Bob Spitz - Led Zeppelin: The Biography

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Sunday, January 26, 1969

They had been playing the band throughout the week. Entire sides of the album. FM radio, the underground free-form pipeline, was a godsend. Hed been tuned in to WNEW-FM, New Yorks preeminent alternative outlet, when it started: Dazed and Confused, Communication Breakdown, You Shook Me, even Babe, Im Gonna Leave You, a Joan Baez number that had been hot-wired and jacked. Scott Muni, the stations afternoon deejay, couldnt help himself. He played the grooves off that record. Alison Steele, NEWs Nightbird, programmed it as though it were on a loop.

Led Zeppelin.

The name alone had visceral power. Sure, it was incongruous. A lead zeppelin was the ultimate sick joke, but spelling it Led took nerve. It told you everything you needed to know about this bandit was dynamic, irreverent, subversive, extremeprimed to rock n roll, not a toady to Top 40 populism. Led Zeppelin wasnt gonna hold your hand or take your daddys T-Bird away. They meant business. This was serious, meaty stuff.

He loved what hed heard. All that was left was to see them for himself.

As luck would have it, his friend Henry Smith was humping Led Zeppelins equipment into a club in Boston that weekend. If he could get himself to the gig, Smith had agreed to slip him into the show. But how? He was basically broke. Theyd been crashing at his parents apartment in Yonkers, where his band, Chain Reaction, had been scratching for work. If he was going to get to Boston, hed have to hitch.

Sunday-afternoon traffic was sparse along the I-95 corridor. The weather hadnt cooperated. An area of low pressure in Oklahoma had been creeping its way eastward, dropping temperatures below the freezing point along the Atlantic coastline. The sky was grim. The forecast predicted a noreaster would hit Boston later that night or tomorrow morning. With a little luck, he might beat it to the gig.

A ride... then another, as the succession of cars plowed up the interstate, stitching a seam from Stamford to Bridgeport to New Haven to Providence and beyond. The songs in his head carried him through dozens of miles. These days, you couldnt take a breath without inhaling a killer. Jumpin Jack Flash, Dock of the Bay, All Along the Watchtower, White Room, Hey Jude, Heard It Through the Grapevine, Hurdy Gurdy Man, Fire. You could feast all day on those babies and never go hungry. But Led Zeppelin had thrown him an emotional curve. Their songs hit him deep. There was something dark and sensual about them, something strangely provocative in their nature. They rolled over him, allowing his imagination to run wild.

Small wonder that theyd erupted via Jimmy Page. He knew all about Page, a guitar virtuoso in the tradition of Clapton, Stills, and Jimmys itchy alter ego Jeff Beck, with whom Page had served a brief but stormy stretch in the Yardbirds as that seminal band was coming apart at the seams. There was already a heady mystique about Page. Hed contributed uncredited licks to scores of hit records, not least on sessions with The Who, the Kinks, and Them. But Page had taken Led Zeppelin into another dimension, a province of rock n roll that was hard to define. Sometimes it was basic and bluesy, sometimes improvisational, other times a hybrid strain they were calling heavy metal, and all of it seasoned with enough folk, funk, and rockabilly elements to blur the lines. That was a lot to take in for a budding rock n roller. Seeing Page and his band would help to put things in perspective.

It was dark by the time he pulled up at the gig, a club called the Tea Party in a converted Unitarian meeting housecumsynagogue that stood halfway along a solitary street. A hallucinatory gloom had fallen over the South End of Boston, casting East Berkeley Street in a desolate embrace. This was not the Boston of wealthy Brahmins, of culture and entitlement. It was a tough neighborhood, a place you didnt want to hang out at night, says Don Law, who ran the joint. There was no sign of life in the surrounding tenements, aside from a bodega next door, whose light threw a waxy fluorescence across the pitted sidewalk. In the silhouette it projected, he could make out the outlines of heads, shoulders hunched against the cold, stretching down the street and around the corner. There must have beenwhat?a couple hundred people waiting in line to get in. More.

Where the hell did everyone come from?

Led Zeppelin was hardly a household name. Until recently, theyd actually been billing themselves as the New Yardbirds. Their debut album had been released only two weeks earlier. Sure, hed expected the freaks and the diehards, but this turnout was way off the chart. Obviously, word had rumbled out along the jungle drums. It wasnt unheard of. Wed have a totally unknown British act open on Thursday, Don Law recalls, and thered be lines down the street by Saturday. Hed seen it with Jethro Tull, Humble Pie, and Ten Years After, all of whom had played the club during the past few months. Radio helped to a large degree. Bostons FM rock venue, WBCN, was still a novelty, in its infancy. Most of its broadcasts were piped right out of an anteroom at the Tea Party, its jocks a ragtag assortment of ex-college kids from the communications departments at Tufts and Emerson. Bands would come off the stage and do an on-the-spot interview. FM airplay of any good album had become one of the surefire weapons to launch a new act. With Led Zeppelin, the evidence was right there on the sidewalk.