Classic Rock 203

“LED ZEPPELIN IV?... IT’S RATHER GOOD, ISN’T IT?” 203

jimmy page H rainbow H prince H taj mahal H suzi quatro H foo fighters H jellyfish H black stone cherry

£5.50

PRINTED IN THE UK

NOVEMBER 2014

cover story

34

Jimmy Page

“The whole history of Zep is musical expansion. We were pioneering in every way.”

november 2014 issue 203

Features 34 Jimmy Page

The Led Zeppelin reissues campaign is about to step up a gear with the almighty one-two of IV and Houses Of The Holy. In an exclusive interview the man behind it all finally reveals the secrets of his twin masterpieces – and explains why as a band Zeppelin is finally a thing of the past.

44 Taj Mahal

He headlined over Led Zeppelin and taught Keith Richards how to play guitar. Fifty years after he first began rewiring the blues, it’s finally time to give him the respect he’s due.

48 Prince

Thirty years on from the release of his landmark Purple Rain, we look back at how the self-contained, reclusive genius who learned to play nice with others, and in the process found his world-conquering groove.

54 Rainbow

As the 1970s came to a close, Ritchie Blackmore was plotting his band’s rebirth: Dio and his dragons were out, Graham Bonnet and Hawaiian shirts were in. And Rainbow were about to become accidental pop stars.

60 The Tea Party

Pitched as ‘The Doors meet Zeppelin’, they were the textbook 90s cult band – until one of them took to a stronger brew.

62 Suzi Quatro

She toured with Slade, Kiss and Alice Cooper, and set the singles chart on fire. But above all Suzi Quatro blazed a trail for female rockers everywhere.

68 Lucinda Williams, Cory Branan & more

Four singers, four sounds, one spiritual home. From the ex-punk to the scion of country royalty, this is what American roots music looks like in 2014.

74 Jellyfish

The power-pop princelings were the new Beatles, ELO and Queen all in one – until bad vibes and psychic turmoil snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

78 Billy Idol

He was MTV royalty, a rebel for a new generation. And away from the box the singer’s life really was all sex, Viagra and punk rock’n’roll – and it very nearly killed him.

’s whatur on yocd? free

p87

ROSS HALFIN

Regulars

november 2014 issue 203

62

18 The Dirt

The Classic Rock Roll Of Honour welcomes Gregg Allman as 2014’s Living Legend; Kinks reunion is on (we think); say hello to Red Racer and Black State Highway; welcome back Mr. Big, The Pineapple Thief and Sixx A.M.; goodnight John Gustafson, Glenn Cornick, Jimi Jamison, Throb…

Suzi Quatro “I see myself as rock’n’roll.

I’ve never seen myself as glam – ever.”

30 The Stories Behind The Songs The Police

A semi-ballad out of sync with the punk zeitgeist, banned by the BBC, Roxanne should have died on its arse. Instead it put The Police on the road to superstardom.

32 Q&A Dave Grohl

The Foo Fighters frontman on uncovering American music history, studios as “churches” and meeting Obama.

89 Reviews

New albums from Status Quo, Billy Idol, Bush, Stevie Nicks, Mr. Big, Audrey Horne, The Datsuns, Ace Frehley, Crobot, Keith Emerson & Greg Lake… Reissues from Led Zeppelin, Foreigner, Ozzy Osbourne, Ian Hunter, Richie Kotzen, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull… DVDs, films and books on Jimmy Page, The Who, Queen, David Bowie… Live reviews of ELO, Foo Fighters, Kate Bush, Airbourne…

106 Buyer’s Guide Elvis Costello

Over five decades the singer-songwriter has amassed a jewel-box catalogue of music unbounded by genres.

110 Letters

Got something to say? Let us hear it – shout it out loud!

113 Lives previews

Gig previews from Blackberry Smoke, Theory Of A Deadman, Paul Rodgers, Living Colour and Purson, plus gig listings – who’s playing where and when.

138 Heavy Load Chris Robertson

The Black Stone Cherry frontman on depression, drugs – and pulling back from the brink with the help of his family.

Subscrib and savee! money*

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* Unless you’re a subscriber, in which case you get the story of rise and rise of the Midwestern local heroes, Kansas.

34 classicrockmagazine.com

“The fourth album?

The Led Zeppelin reissues campaign is about to step up a gear with the almighty one-two of IV and Houses Of The Holy. And the man behind it all – that’s Jimmy Page, of course – is finally ready to reveal the secrets of his twin masterpieces – and explain why Zeppelin is finally part of the past.

I

Words: Paul Elliott Portraits: Ross Halfin

MAIN PIC: PHOTOSHOT / INSET: GETTY

t is 10 o’clock on a rainy late summer morning when Jimmy Page arrives at The Gore Hotel to meet with Classic Rock. Situated in the London borough of Kensington, Page knows the hotel and the area well. He has a home nearby, and within a few minutes’ walk is the Royal Albert Hall, where Led Zeppelin were filmed in concert on January 9, 1970 – which was also Page’s 26th birthday.

In the hotel’s Green Room, decorated with antique portraits of English nobility and lit by a vast chandelier, Page offers a warm handshake and settles on one of two facing sofas. Now 70, his shoulder-length hair its natural silver, the guitarist has aged better than most of his contemporaries. He is elegantly dressed in black shirt, trousers and boots, and drinking strong black coffee, with sweetener. “Too many of these and I’ll start speeding,” he says.

There’s a lot to talk about. In a conversation that runs to 80 minutes, Page will discuss everything from his life during those heady days of the early 70s as the leader, guitarist and primary creative force in one of the most successful rock groups of all time to his plans to release new music in 2015, music that he has been crafting for years. And he will also address the one question that will not go away: will Led Zeppelin ever perform together again?

But there’s a more immediate matter at hand, which is the release of the two Led Zeppelin albums that form the second instalment in the high-profile reissue programme of the band’s entire catalogue: Led Zeppelin IV and Houses Of The Holy.

Page smiles broadly when he recalls that untouchable period. “It was a wonderful time,” he says. “I can’t remember it all. But let’s see what I can remember…” ➻ classicrockmagazine.com 35

“My hair was a talking point, always. ‘There’s a band meeting.’ ‘ What about?’ ‘Graham’s hair.’”

Graham Bonnet

BRIAN ARIS

54 classicrockmagazine.com

As the 1970s came to a close, Ritchie Blackmore was plotting his band’s rebirth: Dio and his dragons were out, Graham Bonnet and Hawaiian shirts were in. And Rainbow were about to become accidental pop stars.

Words: Jon Hotten

ROB VERHORST

I

t was December 1978, and 20 degrees below freezing in Darien, Connecticut.

Don Airey had left England in such a rush that he’d forgotten his coat. The keyboard player had been asked by his old friend Roger Glover to fly to the States to join Rainbow as they geared up to record their fourth album. As he walked into the rehearsal studio he passed a familiar figure on the way out.

“I said to Ritchie: ‘Was that Ronnie? Is he coming back?’”

Airey recalls today. “And Ritchie said something like: ‘Nah, he’s gone.’ And that was it. I don’t know what had happened, and I still don’t.”

‘Ronnie’ was Ronnie James Dio, Rainbow’s leather-lunged singer since their inception three years earlier. ‘Ritchie’ was Ritchie Blackmore, the ex-Deep Purple guitarist who had founded the band and who had poached Dio from a band that had supported Purple, Elf. Over the course of three albums, the pair had forged a neo-classical sound that practically defined heavy metal during that period. But it was an increasingly uneasy partnership between these two talents. And it had just fallen apart.

Deep Purple bass player and Blackmore’s former bandmate Roger Glover had been in Connecticut for a couple of weeks longer than Airey, but the future of the band that he’d been hired to produce was unclear to him too.

“There was a lack of communication between Ronnie and Ritchie,” Glover says today of those rehearsals. “Ritchie would be working out riffs and trying out ideas for songs, and Ronnie’s in a corner writing away – he hardly ever sung a note, and when he did it was very half-hearted. I went round Ritchie’s house, and he said: ‘I’ve got an idea for a song,’ and he gave me a cassette. Then I went over to Ronnie’s house, and I’d say: ‘Ritchie wants you to listen to this.’ He’d listen

to it and go: ‘Nah, I don’t like it. Here’s an idea…’ and give me another cassette for Ritchie, who’d say: ‘That’s not an idea, it’s just a rhythm…’ I woke up one morning, not long after I’d started, and our manager, Bruce Paine, said: ‘Well, it’s over.

Ronnie’s left the band. Everyone’s gone except Ritchie and Cozy Powell’.”

Glover had previous with Blackmore. Five years ealier, in 1973, Deep Purple had just finished a gig in Osaka when Blackmore declared that he would be leaving the band unless Glover and Ian Gillan left instead. Hurt, Glover had poured his energies into production work, while Blackmore – who had left Purple shortly after anyway – had put together Rainbow.

Then in July 1978 Bruce Paine – who had looked after Deep Purple back in the day – asked Glover to fly down to see Rainbow play in Chicago with a view to him producing their next record. Ritchie had been very welcoming and had agreed. But then they got to Connecticut and the wheels had come off once more. And so it was that Glover found himself in a rehearsal room in Darien, Connecticut waiting for Blackmore, Airey and Cozy Powell to come up with something that he could produce.

“Ritchie was very charming,” says Don Airey, “but he seemed to be working too hard to me. There had been a lot of grief for him. It was like he wanted a bit of peace or something. We’d start at eleven in the morning and go on until two at night, and the time just seemed to fly. You had to knuckle down for fourteen-hour days.”

Little did any of them know that when they did, it would mark a clear break with Rainbow’s epic past and set them up for the 1980s. The album this as-yet-incomplete line-up would eventually make, Down To Earth, turned them into unlikely hitmakers and resulted in the founding of one of the most iconic music festivals in history. But for the four men sitting in the rehearsal room in Connecticut that cold December, all that seemed a long way off. ➻ classicrockmagazine.com 55

A NEW REVOLUTION The making of…

Thirty years on from the release of Prince’s landmark movie and soundtrack album, we look back at how the self-contained, reclusive genius learned to play nice with others, how to rock and in the process found his world-conquering groove.

I

Words: Bill DeMain

t’s August 3, 1983. Inside the First Avenue club in Minneapolis, a sweaty congregation of 1,500-plus believers is staring across the low stage at an 18-year old guitarist named Wendy Melvoin, who’s making her debut with hometown heroes Prince & The Revolution. Dressed in a sleeveless V-neck top, her curly hair tumbling over one eye, she strums a circular progression of gospel-like chords on her purple Rickenbacker guitar. It’s the final number in a 10-song set of new and wildly eclectic material. The other musicians fall in lightly behind her. The hypnotic groove swells for nearly five minutes, while the leader of the band, lurking in the shadows, wrenches some sustained fuzzedout cries from his Telecaster. Finally, he flips the guitar behind his back, gunslinger-style, and steps to the microphone. Purple lamé jacket, ruffled collar, Little Richard hairdo, this magnetic five-foot-two soul preacher closes his eyes and sings, ‘I never meant to cause you any sorrow…’

There are no cheers of recognition. This is the debut performance of Purple Rain, the title song of the album – and movie – that will propel Prince Rogers Nelson into the pop culture stratosphere.

Within 18 months, the 25-year-old dynamo, who’s already charted with songs like Little Red Corvette and 1999, will be selling out arenas. He will also rival Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and, most significantly, Michael Jackson as the artist who defines the decade of the 1980s.

And maybe more than any of these iconic contemporaries, Prince, with his inimitable songwriting, production-style and sexed-up ethos will imprint generations of artists to come, from George Michael to Justin Timberlake to Lady Gaga to Beyoncé.

Purple Rain, an album that spent a staggering 24 weeks at No.1 and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, remains not only Prince’s zeitgeist moment, but the most

thrilling and cohesive artistic statement he ever made.

This is the story of how it happened.

P

rince was not a team player. Like auteurs Stevie Wonder, Todd Rundgren and Paul McCartney before him, the Minneapolis multi-track whiz kid wrote, arranged, produced and played almost every instrument on his first five albums, from 1978-1982. The minimalist, pogo-funk sound of those early records, typified by songs like When You Were Mine, I Wanna Be Your Lover and I Feel For You, was charmingly offbeat and original.

But it was also insular. Prince must have sensed that if he was going to punch that higher floor on the elevator to global supremacy, he needed to rock. And to rock, he needed a band.

“The reason I don’t use musicians a lot of the time had to do with the hours that I worked,” Prince told Rolling Stone in 1985. “I swear to God it’s not out of boldness when I say this, but there’s not a person around who can stay awake as long as I can. Music is what keeps me awake. There will be times when I’ve been working in the studio for twenty hours and I’ll be falling asleep in the chair, but I’ll still be able to tell the engineer what cut I want to make. I use engineers in shifts a lot of the time because when I start something, I like to go all the way through. There are very few musicians who will stay awake that long.”

While he had toured with various players early on, it wasn’t until the breakthrough success of 1982’s album 1999 that Prince surrounded himself with the formalised line-up of musicians that he considered his equals. In 1983, he added an ampersand and called them The Revolution.

To be a member of Prince’s band meant not only staying awake but living up to the boss’s sky-high standards. Hitmaking R&B producer Jimmy Jam, who played in the first of Prince’s many side project bands, The Time, told me,

“There’s not a person around who can stay awake as long as I can. Music is what keeps me awake.” P r i n c e

PHOTOSHOT

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