Robert Plant: A Life (11 page)

Atlantic Records was at this time being run by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, a pair of passionate music fans who between them had signed Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett to the label. The Turkish-born Ertegun was then the more ascendant of the two, having picked up both Cream and an American rock band, Iron Butterfly, each of which had taken off.

Although Wexler was more of a soul man and had little interest in rock music, he nonetheless had a point to prove and took the meeting with Grant. When it concluded, and despite leaving Zeppelin to Ertegun thereafter, Wexler handed Grant a $200,000 deal for his band. It was an unprecedented sum for a new act and one that soon enough led to accusations of their being over-hyped.

On his return Grant handed the salaried Plant and Bonham each a check for £3,000, more money than either had ever seen. They went out and bought matching cars, gold S-Type Jaguars. Back home in the Midlands, Plant paraded his first flush of success, rolling up at Stringers, the department store on Stourbridge High Street where he had been a stock boy, showing off his flash new motor to the girls on the shop floor.

He had, however, the promise of an even greater prize. Zeppelin’s first U.S. tour was scheduled to begin that Christmas. He was headed west, to the source of all the music that had lifted and then propelled him out of his parents’ home and on through two-bit bands and dead-end jobs. The anticipation of it kept him awake at night, but so did a cold, hard fact. Going there, he would come face to face with an audience that had seen it all before. Looking into the whites of their eyes he would know whether he had what it took or not.

On November 9, the month before he left, Plant married Maureen at a church in West Bromwich. She was eight months’ pregnant at the time, their daughter Carmen arriving less than two weeks later. After the wedding the couple hosted a reception for friends and family at Queen Mary’s Ballroom on the site of Dudley Zoo. Zeppelin had a gig at the Roundhouse in London that night and the groom had to duck out early, taking Bonham with him.

As their families gathered for Christmas, three-quarters of Led Zeppelin flew out to Los Angeles. Jones, their man apart, went instead to New York with his wife to visit friends. He would make his own way to Denver for the band’s first show on American soil. Grant had also absented himself, choosing to spend the holiday at home with his wife and two children.

Landing in L.A., Plant, Page and Bonham were met by their new road manager, Richard Cole, a twenty-two-year-old who’d paid his dues with Grant on the last Yardbirds tour. Cole drove his charges to the Chateau Marmont Hotel, where Bonham cooked them a Christmas dinner. The mood was quiet, reflective.

“Robert and Bonzo seemed nervous,” says Cole. “Jimmy had played big places with the Yardbirds and Jonesy did theaters during his time with Jet Harris, but those two hadn’t experienced anything like this. They were apprehensive about everything.

“You have to remember, going to America then wasn’t like it is today. Everywhere you go in the world now is Americanized. The first time I went there in 1967 I couldn’t wait to get out. I was petrified—the way things were done was on a different scale.”

In 1968 the U.S. was divided along social, political and racial lines. The resulting collisions were ugly and brutal. That year Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis and Senator Robert Kennedy shot dead in Los Angeles, wiped out in his prime, like his elder brother Jack before him. The wave of hope the Kennedys had ushered in was extinguished the month before Zeppelin’s arrival. Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, had won the presidential election of that November, driving the fractures further apart, rushing the ’60s to a violent and venal conclusion.

This tour of the States was like no other Zeppelin would do. They were ferried around in rental cars, flew commercial airlines and crashed out in budget-price hotels. And for the first—and last—time they were often as not the warm-up act, beginning with the opening night at Denver’s Auditorium Arena on December 26, at which they did the honors for American rockers Vanilla Fudge.

The impression Zeppelin made was instant, indelible. American audiences of the time had been fed a staple diet of stoned-sounding bands but there was nothing mellow or rolling about Zeppelin’s groove. They hit hard and loud, and in doing so seemed new and impossibly exciting.

By the time they made it out to California at the beginning of 1969 they had got into their stride. They were there for three shows with Alice Cooper at the Whiskey a Go Go in Los Angeles and a four-night stand at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Out West they laid foundations and made connections that would endure to the end.

One such connection was with Bill Graham, a thirty-eight-year-old impresario born Wolodia Grajonca in Berlin in 1931, the son of Jewish émigrés from Russia. Both his parents and elder sister had died during the war and he had fled Nazi Germany, first to France and then New York, where he was adopted by an American family and changed his name to William Graham. In the early ’60s he moved to San Francisco, working first as a theatrical manager and coming to preside over the Fillmore, the venue that provided a launch pad for bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

Straight-talking and obdurate, Graham was instrumental in revolutionising the rock-concert business in the US, bringing to it high-quality PA and lighting systems, and later establishing the practice of building large-scale events around superstar acts. For the next eight years, right up to its sordid and senseless end in Oakland in 1977, he and Zeppelin enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship.

Yet if there was a center of the empire Zeppelin created it would be Los Angeles, specifically Sunset Strip, a neon-lit, two-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard that runs through West Hollywood. Since the 1940s the Strip had been the city’s nocturnal playground—a subterranean world of jazz clubs and opium dens, where movie stars and starlets rubbed shoulders with gangsters. Glamor and glitz on its surfaces—and decadence just underneath.

Once the ’60s got going, sparked by the Beatles and the British Invasion bands trailing them, the Strip gave itself over to new sounds and a different kind of hedonism, the Byrds emerging at the head of this coming aristocracy. When drugs and egos took the Byrds down, the Doors occupied their throne. Not that Jim Morrison and his cronies were any longer able to breathe such rarefied air, so by the time Led Zeppelin came to town the Strip was waiting to be taken once more.

Soon enough Zeppelin would conquer it, setting up court beneath the shadow of the Hollywood sign and gorging themselves on the fruits and flesh on offer. That, however, was to come. On this initial sortie Zeppelin had it all to prove—not least their singer, for whom California was the land of promise.

“I started hanging out with Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, people like that,” he told me. “They were crazy days. You couldn’t say that any of us had any idea of continuity. But all the time I was meeting these little starbursts and around me galaxies were going Boom! Boom! Boom! I absorbed it all, like moondust.”

The Flower Power children were rather less prepared for Led Zeppelin. During those eight shows on the West Coast the band did not so much entertain as attack.

“They were so fucking blasé on the West Coast,” says Cole. “Not just the musicians but the audiences, too. Because they’d been spoiled rotten, having all these fantastic bands out there. They were so much more laid back than everywhere else in the States. When Zeppelin got there it was like a rocket going up their fucking arses.

“Once the band fired up they were off. They were incredible, they really were. After the second show in San Francisco I was driving back to the hotel with Peter and I told him I didn’t want to work with any of his other bands. I said, ‘Just give me this one—they’re going to be good for you.’ ”

Looking out into dumbstruck faces night after night, Plant got his answer—he was where he was meant to be. Once more, he strutted. Or, as he put it to
Q
magazine in 1988, “I must have been pretty insecure to want to run around, pushing my chest out, pursing my lips and throwing my hair back like some West Midlands giraffe.”

“Robert was then starting to find his feet,” says Cole. “But there are always two different sides to musicians—off-stage and on-stage. Off-stage he and I had our ups and downs. Stupid little niggles. I remember being in Miami on that tour, sitting out by the pool at the hotel. Robert said he was going off to the shops and, joking, I told him to bring me back a sandwich. If Peter had been going I’d have said the same to him but I don’t think Robert ever forgave me for it.”

The band’s debut album was released in the U.S. on the day of their last show at the Fillmore. Critics treated it with suspicion if not outright disdain. Writing in
Rolling Stone
, John Mendelsohn dismissed it as “an album of weak, unimaginative songs,” suggesting the band’s singer was “nowhere near as exciting as Rod Stewart.”

It also gave rise to the first of many plagiarism allegations that would dog the band. A young American singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, claimed “Dazed and Confused” as his own, insisting Page had heard him perform an acoustic version of the song in New York in 1967. Page and the band brushed aside both Holmes and the critics. On the road they were winning over American audiences one stop at a time. The album took up residency on the U.S. charts and would remain there deep into the following year.

The tour concluded on the East Coast. On the last of four nights at Boston’s Tea Party club a baying crowd refused to let them go and Zeppelin ended up playing a four-hour show, filling it out with Beatles covers. In New York Grant pulled a favor off Bill Graham at his Fillmore East, having his band switched from being the first on to the middle act of a three-band bill. It was a showman’s gambit, putting Zeppelin in direct competition with headliners Iron Butterfly, whose pedestrian set they pulverised.

For Plant, even his wildest expectations had been exceeded, and all too fast for him to take it in. Eight months beforehand he had been penniless and starting a job as a laborer; now he had the U.S. at his feet. It was enough to mess with anyone’s head.

“As the guy from the Black Country I felt very much out of place to begin with,” he told me. “To go from laying Tarmac in West Bromwich to playing the Fillmore in San Francisco . . . it was really disorientating. I had been twenty when Zeppelin started touring. I was marooned many times. I had to be saved here and there, and got lost, too.”

In the middle of it all, the strangest experiences must have been the most compelling, since it was through these that he was best able to gauge just how far he had come.

In Chicago, toward the end of the tour, Plant took a call at his hotel from a couple of the Plaster Casters, a group of girls who had taken it upon themselves to make casts of the erect penises of young buck rock stars. In the event he did not acquiesce.

“These two girls came into the room with a wooden case, suitably inscribed and all very ceremonious,” he told Mark Williams of the
International Times
. “All of a sudden one of them starts to take her clothes off. She’s rather large, no doubt about it, and there she is, standing naked as the day she’s born.

“Then she covered herself with soap, cream doughnuts and whiskey, all rubbed in together, head to toe, and she’s this moving mountain of soapy flesh. At first, she dug it. But her friend, who’d come along for the ride, began trying to disappear under the bed. Eventually, she got into the shower, grabbed her clothes and split.”

Back in the U.K. all that was familiar to the band was the antipathy with which British critics received their debut album when it was finally released there in March. At home they were returned to the club circuit and Plant found himself playing Wolverhampton’s Club Lafayette and Mothers in Birmingham, not so far from where he had begun.

A typical date was on April 8, when Zeppelin performed at the Cherry Tree pub in Welwyn Garden City, a satellite town of London. Dave Pegg, who had played with Bonham in the Way of Life and would later join folk-rockers Fairport Convention, accepted an invitation from the drummer to the gig.

“Bonzo picked me up in what must have been his mum’s car, a Ford Anglia Estate, and we tore off to the show,” Pegg remembers. “It was a fabulous gig, but it was in a pub.

“The next time I saw him we went down to London in his gold S-Type Jag. Robert was with him. The two of them had got the same car and all they did was compare noises. “You’ve got a funny rattle there, mate,” that kind of thing. On the way back, we stopped off at the Watford Gap services on the M1. There was a bit of an altercation involving Robert, because Maureen was in there. She’d gone off to see another band called Trapeze and she was with them.”

At the end of that month Plant could again put such everyday realities behind him, Zeppelin going back to the U.S. for a co-headlining tour with Vanilla Fudge. They would cross the States twice more before the year was out, the shows getting bigger, the furor around them swelling.

That summer, Zeppelin rolled through North America as Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon and members of the Manson family broke into the actress Sharon Tate’s Los Angeles home and sent her to her doom. In August Grant turned down an offer for the band to join the last hurrah of the peace and love generation at the Woodstock Festival, most likely balking at the size of the proposed fee, although he was reported to have said that he declined because Zeppelin would have been just another band on the bill. Whatever his reasoning, Zeppelin were not shackled to the era now passing.

Arriving in L.A. that April, they had begun work on their second album at A&M Studios. Recording would continue, on and off, for the next eight months, the band using nine different studios in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. However piecemeal this approach,
Led Zeppelin II
proved to be a tighter, more coherent record than its predecessor, the months of touring having sharpened the band into a precision-drilled unit.