Lenny Kaye on Led Zeppelin 1977

["David Montgomery" <dmontgomery@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Led Zeppelin
ON MAY 5, 1973, A CAPACITY CROWD OF 56,800 paid $309,000 to watch Led
Zeppelin perform for nearly three hours in a Tampa, Florida, football
stadium. The largest paid concert attendance for a single musical act in the
history of the United States, it topped the Beatles' previous high of 55,000
and a mere $301,000 at Shea Stadium. Records are made to be broken, but if
there's any shattering to be done at this point, Led Zeppelin will probably
be the ones to crack the mark again. Like their namesake, they defy gravity
to ride a core of flaming vapor, the acknowledged heavyweight band champions
of the world.

When Jimmy Page brought his New Yardbirds back from Scandinavia in 1968, he
could only guess at the implicit power contained within the group. As the
original Yardbirds' final lead guitarist, he had inherited their
experimental mantle after a farewell at the Luton College of Technology in
July, hoping to augment the loss of Keith Relf and Jim McCarty with
singer-guitarist Terry Reid and drummer Paul Francis. Reid had signed a solo
contract with producer Mickie Most, however, and suggested a young vocalist
named Robert Plant in his place.

"I went up to see him sing," Jimmy reminisced to England's ZigZag, "he was
in a group called Obstweedle or Hobbstweedle, something like that [actually,
Obbstweedle], who were playing at a teachers training college outside of
Birmingham ? to an audience of about twelve people... you know, a typical
student set up, where drinking is the prime consideration and the group is
only of secondary importance." He didn't care for the band's San Francisco
outlook, "but Robert was fantastic, and having heard him that night, and
having listened to a demo he had given me [of songs recorded with his
previous group, Band of Joy], I realized that without a doubt his voice had
an exceptional and very distinctive quality."

Plant was indeed a find, a multi-octave spread built on a freewheeling vocal
attitude that would often discard words for rococo improvising, spiraling
upwards in tandem with Page. Robert recommended another ex-Band of Joy
member, drummer John "Bonzo" Bonham, and when Chris Dreja decided to pursue
a career in photography, John Paul Jones was added on bass, an acquaintance
from Jimmy's session days who had arranged, among other things, Donovan's
'Mellow Yellow'. They dropped the name of the New Yardbirds ? "We felt it
was working under false pretenses" ? and, courtesy of Keith Moon, became Led
Zeppelin.

In a small rehearsal space in London, they put the pieces together. "We
played for a while, and then we started laughing at each other. Maybe it was
from relief or maybe from the knowledge that we knew we could groove
together. But that was it. The statement of our first two weeks together is
our first album. Between us we wrote seven of the tracks and it only took us
thirty hours to cut it. I suppose it was the fact that we were confident and
prepared which made things flow so smoothly in the studio. We recorded them
almost exactly as we'd been doing them live."

And live, Led Zeppelin had quickly established themselves as a powerhouse of
stage charisma and pyrotechnics. Coming across the ocean in an uproar of
guitar and vocal mayhem, their earliest and most apparent roots were blues,
Willie Dixon songs ('You Shook Me', 'I Can't Quit You Baby') mingled in
sexual metaphor and electronic extension, pinioned by the folk-ish calm of
'Black Mountain Side' and 'Communication Breakdown's amphetamine
acceleration. Page, frustrated in his attempts to imbue the Yardbirds with
his personality, had taken calculated vengeance here, showcasing a mastery
of his instrument that instantly rearranged the pop hierarchy of Clapton,
Hendrix and Beck. Led Zeppelin had their antecedents ? Beck himself had
scored heavily with his own Yardbirds' spin-off, featuring vocalist Rod
Stewart ? but the vacuum created by the demise of Cream called for nothing
less than the colossal. With the short-lived fad of the supergroup (Blind
Faith) seemingly shaky, Led Zeppelin demonstrated they could not only be the
biggest, but the best.

Primeval, not primitive, the march of the dinosaurs that characterized their
first release broke open the flattened planes of Zeppelin's appeal. They
seemed to bask in the glory of stardom, swashbuckling and daring rock and
rollers. For American audiences, much of England's lure had always been its
slightly decayed air of kinky glamor, and as Robert sang of having his lemon
squeezed, strange stories circulated of dead sharks being found in deserted
Zeppelin hotel rooms. The promise of lifestyle drew as many adherents as
their music drew critics, "Who said that white men couldn't sing blues?"
queried critic John Mendelssohn in a devastating Rolling Stone parody of Led
Zeppelin II. "I mean, like, who?"

"That's the sort of thing we used to get," Page noted. "The public was
always 100 percent behind us, but we had few allies in the press." The last
is an understatement. As the beachhead of what would become a full-blown
metallic invasion (Deep Purple, Humble Pie, as well as Black Sabbath and
Grand Funk Railroad), Led Zeppelin were unmercifully called to task, victims
of their own abrupt rise and decibel attack. Much of the criticism was
unfounded; they might have been blatant, but there was conscientious effort
behind each of the tracks on their albums, especially after Plant began
writing lyrics. His strain of Celtic mysticism surfaced in Led Zeppelin III,
whose material grew to life in "a small derelict cottage in South
Snowdonia," Bron-Y-Aur, a bucolic setting of gallows poles and highwaymen.

By late 1971, even the critics had to reconsider. Were Zeppelin as crass as
portrayed, the expectation might have been a hurried succession of albums
and tours, exploiting their formula to indifference. Instead, there was no
formula, and Zeppelin showed a distinct willingness to remove themselves
totally from the public eye when it came time to work, "You can compare it
to a successful author," Plant told Hit Parader's Lisa Robinson. "If he
writes a book and it's a fantastic success ? then he's not expected to
follow it up immediately with something else, because that makes him a slave
to the wrong thing... it has to be presented to the people when it's ready.
It's the same with us."

Their wait was rewarded with 'Stairway To Heaven', on a fourth album which
bore no name but a series of runic symbols, one for each member. The song
was written in stages, beginning at the Bron-Y-Aur cottage, moving from
acoustic soft to slashing electric in deliberate movements, its verses
reminiscent of The Faerie Queene, opening to a miles-long depth and resolve.
On the same album, 'Rock and Roll' let their fans know that megatonnage
could never be forgotten.

It is this ability to be in all places at once that has allowed Led Zeppelin
to outlast their many imitators. Future albums (Houses of the Holy, Physical
Graffiti) have shown an even greater leaning to the unexpected, an
absorption of structures from Moroccan to Jamaican to James Brown rhythm and
blues that transforms each into the stylized energy emphasis of Zeppelin's
own. Arguably the world's most popular group (in the sense that there are
only unreliable measuring sticks), they travel in style: a private jet, one
of the world's largest sound systems, their own record company (Swan Song),
and a manager, Peter Grant, whose burly ex-wrestler's figure befits their
image. Along with platinum albums, even misfortunes take on grander scales:
while performing the final concerts of their 1973 tour in New York, their
hotel safe-deposit box was milked of $180,000 in cash.

And yet they've never talked of solo careers ? "Once you've done a
'Stairway,' and you've listened to it after you've recorded it," says
Robert, "you've reached a point where you can't play with anybody else" ? or
given any less than their utmost.

"It's a bit awe-inspiring," admits Page." You drive up and see all those
people and it hits you that you're the people they've all come to see. To
coin a phrase, it's your arses that are on the line. But then I suppose
that's one of the reasons people always come to see us and always came to
see us in the past, is that we try our hardest. We've never ever gone out
there and chewed gum and sort of messed about, we've always played our
bullocks off. Whether you like it or not is another issue altogether. When
you've done all you can do, then you're happy with what you're doing and
you're not compromising." Beset by a broken left finger before a recent
tour, he promptly developed a three-finger style to compensate, seemingly
unaffected.

© Lenny Kaye and David Dalton 1977

excerpted from Rock 100, Cooper Square Press, 1999