Stairway To Heaven (5 page)

W
hat's wrong with you bastards? Don't you have any professionalism left?”

Jimmy Page had run out of patience. He was pacing the floor and lecturing Keith Relf, lead vocalist for the Yardbirds, minutes after the end of a concert in Chicago during which Relf's drinking had taken precedence over the music itself. Jimmy kicked wildly at a nearby guitar case, knocking it onto its side. His arms were crossed across his chest. The aggravation showed in his furrowed brow, his agitated voice.

“You come onto the stage, Keith, and you act as though you're spending the evening at a fuckin' pub,” Jimmy shouted. “What the hell's wrong with you?”

That night, Relf had carried several bottles of booze right onto the stage with him—Scotch, brandy, bourbon, and beer. After the last chords of “Heart Full of Soul” resonated, he bent down to pick up the Scotch, then guzzled it straight out of the bottle. He did the same after “For Your Love”—in fact, after nearly every song. All the while, Jimmy glared at him from across the stage, yelled at him to “cool it,” but to no avail. Keith was so sloshed that the rest of the band should have dragged him off the stage.

The Yardbirds were disintegrating, and Jimmy knew it. It kept him awake at night. And for a musician with such enormous talent and such unwavering perfectionism, Pagey seemed like an unlikely candidate to preside over the demise of one of the best-known rock bands of the sixties. Yet when I began working with Jimmy and the Yardbirds early in 1968, that was precisely what he was doing. The Yardbirds were crumbling around us.

By that point, Jimmy had been with the band for nearly two years, joining them as their bassist in June 1966. When he became a Yardbird, he saw it as an escape…his avenue for finally fleeing the creative straightjacket of London studio work. It also eventually provided Jimmy with the springboard that launched him into a twelve-year career with Led Zeppelin.

But first, Jimmy had to officiate at the funeral procession of the Yardbirds, where I served as one of the pallbearers. I worked as the band's tour manager on its final American tour that began in March 1968.

Peter Grant, then the Yardbirds' manager, had hired me to join the final Yardbirds tour after I had traveled with another of his acts, the New Vaudeville Band. Mick Wilshire, a drummer who I had met two years earlier while on vacation in Spain, was part of the New Vaudeville Band, and arranged for my first meeting with Peter. When I walked into Grant's office for the first time, he was sitting comfortably behind an oversized desk. It was a large office, befitting a man like Peter, who was one of the biggest fellows I had ever met. When he rose to greet me, I gulped. It seemed to take him forever just to stand all the way up. At six-foot-six, he was an imposing presence. Later, when I learned he had once been a nightclub bouncer, a professional wrestler, and a movie double for heavyweight British actors like Robert Morley, I wasn't surprised—and was a little more cautious when I was around him.

Peter was raised by his mother in a poor neighborhood in London. He dropped out of school, was scrambling for odd jobs by his early teens, and eventually stumbled into the music business. He became the British tour manager for American performers like the Everly Brothers and Little Richard, during which time he developed a show-no-mercy attitude toward anyone who crossed him. I heard the story that one evening, he pummeled a rock promoter who tried to cheat Little Richard out of a few pounds; not only did Peter's anger send the poor fellow to the emergency room, but Peter also punched out several cops who had been called in to quiet the disturbance. For Peter, it was just like being back in the wrestling ring.

I was always known as a tough guy, but Peter Grant, I figured, was in a class by himself. At that first meeting, I told Peter a little about myself and the bands I had worked for. “Well, Cole,” he finally said, “the tour manager's job with the New Vaudeville Band is open. I can pay you twenty-five pounds a week. Do we have a deal?”

“Not yet,” I answered without a pause. “Thirty pounds a week, that's what I need…. Take it or leave it!”

Peter seemed astonished by my response. Frankly, so was I, particularly since I was still feeling anxious sitting across from this oversized man. Later Peter told me, “I wasn't used to people talking to me like that. But on balance, I figured it was a good sign. I doubted you would take shit from anyone.”

Peter agreed to the thirty-pound-a-week salary. We shook hands, and then as I headed for the door, he bellowed, “One more thing, Cole.” I turned, and he was shaking his index finger at me. “I never want to hear that you've repeated anything that goes on in this fucking office. If you do, I'll cut your ears off! Cut 'em right off!”

At that moment, I had no doubt that he would.

“Give me a call at the end of the week, Cole. By then, I'll know when you're going to start.”

That was my introduction to Peter Grant. It was also my foot in the door to Grant's organization, which eventually led me to the Yardbirds.

 

My tenure with the Yardbirds was a difficult experience for both me and Pagey. In the pre-Page era, the Yardbirds had enjoyed a reign of enormous popularity that began in London in 1963. Throughout the midsixties, their name alone made rock fans worldwide take notice, in large part because of their superb guitarists. Before Jimmy, the Yardbirds had provided forums for two of the finest of the era—Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. Few guitarists could follow in those footsteps; Jimmy Page was one of them.

When Paul Samwell-Smith quit the Yardbirds in 1966, Pagey took his place. For the next two years, he was a permanent fixture in the band. But by early 1968, when I joined the Yardbirds as their tour manager, they were on their last gasp—a fact of life that everyone in the band acknowledged. If burnout can happen to rock musicians, it had definitely steamrolled its way over the Yardbirds. Of the original 1963 Yardbirds lineup of five musicians, three of them—Keith Relf, Chris Dreja, and Jim McCarty—were still hanging on at the end, although with almost no measurable enthusiasm.

From the moment Jimmy joined the Yardbirds, he ended up carrying the band as best he could. Particularly during that final 1968 tour, Relf was just going through the motions. “We've got some contractual obligations, so I'm willing to meet them,” Keith told me one afternoon while sipping on a beer in his hotel room. “But I'm tired of it all. I'm just used up.”

During that last tour, Relf was a shadow of what he had once been—drowning in his excessive use of alcohol and angel dust. He did a lot of acid, too, often in his hotel room with incense burning nearby. Jimmy and I would sometimes have a snort of coke together, but Keith seemed incapable of knowing when he was overdoing it. “I'm fine!” he used to shout when I showed some concern. “Damn it, you're my tour manager, not my mother!”

Throughout that tour, we traveled primarily in a leased Greyhound bus that had most of its seats removed. Canvas beds had been anchored to the floor, and that's where we slept, or at least tried to, when we weren't in hotels.
There was a single bathroom in the back, but no stereos, cooking facilities, or power outlets. It was a third-class, thoroughly cheerless operation all the way.

Jimmy had clearly assumed leadership of a band capsizing at sea. While the other musicians were suffocating in their own depression and despondency, approaching the last Yardbirds tour as thought it were a death march, Jimmy would kick them in the ass and try to get them excited about making music again. “Let's give the fans their money's worth tonight,” he would plead with the rest of the band. But no matter how passionately his appeals became, he was usually ignored.

When Keith Relf was drunk, he played the harmonica like he had just picked it up for the first time. He also stumbled over song lyrics. He even yelled obscenities at the audience and at the other Yardbirds. Nevertheless, it was my job to try to keep Keith singing for an hour, get the money from the promoter, and deal with any complaints later.

Most of the complaints came from Pagey himself. “What the hell do you think you're doing?” Jimmy seethed after the disastrous Chicago concert. “These fans are paying money to hear us sing, Keith, not to watch you get drunk.”

His anger fell on deaf ears. “I'm not hurting anyone, Jimmy,” Keith said. “I didn't hear that anybody asked for their money back.”

Despite the noticeable stress upon Jimmy, I watched him emerge as the consummate professional—the same qualities he later demonstrated throughout the reign of Led Zeppelin. Even near the final hours of the Yardbirds, Pagey would sometimes spend much of the afternoon carefully coiffing his hair and selecting stylish attire, highlighted by ruffled shirts, antique scarves, and velvet jackets. While the rest of the band was wearing jeans, beads, and caftans, Jimmy had the look of an eighteenth-century British gentleman. He felt the fans deserved something special, even if he was the only Yardbird who did.

There was another factor at work besides Jimmy's professional pride. He also hoped to do something with the name “Yardbirds” down the road. He still believed there was some luster associated with the Yardbirds name, and at one point he approached Relf and McCarty:

“If you're not going to carry on, I'd still like to. I'm thinking of forming a new band and would like the rights to use the name.”

Relf laughed. “Is there actually something left that's worth anything?” Without hesitating, he added, “It's all yours. I don't want anything to do with that fuckin' name anymore!”

They signed some legal documents, and Jimmy assumed ownership of the “Yardbirds.”

The last Yardbirds concert in America was on June 5, 1968, at an auto raceway on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama. That morning, we were sitting by the pool of our hotel while a nearby radio blared a series of news bulletins:

“Senator Robert Kennedy, who was shot last night at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, is lying near death in a hospital.”

I was mortified. I felt the country was coming apart before my eyes.

For that final concert, the Yardbirds performed on a makeshift stage consisting of two thirty-five-foot flatbed trailers. The fans—spanning the dirt racetrack to the edges of the stage—were remarkably enthusiastic. Just before Jimmy went onstage, he said to me, “It's sad, isn't it? This band could have gone on for years if the enthusiasm were there. I hate to see a great band die.”

But that night, it did. As a single spotlight lit up Relf, then Page, then Dreja and McCarty, they played as the Yardbirds for the last time in America: “Heart Full of Soul”…“Over Under Sideways Down”…“Shapes of Things.” When the last chords of “For Your Love” faded into the night, any nostalgia that I felt was overshadowed by a sense of relief that it was finally over. Jimmy was wonderful to work with, but the tension within the band was almost unbearable at times.

I
n the wake of the Yardbirds' demise, Jimmy Page had started planning his future. Emotionally, he was exhausted from the strain of presiding over the group's death sentence and, for a time, even considered taking a hiatus.

“Maybe I need a break,” he told a friend. “I'm not sure I have the stamina right now to start all over again with a new band.”

But it wasn't in Jimmy's nature to sit still. He loved making music too much. He would get high from the sounds he could elicit from his guitar. Even during the times when Jimmy was using drugs, no pill or other substance could make him as euphoric, as intoxicated as music. As with any powerful, addicting drug, he was driven back to his instrument for another fix, another hit of the compelling stimulant.

There were some practical considerations as well—in particular, contractual agreements that needed to be honored. Even though the Yardbirds had disbanded, they left some unmet concert commitments in their wake—most immediately, a Scandinavian tour. That meant forming a band—the name New Yardbirds kept spinning in Jimmy's head—that could go on the road and play the remaining dates.

So in late summer 1968, in the midst of the Supergroup era, Jimmy was faced with the prospect of creating a new band. And the more he thought about it, the more intriguing the possibilities seemed. He knew about the obstacles and the land mines, of course—the huge egos and the heavy pressures
that had subverted more than one Superband. “I'm not in any mood to have another band fold underneath me,” he said. “I'm still feeling the repercussions from the Yardbirds.”

Cream was the most recent Supergroup to go up in smoke. That band featured three of the most talented rock musicians of the times—Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker—and they exploded with power and influence upon the release of their first album in 1967. As their name suggests, they really were the cream of the rock music crop, combining white blues with hard, driving rock. But by late 1968, the band was disintegrating, and it played its final concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York and Royal Albert Hall in London.

With Cream extinct, critics began debating who—if anyone—could fill the blues-rock void. Some talked about Ten Years After. Others looked toward Pink Floyd. But when Jimmy ultimately made the decision to form a new band that would become Led Zeppelin, he put the debate to rest.

Jimmy spent a lot of restless nights by himself at his home in Pangbourne, contemplating who he might invite to join the new band—jotting down names, adding and crossing musicians off the list, trying to picture how the band might jell with varying combinations. He was taking the whole process seriously. John Entwistle, Keith Moon, Jeff Beck…B. J. Wilson and Nicky Hopkins…they were all on Jimmy's “A” list. So were Steve Marriott and Steve Winwood, who were his top contenders to handle the lead vocals. In those early weeks, neither Robert Plant nor John Bonham was even in contention. In fact, Jimmy didn't even know who they were.

“I tried to send word to Marriott,” Jimmy often recalled. “I was excited about being in a band with him. I really thought it might work. But when his management team got back to me, they said Steve felt committed to Small Faces. He wasn't interested.”

Jimmy continued to scrutinize and narrow down the list of candidates. Before long, Terry Reid emerged as his frontrunner for the role of lead singer. Jimmy had seen him perform and was taken with his potent, gravelly voice. But again Jimmy's plans were undermined.

“It sounds exciting,” Reid told him by phone. “But I'm afraid I'm going to have to rule myself out. I'm already under contract with Mickey Most. I guess that puts me out of the picture.”

At times, Jimmy would grow weary of this winnowing process. He called Terry back and asked, “Is there anyone else you can suggest for vocals?” He wasn't expecting to hear any names that he wasn't already considering. But he was beginning to feel that perhaps this was a hopeless venture.

“Well, there's one guy you should look at,” Terry said. “His name is Robert Plant. He's with a band called Hobbstweedle.”

Plant's name meant nothing to Jimmy, and Hobbstweedle was barely pronounceable and certainly wasn't recognizable to Jimmy or anyone in his immediate circle. But he trusted Terry's opinion enough to track Plant down. He found him performing at a teachers' training college near Birmingham, singing before a crowd barely big enough to fill up a Volkswagen van.

Frankly, most of Plant's song selections that night didn't really excite Jimmy—tunes by Moby Grape, for example. But that voice—Jimmy got the chills listening to Robert—his strong, sexy, emotional, plaintive voice, like a cry from deep within Robert's soul.

 

“Why isn't this guy a star yet?” Jimmy thought to himself. “Something's gotta be wrong with him. Maybe he has one of those obnoxious personalities and no one can get along with him.”

Jimmy figured he'd need to get to know Robert Plant better before offering him a place in the band. In the meantime, however, he couldn't get Robert off his mind. Overnight, he forgot about the others he had once considered—Reid, Winwood, Marriott. Unless Robert turned out to be some kind of social pariah, this was the singer he wanted.

On Robert's end, he was both excited and anxious at being contacted by Pagey. To the struggling rock singer, Jimmy Page was one of the stars in the rock stratosphere to which Robert aspired. When Jimmy told him that he was searching for a singer for a new Page-led band, Robert realized that this could finally become his ticket to fame. When Jimmy invited him to visit his Pangbourne home, Robert vowed, “I'm not going to blow this chance. This kind of opportunity may never come again.”

On his way to Pangbourne, already edgy and nervous, Robert was accosted in the train station by an elderly woman offended by the singer's long hair. “Cut it! Cut your hair!” she screamed. “Don't you have any sense of decency at all?”

Before Robert could react, she slapped his cheek.

Robert was shaken by the incident. Maybe this is an omen, he thought, trying to regain his composure. Maybe this isn't meant to be. Maybe I should just turn around and go home.

But once he was at Jimmy's house, Robert's anxieties eased. The Page-Plant meeting simply couldn't have gone any better. They spent the afternoon talking about their respective musical tastes. They swapped stories. They laughed together. At one point, Jimmy said, “I want you to hear something.” He walked to his stereo and put on a Joan Baez album on which she was singing “Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You.”

“What do you think of this?” Jimmy asked. “Can you see us playing it?”

Robert listened. Less than midway through the tune, he nodded. When the
song had ended, he picked up Jimmy's acoustic guitar and started strumming an arrangement of the song. “This might work,” he said.

The chemistry was there. Robert was on board. The young singer was so happy he wanted to scream for joy, but restrained himself, at least until he was out of earshot of Pagey.

 

Just before Robert left for home, he put in a good word for Bonham, his old friend. Plant and Bonham lived not far from one another, and they still spent time together now and then. But they hadn't performed onstage with each other since the Band of Joy dissolved. Even so, Robert could already picture Bonzo as part of the new band, and the idea excited him. “Don't make any decisions about your drummer until you've seen him play,” Plant told Page. “It's hard to describe. I don't think anyone plays the drums like him. I know no one plays them any better.”

Bonzo, however, was touring with Tim Rose and seemed quite content to stay just where he was. After all, he was making about forty pounds a week, which was the most money that he had ever earned. It would have been tough for him to give up his steady income.

“When you've got a good thing going, you don't throw it out the window,” Bonzo told Jimmy on the phone. “I'm content right now. Things seem to be working for me.”

Nevertheless, based on the high praise from Robert, Jimmy wanted to hear Bonham perform. He traveled to the Country Club in West Hampstead where Bonzo was performing with Rose. The show began rather routinely, but about twenty-five minutes into the set, Bonham took the spotlight. Jimmy's eyes widened as Bonzo attacked the drums like a kamikaze pilot. He bombed and strafed. He blitzed and blasted. He even put his sticks down and flailed away on the drums with his hands. He did everything but pounce on them and leave them in splinters.

“I've gotta get this guy,” Jimmy told himself. “There's gotta be some way to change his mind.”

Jimmy started working on the drummer. “This could be a breakthrough band, John…. We have wonderful management…. I think this is an incredible opportunity for all of us…. Think about it and let's talk again.”

Jimmy recruited Peter Grant, who would manage the new band, to help him hound Bonham. They took Bonzo to lunch. They courted him with dozens of telegrams. They got Plant to do some arm twisting, too. “We're not taking ‘no' for an answer,” Jimmy finally said. He wasn't kidding.

Eventually, Bonzo's resolve began to weaken. He knew about Pagey's star status and, of course, had worked with Plant. Maybe, he thought, this new
band does make sense. One day, he finally threw up his hands and told Jimmy, “You win! Let's do it!”

Page was ecstatic. “You won't regret it,” he told Bonham. But for weeks, the drummer lay awake at night, wondering if he had made the right decision. He was leaving behind a sure thing—forty pounds a week—for a venture that, to him, seemed risky. “I hope I didn't botch this one up,” he told himself.

Meanwhile, John Paul had heard about Jimmy's efforts at putting together a new band. He had been looking for an opportunity to get away from studio work, at least for a while. So he called Jimmy with the intent of casually raising the issue of the new band. They chatted for fifteen minutes, and then near the end of the conversation, John Paul told his old session pal, “Give me a call if you need a bass player.” A few days later, Jimmy did.

The band was finally in place. All that was left was to see if things clicked musically. “We've got to get together and play,” Jimmy told John Paul. “I'm going to set something up for next week.”

They all agreed to meet for their first rehearsal in a small, humid studio on Gerrard Street in London. Jimmy didn't sleep well the night before that first get-together, wondering if everything would finally jell as he had hoped. Robert showed up for the rehearsal with butterflies in his stomach. Everyone wanted it to work, but no one was sure what would happen. Just to be safe, Bonzo kept Tim Rose's phone number in his wallet.

At that first session, Jonesy met Plant and Bonham for the first time. Plant was a little surprised at Jonsey's appearance. After all, Page had described John Paul as “a veteran studio musician”; based on that, Plant and Bonham had wondered if they might be working with an older father figure. John Paul didn't quite fit that mold.

There was nothing in particular planned for that afternoon, but as they picked up their instruments and stared at each other nervously, Jimmy suggested that they play “Train Kept a-Rollin',” one of his favorites from his Yardbirds days. It began a little rough, but not for long. Very quickly, everything began to fall into place. They segued into “As Long as I Have You,” a song by Garnet Mimms. Then “I Can't Quit You Baby.” As the music bounced off the walls, Jimmy found himself smiling. By the time they were playing “Dazed and Confused,” Jimmy was almost giddy with excitement.

“I think we've got something here,” Jimmy announced.

No one disagreed. Four chaps whose whole lives were music all realized that they might have finally found their ultimate vehicle of expression.

When that initial jam session ended, Robert asked, “Well, what next?”

Jimmy wasn't sure. “I don't know yet, but don't stray too far from home. I want to get things moving quickly.”

 

Two days after that jam session, Jimmy sat down with Peter. Pagey didn't try to temper his enthusiasm.

“I wish you had been there,” Jimmy said. “I wish you could have heard us. It was magical. Everything just came together.”

Peter could feel Jimmy's excitement. “Well, how soon can you have a polished act ready to go?”

“Peter, it's not going to take long. By the end of that rehearsal, we all felt we were in high gear. I'd like to get us out for a few live performances.”

Peter pulled out the remaining Yardbirds contracts and began making some phone calls. In less than a week, the band's first minitour was arranged, beginning in Copenhagen and Stockholm in mid-September. For those first concerts, the band was billboarded as the New Yardbirds.

The band rehearsed for only a few days before heading out to Scandinavia. At the time, I was in the U.S., traveling with the Jeff Beck Group, another band managed by Peter Grant. But during my frequent contact with Peter's office, I kept hearing about the New Yardbirds. When Peter would mention them, you could hear the anticipation in his voice. “Richard, Pagey thinks this band could be incredible,” he said. “It looks like things are going to move fast for them. They could be very big very soon.”

In Copenhagen, the New Yardbirds' first set included “Communication Breakdown,” “Dazed and Confused,” “How Many More Times,” “Babe I'm Gonna Leave You,” and “White Summer.” Bonzo later told me that there were some kinks and some equipment problems. There were false starts on a couple of songs, due more to nerves than anything else. But they left the auditorium quaking, he said. I wish I had been there.

Once back in London, Jimmy couldn't contain his excitement. “Peter, I want to go into the studio right now,” he said. “Let's get some of this music on tape. Our sound is already tight enough to make some recordings.”