Led Zeppelin – Good Times Bad Times, The Early Years

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Contents Chapter One

GOOD TIMES BAD TIMES........ 3 Chapter Two

THE PLAYERS................................. 9 Chapter Three

EARLY DAYS.................................. 25

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- CHAPTER ONE -

GOOD TIMES BAD TIMES

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he year was 1966, and the face of popular rock music was about to undergo a seismic shift as a young, talented guitarist from Heston in Middlesex joined forces with Jeff Beck in the British rock quintet the Yardbirds. That guitarist, of course, was Jimmy Page, born in January 1944, the future founder of British rock stalwarts Led Zeppelin, and one of the de facto fathers of heavy metal.

Page had become a guitar prodigy almost by accident, as he explained to Rolling Stone writer, and later film director Cameron Crowe in 1975: ‘Somebody had laid a Spanish guitar on me when I was a kid… a very old one. I probably couldn’t play it now if I tried. It was sitting around our living room for weeks and weeks. I wasn’t interested. Then I heard a couple of records that really turned me on, the main one being Elvis’ Baby, Let’s Play House, and I wanted to play it.

I wanted to know what it was all about. This other guy at school showed me a few chords and I just went on from there.

‘Probably my greatest influence on acoustic guitar was Bert Jansch who was a real dream weaver. He was incredibly original when he first appeared, and I wish now that he’d gone back to things like Jack Orion once again. His first album had a great effect on me as a guitarist. At first though I wasn’t really playing anything properly. I just knew a few bits of solos and things, not much. I just kept getting records and learning that way. It was the obvious influences at the beginning: Scotty Moore, James Burton, Cliff Gallup – he was Gene Vincent’s guitarist – Johnny Weeks, later; and those seemed to be the most sustaining influences until I

began to hear blues guitarists – Elmore James, B.B. King, and people like that. Basically, that was the start: a mixture between rock and blues, before I knew it I was in a band called the Crusaders it was the sort of band where we were traveling around all the time in a bus. This was before the Stones happened, so we were doing Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, and Bo Diddley things mainly. At the time, public taste was more engineered towards Top Ten records, so it was a bit of a struggle. But there’d always be a small section of the audience into what we were doing. I did that for two years after I left school, to the point where I was starting to get really good bread, but I was getting ill, so I went back to art college. That was a total change in direction. As dedicated as I was to playing the guitar, I knew that doing too much live was doing me in. Every two months I had glandular fever.

So for the next eighteen months I was living on ten dollars a week and getting my strength up. But I was still playing even when I was at art college. Eventually I started to do session work. I might do three sessions a day: a film in the morning, and then there’d be something like a rock band and then maybe a folk one in the evening. I didn’t know what was 3

coming! But it was a really good disciplinary area to work in, the studio. And it also gave me a chance to develop all of the different styles.’

In due course these different styles were put to good use. Page became an in demand session musician and was soon rated at least second in order of preference on the busy London scene. ‘If there were three sessions requiring guitarists going on at any time, Big Jim Sullivan would play one and the other producers would end up with… well, we won’t mention any names. Without Big Jim they were desperate. When I came on to the scene, work quickly escalated. I became a new name. Big Jim had been carrying the whole weight on his shoulders and he was the only other young face on the scene. Believe me, a lot of guys would consider that to be the apex – studio work and, of course, certain sessions were really a pleasure to do, but the problem was that you never knew what you were gonna do. You might have heard that I played on a Burt Bacharach record. It’s true.

I never knew what I was doing. You just got booked into a particular studio between the hours of two and five-thirty.

Sometimes it would be somebody you were happy to see, other times it was, “What am I doing here?”

‘When I started doing sessions, the guitar was in vogue.

I was playing solos every day. I had work flooding in as they didn’t have any young guys playing guitar. There was only one other young guitarist, and he was about twenty-six and had lost a lot of enthusiasm for playing. So I had all these groups asking me to play on their records, and I just took it and thought I might as well, because I can be a painter and starve the rest of my life, but I can always go back to it. Then afterwards, when the Stax thing was going on and you got whole brass sections coming in, I ended up hardly playing anything, just a little riff here and there… no solos. And I remember one particular occasion when I hadn’t played a solo for, quite literally, a couple of months. And I was asked to play a solo on a rock ’n’ roll thing. I played it and felt that what I’d done was absolute crap. I was so disgusted with myself that I made my mind up that I had to get out of it. It was messing me right up. When the Stones first started they were doing really good interpretations of Muddy Waters 4

songs and all that Chess catalogue. They weren’t the only ones, of course. Down in the South, that’s what was going on. Then you had the Beatles in Liverpool with Please, Mr. Postman, and it really wasn’t the same deal as what was going on down South, but it got very popular and changed what was going on. It wasn’t so much, for me, their music, but the fact that they wrote their own songs, and all of a sudden they opened the door for any band that could write songs. I started doing studio work. That’s the big change they made on the music scene.’

With his disillusionment concerning his input into the creative side of the recording process growing rapidly, and no real prospect of earning a living as an artist, Page was left with only one option, which was to re-join a band and get back on the road and into the live arena. ‘I left session work to join the Yardbirds, at a third of the bread, because I wanted to play again. I didn’t feel I was playing enough in the studio. I was doing three studio dates a day, and I was becoming one of those sort of people that I hated…’

Page had in fact been recommended to the Yardbirds management by Eric Clapton, the Yardbirds outgoing guitar hero who had grown increasingly disenchanted by the group’s attempts to create pure pop hits. However, Page was initially sceptical and was none too pleased to be offered the gig in a rather round about way. ‘I originally turned it down because the invitation was to put to me in what seemed to be an underhand manner by their manager who slipped over to me and said “Oh Eric’s taking a ‘holiday’” which was his way of saying Eric was no longer in the band. I didn’t know at the time that Eric had actually recommended me and I didn’t want Eric to think I’d gone behind his back so I didn’t take the gig.’

Although he had made the decision to give it up, Page was still reluctant to make the big leap into an uncertain world and finally give up his lucrative session work. He therefore delayed the decision once more and instead recommended his friend Jeff Beck for the empty Yardbirds slot. Page made up the time by, among other things, playing a few sessions with the Kinks. The significance of his contributions to these sessions and the presence of a future guitar god at a time

when the use of feedback was first being considered continues as a matter of debate to-day, although the guitarist himself subsequently played down his role in proceedings: ‘I didn’t really do that much on the Kinks records. I know I managed to get a couple of riffs on their album, I also played on I Need You – I did that bit there in the beginning. I don’t know who really did feedback first; it just sort of happened. I don’t think anybody consciously nicked it from anybody else. It was just going on… I know that Ray didn’t really approve of my presence. It was Shel Talmy’s idea. One aspect of being in the studio while potential hits were being made was the press – too many writers were making a big fuss about the use of session men. Obviously I wasn’t saying anything in the press, but it just leaked out… and that sort of thing often led to considerable bad feeling.’

It was not until Peter Grant took over the management of the Yardbirds that Page finally relented on his earlier decision and in June 1966 he at last became a Yardbird.

Amazingly Page originally joined the group as a bassist, but soon switched to second lead guitar once Chris Dreja had mastered the bass duties.

This switch undoubtedly benefited the band and created a powerful, duelling frontline attack with Jeff Beck. This twin guitar style lacked the polish that later brought fame to twin lead guitar driven rock bands such as Wishbone Ash and Thin Lizzy. The seeds of the potential artistic failures must have been obvious to Page on his first meeting: ‘I went to a Yardbirds concert at Oxford, and they were all walking around in their penguin

suits. Keith Relf got really drunk and was saying “Fuck you” right in the microphone and falling into the drums. I thought it was a great anarchistic night, and I went back into the dressing-room and said, “What a brilliant show!” but instead there was this great huge argument going on; and Paul Samwell-Smith saying, “Well, I’m leaving the group, and if I was you, Keith, I’d do the very same thing.” So he left the group, but Keith didn’t. He couldn’t really as they were stuck, with commitments and dates, so I said, “I’ll play the bass if you like.” And then it worked out that we did the dual lead guitar thing as soon as Chris Dreja could get it together with the bass, which eventually happened, though not for long, but then came the question of discipline. If you’re going to do dual lead guitar riffs and patterns, then you’ve got to be playing the same things. Jeff Beck had discipline occasionally, but he was an inconsistent player, when he’s on, he’s probably the best there is, but at that time, and for a period afterwards, he had no respect whatsoever for audiences.’

The saving grace for Page in making his decision to finally join the Yardbirds lay in the comforting presence of Peter Grant who could make commercial sense out of what appeared to be an artistic shambles; as Grant himself later recalled, ‘I started managing the Yardbirds in 1966. They were not getting hit singles, but they were already into the college scene here and the underground scene in America.

Instead of trying to get plays on all the Top 40 rubbish, I realised there was another market. The Yardbirds were, in

‘You can’t give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you’ve tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.’

ROBERT PLANT

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fact, the first British group booked into the Fillmore in San Francisco. Otherwise everybody just played hops.’

Grant had learned a great deal about the music business from working with the notorious Don Arden, a manager with an acutely ruthless reputation in his dealings with bands and anyone else who got in his way. With a background in the wrestling ring and formidable physical stature, Peter Grant certainly had tough-guy credentials, but he also had a heart and, truly, a love for his artists. There is no doubt however that the year and a half Page spent in the ranks of the Yardbirds had a huge impact on the musical roots of Led Zeppelin. In an interview given in 1999, Page recalled his blues-inspired early years with the Yardbirds as being one of the main reasons the chemistry of Led Zeppelin was so special, stating, ‘I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the main influence was the blues. I was seduced by rock ’n’ roll as a teenager and that’s what made me want to play. From then I discovered the blues and country blues, folk musicians, then folk with Arabic and on and on. I was gobbling it all up, then it just came up as the music that you heard. Sometimes it worked really great, and sometimes it didn’t. There were a lot of harmonies that I don’t think anyone else had really done, not like we did. The Stones were the only ones who got into two guitars going at the same time from old Muddy Waters records. But we were more into solos rather than a rhythm thing. The point is,

you’ve got to have the parts worked out, and I’d find that I was doing what I was supposed to, while something totally different would be coming from Jeff. That was alright for the areas of improvisation but there were other parts where it just did not work. When I joined the band, he supposedly wasn’t going to walk off stage anymore. Well, he did a couple of times. It’s strange; if he’d had a bad day, he’d take it out on the audience. I don’t know whether he’s the same now; his playing sounds far more consistent on records.’

When Beck left the group late in 1966, the Yardbirds were already spiralling down the path to destruction.

Peter Grant instinctively deduced that Page’s talent was something of far more value than the currency of the Yardbirds’ name in a changing musical landscape and stuck with the talented guitarist. In 1966, when Jimmy expressed an interest in doing something musically different from the Yardbirds, Peter Grant helped nurture the Becks Bolero project which led indirectly to the formation of Led Zeppelin. Page had sent out feelers on forming a supergroup with the idea of featuring both he and Beck on guitars, backed by The Who’s discontented drummer Keith Moon and possibly bassist John Entwistle. Steve Winwood, Steve Marriott and Donovan were also being lined up as potential lead singers. In spite of a 1966 recording session with Page, Moon and Beck, the proposed group failed to materialise. By coincidence future Led Zeppelin bassist and keyboardist John Paul Jones was also involved in the session as an arranger for the music which

‘The Yardbirds sort of disbanded, and I was disappointed because I thought what we were doing was really good.

I thought we were really onto something. I thought I was really onto something with these ideas that I had.’

JIMMY PAGE

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touched upon early Indian influences: ‘In those early days I was very interested in Indian music, as were a lot of other people too.’

The sessions themselves were productive despite rather trying circumstances, as Page later recalled: ‘On the Beck’s Bolero thing, the track was done despite the fact the producer just disappeared. He was never seen again; he simply didn’t come back. Simon Napier-Bell just sort of left me and Jeff to it. Jeff was playing slide, and even though it says he wrote it, I wrote it. I’m playing the electric twelve-string on it. Beck’s doing the slide bits, and I’m basically playing around the chords. The idea was built around Ravel’s Bolero. It’s got a lot of drama to it; it came off right. It was a good line-up too, with Keith Moon and everything. Because Moonie wanted to get out of The Who, and so did John Entwistle, it all came down to getting hold of a singer, it was either going to be Steve Winwood or Steve Marriott. Finally it came down to Marriott. He was contacted, and the reply came back from his manager’s office: “How would you like to have a group with broken fingers, boys?” So the group idea was dropped because of threats from Marriott’s camp and Winwood’s other commitments. I think it would have been the first of all those bands, sort of like the Cream. Instead it didn’t happen – apart from the Bolero. That’s the closest it got. John Paul is on that too; so is Nicky Hopkins.’

Outside of his own stalled projects Page remained committed to the Yardbirds, but the Yardbirds however continued to stagger from inertia to crisis. This was nowhere more apparent than in the studio, as Page recalled: ‘One thing for sure, is it was chaotic in recording. I mean we did one tune and didn’t really know what it was. We had Ian Stewart from the Stones on piano, and we’d just finished the take, and without even hearing it the producer, Mickie Most, said, “Next.” I said, “I’ve never worked like this in my life,” and he said, “Don’t worry about it.” It was all done very quickly, as it sounds. It was things like that that really led to the general state of mind and depression of Keith Relf and Jim McCarty that broke the group up. I tried to keep it together, but there was no chance; they just wouldn’t have it. In fact Relf said the magic of the band disappeared when 8

Clapton left. I was really keen on doing anything, though, probably because of having had all that studio work and variety beforehand. So it didn’t matter what way we wanted to go; they were definitely talented people, but they couldn’t really see the wood for the trees at the time. I only recorded a few songs on record with Beck, Happenings Ten Years Time Ago, Stroll On, The Train Kept a Rollin’, and Psycho Daisies, Bolero and a few other things.’

It was during his Yardbirds time that Page began to experiment with the use of the violin bow. This idiosyncratic approach has become synonymous with Led Zeppelin but the roots lay in his work with the Yardbirds. ‘The first time I recorded with it was with the Yardbirds. But the idea was put to me by a classical string player when I was doing studio work. One of us tried to bow the guitar, then we tried it between us and it worked. At that point I was just bowing it, but the other effects I’ve obviously come up with on my own – using wah-wah, and echo. You have to put rosin on the bow, and the rosin sticks to the string and makes it vibrate.’

Veteran rock journalist Mick Wall explained further, ‘Dave McCallum who used to play Illya Kuryakin in The Man From Uncle, his father was a session violinist and he was doing a session with Jimmy one day and he just asked Jimmy out of the blue, bored one moment, have you ever thought about using a violin bow on a guitar?’

After participating in the Yardbirds’ 1967 album Little Games, Page continued to work as a session musician while the fragmenting band decided what to do with their career. The album, which turned out to be the band’s last, included some string arrangements by John Paul Jones. In early 1968 Page returned the favour and played on Jones’ version of Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man, and the developing relationship deepened when Jones decided to ask Page if he would consider him as a member of any future bands he might develop.

- CHAPTER TWO -

THE PLAYERS

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ohn Paul Jones was born John Baldwin in Sidcup, Kent. The stage name John Paul Jones was only adopted after it was suggested to him by friend and former Stones svengali Andrew Loog Oldham.

Despite the spotlight invariably being placed on the more flamboyant members of Led Zeppelin, many critics convincingly cite Jones’ solid temperament, brilliant musicianship and wide experience as crucial elements contributing to the success of the band.

Jones was tutored on the keyboard and learned his formidable arranging skills from his father, Joe Baldwin, who was a pianist and arranger for big bands in the 1940s and 1950s, notably the Ambrose Orchestra. Jones’ mother was also in the music business which allowed the family to sometimes perform together while touring around England.

Jones’ early influences were mainly jazz and classical and he also formally studied music while a student at Christ College boarding school in Kent. At the age of fourteen, he became choirmaster and organist at a local church, and during that year he also bought his first bass guitar, a Dallas solid body electric, followed by a Fender Jazz bass. Many years later Jones revealed it was the fluid playing of Chicago musician Phil Upchurch that inspired him to take up the bass. As Jones later explained to Steven Rosen, ‘I’ve got to own up, the first record that really turned me on to bass guitar was You Can’t Sit Down by Phil Upchurch, which has an incredible bass solo and was a good record as well. It was very simple musically, but the record had an incredible amount of balls.’

In the same interview with Steven Rosen, given during the 1977 US tour aboard the band’s private jet, John Paul

Jones once more expanded upon his early experiences: ‘I used to play piano when I was younger, and there was a rock and roll band forming at school when I was fourteen, but they didn’t want a piano player – all they wanted was drums or bass. I thought, “I can’t get the drums on the bus”, bass looked easy – four strings, no chords, easy – so I took it up.

And it was easy; it wasn’t too bad at all. I took it up before guitar, which I suppose is sort of interesting. Before I got a real four-string, my father had a ukulele banjo, a little one, and I had that strung up like a bass, but it didn’t quite have the bottom that was required. Actually my father didn’t want to have to sign a guarantor to back me in the payments for a bass. He said, “Don’t bother with it; take up the tenor saxophone. In two years the bass guitar will never be heard of again.” I said, “No Dad, I really want one, there’s work for me.” He said, “Ah, there’s work?” And I got a bass right away.

It was a pig to play though; it had a neck like a tree trunk.

It was a solid body Dallas bass guitar with a single cutaway.

It sounded all right though, and it was good for me because I developed very strong fingers. I had no idea about setting instruments up then, so I just took it home from the shop. I 9

had an amplifier with a ten-inch speaker – oh, it was awful. It made all kinds of farting noises. And then I had a converted television; you know one of those big old stand-up televisions with the amp in the bottom and a speaker where the screen should be. I ended up giving myself double hernias. Bass players always had the hardest time because they always had to cope with the biggest piece of equipment. It never occurred to me when I was deciding between that and drums that I’d have to lug a bass amp. As a bass player I wasn’t influenced by a lot of people because it was only in the mid to late ’60s that you could even hear the bass on records. I had a number of obvious jazz influences – most of the good jazz bass players influenced me in one way or another… Charles Mingus, Ray Brown, Scott La Faro. I even got into jazz organ for a while until I couldn’t stand the musicians any more and I had to get back to rock ’n’ roll. The music I really liked playing was the Shadows, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis. Stuff like that.

John Paul Jones was too talented to be restricted to bass guitar. He of course went on to make a huge impact with his wonderfully constructed keyboard and mandolin contributions to Led Zeppelin. ‘Organ, in fact, was always my first love, but for session playing I found it much easier to carry a bass guitar to work than a Hammond organ. So there I was, living with all I had, a guitar, a Hammond organ, a table and a bed in my room.’ Posterity recalls his name as bassist par excellence but John Paul Jones had in fact started his rock ’n’ roll career at the keyboard doubling on piano.

“We didn’t have a drummer at first, because we never could find one. That also happened to another bass player, Larry Graham, Sly Stone’s bass player. He started off in a band with no drummer, which is how he got that percussive style. With no drums you’ve got a lot to make up for once the lead guitar takes a solo because there’s only you left. You’ve got to make a lot of noise. After a while we roped in a drummer whom I taught, would you believe? I’ve never played drums in my life! As regards my own style I don’t like bass players that go boppity boppity bop all over the neck; you should stay around the bottom and provide the low end of the group. I work very closely with the drummer; it’s very important. So not very long afterwards I found another band, this time with a 10

drummer. This band also came along with really nice-looking guitars, and I thought, “Oh, they must be great!” They had Burns guitars so I got myself one, too – the one with the three pickups and a Tru-Voice amplifier. We all had purple band jackets and white shoes, and I thought, “This is it, this is the big time. We played at American Air Force bases, which was good training, plus they always had great records in the jukebox. That was my introduction to the black music scene, when very heavy gentlemen would come up insisting on Night Train eight times an hour.”

Interestingly, for a man who helped to create a blues based monster, in his early years Jones was never very much influenced by the blues. Despite the massive blues influence on Led Zeppelin, which appears almost inbuilt, Jones attributes this entirely to the influence of Robert Plant. ‘I wasn’t into blues at first but soon followed Robert’s interest in it. During our first rehearsals, any feeling of competition within the group vanished after one number.’

Jones’ big break came in 1962 when he met Jet Harris and Tony Meehan (who had just left the Shadows) and played bass for their band for two years. Coincidentally Jet and Tony had just had a No. 1 hit with Diamonds, a track on which Jimmy Page had played as a session musician. ‘That was when I was seventeen, I suppose. And those were the days when they used to scream all the way through the show. It was just like now, really, where you have to make a dash for the limos at the end of the night – run a sort of terrible gauntlet. In the days before roadies you’d have to drag around your own gear, so we all invested in a roadie. We thought we owed it to ourselves, and this bloke was marvellous. He did everything, he drove the wagon, he lugged the gear, he did the lights – the whole thing.’

Outside of his work as a full band member, Jones played his ’61 Fender Jazz Bass on hundreds of sessions from 1962 to 1968 . ‘I got into sessions because I thought, “I’ve had enough of the road,” I bought myself a dog and didn’t work for six months. Then I did start up again. I played in other silly bands.

I remember that Jet Harris and Tony Meehan band – John McLaughlin joined on rhythm guitar. It was the first time I’d met him and it was hilarious. Here he was this genius guitar player sitting there all night going D minor to G to A minor.

That was my first introduction to jazz when he came along, because we’d all get to the gig early and have a blow. Oh, that was something, first meeting him. And then I joined a couple of other bands with him for a while, rhythm and blues bands.’

In 1964, Jones began session work with Decca Records on the recommendation of Tony Meehan. Between 1964 and 1968 he was much in demand arranging, and playing keyboards or bass guitar for artists including the Rolling Stones on Their Satanic Majesties Request. ‘I just did the strings – they already had the track down. It was She’s a Rainbow. And then came the first Donovan session which was a shambles, it was awful.

It was Sunshine Superman and the arranger had got it all wrong, so I thought, being the opportunist that I was, “I can do better than that” and actually went up to the producer and he said, “Is there anything we can do to sort of save the session?” And I piped up, “Well, look how about if I play it straight?” – because I had a part which went sort of all over the place and then there were some funny congas that were in and out of time.

And I said, “How about if we just sort of play it straight; get the drummer to do this and that?” The successful contribution worked and the first Donovan session was soon followed by others. “Next up was Mellow Yellow which we argued about for hours because they didn’t like my arrangement at all, not at all. Mickie stood by me. He said, “I like the arrangement, I think it’s good”.

It wasn’t Donovan – he didn’t mind either – but he had so many people around him saying, “Hey, this isn’t you.” But he sold a couple of a million on it, didn’t he?’

Session work began to flow and Jones was in demand for work in the studio with Cat Stevens, Rod Stewart, Shirley

Bassey and Lulu. Numerous others also benefited from Jones musical input as an arranger, in addition to recording sessions with Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, Nico, Wayne Fontana, the Walker Brothers, and many others. Jones also got to record with fellow friends of Tony Meehan and Jet Harris as part of Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

One little known fact from this period is that Cliff Richard and the Shadows came disconcertingly close to changing the face of rock history and preventing the future formation of Led Zeppelin. This occurred when they gave serious consideration to John Paul Jones replacing their departing bassist Brian ‘Licorice’ Locking.

Fortunately for the history of popular music Cliff instead chose John Rostill and Jones was left to continue his session career. Despite his studio track record, Jones’s experience of live gigging was still relatively limited. He had, of course, been on the road with Jet Harris and Tony Meehan when the ex-Shadows enjoyed their brief chart-topping spell a few years before, but Jones’ attempt to join Cliff Richard’s backing group in their wake was thwarted by an unlikely drawback. The Shadows lead guitarist Hank Marvin gives lie to the old saw about the sixties: he was there and he does remember the times very sharply. Asked about John Paul auditioning to join the Shadows, Marvin clearly recalled that in those days, Jones smoked through a long cigarette holder. This mannerism ruled him out: he was deemed too camp to join the rough and ready ranks of the Shadows!

Reluctantly Jones returned to the grind of the recording studio scene, but by 1968 was quickly becoming burnt out.

As a session arranger he was composing scores for horns and

‘I remember in the early days when we played six nights a week for a month and I was doing my long drum solo every night. My hands were covered in blisters.’

JOHN BONHAM

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strings the night before, handing them out the next day and finishing the product. Jones himself was quick to recall the drag of the increasing fatigue: ‘I was arranging fifty or sixty things a month and it was starting to kill me.’

During his time as a session player, Jones had often crossed paths with fellow session veteran, guitarist Jimmy Page.

Boredom was obviously a factor in shaping Jones’ thinking but it also must have affected Jimmy Page too, as much of his work was mundane in the extreme. As Jones later recalled: ‘I’d met Jimmy on sessions before. It was always Big Jim and Little Jim – Big Jim Sullivan and Little Jim, and myself and the drummer. Apart from group sessions where he’d play solos and stuff like that, Jimmy always ended up on rhythm guitar because he couldn’t read too well. He could read chord symbols and stuff, but he’d have to do anything they’d ask when he walked into a session. I used to see a lot of him just sitting there with an acoustic guitar sort of raking out chords.

I always thought that the bass player’s life was much more interesting in those days, because nobody knew how to write for bass, so they used to say, “We’ll give you the chord sheet and get on with it.” So even on the worst sessions you could have a little run-around. But that was good; I would have hated to have sat there on acoustic guitar.’

Partially as a result of being driven to distraction by an inane procession of jobs, in June 1966 Page finally joined the Yardbirds. Despite the fact that he was no longer on the session circuit, the paths of the two future Zeppelin colleagues soon crossed again, when in 1967, Jones contributed his stylish arrangements to the Yardbirds’ Little Games album. Soon afterwards the Yardbirds began to disintegrate and Page was again employed on session work.

Page and Jones next met during the sessions for Donovan’s The Hurdy Gurdy Man in 1968. It was at this point that Jones first expressed to Page an interest in being a part of any projects the guitarist might be planning. Many years later Page could still recall vividly the initial overture from Jones that led to the birth of Led Zeppelin: ‘I was working at the sessions for Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man and John Paul Jones was looking after the musical arrangements. During a break he asked me if I could use a 12

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bass player in the new group I was forming. Now John Paul is unquestionably an incredible arranger and musician – he didn’t need me for a job. It was just that he felt the need to express himself and he thought we might be able to do it together. Sessions are great, but you can’t get into your own thing. We talked about it and agreed that in order to give what we had to offer, we had to have a group. John simply wanted to be part of a group of musicians who could lay down some good things. He had proper music training and he had quite brilliant ideas. I jumped at the chance of getting him.’

Page’s requirement for a bassist came about as the Yardbirds all but disbanded, leaving only Page and recently switched bassist Chris Dreja to complete some previously booked Yardbird dates in Scandinavia. Page’s brief time in the Yardbirds was certainly fraught; but it was memorable, as he later explained: “I have mainly really good memories – apart from one tour which nearly killed all of us, it was so intense – other than that, musically it was a great group to play in. Any musician would have jumped at the chance to play in that band. It was particularly good when Jeff and I were both doing lead guitar. It really could have been built into something exceptional at that point, but unfortunately there’s precious little on vinyl of that particular incarnation. There’s only Stroll On from the Blow-Up film – that was quite funny – and Happenings Ten Years Ago and Daisy.

‘We just didn’t get into the studio too much at that time.

Obviously, there were ups and downs. Everybody wants to know about the feuds and personality conflicts. There were a few tensions but I don’t think that it ever got really evil.

It never got that bad. Jeff and I had our ups and downs. Jeff can be very difficult to work with, even purely from a playing point of view. We did have something that could have been really special though, especially when we were doing the duallead thing together. We’d rehearse hard on certain things – working out sections where we’d play harmonies like a stereo guitar effect – then onstage Jeff was just uncontrollable. He’d go off into something absolutely different but sometimes the magic would be there. That was actually the high point of my 14

time with the Yardbirds in some respects, and it’s a pity we spent so little time in the studios when that was going on.’

Despite the enormous potential in the Yardbirds, the spirit had really gone out of the band and this was all too obvious to Page: ‘It somehow just got to the point where Relf and McCarty couldn’t take it anymore. They wanted to go and do something totally different which later became Renaissance. When it came to the final split it was a question of begging them to keep it together, but they didn’t. They just wanted to try something new. I told them we’d be able to change within the group format. Coming from a sessions background I was prepared to adjust to just about anything. I hated to break it up without even doing a proper first album.

I tried desperately to keep them together. The gigs were there, but Keith in particular would not take them very seriously, getting drunk and singing in the wrong places. It was a real shame. The group were almost ashamed of the very name, though I don’t know why. They were a great band. I was never ashamed of playing in the Yardbirds. There’s still a lot of magic attached to the Yardbirds’ name, and I find it amazing as I saw that group crumble – not in popularity but certainly artistically – it could have been the biggest group ever.’

Before a new Yardbirds band could be assembled to honour the forthcoming concert dates, Dreja announced he too was about to leave the fold in order to take up photography. As Page retained the rights to the Yardbirds name, and the group had some live bookings to fulfil, Page was suddenly faced with the task of recruiting a bassist, singer and drummer in order to tour under the Yardbirds name – or face legal action for defaulting on bookings.

Fortuitously, Jones was nearing the end of his days as a session man and had a strong desire to become more creative musically. So in mid 1968 when Jones inquired of the guitarist concerning the possibility of setting up a band, the pieces were finally aligned. Page gladly welcomed his old friend into the new project, making John Paul Jones the second member of the New Yardbirds and the future Led Zeppelin. Page is on record expressing his delight at recruiting Jones, and many years later Jones recalled his mutual admiration for Page:

‘I’ve rated Jimmy Page for years and years. We both came from South London, and even in 1962 I can remember people saying “You’ve got to go and listen to Neil Christian and the Crusaders – they’ve go this unbelievable young guitarist.”

I’d heard of Pagey before I’d heard of Clapton or Beck, so I suppose it was no surprise when my missus said to me, “Will you stop moping around the house; why don’t you join a band or something?” And I said, “There are no bands I want to join.” She said, “What are you talking about?” And she said, “Well, look, (I think it was in Disc), Jimmy Page is forming a group,” – he’d just left the Yardbirds – “why don’t you give him a ring?” So I rang him up and said, “Jim, how you doing?

Have you got a group yet?” He said, “I haven’t got anybody yet.” And I said, “Well, if you want a bass player, give me a ring.” And he said, “All right, I’m going up to see this singer Terry Reid told me about, and he might know a drummer as well. I’ll call you when I’ve seen what they’re like.” He went up there, saw Robert Plant, and said, “This guy is really something.”’

With the Scandinavian dates looming the duo had to be expanded to a quartet and soon, but it was not to be done without a few false starts. Page’s first choices were vocalist Terry Reid and Procul Harum drummer B. J. Wilson, but both were unavailable. As Page put it ‘I wanted someone who could really belt out the blues, well rock really, but blues, and also be able to handle the subtleties as well. So someone with a really good vocal range and power.’

Page was directed to one such singer by Reid, who recommended Robert Plant, then the front man of an act called Hobbstweedle. Rose-tinted nostalgia surrounds the sixties, but old attitudes were still ingrained in most of society.

We live in much more informed and tolerant times now, it’s hard to recall just how much fuss could be generated by someone who dressed ‘weirdly’. Sure, fops and dandies might be acceptable in the John Stephen boutiques of Soho, but outside this small community of London’s beautiful people, tastes were still trenchantly rooted in the past and woe betide the non-conformist. Robert Plant fell victim to this many times, most famously when he went to meet Jimmy Page in the leafy town of Pangbourne in Dorset. There an indignant older woman assaulted him because she didn’t approve of his girly hair. Robert told the underground publication International Times that he was ‘staggered’ at being slapped around, ‘So I called a cop and he says it was my own fault for having long hair!’

Appearing as the frontman for Band of Joy, Plant’s flower child mane immediately got him noticed in the Scottish town of Coatbridge too. The long leopard print coat he was wearing might’ve helped endorse the impression. It certainly made an impression on Ted McKenna, later of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, who was drumming in a local Stax/Motown covers outfit at the time. As McKenna later explained to rock writer John Cavanagh, he’d heard that the Band of Joy’s John Bonham was a hotter drummer than current favourite Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge and was keen to find out for himself, but the Band of Joy set that night was cut short. The show was in a church hall and when the parish priest popped in to see how the evening was going, he spotted the figure that had already caused much curtain-twitching in the town performing atop a tubular metal school chair. The clergyman, who had expected to see rather chaste teenage dancing, witnessed

‘I believe every guitar player inherently has something unique about their playing. They just have to identify what makes them different and develop it.’

JIMMY PAGE

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blushing girls transfixed by the hitherto unknown spectacle on stage. Ted McKenna recalls being told that these English visitors were coming off… ‘NOW!’ and that the local group had to go on at once and get people dancing.

Fortunately, unlike the parish priest of Coatbridge, Jimmy Page straight away viewed Robert Plant’s sexual allure and innate showmanship as a positive force. ‘We still had these dates we were supposed to fulfill. Around the time of the split, John Paul Jones called me up and said he was interested in getting something together. Also, Chris Dreja was getting very into photography, and he’d decided he wanted to open his own studio and by that time was no longer enamoured with the thought of going on the road. I’d originally thought of getting Terry Reid in as lead singer/second guitarist, but he’d just signed with Mickie Most as a solo artist… quirk of fate. He suggested I get in touch with Robert Plant, who was then in a band called Hobbstweedle. When I auditioned him and heard him sing, I immediately thought there must be something wrong with him personality-wise or that he had to be impossible to work with, because I just couldn’t understand why, after he told me he’d been singing for a few years already, he hadn’t become a big name yet.’ Page was instantly impressed with Plant’s vocal abilities and was clearly on the verge of making up his mind to invite Plant to join the band now known as the New Yardbirds. Nonetheless Page was still suspicious that a singer of such obvious talent might have hidden personality problems and decided on an extended interview just to be sure.

‘I went to see Robert sing. They were playing at a teacher training college in Birmingham to an audience of about twelve people. It was a typical student setup where drinking is the prime consideration and the group is only of secondary importance. Anyway I thought Robert was fantastic. Having heard him that night and having listened to a demo he’d given me of songs he’d recorded in his Band of Joy days, I realised that without a doubt his voice had an exceptional and very distinctive quality. So I asked him if he wanted to come down to Pangbourne and spend a few days talking things over.’ Fortunately for Zeppelin fans everywhere, other than the aforementioned incident with an outraged pensioner

the extended interview in Pangbourne seems to have gone swingingly and Robert Plant became the third member of the New Yardbirds.

Robert Anthony Plant was born in West Bromwich on 29 August 1948 but grew up in the black country around Halesowen and Kidderminster. The overwhelming love for music led to Plant abandoning a planned career as a chartered accountant to become part of the Midlands blues scene. As a result of the burgeoning local blues scene there were blues clubs springing throughout the black country including a particularly influential gathering in the town of Stourbridge close to Plant’s home. ‘The Seven Stars Blues Club was really my initiation. Our group was called The Delta Blues Band. When we weren’t doing that number, a guitarist and myself would go around all the local folk clubs playing Corinna, Corinna, plus all those vulgar blues tunes like Petti Wheatstraw’s stuff. When you look deeper into that kind of music you find it has a lot of the feelings which exist in blues. Then of course you realise that the blues field is a very wide one.’ In addition to his proto-blues efforts Plant did various jobs whilst pursuing his nascent music career, the most famous of which was working for the major British construction company Wimpey in Birmingham in 1966 laying tarmac on roads where he was affectionately known to his fellow navvies as ‘the pop singer’: ‘I was nineteen, I was fed up of fixing the roads and working on a Saturday and Sunday.

It was just nice to meet anybody, and when I heard [Page] play it was great; it was a celebration. He was someone who could play the blues and he had an attitude that wasn’t just black, it was very much London art school, a kind of aggressive angular thing.’

Other jobs were even less exotic, and Plant also worked at Woolworths in Halesowen town for a short period of time.

In his capacity as a fledgling pop star Plant had made some progress and had actually cut three obscure singles on CBS Records and sung with a variety of bands, including the Crawling King Snakes, which first brought him into contact with drummer John Bonham. Plant and Bonham both went on to play in the Band of Joy, merging blues with newer psychedelic trends. Despite the fact that Plant met with 17

absolutely no commercial success in his early career, word concerning the young man with amazing good looks and the powerful voice quickly spread around the live circuit. During this period Plant also developed a lifelong passion for the blues which evolved and changed radically during the latter part of the sixties. ‘I got hold of a Buffalo Springfield album.

It was great because it was the kind of music you could leap around to, or you could sit down and just dig it. I thought to myself, “This is what an audience wants and this what I want to listen to.” Then I got the first Moby Grape album, which was a knockout… the guitar playing and everything was very good. It fitted together so well. It was the spirit of it that I reacted to, I think. I had loved old blues, but all of a sudden I couldn’t listen to old blues anymore.

It really was a big change… now I was sobbing to Arthur Lee and Love doing Forever Changes.’

All of this passion helped the Band of Joy live shows along, and the band benefited from the presence of their brilliant front man and world class drummer, but it was never enough to forge the breakthrough which Plant craved. ‘Eventually we were getting between sixty and seventy-five quid a night. But it didn’t keep improving. In the end I just had to give it up. I thought “Bollocks! Nobody at all wants to know about us!”

Bonzo went to work with Tim Rose.’

Not surprisingly that was the end for the Band of Joy; and the short lived Hobbstweedle was in its infancy when Plant

got the call. On securing the gig and discovering that the New Yardbirds band still had a vacancy on the drum stool, Plant immediately settled on Bonham as the ideal drummer and wasted no time in making his views known to Page. ‘At this time a number of drummers had approached me and wanted to work with us. Robert suggested I go hear John Bonham, whom I’d heard of because he had a reputation, but had never seen. I asked Robert if he knew him and he told me they’d worked together in this group called Band of Joy.’ John Henry Bonham was born in Redditch, Worcestershire, England.

Bonham first learned how to play drums at the age of five, making a drum kit out of containers and coffee tins, and copying the moves of his idols Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich.

‘I’ve wanted to be a drummer since I was about five years old.

I used to play on a bath salts container with wires on the bottom, and on a round coffee tin with a loose wire fixed to it to give a snare drum effect.

Plus there were always my Mum’s pots and pans. When I was ten, my Mum bought me a snare drum.’ Bonham eventually received his first proper drum kit at the age of fifteen, and from then on he would never look back. His distinctive ultra-loud style posed problems from the outset: ‘I was always breaking drum heads when I first started playing. Later on I learned how to play louder but without hitting the drums so hard. It’s all to do with swing. I never had any lessons. When I first started playing I was very interested in music and was able to read it.

‘The trouble is now, with rock ’n’ roll and stuff, it gets so big that it loses what once upon a time was a magnificent thing, where it was special and quite elusive and occasionally a little sinister. It had its own world nobody could get in.’

ROBERT PLANT

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But when I moved into playing with groups I did a silly thing and dropped it. I do think it’s great if you can write ideas down in music form.’

After leaving school Bonham worked for his father Jack Bonham in the construction industry in between drumming for different local bands. In 1964, Bonham joined his first band, Terry Webb and the Spiders, meeting his future wife Pat Phillips at a dance in Kidderminster. ‘I swore to Pat that I’d give up drumming when we got married, but every night I’d come home and just sit down at the drums. I’d be miserable if I didn’t.’ Fortunately for rock fans Bonham never kept his promise and also played in other Birmingham bands such as The Blue Star Trio and the Senators, who released a moderately successful single She’s a Mod. Bonham was bewitched by the experience and decided to make drumming a full-time occupation. Two years later, he joined Way of Life, but the band soon became inactive. In desperation for a regular income, he joined the blues group Crawling King Snakes, whose lead singer was a young Robert Plant.

During this period, Bonham developed a reputation as one of the loudest drummers in England, often breaking drumheads and being asked by clubs to stop playing. Asked to leave one Birmingham studio because he was too loud for the owner, he was told that there was no future for a drummer who played as loudly as he did. Ten years later, the owner received a note reading ‘Thanks for the career advice’, accompanied by a Led Zeppelin gold record. In 1967, as Bonham later explained to Chris Welch in a 1975 interview, for him there was no real alternative to a life behind the drums stool: ‘Drumming was the only thing I was any good at, and I stuck at that for three or four years. If things got bad I could always go back to building. I had a group with Nicky James, an incredible lead singer. But we had so much of the equipment on hire purchase, we’d get stopped at night on the way back from a gig and they’d take back the entire PA. Nicky had a big following then, and he could sing any style, but he couldn’t write his own material. We used to have so many clubs we could play around Birmingham in those days. Lots of ballrooms too. All those places have gone to the dogs – or bingo. I was so keen to play when I quit school. I’d

have played for nothing. In fact, I did for a long time. But my parents stuck by me… I never had any drum lessons… I just played the way I wanted, and got blacklisted in Birmingham.

“You’re too loud!” they used to say. “There’s no future in it.”’

It was then that Bonham’s former band, Way Of Life, asked him to re-join the group, and Bonham agreed, though throughout this period Plant kept in constant contact with him. Eventually Way Of Life folded, and when Plant decided to form Band of Joy, Bonham was naturally his first choice as drummer. The band recorded a number of demos but could not get things together sufficiently to make an album. Fiscal matters for the young musicians remained correspondingly precarious. Things looked up in the following year as American singer Tim Rose toured Britain and invited Band of Joy to open his concerts but then soon nose dived when Rose returned for another tour months later. Bonham had been spotted and was formally invited by Rose to join his backing band. Without giving the matter another thought Bonham jumped ship in favour of the gig which provided him with a regular income. It is a measure of the uniqueness of Bonham’s talent for the drums that as the Tim Rose tour was drawing to a close two established singers, in the form of Joe Cocker and Chris Farlowe, had already made lucrative offers to Bonham to play in their own touring bands. The drummer was in the process of considering these two competing offers when the call from Plant came through.

We have seen that Page’s choices for drummer in the New Yardbirds included Procol Harum’s B. J. Wilson, but a number of other established session and name drummers including Clem Cattini, Aynsley Dunbar and Ginger Baker were also rumoured to be on Page’s wish list.

As journalist Mick Wall explained, ‘The Procol Harum drummer was going to be the first choice of drummer but again he’s in Procol Harum, and they’ve just had a huge hit with Whiter Shade of Pale. It was taking a real chance to expect someone like that to leave, what was at the time, a really successful group to start something brand new, so getting Bonham involved was very lucky.

‘The first time [Page] saw Bonzo play that was it, he had to have him in the group. In fact Bonzo didn’t have a telephone 21

at home, so they sent something like forty telegrams and he didn’t reply to any of them. He was playing with Tim Rose at the time, earning a good salary and it seemed like a cushty number. He was a guy with a wife and kids, who lived in the Midlands and for the first time in his professional career was earning a decent wage. Then here was this poncey London guy with ringlets for hair saying “I’m going to form the ultimate group, do you want to join?”, “No I don’t.” So in fact Peter Grant, the Led Zeppelin manager and Jimmy went up and took Bonzo to the pub. This was a really good move, a few ales later they had twisted his arm. They argued “You can’t turn it down!”

‘He agreed to come along and do one rehearsal, and it was at that rehearsal in Soho that, within the space of the first number, all four of them went “Woah, we know you said this was going to be good, but this is way beyond that.”

Of Bonham joining the band Robert Plant later recalled, ‘We needed a drummer who was a good timekeeper and who really laid it down, and the only one I knew was the one I’d been playing with for years who was Bonzo Bonham. I got so enthusiastic that I hitched back to Oxford and chased after John, got him to one side at a gig and said, “Look, mate, you’ve got to join the Yardbirds.”

But he wasn’t easily convinced. He said, “Well, I’m all right here, aren’t I?” He’d never earned the sort of bread he was getting with Tim Rose before, so I had to try and persuade him. I had nothing to convince him with really, except a name that got lost in American pop history.’

The issue of the new drummer was formally decided when Page saw Bonham drum for Tim Rose in Hampstead, North London, in July 1968. Page and manager Peter Grant were

instantly convinced that he was the perfect fit for the new project. As Grant later recalled, ‘I had a great belief in Jimmy Page both as a producer and a musician. John Paul Jones also had a great reputation. Robert had all the things together the very first time we took a look at him. John Bonham was ideal for the group.’

Page himself recalled, ‘Although I had in mind a very powerful drummer I wasn’t ready for John Bonham I must say. He was beyond the realms of anything I could have possibly imagined; he was absolutely phenomenal.’

Nonetheless there were still some lingering issues to be resolved as Bonham later revealed: ‘I had so much to consider. It wasn’t just a question of who had the best prospects, but also which was going to be the right kind of stuff to play. Farlowe was fairly established and I knew Joe Cocker was going to make it. But I already knew from playing in Band of Joy with Robert the kind of stuff that he liked, and I knew what Jimmy was into. In the end I decided I liked that sort of music better. And it paid off.’

It certainly did, and Bonham quickly became a core member of the fledgling band. As Robert Plant put it, ‘Without Bonzo the band wouldn’t have meant anything at all. I mean he was the emulsifying agent in the whole thing, he was the guy who stopped it being just another rock band really, at least in its performance. The writing, Jimmy’s approach was so unique and is so unique but Bonzo’s delivery is what made it what it is.’

With the new line up settled, the band convened in Soho for a practice session to see how things might gell together.

John Paul Jones recalled the excitement of the very first

‘There were times when I blundered and got the dreaded look from the lads, but that was a good sign. It showed I’d attempted something I’d not tried before.’

JOHN BONHAM

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Led Zeppelin session. ‘We started under the name the New Yardbirds because nobody would book us under anything else. We rehearsed an act, an album, and a tour in about three weeks, and it took off. The first time, we all met in this little room off Wardour Street in London, just to see if we could even stand each other. It was wall-to-wall amplifiers and terrible, all old. Robert had heard that I was a session man, and he was wondering what was going to turn up – some old bloke with a pipe? So Jimmy said, “We’re all here, what are we going to play?” And I said, “I don’t know, what do you know?” And Jimmy said, “Do you know a number called, The Train Kept a Rollin’?” I told him, “No.” And he said, “It’s easy, just G to A.” He counted it out, and the room just exploded, we could see the grins spreading and we said, “Right. We’re on, this is it, this is going to work!” And we just sort of built it up from there. Dazed and Confused came in because Jimmy knew that, but for years I could never get the sequence right; it kept changing all the time with different parts, and I was never used to that. I was used to having the music there – I could never remember – in fact, I’m still the worst in the band for remembering anything.’

With the line up complete the band was still dubbed the New Yardbirds for the Scandinavian dates which had to be completed immediately. The New Yardbirds tag actually lingered on for some time particularly as the band found it difficult to find UK work under their preferred name of Led Zeppelin so the two names overlapped for a few months. The band could not fully begin to develop until the name was finally settled. ‘It was just a joke in England. We really had a bad time. They just wouldn’t accept anything new. It had to be the New Yardbirds, not Led Zeppelin.’

Led Zeppelin was born officially on 26 October 1968, making their stage debut under the new name at Bristol’s Boxing Club. With Peter Grant’s background in the ring, maybe he would’ve got a better reception there than did the future of rock. The audience was none too impressed and that night the line about going down like a lead Zeppelin proved all too prophetic! Fortunately as Page recalled, salvation awaited on the other side of the Atlantic where Peter Grant had all the right contacts: ‘We were given a chance in 24

America. We started off at less than $1,500 a night. We’d played for only $200 at one gig, but it was worth it. We didn’t care. We just wanted to come over to America and play our music. Even though the Yardbirds had been getting about $2,500 a night, Led Zeppelin could only hope to start off at about the $1,500 mark and work our way up from there.

To begin with, we arrived on the scene at just the right time in America as Cream had disbanded and Hendrix was into other things – Atlantic Records were looking for a new heavy rock group to boost and we were it,’ said Jimmy to the Record Mirror in 1970. ‘There was a certain nostalgia for me from the Yardbirds, and that – coupled with Robert Plant’s powerful stage presence – was enough to get us going. In the States now they are talking about Robert as the next Mick Jagger! ‘…I think our initial success was due to the fact that so many of the good American groups were moving towards softer sounds which made our heavy rock approach more dramatic. Blind Faith were a disappointment to many, because they expected them to lean more toward the Spencer Davis-Winwood era than an extension of Traffic, which is what they were. It meant that no-one was filling the gap left by the Cream and in many ways it is their audience we have captured.’

- CHAPTER THREE -

EARLY DAYS

D

espite the uncertain beginnings, the band was officially known as Led Zeppelin on both sides of the Atlantic by the time their first album was recorded in October 1968. The Led Zeppelin name had originally been conceived for the now abandoned Beck/Page super group in 1966.

Page recounted the evolution of the phrase in his 1977 Trouser Press interview: ‘We were going to form a group called Led Zeppelin at the time of the Beck’s Bolero sessions, with the line-up from that session. It was going to be me and Beck on guitars, Moon on drums, maybe Nicky Hopkins on piano. The only one from the session who wasn’t going to be in it was Jonesy, who had played bass. Instead, Moon suggested we bring in Entwistle as bassist and lead singer as well. Keith Moon himself had come up with the name during the 1966 sessions which he’d coined from John Entwistle’s term for a bad gig, which he sometimes described as ‘going over like a lead zeppelin’.

The ‘a’ of ‘lead’ was thoughtfully dropped by Page and Grant to prevent confused concert goers from pronouncing the word ‘leed’. Journalist Chris Welch later recalled how Jimmy Page himself had gone to great pains to ensure the correctness of the new spelling during a visit to the Melody Maker offices in late 1968. ‘He came in to tell me that the New Yardbirds name was no more and of course I asked him for the name of the new band. He told me what it was and I and immediately wrote Lead Zeppelin on my pad. Jimmy

said “No, no it’s spelled without the “a”. It’s pronounced like the metal but spelled Led.’ With the name finally settled the band went into immediate rehearsal, with Plant and Page in particular immediately hitting it off with their shared musical passions.

They began their writing collaboration with re-workings of earlier blues songs, although Plant himself would receive no song-writing credits on the band’s first album because he was still under contract to CBS Records.

‘I don’t think Jimmy was dominating anything as some have suggested. I was able to suggest things and the two of us re-arranged Babe I’m Gonna Leave You. When we heard it back in the studio, we were shaking hands with our brains because it turned out to be so nice. It was really good to be able to get if off like that. It’s been a good relationship all round. John Paul Jones has never worked with anybody like me before – me not knowing anything of the rudiments of music or anything like that, and not really desiring to learn them. It’s been amazing how we hit it off.’

Page later recalled his vision for the band to Mick Houghton at Circus magazine in 1974: ‘I knew exactly the 25

style I was after and the sort of musicians I wanted to play with, the sort of powerhouse sound I was really going for. I guess it proves that the group was really meant to be, the way it all came together. And I was so lucky to find everybody so instantly, without making massive searches and doing numerous auditions that you hear about to fill the gaps.’ When the band came together, the pool of talent was profound, and although his first inclination had been towards a supergroup the guitarist was more than happy with the results of his brief search, even though it didn’t exactly set any bells of recognition ringing in the musical pedigree stakes. ‘Nobody had heard of Robert or Bonzo really. Robert had been around for a long time, making records, he was in contact, and involved with big name managers – in fact he really had quite a lot of opportunities to make it before Zeppelin. It’s quite remarkable that he didn’t. It’s strange the way it happens. I really think at times that our group was meant to be.

In later years Page further elaborated, ‘When we started the band, I know what I wanted to do was to make music that people would respect. I knew that it was good, but I didn’t have the faintest idea that it was going to become what it did obviously. I hadn’t even thought or wished it to, I think the only think I wanted to do was to make something that would stand the test of time. I had an idea of exactly what I wanted to do with the first album and the band. There’s a lot of contrast in the album, which is one of the things I really wanted to get together which I didn’t think anyone else was doing. That was the way it was shaped, but fortunately it shaped up the way I hoped it was going to.’

It was now that the first glimmer of the commercial brilliance that Peter Grant brought to the table was seen. The manager felt the zeitgeist of the explosion that was about to happen in ‘progressive’ rock music and so did Ahmet Ertgun of Atlantic records. Zeppelin were exactly the kind of act Atlantic were looking for. Better still, Atlantic had access to the funds and Grant was just the man to convince Ertgun to invest in his new talent, holding out for what was then an amazing price of $100,000, the largest advance ever paid by Atlantic Records; all of this in the winter of 1968 when the band was still very much in its infancy.

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Led Zeppelin had struck at exactly the right time according to John Paul Jones: ‘Cream had just broken up, and there are people that say we took over that position because there wasn’t too much room about then I seem to remember.

But once Cream had broken up we were left out there and we came up with the goods….’

Atlantic didn’t have to wait long to reap the rewards from their investment. Led Zeppelin made their U.S. concert tour debut in Denver within a month of receiving their advance, and judging from the instant acclaim accorded to the band, Atlantic’s faith looked to have been well placed. Moving on to dates in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other west coast cities, the band hit the ground running and seemed to explode into popularity.

Shortly after this first foray into America for Zeppelin, the band released their self-titled debut album in January of 1969. The importance of the US in Grant’s plans could not be underestimated, and the band were to be back for four more tours in 1969 alone.

The album was made in what by modern standards was a record time. In 1999 Jimmy Page still recalled the precise details: ‘It comes out to thirty-six hours – I know that because I had to pay the bills! Of course, it wasn’t like we went into there for thirty-six hours non-stop, but we paid for thirty-six hours of studio time. We had a chance to air the songs onstage in a small tour of Scandinavia. It gave us a chance to know the numbers before going in the studio. JPJ and I were veterans in the studio so we had all the discipline.

John Bonham and Robert had been in the studio before for a couple of things. It wasn’t like anyone was going in there for the first time. In any case, everyone got swept away by the energy of it.’

By 1968, rock music was becoming something quite distinct from pop, with Jimi Hendrix and Cream leading the way in style and volume. Many of those who followed in their wake certainly managed the latter, but failed somewhat in the style department; and the music of, say, Iron Butterfly seems pretty stodgy today. Led Zeppelin, the self-titled debut album, showcased music of outstanding freshness, rich in dynamic texture and undeniably passionate, whatever the

style. That’s not to say there weren’t some genuine issues concerning the originality of the sources particularly with Jeff Back exploring some very similar territory. Dazed and Confused, originally by Jake Holmes, was altered by Led Zeppelin and claimed as their own. It was another stand-out track on their debut album and one which became a central feature of their live shows, thanks to its possibilities for extended improvisation. There was also some crossover from the Yardbirds, which was a source of some embarrassment for Page.

‘You’ve got to understand that Beck and I came from the same sort of roots. If you’ve got things you enjoy, then you want to do them – to the horrifying point where we’d done our first LP with You Shook Me, and then I heard he’d done You Shook Me on Truth. I was terrified because I thought they’d be the same.

But I hadn’t even known he’d done it, and he hadn’t known that we had. Obviously I’d pioneered a lot of ideas with the Yardbirds, even though they hadn’t been widely heard because of the recording situation, and it was a chance to take those ideas further on.

It was inevitable that the first LP had leftover ideas from the Yardbirds because that’s what I’d been working on. It was original stuff that I’d developed myself.’

Blending elements of folk, distorted amplification, Eastern sounds and, in particular, blues, Led Zeppelin was one of the pivotal records in the pioneering of the heavy metal movement of the 1970s. Included on the album were cover versions of I Can’t Quit You Baby, by legendary bluesman

Willie Dixon, and You Shook Me, by Dixon and J. B. Lenoir.

Page later said of the blues influence: ‘We were just trying to recreate that first experience of hearing the Chicago blues.’

Zeppelin’s eponymous debut LP immediately made a huge impact with its bludgeoning riffs, powerful drumming and deft homages to old-style blues and new-school melodic rock. Page was always proud of the debut album which he’d written, produced and paid for. ‘It came together really quick.

It was cut very shortly after the band was formed. Our only rehearsal was a two-week tour of Scandinavia that we did as the New Yardbirds. For material, we obviously went right down to our blues roots.

I still had plenty of Yardbirds riffs left over. By the time Jeff Beck did go, it was up to me to come up with a lot of new stuff. It was this thing where Clapton set a heavy precedent in the Yardbirds which Beck had to follow, and then it was even harder for me, in a way, because the second lead guitarist had suddenly become the first. And I was under pressure to come up with my own riffs. On the first LP I was still heavily influenced by the earlier days. I think it tells a bit, too. The album was made in three weeks. It was obvious that somebody had to take the lead, otherwise we’d have all sat around jamming and doing nothing for six months. But after that, on the second LP, you can hear the real group identity coming together.’

There were a number of studio tricks on display that demonstrated Page’s considerable expertise as a highly aware producer who from long experience knew exactly the effects

‘Nobody could have predicted the effect of John Bonham’s drum introduction on Good Times Bad Times, because no matter what he’d played in before, he’d never had the chance to flex his muscles and play like John Bonham.’

JIMMY PAGE

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he wanted to achieve: for example the famous guitar sound on Communication Breakdown has its own distinctive quality. Nine years later Page was still happy to expand on the recording techniques to an inquisitive Steve Rosen: ‘I put the guitar amp in a small room, a little tiny vocal booth-type thing and recorded from a distance. You see, there’s a very old recording maxim which goes, “Distance makes depth”.

I’ve used that a hell of a lot on recording techniques with the band generally, not just me. Before that the fashion was for close up microphones on the amps. It was a case of just putting the microphone in front, but I’d have a microphone right out the back as well, and then balance the two, and get rid of all the phasing problems; because really, you shouldn’t have to use an EQ in the studio if the instruments sound right. It should all be done with the microphones.

But everybody has gotten so carried away with the EQ pots that they have forgotten the whole science of microphone placement. There aren’t too many guys who know it. I’m sure Les Paul knows a lot; obviously he must have been well into that, well into it, as were all those who produced the early rock records where there were only one or two microphones available in the studio.’

The amazing guitar solo on I Can’t Quit You Baby is another example of the inventiveness at the heart of this superb piece of studio work. Page is still proud of this despite a few rough edges: ‘There are mistakes in it, but it doesn’t make any difference. I’ll always leave the mistakes in. I can’t help it. The timing bits on the A and the B flat parts are right, though it might sound wrong. The timing just sounds off.

But there are some wrong notes. You’ve got to be reasonably honest about it.’

The other hallmark of the album was the advent of the guitar bow technique. ‘When I was doing sessions I’d been playing with a violin bow across the strings, which I suppose I could say has become a bit of a trademark now, but that wasn’t actually my idea. It was suggested to me by one of the violinists in the string section. It obviously looks a bit gimmicky because one hasn’t seen it done before, and as soon as you pick up a bow and start playing guitar with it that’s the first thing people say – “Oh, that’s an interesting gimmick” – 28

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but the fact is that it’s very musical, it sounds like an orchestra at times, the cello section, violins… it’s quite amazing!’

Much later, Robert Plant added his own views in his own unique style: ‘That first album was the first time that headphones meant anything to me. What I heard coming back to me over the cans while I was singing was better than the finest chick in all the land. It had so much weight, so much power, it was devastating. I had a long way to go with my voice then, but at the same time the enthusiasm and spark of working with Jimmy’s guitar shows through quite well.

It was all very raunchy then. Everything was fitting together into a trademark for us. We were learning what got us off most and what got people off most, and what we knew got more people back to the hotel after the gig… We made no money on the first tour. Nothing at all. Jimmy put in every penny that he’d gotten from the Yardbirds and that wasn’t much. Until Peter Grant took them over, they didn’t make the money they should have made. So we made the album and took off on a tour with a road crew of one.’

During this early period in their career, the band’s ascent was assisted by numerous tours of America. As their popularity grew they moved on from clubs and small ballrooms to larger concert halls. Sometimes lasting over three hours, gigs would include plenty of improvisation, soul and funk-based interludes and ridiculously long drum solos from John Bonham. The band had so little of their own repertoire that they drew on a huge variety of rock and soul standards to keep the proceedings rolling along. The four musicians simply loved performing together and it should come as no surprise that due to the varied ever changing nature and sheer excitement of these shows, many have long circulated as Led Zeppelin bootleg recordings.

Years later Page later told Crowe that Led Zeppelin played long concerts out of necessity, not ego: ‘We need that amount of time to get everything across. You put on a support act and they’re gonna want to do at least an hour – probably an hour and a half – so that makes the whole show about five hours long, including gear changeovers. Some halls have to get everybody out by eleven, so where does that leave the headliner? We established a policy long ago that our concerts 30

would feature only Zeppelin and the people would know exactly what they were coming to hear. Myself, I get fed up with hearing about groups who only do a fifty-minute show.

It’s not right. It all depends on how much a performer has got to say, I suppose, and Zeppelin has got quite a bit to put across… We’ve played every single market that there is to play in the last few years… apart from Bangkok and India, which we’ll get to in the next year. There’s no reason why, other than the fact that we just love to play. We love touring too much to give it up. We took a film crew on our last tour, you know.

The movie’ll be out soon and that one film will be the end-all story of why we have such a great time on the road.’

It wasn’t long before John Bonham was famous for playing an extended drum solo, including a section played with just his hands and another involving orchestral timpani. As he told Chris Welch: ‘Not everybody likes or understands a drum solo, so I like to bring in effects and sounds to keep their interest. I’ve been doing the hand drum solo for a long time – sometimes you can take a chunk out of your knuckles on the hi-hat or you can catch your hand on the tension rods.

I try to play something different every night on the solo, but the basic plan is the same, from sticks to hands and then the timps, and the final build-up. It would be really boring to play on the straight kit all the time. On the last States tour I was really chuffed when I had some good reviews from people who don’t even like drum solos. I usually play for twenty minutes, and the longest I’ve ever done was just under thirty. It’s a long time, but when I’m playing it seems to fly by. Sometimes you come up against a blank and you think “How am I going to get out of this one?” Or sometimes you go into a fill and you know halfway through it’s going to be disastrous. There have been times when I’ve blundered, and got the dreaded look from the lads. But that’s a good sign. It shows you’re attempting something you’ve not tried before, you can’t play loud enough. I just wish there was a way of wiring a drum kit to get the natural sound through the PA. I’ve tried so many different ways, but when you’re playing with a band like ours you get so many problems with sound.

With Jimmy and John Paul on either side playing lead, they can leak into the drum mikes, and if you have too many

monitors you start to get feedback. I never get it the way I want.’

As Page told Keith Altham in Top Pops in September 1969: ‘Things have happened so quickly it is unbelievable.

Our group will only have been formed a year this October and already some critics are giving us rave reports. It is impossible to convey just how big Zeppelin are now in the States, but if I tell you that our album sold 20,000 copies in three days last week and is still pounding along it might give you some idea. You can turn on the radio and hear a Zeppelin track played three or four times a day.’

The first album, in spite of receiving mostly favourable reviews, was also at the root of a long-running feud between Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stone, which began when John Mendelsohn, a leading journalist on the magazine, savaged the band for mimicking black artists, ‘over-riffing’, and the straight-out theft of compositions that were not credited to their original composers. Page was outraged at the article, but was also stung into action by the increasingly widely circulated suggestion that the band had been hyped to fame and glory.

‘For anyone to imply that Led Zeppelin were prefabricated or hyped-up on a gullible public is grossly unfair.

You can’t compute or calculate for a situation like that or the chemistry which arises when you put together a band. The only people with a similar musical approach at the time were Cream, but I always felt their improvised passages used to go on and on. We tried to reflect more light and shade into the spontaneous pieces, and also a sense of the dramatic. If there was a key to why we made it, it was in that.’

John Paul Jones was equally unimpressed with the piece: ‘I always remember the first review of the first album in Rolling Stone. Where they just dismissed it out of hand. Completely I don’t think the bloke would even listen to it and said as much.’

The schism between Zeppelin and Rolling Stone marked the beginning of the policy of rejecting every request for interviews and cover stories by the magazine. As their level of success escalated, the significance of the magazine in the eyes of the band grew less and less, but the grudge remained

as strong as ever. Two years later Robert Plant was still bitter about it as he commented in interview with Rick McGrath in 1971: ‘… things like Rolling Stone get out of hand. Even in England people buy it because it’s been around for such a long time. It gets to be a habit. And what they read is something else, man. Because it’s always down, down, down. Why don’t they stop all that and start being nice? Is that such a hard thing to do?’

Whatever Plant might say, there were some genuine grounds for the controversy over the originality of their tracks. Even the less contentious numbers such as Black Mountain Side had a long history prior to the first Zeppelin album, as Jimmy Page later explained: ‘I wasn’t totally original on that. It had been done to death in the folk clubs a lot; Annie Briggs was the first one that I heard do that riff. I was playing it as well, and then there was Bert Jansch’s version. He’s the one who crystallised all the acoustic playing as far as I’m concerned. Those first few albums of his were absolutely brilliant. And the tuning on Black Mountain Side is the same as White Summer.’

More controversy arose after the first pressings of Led Zeppelin’s Hindenburg disaster-based album cover were circulated.

The, now iconic, cover was created by the famous graphic designer and illustrator George Hardie. Hardie is now best known for his work with Hipgnosis and Pink Floyd, and had a significant impact on the imagery of the rock scene.

Recalling the creation of Led Zeppelin’s classic artwork Hardie reminisced, ‘I only had one idea, which is a picture that actually appears very tiny on one of the later album covers and a little tiny logo at the bottom. This was a kind of picture of sea and clouds and a zeppelin, very much like Milton Glaser who was my graphics hero at the time, and copied from an old tin sign in America.

‘When I’d done the roughs I rang I suppose Steven Goldblatt and said “What happens next?” and he said “Well you’ll have to show them to the band.” I said “Well I hope you’re coming along to hold my hand” and he said “No I’m not, you just go, it’s in Oxford street at the top of a building – Rack Records. So I went in and sat down and the band 31

were there, not Jimmy Page, but three others, four others, obviously very nervous. Then Jimmy Page arrived and I met Peter Grant, and Jimmy Page said “No.” He hardly looked at it you know, he just brought out the book of photographs and said “No, this is what we’re going to have. We’d like you to do this.” And so I said yes and went away and did it pretty much.

Obviously the best thing would be for my original idea to be accepted, but it wasn’t and then you have the possibility of making money, because you’re otherwise working in a pub or something and you don’t want that.

‘So faced with this photograph one thing was that I didn’t, in those days, know how to get copyright for something like that, which I know now. Also that if I did that I wouldn’t get any money, I would just be finding out for them how to get a photograph and put type on it. So a way round it was to find a way of making a copy of the photograph with my own fair hand and then that would solve the problem. I can’t remember whether it was £60 or $60, but I remember I put it in a New York bank account because it seemed like a really flash thing to do at the time. I probably bought my first invoice book, which would have been a little one with cotton in it and sent them an invoice after hours of conversation with Steven Goldblatt about what I could get away with. So it was carefully worked out, but they didn’t have a fixed price, no they didn’t have an idea – I just guessed what I’d get, but $60 was good in those days.’

Sadly there were those who didn’t think it was good, including Eva von Zeppelin, a surviving relative of the creator of the Zeppelin airships, who threatened legal action against the band.

Quite what grounds Eva had for bringing her threatened claim have never been satisfactorily explained, but amidst all the other issues the band were taking no chances. Whilst the short-lived threat of legal activity was still in the air, the band briefly changed their name to the Nobs.

Still, it wasn’t all gloom and doom, as Led Zeppelin’s live shows began to gain a huge reputation. Everywhere that is except for the pages of Rolling Stone. Unlike the rest of young America Lester Bangs was not to be won over and he widened the the gulf between the magazine and the band somewhat 32

more when he filed an article in November 1970, describing their sound as a ‘… thunderous, near-undifferentiated tidal wave of sound that doesn’t engross but envelops to snuff any possible distraction.’ Everyone else loved it. ◊

A track-by-track review of

Led Zeppelin I Released 12 January 1969 Produced by Jimmy Page This is probably one of the best debut albums ever issued by any band in the history of rock. If there was ever an indication of how good a band Led Zeppelin were to become, then taking yet another listen to this little gem was a sure fire way of becoming hooked. In retrospect, it may seem strange that the debut album didn’t take off in Britain, and it was Led Zeppelin II that catapulted the band to fame and fortune.

Good as many of the tracks on II were, the debut is still the more cohesive and pleasurable album.

The cover was very simple but incredibly effective and striking. See this one and it is indelibly stamped in the memory. All in all, this was a classic start from a band that was to become one of the biggest bands, if not the biggest, of the classic rock era.

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Good Times Bad Times (Page/Jones/Bonham) This track was released as a single and eventually reached No. 80 in the US pop chart. As the debut album’s opening track, it’s a classic with its rather cool vocal, solid riff and stellar performances from all four band members. Page’s swirling guitar effect was achieved by using a rotating ‘Leslie’ speaker with his guitar, just like Clapton had done on Badge, and Harrison had done in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Bonham’s superb, hooky drumming is also worthy of mention – his jaw-dropping bass-drum playing is all the more remarkable for the fact that it was recorded long before the advent of the double pass drum pedal. Although Jones has since stated that the riff was the most difficult he ever wrote, the track’s direct power was certainly a good indicator of the things to come.

Even long-time detractors Rolling Stone had to concede to the track’s brilliance, when in a reassessment of Led Zeppelin in 2016, Andy Greene praised Good Times Bad Times.

‘Jimmy Page’s guitar pounces from the speakers, fat with menace; John Bonham’s kick drum swings with anvil force; Robert Plant rambles on about the perils of manhood. Hard rock would never be the same.’

The track was rarely played live at Led Zeppelin concerts in its entirety, although in a few instances in 1969 it was used as an introduction to Communication Breakdown.

It also appeared in almost complete form within the Communication Breakdown medley performed at the LA Forum on 4 September 1970, where it included a bass solo by Jones (as can be heard on the Led Zeppelin bootleg recording Live on Blueberry Hill), and several Whole Lotta Love medleys in 1971.

Babe I’m Gonna Leave You (Bredon/Page/Plant) This was inspired by Joan Baez’s 1962 version, and was originally credited as ‘Trad. Arr Page’, but following legal action, folk singer Anne Bredon was given a third of the songwriting credit. With Robert Plant’s haunting vocals, this is certainly one of the high points of the album, and quite possibly of the bands career. Beautiful acoustic guitar playing building to a huge Bonham-led apex creates a wonderful 34

interplay with Plant’s vocal gymnastics, topped off with Jimmy Page’s classy guitar breaks – it didn’t get much better than this as far as the mighty Zeppelin were concerned.

Jimmy Page recalled the genesis of Babe I’m Going To Leave You stating, ‘I heard that on the Joan Baez album and that’s the version I played to him. I said “Look I’ve got an idea of how to do this.” In other words I had all the arrangement for that in my head.’

You Shook Me (Dixon/Lenoir) This is what early Led Zeppelin were masters at – heavy blues complemented by Plant’s wailing vocals. Grungy slide guitar really sets this track in (slow) motion. This is probably the best rendition of Willie Dixon’s classic track. John Paul Jones’s electric piano and organ hint at his incredible versatility, and Plant’s harmonica adds spice. This track ultimately cost the band a lot – firstly in royalties. The original composers Willie Dixon and JB Lenoir were not credited on the original release, so Dixon sued Zeppelin and received a substantial amount in damages. Secondly the band’s friendships were affected: a version of this very same song was included on Jeff Beck’s first album with the Jeff Beck group, Truth. Beck accused his former band mate Page of stealing his idea, which led to a long-running feud between the two men.

Dazed and Confused (Page) Another controversial track, this was originally written by folk singer Jake Holmes, who had opened for Jimmy Page’s former band the Yardbirds. Page had performed a version of it with the Yardbirds, although it was never officially released.

Just as with the other ‘reappropriated’ songs on this debut album, the track was attributed to Jimmy Page, and since Holmes has never challenged this accreditation, Page remains the sole benefactor of the song’s royalty payments.

This track marks the first time that Page played his guitar with a bow on a Led Zeppelin record, and his playing here led to Page being compared to Beck, Clapton and Hendrix as a god among men. This is classic Led Zeppelin, and a song that was later extended in live performance to a running time of

over thirty minutes, enabling Page to create a medley of sorts, bringing in notable riffs from other artists’ songs as well as his own.

The thumping bass and frenzied use of the cymbals in the faster middle section really create the feel of a runaway locomotive, before the track reverts to the start-up signature and then ends in a flurry. With that bass line and a real sense of atmospherics generated by the less-is-more guitar playing of Page, Dazed and Confused not only established a new kind of rock sound but also gave us a catchphrase for a whole retrofocused generation in the 1990s.

Your Time Is Gonna Come (Page/Jones) An organ-led piece from the overlooked John Paul Jones, with lyrics by Jimmy Page, the song is full of gentle bile aimed at an unfaithful girlfriend. Gentle, if out-of-tune guitar from Jimmy gives this song a lovely feel, and the vocal melody, with accompanying backing harmonies and lyrics that touch upon Ray Charles’ I Believe to My Soul, is reminiscent of the Stones imitating the Beatles. Along with Black Mountain Side this track gives respite from some of the heavier songs on the album.

Black Mountain Side (Page) Another folk song of dubious origin. Although credited to Page, this is actually thought to be a traditional melody called Black Waterside, in an arrangement suspiciously similar to the version recorded by British folk hero Bert Jansch for his 1966 album Jack Orion. Still, there is some lovely playing here – indeed, the piece was played at Led Zeppelin concerts between 1968 and 1970, as well as on the 1977 and 1980 tours, as a showcase for Page’s solo ability. It was often segued with White Summer, another partial cover, which Jimmy Page had recorded for the Yardbirds back in 1967, and often ran to over ten minutes.

radio play. In fact, Page’s downstrokes-only riff is often cited as a touchstone for punk. American radio still loves this track today as much as they did back in 1968.

I Can’t Quit You Baby (Willie Dixon) Another Willie Dixon classic that slows the pace down again.

Although the song sounds rather dated today, there is no doubting Jimmy Page’s ability to take a classic like this and make it his own. Robert Plant’s aggressive vocals give the song a whole new energy – this is Led Zeppelin at their best, with all four members firing on all four cylinders.

How Many More Times (Page/Jones/Bonham) To many this minor epic is as good a song as Dazed and Confused. However, it was never really performed and transformed in the live set in quite the same manner. The band certainly could have and should have! Great guitar work in this one with plenty of double tracking even at this early stage of the game. This track certainly displayed top Guitar Player Jimmy Page’s skills in the studio as well.

How Many More Times became not just the end of the first album but the crescendo to the whole show during the 1960s. It’s a brilliant all round playing from the band, especially John Bonham, and a great end to a classic debut album.

Communication Breakdown (Page/Jones/Bonham) Also released as the B-side to Good Times Bad Times, making a single that really had to be purchased if you like rockers.

It is a classic frantic Zeppelin song that became perfect for 35

Anyone who enjoys modern rock music owes a debt of thanks to Led Zeppelin.

Robert Plant’s intriguing voice and lyrics, the breathtaking arrangements and dexterity of Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, as well as John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham’s unique powerhouse drumming combined to make one of the most spectacular bands in music history. From the outset they had something special, and inside we uncover just what that was, examining their early years and the formation of a legend.

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