland Park. There he shut himself off to embark on a doomed project of his own, a proposed soundtrack for the American filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s next experimental project,
Lucifer Rising
. Page worked sporadically. Rumors were circulating around the Zeppelin camp that he had begun using heroin, although Page has never publically commented on this and the rumors were never substantiated.

“I think the idea of a having a label really appealed to Robert,” says LeFevre. “Because he’s somewhat of a musical historian—I mean his knowledge is absolutely incredible. And it could have been brilliant. Abe Hoch was a super-intelligent guy and he knew his business. But 484 King’s Road was not as much of a place for business as it should have been. I was there all the time and someone would always say, ‘Oh, let’s just go to the pub.’

“My impression is that all the band liked the idea but when it came down to it they couldn’t be fucked. They tried to put people in place to orchestrate the running of it but didn’t give them any authority, so no decisions were ever made. Of course, I suspect around this period certain people also started to experiment with certain substances, so there was never any cohesive movement.”

It would be October before the band got around to officially launching Swan Song at home. Fittingly enough, the party took place on Halloween in a series of underground tunnels called Chislehurst Caves to the south-east of London. A sense of all that had happened to Led Zeppelin in the last year—and all that was still to come—seemed to be encapsulated in that one night.

“The whole thing was madness,” recalls the DJ Bob Harris, a party guest. “I remember the jazz singer George Melly did a set and there were rows of coffins in front of the stage. Once he started doing his act, the coffins opened and naked girls appeared from out of them, covered in jelly and writhing to the music. One looked around thinking, ‘What was that thing about Sodom and Gomorrah?’ It was ridiculous. Ridiculous—and very, very crazy.”

10

CRASH

I was lying there in some pain, trying to get cockroaches off the bed.

Neither the setting up of Swan Song nor the chaotic production of their film distracted Led Zeppelin from the business of making their next record. In the spring of 1974 they retired for a third time to Headley Grange. Page retained a room in the freezing house but the others chose to be sequestered nearby at a plush country hotel. Not coincidentally, the mobile studio parked on the lawn on this occasion belonged to Ronnie Lane of the Faces—a cheaper alternative to the Rolling Stones’ studio they had previously used.

During the creative boom of the last four years enough songs for two records had been stockpiled and they elected to use them all. Since the band were now filled with a sense of their own importance, this much was inevitable. The double album was then perceived as being a defining artistic statement, one that had already been made by the Beatles’
White Album
, the Rolling Stones’
Exile on Main St.,
Bob Dylan’s
Blonde on Blonde
and, just the previous year, the Who on
Quadrophenia
. Of course, Zeppelin would have to join this pantheon.

They worked fast, cutting the majority of the songs in one or two takes. Fifteen tracks in all, eight dating as far back as the spring of 1970 and the rest written in recent months. Sound engineer Benji LeFevre was present throughout the sessions. “There were moments of musical genius,” he says. “As a unit it was like . . . Phew! There was the most amazing bond, certainly when I began working with them.

“Yet there were also times when it all stuttered to a halt. We took farm animals up to the first floor and let off flares. Complete madness. Everything stopped for several weeks when one of the roadies, Peppy, drove Bonzo’s new car—a BMW 3.0 CSL—into a wall. Bonzo was so upset about his pride and joy that he wanted to kill Peppy, who hid in a wardrobe for thirty-six hours.

“It was just young blokes having a laugh. The band had this belief about them then that they were untouchable—as we all do. It was all to do with testosterone and, believe me, Robert had more of it than anybody I’ve ever known.”

Still, at the edges, the fraying continued. One morning Bonham arrived at the Grange with a bag containing 1,500 pills of the sedative Mandrax, intending to conceal them from the rest of the band by taping them to the inside of his drum heads. A member of the crew spotted the flaw in this plan, pointing out to Bonham that he had a Perspex kit.

“Like most drummers, Bonzo tended to exceed the limit more than most people would,” says LeFevre. “Sometimes he was particularly cruel to Mick Hinton—his roadie. Bonzo would punch him in the face for no reason at all.

“With Robert and Bonzo, they were so tight you couldn’t slip a piece of toilet paper between them. But Robert wasn’t afraid to go out into the world and be himself. He’d buy a few people a drink in the pub. Whereas Bonzo would go into a pub and announce that he was going to buy everybody drinks all afternoon. Why? Insecurity probably.

“As with any group of friends, the dynamic between each of them ebbed and flowed. The relationships changed depending on the circumstances, of which there were some heavy ones. And also, I imagine, with the amount of mind-altering substances being consumed. Because then paranoia starts to evolve.”

For now, however, none of these external forces diminished the music. The completed album,
Physical Graffiti
, was the second—and last—stone-cold classic Zeppelin would make. Its fifteen tracks ran to more than eighty minutes and sprawled out across four sides of vinyl, but none of this expanse was wasted. Rather, it allowed for the setting loose of Zeppelin’s most intricate and varied collection of songs, plunging through rumbling rockers like “Custard Pie” and “Night Flight” and into gradually unwinding epics such as “Ten Years Gone” and “In the Light,” the latter’s spiralling drone stolen from the baked streets of Marrakech. Something as decorative as “Bron-Yr-Aur” or reflective as “Down by the Seaside” was set alongside the primitive crunch of “The Wanton Song.”

Appropriately, it sounded enormous. Conducting the orchestra through all its tremors and earthquakes, Page reached his apogee as a producer. He mixed the songs into a great rhythmic soup, basing it on Bonham’s reverberations—his drums again recorded in the Grange’s vast entrance hall—and layered multiple guitar tracks on top of these.

There was a manic zeal to the whole enterprise, though. “Trampled Underfoot” cut a thrilling dash, Jones taking the inspiration for his bubbling clavinet line from Stevie Wonder. “In My Time of Dying” was unrecognisable from the original blues song from which it was appropriated, Blind Willie Johnson’s “Jesus, Make Up My Dying Bed” from 1927. Huge and unbending, the Zeppelin track powered along for more than eleven minutes, Page’s bottleneck guitar ricocheting off Bonham’s tumultuous fills.

Then there was the song that is perhaps their grandest achievement, “Kashmir.” Page’s majestic, circling riff cast it out across a cool desert night and into Jones and Bonham’s driving rhythm, and on through all the mysteries and wonders of Plant’s incantations. It did not matter that Kashmir itself is, in fact, a wet, mountainous region or that neither Plant nor Page had ever been there—it was the song that best captured the spirit of their wanderings.

On “Sick Again” Plant looked back with a jaded eye at the tawdry scene he had last encountered on Sunset Strip, perhaps referring to Lori Maddox, Page’s teenage consort, in the line, “One day soon you’re gonna reach sixteen.” Yet “Black Country Woman” gave rise to more lasting examination, as Plant, in the best blues tradition, beseeched his woman not to treat him mean, before concluding, “That’s alright, I know your sisters, too.” Here was further fertile ground upon which to grow speculation about the state of relations between Plant and his wife’s younger sister, although if this was at the song’s root it suggested that Maureen Plant never listened to her husband’s records.

Physical Graffiti
was released on February 24, 1975 in a die-cut sleeve that pictured a New York City brownstone tenement block, through the windows of which one could pick out Elizabeth Taylor, Lee Harvey Oswald and the band themselves dressed in drag. There were other big, ambitious records that year, Bob Dylan’s
Blood on the Tracks
, Bruce Springsteen’s
Born to Run
and
Fleetwood Mac
among them, but this, the artwork alone seemed to insist, was the greatest and most imposing of all. So it proved, shipping more than a million copies and becoming the fastest-selling record in history. For now, at least, there was still no stopping them.

By the time
Physical Graffiti
came out Zeppelin were touring North America. This was also a vainglorious endeavor, taking in thirty-five dates. It began with three consecutive shows at Chicago Stadium, and included as many nights again at both New York’s Madison Square Garden and the Forum in Los Angeles. The band and their closest retinue once more piled aboard the Starship, basing themselves in two or three key cities for weeks on end, flying out to each gig from these and then back again.

The production was even bigger than it had been on their last haul around the U.S. almost two years before—louder, flashier and with more of everything. On-stage, Page was often resplendent in a black velvet suit, a pair of flaming dragons snaking down its sides. Bonham dressed in the garb of a
Clockwork Orange
droog—a white boiler suit and a bowler hat—as did his hapless Sancho Panza, Mick Hinton.

When they were firing on all cylinders, as remained the case on the best of nights, Zeppelin seemed immense and invincible, both larger than life and also a step removed from it. Their sets, longer than ever, never quite buckled under the weight of so many gargantuan songs: “In My Time of Dying” and “No Quarter,” “Kashmir” and “Stairway to Heaven.”

Dennis Sheehan, now U2’s tour manager and then one of Grant’s staffers, joined the entourage for the first time on this tour. “A lot of what’s written about Zeppelin is how raucous they were, and how sex and drugs dominated—everything but the music, which always seems to be a secondary thing. You can’t be as good as they were and have everything else be dominant over the music,” he insists. “Yes, there were bad things that happened on that tour. But for every bad thing, there were a thousand great moments.