Led Zeppelin IV (Rock of Ages) - Hardcover

Hoskyns, Barney

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9781594863707: Led Zeppelin IV (Rock of Ages)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594863709 ISBN 13: 9781594863707

Publisher: Rodale Books, 2006

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Led Zeppelin IV, often called heavy metal's greatest album, kicks off an exciting new series that takes a fresh, in-depth look at some of the greatest works from the most influential artists of the rock era. Fans may know the songs, but wait until they hear the stories behind them!

The music contained in Led Zeppelin IV is part of the soundtrack to a generation. Released in 1971, it rocks, stomps, glides, and shimmers as it covers all the bases the band had mastered: heavy blues, barroom rock and roll, mandolin-driven folk, epic Tolkien-infused mysticism, acoustic Americana, and more. Certified gold one week after its release, the album went to #2 on the U.S. charts and #1 in the U.K. It remained on U.S. charts for 259 weeks.

There probably isn't an aspiring rock guitarist anywhere who hasn't plucked out the notes and chords to "Stairway to Heaven" or "Black Dog," and yet many music lovers are unaware of the intriguing backstory to this genre-defining work.

To this day there is confusion about what is the actual title of the album. And what about those mysterious symbols? Barney Hoskyns pierces those veils and more as he tells the fascinating story of the evocative set that cemented Led Zeppelin's standing as the biggest, baddest, loudest band in the world—and that remains today the apex of their art.

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About the Author:

BARNEY HOSKYNS is one of rock music's most respected journalists. His most recent books include Mellow Gold: Songs, Drugs & Money in the L.A. Canyons and The Sound and the Fury: A Rock's Backpages Reader. He has written for GQ, Spin, Mojo, and Uncut. He is also editorial director of the online library Rock's Backpages (www.rocksbackpages.com). After living in the U.S. for several years, Hoskyns currently resides in London.

1

I'VE ONLY BEEN THIS YOUNG ONCE

THINGS WEREN'T looking up for young Robert Plant as he alighted at Pangbourne Station on a sultry afternoon in the summer of 1968. The Black Country boy with the big bluesy voice had sung with several promising bands and had even released a couple of singles, but he couldn't get a break and was beginning to despair of his career ever taking off. Traveling from Birmingham to Berkshire on that late July day, "it was the real desperation scene, man, like I had nowhere else to go."

Plant's old band, an outfit known as the Band of Joy, had played covers of songs by such West Coast bands as Love, Moby Grape, and Buffalo Springfield, in contrast to the blues and blue-eyed soul in which he had specialized just a couple of years earlier. Smitten with tales of free love and flower power in San Francisco and Southern California, Robert had been reborn as a midlands hippie, a groovy androgyne with curly blond locks who dressed in loon pants and Carnaby Street caftans.

"I really just wanted to get to San Francisco and join up," Plant recalls. "I had so much empathy with the commentary in America at the time of Vietnam that I just wanted to be with Jack Casady and with Janis Joplin. There was some kind of fable being created there, and a social change that was taking place, and the music was a catalyst in all of that."

But if the Band of Joy's renditions of Buffalo Springfield songs had, in Plant's words, "saved me from ending up being the typical English pub singer," the group hadn't exactly set the world on fire. "There were very few other groups around at the time doing that sort of thing," Plant told the underground paper International Times the following spring. "Eventually we were getting sixty, seventy-five quid [or approximately $113-$142 US] a night. In the end, however, I just had to give it up. I thought, 'Bollocks [Crap], nobody wants to know.'" Later he claimed that "everyone in Birmingham was desperate to get out and join a successful band . . . everyone wanted to move to London."

As he stepped on to the platform at Pangbourne, a sedate town in the Thames Estuary, Plant's appearance caused a few eyebrows to rise: Carnaby Street this wasn't. Barely had the singer closed the door of the compartment behind him when he was set upon by an indignant matron of advancing years, berating him for his unkempt locks and effeminate apparel.

"There I was with my suitcase, and suddenly this old woman starts slapping my face and shouting about my hair," Plant told International Times. "Well, I was staggered, so I called a cop and he says it was my own fault for having long hair. So much for British justice."

Recovering from the assault, Plant found a taxi and asked the driver to convey him to a nearby boathouse on the river. He had come to see a guitarist whose hair was no shorter than his own, and who--just a few days before--had driven up to the midlands to watch Plant perform with his new group, the oddly named Hobstweedle.

Unlike Robert Plant, Jimmy Page's career was unmistakably on the rise. From the early '60s onward, "Little" Jimmy was one of the premier studio guitarists on the London music scene, adding his licks to literally hundreds of hits by artists as diverse as the Who, Lulu, and Val Doonican. He'd played on sessions for American producers Bert Berns and Burt Bacharach. He was seldom out of work.

There was another string to Page's bow, moreover: He could produce. Hours upon hours in London's recording studios had afforded him the opportunity to study the technical side of record production and to pick up tips from hitmakers such as Mickie Most (producer of the Animals, Herman's Hermits, and Donovan) and Shel Talmy (producer of the Kinks, the Who, and Manfred Mann). By 1965, Page was sufficiently versed in recording techniques for Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham to hire him as in-house producer for the new Immediate label.

The sunless, often subterranean world of studios wasn't enough for Page, however. He was tiring of the long hours and factory-line work of pop sessions. "Believe me, a lot of guys would consider that to be the apex-- studio work," Page would say a decade later. "I was doing three studio dates a day, and I was becoming one of those sort of people that I hated."

Early in 1966, Page was approached by the Yardbirds, the R&B group that had provided a launching pad for the career of guitar deity Eric Clapton. Now featuring the equally dazzling guitarist Jeff Beck, the Yardbirds needed a replacement for bassist Paul Samwell-Smith. Page, all too aware of the drastic drop in income it would entail, stepped into the breach. It wasn't long before he was playing guitar rather than bass alongside Beck.

For an all-too-brief period in the fall of 1966, the two men played and recorded together in the Yardbirds as sparring partners, their intertwined licks heard on the far-out single "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago." But the band was never going to be big enough for both of them. "Tensions were rising within the group," recalls then-manager Simon Napier-Bell. "For Jimmy, the problem was that [the] solos were not his own creation. For Jeff, the problem was that Jimmy was stealing half his applause."

When the temperamental Beck quit the Yardbirds in October, Page found himself the lead guitarist in a group veering somewhat unsteadily from blues to pop and back.

If commercially the Yardbirds were in decline, Page's new prominence within the group gave him an opportunity not only to experiment as a guitarist but to tour the new psychedelic ballrooms of North America. At San Francisco's legendary acid palace, the Fillmore, gimmicks such as playing his guitar with a violin bow proved irresistible to the heads of Haight-Ashbury.

"On 'Glimpses' I was doing the bowed guitar thing, and I had tapes panning across the stage on this high-fidelity stereo sampler," Page says. "It was quite avant-garde stuff for the time."

With one foot in the 3-minute, 45-rpm pop era and the other in the new album-oriented world of rock, the Yardbirds were in danger of being left behind by hard-hitting new acts such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience; Eric Clapton's band, Cream; and even the new Jeff Beck Group. "The Yardbirds were quite powerful within their own right," Page recalled, "but Mickie Most was really just interested in singles and we were interested in albums."

There was one person who believed in the Yardbirds, however, and that was the man-mountain who'd taken over from Simon Napier-Bell as their manager. More accurately, Peter Grant believed in Jimmy Page, whose charisma was obvious from the minute he joined the band. Cool and beautiful in an almost effeminate way, Page looked like a new kind of pop star.

Napier-Bell had informed Grant that Page was a troublemaker, but Grant respected Page's financial acumen and resolved to fight for the band in their relationship with their record company. Years later, Grant's wife, Gloria, half-joked that her husband loved Jimmy more than he loved her.

"When I started managing the Yardbirds," Grant recalled, "they were not getting the hit singles but were on the college circuit and underground scene in America. Instead of trying to get played on Top 40 radio, I realized there was another market. We were the first UK act to get booked at places like the Fillmore. The scene was changing."

Grant, whose massive 6-foot-3-inch frame belied his early years as a wrestler, had worked in partnership with Mickie Most before striking out on his own as a manager. An intimidating if avuncular figure who'd toured with such rock-and-roll legends as Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, Peter was astute enough to see that a new cult of the guitar hero was blossoming around Clapton, Hendrix, and Beck and that Page could be groomed as the next great gunslinger.

In the spring of 1968, the Yardbirds agreed to call it a day, with a final tour of the United States to complete. One afternoon before departing in March, Page and Grant drove around London's West End discussing what the future held. "We were in a traffic jam," Grant recalled, "and I said to Jimmy, 'What are you going to do? Do you want to go back to sessions or what?'" When Jimmy said he had some ideas for a new group and that he wanted to produce as well as play guitar, Grant said simply, "Let's do it."

The tour wound up in Montgomery, Alabama, in early June of 1968, with Page returning to London on June 15. After honoring a last UK commitment in Luton, the Yardbirds were no more. Uncertain of the right direction in which to go, Page and Peter Grant settled on the concept of "the New Yardbirds," looking to recruit new members alongside original bassist Chris Dreja.

The latter's first choice as a replacement for Relf, Mickie Most protege Terry Reid, declined the job offer but pointed Page in the direction of a singer he described as "the Wild Man from the Black Country." Thirteen days after the Yardbirds' muted last hurrah, Page and Grant drove up to a teacher-training college in Birmingham to watch Robert Plant holler away in Hobstweedle. The band wasn't to Page's taste, but Plant's voice, presence, and sexuality were exactly what he was looking for.

"Robert was all right," Page said. "He was singing really well, although it was stuff that I didn't personally like very much. He was a Moby Grape fanatic, and the group was doing all of those semiobscure West Coast songs." Jimmy told John Tobler and Stuart Grundy that "it seemed really strange . . . that somebody that good hadn't emerged before, but it always seems that at the end of the day, someone who's good will come through." He added that it "unnerved" him just to listen to Plant's "primeval wail," which had evolved from a Stevie Winwood pastiche to a goosebump-inducing shriek.

Page's first impression of Plant was of "a big, rug-headed kern [yokel]." Good-natured and curious, the Black Country boy was woefully unsophisticated compared to Page. Plant, by the same token, was overawed by the guitarist. "You can smell when people have traveled and had their doors opened a little wider than most," he said. "You could feel that was the deal with Jimmy."

Within minutes, the two young men were combing through Page's vinyl collection, pulling out albums and bonding over shared favorites by an eclectic assortment of artists. "We found we had exactly the same tastes in music," Plant said a few months later. LPs by Larry Williams, Don and Dewey, Incredible String Band, and Buddy Guy spilled across the floor. They played Muddy Waters' "You Shook Me" and Joan Baez's "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You."

"I had a whole sort of repertoire in my mind of songs that I wanted to put into this new format," Page claimed in 2005. "[Songs] like 'Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You.' But it was all going to grow; I was seeing this dynamic. It wasn't down to one particular thing. It wasn't just the blues or rock and roll or folk music."

What struck Plant straightaway was the intensity of Page's musical drive-- an almost feverish need to realize his musical vision. "I don't think I'd ever come across a personality like it before," the singer recalled. "He had a demeanor which you had to adjust to; certainly it wasn't very casual to start with."

Unlike Robert, who'd grown up in the bosom of an extended family and social circle, Jimmy was a born loner, an only child whose immersion in the guitar compensated for his lack of companionship.

"I was trying to build a band," Page says. "I knew what way it was going to go. I knew how to put the things in place, and I had a good idea of what style of vocalist I was looking for. The whole personality aspect does come into it, but initially the whole thing is, if you've got a bond musically and everyone's got that mutual respect for each other, it should work . . . at least for a little while."

Page, as it happened, had already been contacted by a bass guitarist--an outstanding musician who, like Page, was tiring of the day-in-day-out grind of London studio work. John Baldwin, who'd changed his name to the more fanciful "John Paul Jones," spotted a small news item in the music press announcing Page's intention to form his own band from the ashes of the Yardbirds. On July 19, he telephoned the guitarist to offer his services.

Page and Jones knew each other and had worked together on several occasions. "I'd heard of Pagey before I heard of Clapton or Beck," Jones has said of the former studio wunderkind. In addition to sessions they'd played together, Jones had arranged strings on the Yardbirds' 1967 single "Little Games."

By early August 1968, Chris Dreja was out of the "New Yardbirds" picture and Jones had clinched the bass spot in the group. "I jumped at the chance to get him," Page said. "Musically he's the best musician of us all. He had a proper training and he has quite brilliant ideas."

Jones, whose only experience of playing in a proper gigging band had been with ex-Shadows Jet Harris and Tony Meehan 5 years before, relished the chance to become part of a self-contained rock group. Wry and self- effacing, his personality offered a further contrast to the Page/Plant dynamic. "Jonesy," commented Plant, "was a bit . . . not withdrawn, but he stands back a little and shoots the odd little bit of dialogue into the air."

The final piece of Page's jigsaw--the drummer--proved the hardest to slot into place. This time the favored candidate came via Robert Plant. John "Bonzo" Bonham had known the singer for years as a fellow product of the music scene around Birmingham and the midlands. Indeed, he had played in the Band of Joy. "[Robert] knows me off by heart and vice versa," Bonzo told an early interviewer. "I think that's why we get on so well."

"Jimmy rang me up and says, 'I saw a drummer last night and this guy plays so good and so loud, we must get him,'" Peter Grant recalled. But Bonham, already rated as one of the best drummers in England, was less convinced than John Paul Jones of the new group's long-term potential. Furthermore, he was earning a decent crust as a drummer-for-hire and had a wife and 2- year-old son to support. That summer found him playing behind American singer-songwriter Tim Rose.

"When I was asked to join the Yardbirds, I thought they'd been forgotten in England," Bonham explained later. "[But] I knew Jimmy was a highly respected guitarist, and Robert I'd known for years. So even if it didn't take off, it was a chance to play in a really good group."

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