On September 7th, 1968, Led Zeppelin
played their first live show ever in, of all places, a converted gym in
Gladsaxe, Denmark. They weren’t yet billed under their soon-to-be
world-famous name but were instead performing under the guise of the New
Yardbirds, a relaunch of the British Invasion blues rockers who’d
imploded just months before. The only known quantity among this new
lineup was guitarist Jimmy Page,
who’d funded the tour through Scandinavia out of his own pocket, but
that was enough draw a young crowd to the venue, known as Teen Club.
“Their performance and their music were absolutely flawless,” local reviewer Bent Larsen wrote
in the venue’s monthly newsletter, “and the music continued to ring
nicely in the ears for some time after the curtains were drawn after
their show.”
As far as gigs go, this
show, which featured several songs that would ultimately appear on the
band’s first album, like “Communication Breakdown,” “Dazed And Confused”
and “You Shook Me,” paled in comparison to the marathon runs they would
undertake at the Forum in Los Angeles or Earls Court outside of London
in the years to come, but the momentousness of the occasion can’t be
overstated. It was Zeppelin’s first step in their ascent to the top of
rock’s Olympus, and Jimmy Page deserves much of the credit for making it
happen.
In the spring of 1968, Page was at a
crossroads. The highly touted session guitar ace was once again a man
without a band. He’d spent the prior two years or so playing in the
Yardbirds, first as a dual-lead foil to his childhood friend Jeff Beck
and then as the group’s focal point when Beck decided to split in the
middle of an American tour. After another quick run through the States,
the band suddenly and unceremoniously called it a day when the different
members of the group decided they wanted to pursue other artistic
avenues.
Page was understandably
disappointed, but he had an idea of how he wanted to proceed. Though the
guitarist’s move from complete anonymity in London’s many recording
studios working with some of the biggest pop and rock stars of the early
Sixties to playing sweaty gigs at universities and clubs across the
pond in the U.S. was thrilling, but Page also felt stifled by the
creative impulses of the Yardbirds’ manager and producer Mickie Most.
Most
was a strict disciple of the three-minute pop song, and he butted heads
with Page, who was taking note of what the Beatles, the Rolling Stones,
Cream and Jimi Hendrix were doing with the album format and wanted to replicate it with his band. Page
was especially inspired by a recording session he’d overseen with Beck
in May 1966 that produced the song “Beck’s Bolero.” “The band was John Paul Jones on bass, Keith Moon, Nicky Hopkins on piano, and myself and Jeff on guitars,” he told David Fricke in 2012. “This
session was absolutely magnificent, like a force of nature. Keith was
having troubles in the Who. He’s going, ‘We should form a band with
this.’” While they were passing around ideas about what they might call
themselves, Moon came up with a tongue-in-cheek idea. “We can call it
Led Zeppelin,’” Page remembered the drummer saying. “’Because it can
only go down, like a lead balloon.’ I thought it was a great name, and I
didn’t forget it.”
Beyond his talent,
reputation and wealth of experience, Page also had a secret weapon.
Peter Grant was a 300-pound former professional wrestler and business
partner of Most, who’d taken over the Yardbirds’ day-to-day management
in their final years. With that band kaput, Grant recognized that his
best chances for success in the industry would lie with the slight young
guitarist with the long black hair. His devotion to Page during the
next 12 years would be total, and as the guitarist began to think about
forming a new band, he knew he could rely on Grant to secure the
requisite recording contract and help him conquer America, which they
both recognized as rock’s next great frontier.
The
first order of business was to find a singer. The Small Faces’ Steve
Marriott was a leading contender, but his manager put the kibosh on that
idea, threatening bodily harm to Page if he pursued him any further.
Terry Reid, the former singer of the Jaywalkers, and another Mickie Most disciple, was another contender who begged off, but not before recommending a 19-year-old up-and-comer from the Midlands named Robert Plant, who was then fronting a group named Hobstweedle. Page and Grant made the trek north to watch this prospect for themselves.
“[They]
were playing at a teacher’s training college outside of Birmingham to
an audience of about twelve people,” Page recalled in the Led Zeppelin
oral history Trampled Underfoot. “Robert was fantastic and having
heard him that night and having listened to a demo he had given me, I
realized that without a doubt his voice had an exceptional and very
distinctive quality.”
All that was left
was to see if this leonine wailer could get on board with the direction
Page wanted to go. Page invited Plant to his boathouse on the Thames,
and they spent the afternoon talking about music and playing records. In
a serendipitous moment, they put on Joan Baez’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave
You,” and excitedly talked about how they could rearrange the song and
blow it out. (The cover
would appear on the band’s 1969 debut.) Plant was definitely in, but
little did Page know at the time that the singer also came with an added
bonus.
“I got so enthusiastic after
staying down there for a week, I hitched back from Oxford and chased
after John, got him on the side and said, ‘Mate, you’ve got to join the
Yardbirds,’” Plant said in Trampled Underfoot. “I had nothing to convince him with except a name that had got lost in American pop history.”
The John in question was drummer John Bonham,
a lifelong friend and on-and-off bandmate of Plant’s. Bonham was
another veritable nobody in the London scene, but Page was taken with
his bombastic style from the minute he heard him play. The only catch
was, Bonham was currently backing the singer Tim Rose, and making a
decent wage out of it too. His wife Pat wasn’t too eager for him to go
off on another adventure with Plant either, which made the proposition a
tough sell all around. Finally, Grant and Page upped their salary
offer, and convinced Bonham to come aboard.
The
final piece of the puzzle was to find the right bass player.
Fortunately for Page, one of the best in the world fell right into his
lap. “I answered a classified ad in Melody Maker,” John Paul Jones told Cameron Crowe in 1975. “My wife made me.” While he’s being a bit flip about the Melody Maker
bit, it’s true that John Paul Jones caught wind of what Page was doing,
and at the prodding of his wife made the call to get in on it. For the
guitarist, who knew and worked with Jones back in his session-player
days, the decision to take him up on the offer was a no-brainer. Right
off the bat he recognized he’d have a steady hand to help him in the
studio, and as the years would show, one of the most dynamic
multi-instrumental utility players and arrangers in rock history to help
realize his grandest musical ideas.
The four men who would comprise Led Zeppelin
came together for the first time in a small basement in Gerrard Street
in London on August 12th, 1968. It didn’t take very long for everyone to
realize they had something special on their hands. “We got together in
this small rehearsal room and just played ‘Train Kept a-Rollin’’ which
was a number I used to do with the Yardbirds, and I think Robert knew
it,” Page said in 1990.
“At the end of it we knew that it was really happening, really
electrifying. Exciting is the word. We went on from there to start
rehearsing for the album.”
While they continued to rehearse for their upcoming two-week live run through Scandinavia, an interesting opportunity came up. Texas-born
pop singer P.J. Proby was working on his next album and had booked John
Paul Jones for the sessions weeks earlier. Rather than cancel, Jones
decided to bring along the rest of his bandmates to help work on the
record. Page was particularly predisposed to
lending a hand, having previously worked in the studio with Proby in
1964 on the eccentric singer’s Number Three U.K. hit “Hold Me.” Thus, the first recordings ever of Led Zeppelin in full flight can be heard not on their own full-length debut, but on Proby’s 1969 album Three Week Hero.
Less
than a week later, Plant, Page, Bonham and Jones took off for that
first gig in Gladsaxe. “Jimmy Page … has made a great job with the three
new men,” Bent Larsen wrote in his review. “They really succeeded.”
Larsen closed his write-up with what in hindsight looks like a
hilariously massive understatement: “We can therefore conclude that the
new Yardbirds are at least as good as the old ones were.”
“I remember everything about that first show,” Grant said in a 1990 interview.
It was so … exciting! Just to be part of it was fantastic. There was
never a thought of, God, this is going to sell X amount of records. I
thought it could be the best band ever.”
Zeppelin played another gig in Denmark the
next night, hit Sweden a few days later, and finished up the short tour
on September 24th in Oslo, Norway. “Everything was fitting together into a trademark for us,” Plant told Cameron Crowe in 1975 of that early foray. “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.”
There
was hardly time to take a breath when they got back to London however.
Page wanted to get Zeppelin into the studio quickly to cut their new
record so he could shop the tapes around to several labels. “I wanted
artistic control in a vise grip, because I knew exactly what I wanted to
do with the band. In fact, I financed and completely recorded the first
album before going to Atlantic,” he told Brad Tolinski in the book Conversations With Jimmy Page.
“It
wasn’t your typical story where you get an advance to make an album,”
he added. “We arrived at Atlantic with tapes in hand. The other
advantage to having such a clear vision of what I wanted the band to be
was that it kept recording costs to a minimum. We recorded the whole
first album in a matter of thirty hours. That’s the truth. I know,
because I paid the bill.” The reported cost for the sessions came out to
be somewhere around £1,782. Atlantic ultimately cut them a
check for $200,000 to sign them. It was, at the time, the biggest
advance ever given to a rock group in music history.
The rest, as they say, is history. Led Zeppelin
dropped in January 1969, while they band was in the midst of their
first tour of America. It became a runaway success, selling millions of
copies, and solidifying them as the dominant group in the decade to
come. Page’s gamble had paid off.
“So
many people are frightened to take a chance in life and there’s so many
chances you have to take,” the guitarist told Crowe at the height of
Zeppelin’s commercial and cultural zenith. “I’m attracted by the
unknown, but I take precautions. I don’t go walking into things blind.”
