The whole band chuckled at this. Brushing long blond ringlets from his eyes, Robert Plant spoke first. He explained that when Led Zeppelin landed in Southern California in 1968, he was nineteen years old, and he just went crazy, but that was all in the past. Now Led Zeppelin were mature family men, successful artists, and all the old tales of groupies and mayhem were gross exaggerations anyway. Now they were looking for someone to tell their side of the story.
Drummer John Bonham was interested in the idea. Hulking, sober, and seemingly benign, he asked the two American publicists if they could help the band reach an even bigger audience—“the people that don’t know about us?”
Bassist John Paul Jones didn’t say a word. To Danny, it seemed as if he didn’t even want to be there and couldn’t care less what the press, or anyone, thought of Led Zeppelin.
Jimmy Page said very little, other than some bitter remarks about Rolling Stone and its persistently negative coverage of Zeppelin, when it covered them at all. Jimmy didn’t need to say much, Danny told me later, because “he was just such a star, with the long black hair, the eyelashes, the corrupt choirboy’s face. Stardom seemed to radiate out from him.”
Danny pitched the blues museum idea, and they seemed to like it. In the end they agreed that Danny would be Led Zeppelin’s publicist for their 1973 tour of America. Danny attended every show of the tour, riding with the band on their private jet, Starship One, and helped with the media frenzy when Led Zeppelin’s hotel safe deposit box was robbed of $180,000 in New York. When the tour was over, Peter Grant hired Danny to be Led Zeppelin’s full-time publicist, working out of the band’s Manhattan office on Madison Avenue.
Two years later, Led Zeppelin’s 1975 North American tour was looming, and Danny was on the phone to me. “Hey, man, how are you? Do you have a minute? Do you want to come on the road with Led Zeppelin? You do? That’s great! Can you get a magazine assignment? You think you can? Terrific. I only need a letter from your editor. Let me know. I’ll save you a seat on the Starship. Gotta go. God bless you—good-bye.”
CHAPTER 4 Vision of the Future
I had first heard about Led Zeppelin seven years earlier, in the autumn of 1968. I was a university student and the editor of the college newspaper. I knew a guy named Don Law, who had graduated the previous June and was now the manager of the Boston Tea Party, the city’s rock venue and electric ballroom. (Don’s father, also named Don Law, had produced all the recordings of blues legend Robert Johnson in the 1930s.) One day I heard that a new band from England, the Jeff Beck Group, was playing the Tea Party, so I called Don Law and arranged for press tickets for me and our paper’s star photographer, Peter Simon.
When we got to the Tea Party, housed in a former temple in Boston’s South End, Don ushered us into the dressing room to meet the band. I was excited because I was a massive fan of the rip-roaring Yardbirds, whose raving, improvised elaborations on the R&B format had revolutionized rock & roll and propelled it into what was being called hard rock. Jeff Beck had replaced original Yardbirds guitarist Eric Clapton a couple years earlier and had now left to go on his own with a new band.
Boston was considered an important tryout town by British musicians because it had a huge student population and the multimedia that catered to it. When Fleetwood Mac arrived from London earlier in the year, they became virtually the Tea Party’s house band. Many UK bands started American tours in front of generally friendly Boston audiences who were about the same age as the group. So Peter with his camera and I with my notebook were politely received by brilliant guitarist Jeff Beck, bassist Ronnie Wood, and drummer Mick Waller. Less effusive, in fact completely ignoring us, was the group’s young singer, Rod Stewart, who was staring at himself in the full-length mirror, using spit to straighten the ends of his exquisitely shag-cut hair.
The band was nervous. This was a big tour for them, and they were supporting a terrific record, Truth, that had several careers depending on its success. We told them we loved the record and played it all the time. The famously moody Jeff Beck loosened up a bit, and Ronnie Wood cracked a few jokes. When the drummer disappeared into the bathroom, Wood informed us that “Wanky” Waller liked to have a quick jerk before playing the show. Rod continued to obsessively tend his coiffure. We were invited to help ourselves to bottles of imported Watneys Red Barrel beer from the ice chest and hang out backstage while the opening band, the Hallucinations, finished their set.
As I was sipping beer, standing against the wall while Jeff Beck and Ron Wood tuned their guitars, my eyes gradually adjusted to the dressing room’s low light. After a while, I noticed two figures sitting in a dark corner. One was a huge man of enormous girth, the other a slender figure in velvet clothes and very long dark hair. Don Law explained that the large one was Peter Grant, who managed the Jeff Beck Group. The slender hippie was his other client, Jimmy Page, who had been playing bass with the Yardbirds and was now stepping into the lead guitar role recently vacated by Jeff. Jimmy was joining the Beck tour for a few days to check out the reaction of the American kids to the new, guitar-heavy rock bands emerging from England. Later that winter, Don told me, Jimmy Page was coming back to America with his band, then called the New Yardbirds, playing a new style of heavy rock that people were saying would blow everyone else out of the sky. Peter Grant was just now booking the Tea Party for Page’s new band.
That night, the Jeff Beck Group was a smash at the Boston Tea Party. Rod Stewart was so shy in those early days that he usually began the set out of sight, singing his gravel-road lyrics from behind the stacks of Marshall amplifiers. Jeff was incredible, making the guitar howl like a hound and purr like a leopard in heat. In the back of the hall, watching the audience grooving and cheering, stood Jimmy Page and Peter Grant—taking it all in, seeing a vision of the future they would eventually come to own.
CHAPTER 4 A Giant Hug for Led Zeppelin
Jimmy Page’s New Yardbirds mutated into Led Zeppelin during tours of Scandinavia and Britain in the autumn of 1968. The band began its first U.S. tour in late December 1968, playing shows in California and the Pacific Northwest. The band’s epochal first album, Led Zeppelin, was released early in January 1969.
I had a new girlfriend at the time, and she was a jazz fan. So was her older brother, whom she wanted me to meet. We were on our way to his house when I stopped at a record store in Cambridge and bought Led Zeppelin’s album with its iconic cover image of the German airship Hindenburg’s catastrophic explosion in New Jersey in 1937.
At the brother’s place, while tea was brewing, I asked if I could play my new record, explaining that Led Zeppelin used to be the Yardbirds, one of my fave English groups. They said they didn’t mind, so I laid the LP on the turntable, dropped the needle into the groove, and turned the volume up. First came the rumble of John Bonham’s leaden wallop, then the unearthly screech of Robert Plant yelling about the days of his youth. This was the first track, “Good Times Bad Times,” and it boasted ferocious energy and a Jimmy Page guitar break that made Jimi Hendrix look sick.
I sensed movement behind me. My new girlfriend and her brother were regarding me with horror, their hands covering their ears to escape the piercing wail, the febrile guitar, and the thunderous hard rock. I lifted the needle, replaced Led Zeppelin with Kind of Blue, drank my tea, went home, and listened to Led Zeppelin under a pair of big headphones.
Immediately, I realized this was new music, an innovative way of making a huge statement with a four-piece rock band. In fact, the term rock didn’t really apply anymore. Soon, perhaps within a year, a music critic borrowed an idea from writer William S. Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch and other visionary, experimental works, to describe the bone-breaking rhythms, crypto-romantic vocals, and light-and-shade guitar playing that typified this new hybrid of hard rock and the din of battle:
“Heavy Metal.”