Bordowitz - Led Zeppelin on Led Zeppelin: Interviews and Encounters

T here are lots of wild stories about Led Zeppelinsome true, some false. Led Zeppelin on Led Zeppelin dishes up the facts, in the bands own words, as they saw them. It shoots down the folklore and assumptions about Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham and presents the bands full history, from when Jimmy Page was playing skiffle to the day the band was honored by the Kennedy Center for their contribution to American and global culture.

Any band is an amalgam of the players, but in very special cases, those players form an entity unto itself. Led Zeppelin on Led Zeppelin captures the ideas of all of the bands members at the time they created classics like Whole Lotta Love, Stairway to Heaven, and Kashmir but also encapsulates the idea of the band itself as it crafted the music that changed pop culture. In the process, the book offers insight into what made Led Zeppelin tickand what made it the most popular band in the world.

In a series of over fifty interviews from 1957 to 2012, many never before seen in print, this is the story of Led Zeppelin, as it happened, told by the people who knew it bestthe members of the band.

O THER B OOKS IN THE M USICIANS IN T HEIR O WN W ORDS S ERIES

Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews

Hendrix on Hendrix: Interviews and Encounters with Jimi Hendrix

Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounter

Keith Richards on Keith Richards: Interviews and Encounters

Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters

Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis

Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters

Copyright 2014 by Hank Bordowitz

All rights reserved

First edition

Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-61374-754-4

A list of credits and copyright notices for the individual pieces in this collection can be found on

Cover and interior design: Jonathan Hahn

Cover photograph: Photofest

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Led Zeppelin on Led Zeppelin : interviews and encounters / edited by Hank Bordowitz. First edition.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-61374-754-4 (cloth)

1. Led Zeppelin (Musical group) 2. Led Zeppelin (Musical group)Interviews. 3. Rock musiciansEnglandInterviews. 4. Page, JimmyInterviews. 5. Plant, RobertInterviews. 6. Jones, John Paul, 1946-Interviews. 7. Bonham, John, 1948-1980Interviews. I. Bordowitz, Hank.

ML421.L4L44 2014

782.421660922dc23

[B]

2014017476

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

This ones for Mom and Dad, who
helped gestate the project.
All thanks and honor.

I love you.

Index

Cast and crew of the Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center.

Laura Moody, Jennie Thomas, Anastasia Karel, and Amanda Rabb at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives.

My son Michael, for his research assistance at both places.

Mike Jacobs and Jeff Peisch, two vintage associates, and Cathy Carapella, a new one, even though that piece didnt make it in.

Maggie, David, John, Dan, Andy, Adam, Margaret, et al. at Bergen Community College.

Paul Cashmere, honcho at Australian music news service the Noise Network, for doing Australian legwork above and beyond.

Denny Somach, who knows more about radio and television syndication than anyone I know, and who recognized Alan Freemans work and knew not only the provenance of the piece but knew the piece itself.

Peter Carlo Evangelista, who transcribed a lot of the recorded sources and stuck with this project for months.

Arthur Levy, one of my mentors in this stuff, who stuck a thumb into his stash of his classic publication Zoo World and pulled out a plum.

Chuck Eddy for understanding.

Dan Sheehan for being such a monster Zep fan that he was willing to read this in manuscript and comment on it.

All of the people whose work appears in this book. Once again, I am standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yuval Taylor, who postponed this book far more times than should be allowed. Amelia Estrich for her work throughout the books production.

Mike (again), Larry, William, and even Caren.

Enough people have recounted the Led Zeppelin story that it has fallen into folklore. Anyone who cares about the group enough knows that Jimmy Page got the group together to keep the legendary British musical breeding ground the Yardbirds going. This same audience also accepts that Led Zeppelin got its name from the Whos late drummer, Keith Moon, who thought the idea of a New Yardbirds would go over like a heavy metal blimp. Yet, as is the case with so much folklore, it aint necessarily so.

Keith Moon did name a band featuring Page with the comment that it would go over like a lead zeppelin, a more spectacular failure than a lead balloonbut that band wasnt the New Yardbirds. In Pete Townshends memoir Who I Am, he speaks of a 1966 rift among the Who following a fistfight between Roger Daltrey and Moon, which ended with Daltrey bloodying Moons nose and Moon and John Entwistle threatening to leave the band. This period of discontent in the Who camp coincided with the Yardbirds managements attempts to simultaneously capitalize on the band, let the members blow off some steam, and allow the members to revitalize themselves by having each musician record a solo project. Page and Jeff Beck wanted to record a rock instrumental entitled Becks Bolero, and they recruited Moon and Entwistle to provide the rhythm section. Page recollected the situation to MOJOs Mat Snow thusly:

This goes right back to the days when Simon Napier-Bell, who was managing the Yardbirds, was trying to get solo discs from each member. Jeff Beck and I were collaborating, and in those days with these solo diversions it seemed we should use other musicians, so there was Keith Moon, John Paul Jones, Nicky Hopkins on piano, myself on 12-string electric, and JeffBecks Bolero was what we were doing. After that session, Keith Moon was really fired up, and I dont blame him, and he said, We must get a band togetherhow about it? He was fed up with the Who at the time, and he wanted to take the OxJohn Entwistlewith him, with Jeff, myself, and all the rest of us It didnt happen. But Keiths name for the band, Led Zeppelin, stuck in my mind.

It has also become Led Zeppelin cant that while Page and Jones were the old studio pros, Bonham and Plant had no real studio experience. However, Plant was recording singles as early as 1966.

Meanwhile, Pages hunt for a bunch of New Yardbirds had far more to do with business than tradition. When the group ran out of steam, it had outstanding obligations to play a series of shows in Scandinavia. Both the groups management and the only remaining member with any enthusiasmPagedid not want to pass up this money-making opportunity, hence they had to put a band together in a hurry.

What Page could not have predicted was the way the guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine of him, John Paul Jones, Brummy singer Robert Plant (recommended by Pages first choice, Terry Reid), and Plants long-time friend, drummer John Bonham, would combine and recombine to create a remarkable strain of musical DNA.