Stairway To Heaven (9 page)

J
immy Page was alone in the boathouse underneath his home, inspecting the instruments and the equipment that were collecting dust. A lot of them dated back to the Yardbirds' days; some of them were even older.

Barely two months earlier, by the end of Led Zeppelin's first American tour, the group had worn out and virtually destroyed much of the old Yardbirds gear it had been using. Unlike Peter Townshend, who intentionally would smash and mutilate instruments as audiences roared their approval, Zeppelin just played them to death. But Pagey, ever frugal, didn't relish investing very much money, if any, on new gear for the upcoming second American tour, which would begin in just two weeks, in late April 1969. How could he resurrect some of this equipment, he asked himself, without crippling the band's already shaky profit and loss statements?

Some blown-out Fenders from the Yardbirds' days were being stored in the boathouse. The Rickenbacker gear from the first Zeppelin tour was next to it, and even though it was still usable, Jimmy didn't think it was up to his standards. The fans might not notice, he thought, but he would.

It was a real dilemma for a perfectionist like Page. He wanted everything to be precise and exact. At the same time, however, the mere thought of spending thousands of dollars on new gear was agonizing. Led Wallet had met Led Zeppelin head-on, and, at least for the moment, it was a stalemate.

That night, Jimmy had a brainstorm. He picked up the phone and called Clive Coulson, who was going to be joining us as a roadie on the new U.S. tour.
“Clive, I want to get some Marshall gear before we leave for America,” Jimmy told him.

“That's pretty expensive stuff,” Clive said. “How much can we spend on it?”

“We're not going to spend a damn thing,” Jimmy exclaimed. “With some tools and a little creativity, it's not going to cost us anything.”

Clive and I arrived at Jimmy's house the next day, and Pagey explained what he had in mind: He told Clive to remove the backs from both the Fender and the Rickenbacker cabinets, take the speakers out of each, and place them in the opposite cabinet. Then he instructed Clive to take the Fender cabinets—once the Rickenbacker speakers were inside them—to Sound City near Piccadilly Circus and trade them in for some new Marshall equipment.

“With the import tariffs, Fenders are the most expensive amps you can buy,” Jimmy said. “They'll never know that there are Rickenbacker speakers inside the Fender cabinets.”

It worked. Clive returned from Sound City with two sets of new Marshall speakers—without spending a quid. Led Wallet was the victor this time.

 

In the final days before the flight to the U.S. for the second American tour, Zeppelin started feeling butterflies. As I've learned over the years, no matter how many tours and concerts a band has to its credit…no matter how well they have played and how loud the crowds have cheered…there is always some apprehension at the start of every new tour. Will this one go as smoothly as the last? Will the fans fill up the seats? Will they leave the clubs and concert halls yearning for more?

But as that tour began, those anxieties proved to be unfounded. Night after night, the band left audiences in one city, then the next, spellbound. San Francisco…Detroit…Chicago…Boston…New York…thirty performances in nineteen cities with music that exploded with such horsepower that it eclipsed nearly everything that had ever reverberated through the Fillmores, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, the Kinetic Circus in Chicago, and Boston Garden.

That second U.S. tour started in San Francisco with some unexpected fireworks. Bill Graham, the unpredictable owner/manager of the Fillmore West, was a bright, hardworking businessman, tough and direct, who was always fair with the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin. He made sure every detail was taken care of, giving us every frill we requested and often more.

But when we arrived at the Fillmore West on that Thursday afternoon in May, a few hours before our first performance, we received anything but a cordial welcome. Clive approached Graham, who was playing basketball with a few employees at a hoop set up in back of the club.

“Mr. Graham,” Clive said, “we're here to set up Led Zeppelin's equipment. Can we get started?”

Graham glared in our direction and pointed his index finger at us.

“Who the hell are you speaking to, fella?” Graham shouted, with veins bulging from his neck. “When I'm ready to talk to you, I'll talk to you. Can't you see I'm right in the middle of something?”

Poor Clive. He turned to me as if to say, “When can I catch the next flight back to London?” He learned firsthand that when Graham wanted to put on his frightening persona, it could be an Academy Award–winning performance. We never figured out why Graham had made such a scene, but we agreed never to interfere with his basketball game again. I also was forced to recognize that although those of us in the Led Zeppelin entourage felt great about the band, others weren't quite ready to roll out the red carpet yet.

 

For part of that second tour, as we had done with the first, Led Zeppelin shared the bill with Vanilla Fudge. But this time, the Fudge weren't always the headliners. In any given city, the band whose albums were getting the most airplay would headline that night, based on Atlantic Records' market research. We really didn't care whether we performed first or last; the audience reaction to Led Zeppelin was always the same—sheer pandemonium.

At the beginning of the tour, Led Zeppelin was playing hour-long shows. But in response to the audiences, the performances gradually grew…from seventy-five minutes…to ninety minutes…and more. When the band would run short on songs, they would improvise tunes by Otis Redding and Love. Robert would even occasionally try to sneak in an old Moby Grape song or two, although the rest of the band would rarely stand for it, primarily as a way of needling Plant a little.

“No show is the same,” Jimmy would say. Even though Zeppelin's own songs were becoming standards, they always left room for improvisation, from Jimmy's inventive riffs to Bonham's drum solos that made believers of the fans all the way in the back row. Sometimes, the band would surprise themselves with the creative directions their music took and the way they could push their instruments to the brink and back.

By the midway point of that tour, Zeppelin's confidence level was sky-high. They had literally come to expect the audience frenzy. They certainly weren't blasé about it, but they would have been surprised if the crowd hadn't become fanatical by the end of each evening. The band's reputation had preceded them, and the audiences appeared to be on the edge of hysteria even as the band was being introduced. Once they started playing, it was wall-to-wall madness.

“It feels great just being out there playing music,” Bonham said to me one
evening just before going onstage. “But once the crowd gets going, it's absolute lunacy. The energy from those fans drives me beyond the point of no return.”

During the tour, however, the band didn't have the luxury of merely basking in the nonstop applause. They were being constantly pressured by Atlantic Records to move toward completion of their second album,
Led Zeppelin II
. The first album had entered the
Billboard
charts at Number 99 and then catapulted its way into the Top 10. Eventually, it would spend seventy-three weeks on the charts, including reappearances as late as 1979—ten years after its release.

“Can't Atlantic just be happy counting the money from the sales of the first album?” Robert complained one day. “I just hate being under the gun like this. It's not fair!”

“Why don't we just be more blunt about it,” Bonzo suggested. “Let's just tell them to fuck off!”

Despite their anxiety over facing record-company pressures in the middle of a tour, Led Zeppelin was also thoroughly professional. They realized they had a contractual commitment that they needed to take seriously. Jimmy and Robert began frantically writing songs in hotel rooms (“Whole Lotta Love,” “Ramble On”), sometimes scribbling lyrics and notes on hotel stationery. Robert wrote a complete song lyric (“Thank You”) on his own for the first time, which he dedicated to his wife. On occasion, these songs were rehearsed and recorded just hours after they were written.

Whenever we had a day off, wherever we were, Jimmy would find an available studio—the Ardent Studio in Memphis, the Gold Star Studio in Los Angeles—and the band would isolate themselves there from early evening until late at night, adding one more track to the album. Robert occasionally entered the studio alone to record some voice-overs. He laid down the lead vocal for “Whole Lotta Love” in a single take (“I was right on the money the first time; there's just no way to improve upon it”).

“Whole Lotta Love” got an enormous amount of Jimmy's attention in the studio. With Robert's vocal already on tape, he spent hours building everything else around it. For the descending chord structure, he used a metal slide and a reverse echo effect. The same backward echo technique also appeared on “Ramble On.”

A lot of the effects in “Whole Lotta Love” and the rest of the album emerged from pure experimentation. Jimmy would sit down in the control room with the engineer on that second album, and they'd literally start playing with the dials, turning them one way, then the other, seeing what kinds of sounds they could create. For “Whole Lotta Love,” they produced a dizzying onslaught of screeches, squeals, and squalls.

Jimmy also worked tirelessly by himself, mixing “Bring It On Home,” then “What Is and What Should Never Be.” He added twelve-string picking to “Thank You” and a barrage of Gibson overdubs to “Ramble On.”

It would sometimes make me nervous just to watch Pagey in the studio. He would become much more anxious there than he ever did onstage. No matter how well prepared he was, he rarely seemed completely satisfied. He always wanted something a little closer to perfection. His confidence would ebb and flow. Sometimes, after hours of mixing, he would collapse his face into his hands, as if trying to smother the tension and hide from the reality of still more sessions, still more work on an album that never seemed to end. It was long, exhausting work, and as much as he enjoyed the creative process, it would sometimes overwhelm him.

On several occasions, Jimmy and I would catch a plane into New York from a gig in Minneapolis or Chicago. I would carry the unfinished tapes on the plane with me, wrapped in foil. We'd grab a taxi to A&R Studios, spend half a day there, and then fly out to the next concert. It was grueling, punishing, and terribly stressful. But he felt it had to be done.

 

As the tour progressed, we flew into Baltimore for a concert at the Merriweather Pavilion. Frank Barsalona and Barbara Skydel of Premier Talent were handling our booking for the tour, and their agency also represented the Who. “Why don't we put Zeppelin and the Who on the same bill?” Frank suggested to Peter.

Peter sat back and contemplated the idea for a moment. “Sure, let's do it.” He knew the Who would be getting top billing, but he felt Zeppelin could hold its own against the more seasoned band.

Both bands were nervous about playing with the other. After the opening act—a singing comedian named Uncle Dirty—Zeppelin took the stage and did a powerful ninety-minute set. Then the Who pulled out all the stops with ninety minutes of their own, capped by a record-breaking destruction of instruments.

Near the end of the show, I went to pick up Zeppelin's money with John “Wiggy” Wolfe, who was doing the same for the Who. “I hope you guys made a lot of money,” I told Wiggy. “With all those instruments that Townshend destroyed, you're gonna need a few dollars to replace 'em.”

Wiggy told me that the Who was being paid $6,750 for the concert. “Really,” I said. “We're getting almost as much—six thousand dollars.”

Wiggy was shocked. “I can't believe you're getting only seven hundred and fifty dollars less than us.”

“Well, particularly since it'll cost you ten thousand dollars just to buy new instruments, I guess Zeppelin came out ahead on this one.”

 

Throughout that tour, as if the difficulties working on the new album weren't enough, Zeppelin and the press continued to be at odds. Even as the size of the crowds at our concerts grew, the media indifference—even antipathy—seemed to intensify. During that second tour,
Variety
's review was typical of the ruthlessness we encountered:

“This quartet's obsession with power, volume, and melodramatic theatrics leaves little room for the subtlety other Britishers employ. There is plenty of room for dynamics and understatement in the Zeppelin's brand of ultrahard rock. But the combo has forsaken the musical sense for the sheer power that entices their predominantly juvenile audience.”

When Jimmy would read bad reviews, he would become absolutely unglued. “Are these critics writing in a vacuum?” he complained one day, sitting in a hotel room in Chicago. “Don't they hear the crowd cheering for more encores?” He disgustingly tossed a review across the room. “And they write with such arrogance, as though their opinion means more than anyone else's. Just because they write well doesn't mean they know music!”

John Paul often took a more whimsical attitude toward the whole matter. “There's one advantage to them snubbing us,” he said. “Because they don't hang around us a lot, we don't have to waste a lot of time answering their questions, which can be pretty idiotic at times.”

Pagey began talking about refusing to do
any
more interviews with the media, something which irked the publicity forces at Atlantic Records. Ultimately, once the band had the power to make unpopular demands like that, Jimmy unconditionally rejected all requests for interviews—a policy that stayed in force for several tours. “Once the media develop a better, more balanced perspective of our music, then I'll start talking to them again,” he said.