LED ZEPPELIN
Fifty years young, LZ treat MOJO to allnew interviews and unpublished pics. The highs, the lows, the legacy, the jardinière – all this and Jason Bonham on his dad, the O2, and the aftermath.
AS DUSK FELL ON THOSE WARM SUMMER EVENINGS of 1967, the young guitarist would slip into his motorboat and disappear on to the river, enjoying the simple freedom of not quite knowing where he was heading. on other occasions, he would aim for land once owned by Gilbert Beale, a wealthy local bird enthusiast. Beale loved peacocks and had established a nature reserve on the Thames, some two miles or so above Pangbourne, but his death at the age of 99 put plans to create a wildlife park on hold. Meanwhile, his island summer house remained empty. It was there that the 23-year-old Jimmy Page would head during many of his night-time sorties, soaking up the sounds and the stillness and, once he’d moored up on the island, wandering around “in a paradise of peacocks”. for Page, these bucolic rambles – launched from the boathouse that he’d recently bought – allowed him time to think and to escape from the turmoil that had begun to engulf The Yardbirds, the band for whom he’d abandoned a lucrative career as a session man in June 1966. It’s almost impossible to be exact about how many sessions Page played on, but his run of roughly 150 recordings from January 1963 had provided him the wherewithal to buy his Pangbourne residence, a few doors down from The Swan pub (itself famed for being mentioned in Jerome K Jerome’s classic 1889 novel, Three Men In A Boat). His work as a jobbing guitarist had also provided Page with an impressive string of industry contacts, and when The Yardbirds split in 1968, he repaired to his boathouse and informed the band’s manager, Peter Grant, of his intention to form a new outfit. Page understood that the pop boom of the early ’60s was at an end. It was time for something new, a step on from the music that had swept around the globe in the wake of The Beatles’ success. All he needed now was a bunch of musicians that could bring his ideas to life. The first of those he welcomed to Pangbourne was 19-yearold, Black Country-born singer Robert Plant. The pair famously bonded over music and tea during the space of a week, and it was Plant who suggested his former bandmate John Bonham as a suitable drummer for the music Page had in mind. The band was completed by Page’s fellow session musician John Baldwin, AKA John Paul Jones, the four-piece convening for a brief rehearsal in London’s Gerrard Street on August 12, 1968. While their name would come a little later, Led Zeppelin were up and running.
n An AuGuST AfTeRnoon ALMoST 50 YeARS To the day since that first rehearsal, Jimmy Page sits in the dining room of The Tower House, the London residence he bought from actor Richard Harris in 1972. Latterly, the building has become the focal point of Page’s life, largely due to the ongoing battle between him and his new neighbour, singer Robbie Williams, whose proposed excavations threaten the foundations of Page’s Grade 1-listed property, built by renowned Victorian architect and designer William Burges. In what are extraordinary steps for a man who values his privacy so intensely, Page has invited both press and TV cameras into his home in order to present his case. Discuss it with him and it becomes obvious that he views himself as The Tower House’s custodian rather than merely its owner. The same could probably be said of Led Zeppelin – the band whose memory Page has done so much to preserve since they split following the death of Bonham at the age of 32 on September 25, 1980. In the 38 years that have elapsed, Page has been the band’s enthusiastic curator, single-handedly overseeing a substantial reissue programme, while Plant and Jones felt it less necessary to engage with the idea of legacy. The band’s 50th anniversary, however, sees all three surviving members collaborating on a book: Led Zeppelin By Led Zeppelin, published by Reel Art Press. All three have raided their personal photographic archives to deliver an impressive, weighty tome. The book also comes with annotations from the trio, presented as an appendix that charts the band’s development. for Zeppelin fans, this is the closest they will come to the band’s autobiography. Sitting in his dining room, Page looks at the book in front of him with a certain amount of pride. “everyone put something into it, and applied themselves,” he says. The guitarist, now 74, is nursing a cold and a sore throat, but he insists that we soldier on with an interview, the aim of which is to tackle the band’s legacy and his role within it. Most recently, he has returned to visit Pangbourne, so it seems fitting that we start back there and a period which, for Jimmy Page, represents “absolute freedom” and where the seeds of Led Zeppelin were sown. Why did you move out of London to Pangbourne?
I’d done my apprenticeship as a studio musician in London. I worked seven days a week at times and it was pretty intense, so I wanted somewhere that was calm and on the Thames. I thought a houseboat would be a good idea but that turned out not to be too practical. But a boathouse? Well, my goodness gracious! When I saw that, it was almost as if it was there waiting for me to move in. I realised pretty quickly that if ever there was a location where you could experience the seasons and the flow, then this was it. It was just a magical place to be.
In the book, there are shots of you with a telescope standing in your lounge, and another next to a gigantic jardinière.
Yeah, you can see a few records, and the taste that I had at the time in that second shot. A lot of the furniture that I was buying was Arts and Crafts furniture [from the late 1880s] which, at that time, was literally being thrown out because it wasn’t fashionable. You could just pick up really lovely things. That jardinière, though, came back from the flea market in
Paris on the plane on the seat next to me because you could do that in those days.
You were also buying art and you’d been to art college. How did art school affect the music you made?
When I was in my teens and I was being introduced to records, I developed the ability to really hear things intently. I’d listen to records and work out what every instrument was doing and how it all gelled together. Then, when I worked in studios, I’d ask the engineers how things were done. The thing about going to art college, though, is that you learned how to see things in different ways. That’s what it did for me: it provided me with a different perspective. I was sort of seeing music in the way that you were layering paints, or like a collage.
So do you actually ‘see’ music?
Well, I can definitely visualise it, there’s no doubt about that. There are definitely things that we did along the way where I knew what they’d be like before we did them. Like When The Levee Breaks [from Led Zeppelin IV ]; from hearing the drum sound onwards, I knew straight away that I was going to put on this sort of backwards guitar to link into the riff. I said to Robert, “Right, let’s do the electric harp now. I’ve got an idea of how we’re going to do it with the reverse with the echo.” I wanted the whole thing to be super-duperdense, and it just is. At the end when it’s repeating, on the stereo mix Robert is constant in the middle and everything is spiralling round him. I really had all that in mind.
You also had a definite view of what you wanted to do with the whole band from the beginning.
Yes. When Robert first came down to Pangbourne I played him the Joan Baez live album [Joan Baez In Concert]. Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You was the first track. I said to him, “It may sound a bit weird that we’re even listening to a Joan Baez album, but if you can mirror that vocal, I’ve got a guitar part that will really work.” I’d done all the acoustic guitar arrangements as you would hear it on the first album. All the other parts – like the pedal steel, and the acoustic overlays – I knew what I wanted to do with those too. Then again, it’s all well and good knowing what you want to do with it, but if you’ve got somebody who is sympathetic to the idea then it really helps, and Robert was. Of course, once we started doing it with the band, then it just took off as a piece of music.
Alongside your interest in art, you’d read a lot and you’d listened to a lot of music. What influenced your thought process the most?
In the Jeff Beck documentary [Still On The Run], Jeff says that when he first came round to my house my record collection was really eclectic. Everyone else had largely rock’n’roll with some blues records from the Chess catalogue – and we were really young at that time – but I had sitar music, Arabic music and electronic music. I was also into a lot of musique concrète where they cut up music, almost like the musical equivalent of William Burroughs. I was also really into classical music, traditional and modern. In The Yardbirds, this idea of mixing all sorts of different types of music together, textures and sounds, carried on. It was the same in Led Zeppelin. I was trying to create something that hadn’t been heard before or, if it had been done before, then it hadn’t been heard in the way in which we played it. That’s what I was trying to do from those first chords (beats out the intro to Good Times, Bad Times on his knees) all the way through the band’s career.
Recalling Led Zeppelin’s first rehearsal, Robert described you
and John Paul Jones as “exotic, stylish, mature”, adding “and they played like a dream.” Do you think Robert and John Bonham were somewhat in awe of you both?
Well, John Paul Jones and I were used to studio disciplines and maybe they hadn’t walked into a rehearsal situation like that where we were ready to go and where it exploded from the start. Then again, I’d never walked into a rehearsal like that. None of us had. The combination of the three instruments and what we were playing was stunning. For John Bonham, this was his opportunity for him to play in the way he felt he wanted to play. It was the same for Robert, for me, and for John Paul Jones. Regardless of what we’d done in the past, as soon as we started playing this whole new thing started moving and in a communal manner. It was an overwhelming experience for all of us. It was life-changing, and we all knew it.
In the book, Robert also mentions the daunting prospect of writing words to fit the band’s music. He had to use his voice almost as…
(Interrupting) …an instrument! That was exactly what it was supposed to be. We didn’t want a crooner over the top of what we were doing. We wanted someone who sounded uninhibited. Primeval! That’s it. It was really clear that he was a vocal gymnast. He could really improvise too. Again, that was super-important to me. I wanted that improvisation and I wanted a singer who could really make a meal out of the songs.
So the words weren’t important?
They kind of were. I was writing lyrics at first but I didn’t consider myself to be a lyricist in the same way that I considered myself to be a musician or a producer. It came to the second album and I’ve got Thank You. I hadn’t written the lyrics for most of it. When we were running through it, Robert said, “Do you mind if I do all of the words on this?” And I said, “Yeah, go ahead.” That was music to my ears because I wanted to concentrate on the sound, the production and the music.
It’s clear that by late 1968 you’ve moved away from the idea of pop music towards the idea of music as art.
Maybe. It gets a bit pretentious when people start talking about art in that sense. People recoil from that. It was just clear to me from my time in The Yardbirds that if you made the right album, then there was an audience willing to listen. I figured even before I even had the group that if an album could be done with enough contrast on it, with enough drama, and what we call the light and shade – which means the acoustic and then the choruses, and super-heavy electric playing – then that would be incredible. That’s what we tried to do. Throughout our career we had a guitar-led approach – not to take anything away from anyone else. And I was always determined to write and present music to the others that would really inspire them. If any piece of music turned up that sounded like what we’d done before, then it would just disappear, because it just wouldn’t interest us at all.
Once you’d finished recording the first album, you and Peter Grant took it to Atlantic Records in New York where Jerry Wexler signed you. How did Jerry react when you first played it to him?
Well, he thought it was really good. I mean, he just really listened to it and he heard it the way everyone else heard it, because we didn’t change a damn thing! He’d never heard anything like it, but he understood the musicianship involved, which is why he wanted to sign us.
Peter remained the band’s manager throughout the band’s career. What did he bring to Led Zeppelin?
He’d been in the business for many years and
that was his world. It wasn’t really mine but he was forensic about contracts. The best part was once he’d negotiated the record contract that gave us freedom to do things, we could continue our steady ascent without any interference. Then he starts to apply certain areas of his experience and business acumen by saying to promoters, “Well, you can have Led Zeppelin but you can have them this way around rather than your way around.” He did that because he had the clout to be able to do it because he was managing us. He was a real ally of mine and he could see what we had from the start. I think he must have thought at some point, “My god! I’ve backed the right horse!” But he totally backed us, and I got on really well with him.
By late ’69, around the release of the second album, Led Zeppelin seemed to be making heavy music for heavier times, suggesting that music would never be the same again…
I think that’s from the first album actually. That first album said things had changed, and that continues to the second album, third album, fourth album, fifth album and Physical Graffiti. It just doesn’t stop until we start recording In Through The Out Door [in 1978] by which point there are machines that can re-create the ambience of rooms as a direct result of sounds we achieved earlier on in our career.
So as a producer, what are the accomplishments you’re proudest of?
On Led Zeppelin I the drums are recorded right across the stereo pitch, or the mono pitch if it was in mono. I’m not sure anyone had ever done that before because they seemed to keep the drums sort of left of centre and right of centre. It happened because of the way John played, tuned and set up his kit. I felt it was really important to capture the full frequencies that were coming off his kit so you could feel it breathing as he played it.
But it’s not just the drums that breathe on those Led Zeppelin records…
No. Parts of Dazed And Confused are almost going towards the avant-garde. It’s very spooky some of the stuff that’s going on. It’s actually disturbing to listen to. But it was meant to be. It’s not meant to be polite. It’s meant to cause a disturbance in your mind.
You were deliberately disturbing the listener?
Yes. Certainly the instrumental section in Whole Lotta Love was. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with that. It wasn’t done by chance. It was designed to be what it was. That was a good serious production in every respect.
Led Zeppelin II was a huge record for the band. You followed it up with III in October 1970, which contains some of your most intimate and acoustic music.
Yes. But the acoustic element has been there since the first album. That album is intimate. But then again, we go and play the Bath Festival – which curiously we’d already done the previous year in 1969 on exactly the same day which was June 28 – and the first number we do is Immigrant Song, the first cut from that third album. People literally just looked at us and thought, “Oh my god, what is this?!”
Bath is interesting in terms of image, too, with your beard/neo-farmer look. John Paul Jones says in the book that you never discussed image very much. In contrast, you say, “I was trying to project a certain style.” What was that style?
It was whatever I was living at that point in time. Seeing the footage from the Royal Albert Hall [in January, 1970], I realise that I probably haven’t had a haircut since my time in The Yardbirds because things had been so intense! Then, at Bron-Yr-Aur [the cottage in west Wales where much of Led Zeppelin III was written] there’s no hot water and I just think, “Oh, I’m going to grow a beard!” Then, the beard started taking over! Suddenly, there were beards everywhere. So I shaved it off and more or less reverted to the way that I looked in The Yardbirds. I had an idea of how I wanted to start looking, for sure.
You can see it in The Song Remains The Same. I start getting into more flamboyant clothing, like the dragon suit. I wanted to wear things that reflected the image of the music.
Have you still got all your suits?
You’re darn right I have! Yeah. The dragon suit looks brand new, too. It doesn’t look like it’s had this whole experience. It’s an extraordinary piece, it really is.
After a three-hour show that suit must’ve been dripping with sweat.
Do you think I sweat, then? Let’s just say that I didn’t do my own laundry! (Laughs) It’s not a very palatable subject is it? Shall we move on?
Between 1968 and ’73 you toured and recorded at a relentless pace. What impact did that have on you as people?
When I put the band together, John Paul Jones already had a family and John Bonham had a family too. Jason [Bonham] was already born. Robert was soon to have a family but I didn’t have one. So going on tour did have an impact on us and their families. In America, once we started off, the response to the live show was so phenomenal. We all know the size of that continent, but we wanted to make a mark there so we had to spend as much time as we could there. The door opened, there was a glimmer of light, and we kicked the door down. That meant that we were over there for almost a full six months in 1969. Then I had my daughter in 1971. Peter [Grant] also had a family and so it sort of came to the point where we weren’t doing tours as we had done and certainly we didn’t tour the way some people do now, where tours go on for two years. I’m not sure how anyone puts up with that length of touring.
By 1973, Led Zeppelin were the biggest band in the world. How did success impact on you as people?
We weathered the storms and we did that through the music. After Pangbourne, I was living in Sussex and it was very, very quiet there. Coming back off of a tour it would take about two days to settle back into a completely different way of life. All the rooms in your house seemed completely different from what you were used to and all of the sounds you heard seemed odd. It was almost as if you needed a debriefing to come off of a tour in order to settle in as the family man or whatever you’d been before you left. To me, that was the other side of the coin to all the extremities of being on the road and really enjoying being on the road. I mean, I didn’t go on the road to be miserable! I went on the road to really enjoy myself, you know.
The enjoyment has been quite well documented. In terms of playing live, the set was constantly evolving too.
Yes, and despite everything, I was always responsible to the show and the performance. I was pushing myself every night we went on stage because I wanted to explore the song and go further than the night before. That was constant: that desire to go further. The sets were going to three, three and a half hour sets. With that level of commitment to it, you would get worn out. There’s no doubt about that, but in another way you’d be extremely fit.
After a fashion. No, you would be really fit in every respect! It’s not like you were living the healthiest of lifestyles.
Well, I don’t know. It depends what you mean by healthy. I thought it was healthy!
The mythology of those early tours has at times obscured the music. Do you resent that?
Has it? No, it hasn’t. It has – and with all due respect to you – in journalistic or written form, but in the audible form it hasn’t affected anything because of all these tens, hundreds of millions of albums that we’re supposed to have sold, I don’t believe a single record got sold on the strength of a mudshark or any other sort of thing that is supposed to have caused outrage. It’s about what that music is and what it actually imparts to the listener and the effect it can have. And that’s a great thing to be
"IT WAS TERRIBLE FOR JOHN'S FAMILY, IT WAS TERRIBLE FOR THE BAND. IT WAS ALSO A GREAT LOSS TO THE WORLD OF MUSIC."
talking about after all this time, something that started 50 years ago and which young musicians are still coming to because it’s a remarkable textbook. That whole ethos of four musicians making music together in a live capacity is real and authentic, and the music is honest. That’s why it lasted.
One thing in the new book really hits home: the press release that you issued when John Bonham passed away. It reads: “We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with a sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.” Who drafted that?
It was done at the office. I didn’t draft it. I don’t know who drafted that. But obviously Peter circulated it around while we’re all still in shock.
When John died, you must have all just felt lost…
Oh God, yeah. Obviously, it was just terrible. It was terrible for John’s family, it was terrible for the members of the band. It was also a great loss to the world of music. We were really affected because he was our musical comrade. He put so much love into the band, as did the others. But it was quite clear that every show was different because of our improvising; I knew that I couldn’t teach someone that aspect of the band. That’s why it had to end. It was about the total respect that we felt for each other as musicians. That wasn’t to say that the music should just stop at that point. There was a careful curation of what came out afterwards. There is a respect for the music as opposed to just flogging it.
Despite that shock, you were obligated to deliver another album, hence Coda.
That was not an easy thing to do. With all of that tragedy Peter put it to me that we owed Atlantic another album. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding!?” So, as you do when there’s really dark or negative times, you turn the situation over on top of itself so that there’s light, and I thought, “Yes! We’ve got Bonzo’s Montreux!” That was just him and I in the studio in Montreux at the casino. That should really have been on the previous album. I knew we had that, and what a celebration of his drumming and his invention that is. That, for me, was the whole rock to build Coda around. And when we reissued the album as a double [in 2015] that felt like a proper celebration.
You have overseen the remastering of the catalogue and every Led Zeppelin reissue. Has the band’s legacy ever been a millstone to you?
Well, Coda was very difficult but other than that, it hasn’t been because I’ve always really enjoyed listening to Led Zeppelin music. I’ve always found it stimulating and fascinating to listen to and that’s it. It’s just the most extraordinary group on so many different levels.
A MONTH AFTER OUR MEETING AT THE TOWER House, Jimmy Page is on Led Zeppelin duty once again, arriving at London’s National Portrait Gallery on a September evening for the launch of Led Zeppelin By Led Zeppelin. Among the 200 guests are a few of the book’s surviving snappers and a number of Page’s children and grandchildren. The gallery’s Main Hall is decked in Led Zeppelin livery. Following an introduction by cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling that ends peppered with Zep puns (“I don’t want to Ramble On or leave you Dazed And Confused…”), Page speaks of his pride in the book. “I hope it travels through to the fans and meets their imaginations and expectations,” he smiles. It’s 11 years since Led Zeppelin played their triumphant, oneoff show at London’s O2 Arena with John Bonham’s son Jason on drums, and it now appears certain it was their last. “I think everyone knows where things are as far as that’s concerned,” says Page. “I don’t really see the point of discussing it any further.” The book and the anniversary have given Page further time for reflection. It’s always seemed that his time leading Led Zeppelin was spent searching for something elusive. What does he think he was he looking for? “Personally? Personally, I wanted to challenge myself to reveal music or open up music that was a challenge for me to play. There was this collective spirit coming together and what I wanted to do was to make music that could change the frontiers of what already existed.” So, five decades on, why does Page think Led Zeppelin’s legacy has endured? “It’s performance art at the end of the day. It’s art! It’s lines, it’s landscapes, it’s architecture, it’s Jackson Pollock, it’s everything! It’s every movement in art! But it’s in music and, in that respect, it’s a whole school of music unto itself. You could say it fits into this category, or that category, but quite clearly it’s just Led Zeppelin. “There’s a lot of people who came in the wake of Led Zeppelin, who got the idea, and played in the spirit of it and sang in the spirit of it, but Led Zeppelin music was different from everything else. It was just a phenomenon.”
M"I DON'T BELIEVE A SINGLE RECORD GOT SOLD ON THE STRENGHT OF A MUDSHARK."