Song 180: “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin, Part Two — “Inspiration is What You Are to Me”

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey Song 180 Dazed and Confused by Led Zeppelin Part 2 Inspiration, That's What You Are to Me Before we begin, this episode contains some brief discussion of sex with underage girls, attempted rape, and drug and alcohol abuse. If those subjects are likely to upset you, you may wish to read the transcript or skip this episode. When Jimmy Page, Peter Grant and Chris Dreher started their plans for the new Yardbirds, Page, who from the start was going to be the leader of this band, had to make a simple choice between art and commerce. On the one hand, the music Page was listening to most at the time was acoustic folk music, music not a million miles away from what the other ex-Yardbirds were doing actually. He was a fan of the English folk baroque guitar styles of Bert Jansch and Davy Graham, and the music he enjoyed most at this point was by people like Pentangle or the Incredible String Band, who were combining English traditional music, psychedelic rock music, and jazz to create something utterly unlike anything that had been heard before. But on the other hand, Jimmy Page also liked money. He liked money a lot. This is the character trait that gets brought up more than any other by anyone who has spent any time at all around him. Peter Grant once said, If you want to bump off Jimmy Page, all you have to do is throw tuppence in front of a London bus. He intended this new band to be a major, major success, and one he would have full control of. He and Grant formed their own company, Super Hype, which was to own everything involving the band, with Grant taking care of the business and Page the artistry. The deal, much like that between Frankie Valli and Bob Gordio, was done on a handshake. Grant would never have a contract with any musicians he managed, and Page and Grant both knew that there were only two ways of making money as a British band. You needed to focus on either Britain or America. If you were going to focus on Britain, you needed to have hit singles, and lots of them. The British pop industry always moved fast. You were only as good as your last hit record, and if you'd had a hit three months ago, everyone wanted to know what you'd done lately. And as the Yardbirds' recent experience had proved, there was no guarantee of getting a hit record no matter what you did. They'd had one of the most successful producers, whose formula had worked for everyone from Donovan to Lulu, and a track record of top 40 hits with their earlier line-ups, and yet everything they'd done for a couple of years had flopped. But in America, there was a new way of getting successful, which didn't require hit singles. There was a circuit of large venues, largely put together by Frank Barcelona at Premier Talent Agency, a booking agency which specialised in mock bands, the first agency to do so. Barcelona divided the US up into territories, and had preferred venues and promoters in each territory, people we've heard of before, like Don Law and Bill Graham. Between that circuit and the new FM radio stations that were springing up, primarily in college towns, and which played album tracks rather than singles, It was now possible for a particular kind of band to make a great deal of money by playing America without a hit single at all. But the kind of band that was having success in the US at this point wasn't playing psychedelic folk. The bands that were having that kind of success were playing what was being called heavy music. Bands like I Am Butterfly. If you wanted to have reliable success then, you wanted to target America, and you wanted to play heavy music. So Page had a choice. Should he play heavy music and make money, or should he play music inspired by the folk guitarist he was seeing at Les Cousins and make the music he wanted to make? He ended up deciding to do both. He was going to make music that would pay a lot of attention to dynamics. Most of the bands that were having success in America were doing extended heavy jams, but ones that had very little dynamic variation. They would start at one level of intensity and stay there, with people taking solos, and maybe getting faster and louder towards the end. But the main effect was a hypnotic, entrancing one. The audience would get lost in the music, as it lasted for 10, 15, 20 or however many minutes. But Page was going to make music with loud, heavy passages, and, often in the same song, with quiet, folkier passages, inspired by people like Bert Janj, John Renborn, and Davy Graham. There was going to be light and shade in this music, applying a pop session player's sense of dynamics and structure, a folk guitarist technique, and the old Yardbirds rave up formula to the new, heavier rock music. The plan he came up with was to put together a band on the same lines as the Jeff Beck group, or The Who. A group, in fact, that would be much like the one that had recorded Beck's Bolero a couple of years earlier. He would be the only guitarist, and there would be a frontman with a great voice, Dreyer on bass, and the best drummer he could find. The only problem was that he couldn't actually find a frontman or a drummer, at least at first. He had multiple ideas for both, of course, but nobody was interested. For the drummer, he approached among others B.J. Wilson, the drummer with Prokel Harum, who had played with him on the session for Joe Cockers with a little help from my friends, Ainsley Dunbar, the drummer with the Jeff Beck Group, and Clem Cattini, who, after leaving the Tornadoes, had become one of Britain's top session drummers. The first two turned the job down, sticking with the bands they were in, while Cattini never got back to Peter Grant about the offer, as he was too busy playing sessions. Cattini has since played on dozens of UK No. 1 hits, for everyone from Benny Hale 12 in Stardust. Similarly, he was unable to find a singer to join the New Yardbirds. Page's initial thought for a lead singer, according to Richard Cole, was Danny Hutton, a session singer for Hanna-Barbera Records, who had had one minor hit under his own name with Roses and Rainbows, which had made number 73 in the US. If I were a king I'd give up everything Just to have you near me Cos roses and rainbows are you. The sky is always blue. Whenever I'm with you, I think I just love you cos Roses and rainbows are you. But as we heard in the episodes on Never Learn Not To Love, Hutton had formed his own new group, which was soon to be one of the biggest groups of the 70s, Three Dog Night. So instead, Page started looking around London. He considered a few people, but Steve Winwood was busy with traffic. Steve Marriott was just about to leave the small faces, but Page was still wary of Don Arden's threats of violence against anyone who poached him. And Joe Cocker and Chris Farlow were both having successful solo careers. The next singer he turned to was Terry Reid, the former lead singer of Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, who had been on the same bill as the Yardbirds on the Rolling Stones and Icantino Turner Tour in 1966. I said that I give up all my love Said everything that I have Said I give up all my love But the hand don't get the glove up Anymore My hand don't get the glove up I gotta buy me a way to eat Reed was interested, but there were three different stories, all of which might partly be true. One, the one Reed always told and which seems plausible, is that Reed had agreed to do two US tours supporting the Rolling Stones, and told Page that he couldn't join Page's new band unless he got compensated for the lost income from those tours. Another, the way that some of those associated with superhype told the story, is that Peter Grant mentioned in the office that Page wanted Terry Reed to be the singer of his new group, and Mickey Most, who at the time was working with Grant, quickly signed Reed up to a solo contract and groomed him for stardom, not letting his new client join the band his associate was managing. And the third story, as told by Peter Grant, is that Grant was against the idea because Reed was already signed with the Most organisation. Grant had worked with him and found Reed's father too difficult and dissuaded Paige from going with him. Reed instead stayed as a solo artist, working with Most, who produced several attempts at hit singles for him, like his version of Super Lungs' My Supergirl, Donovan's disturbing song about 14-year-old girls. Read, who died last month, was regarded by most of his peers as the best blues rock singer in Britain, but most planned to make him a star was very far from successful. Read's only entry in the UK charts in any capacity was an archival album he released in 2016, spending one week at number 95 on the album charts. although he would go on to be a respected cult artist. But while he didn't end up singing in the New Yardbirds, he did end up pointing the way to the man who would. Reid, once it became clear that he wasn't going to take the job, suggested to Page that he and Dreher go to the West Midlands to see a singer he'd often been on the same bill as. And so it was that Page and Dreher visited the West Midlands College of Education in Walsall to see a band with the ridiculous name Obstweedle. A lot of sources have the band name as Hobstweedle, with an H, but that's probably people mistranscribing a Brummie accent. There are posters that clearly show the spelling. The band were unimpressive, but the lead singer, Robert Plant, was much better than the band he was performing with. Plant was several years younger than Page, only 19 years old at the time, while Page was 24. But he was already a veteran performer, though up to that point an unsuccessful one. Plant, like almost every kid born in the late 40s, had become a big Elvis fan as a small child. But by the time he was 13 or 14, he was already something of a budding scholar of the blues, getting a paper round and using the money to buy records like Robert Johnson's King of the Delta Blues Singers, saying later, When I first heard Preaching Blues and Last Fair Deal Gone Down by Robert Johnson, I went, This is it. Just the last five years going down Last five years going down Just the last five years going down Good Lord, on that girl, hold on By the time he was 15, he was a fair blues harmonica player and had ambitions of being a singer. He sat in with a band of school friends, the Jurymen, when their singer got ill. Although they wouldn't let him stay with the band once the singer got better, as they all had band uniforms and didn't have one that fit him. Age 16, he went to his first proper blues show, seeing Sonny Boy Williamson 2 in Birmingham, on a bill with several British actors who have intersected this story in one way or another. The Yardbirds, the Spencer Davis group, whose vocalist Steve Winwood would later briefly be considered by Page for the New Yardbirds, and Long John Baldry and his Hoochie Coochie Men, featuring Rod Stewart. At that show, Plant went up to Williamson at a urinal and tried to introduce himself. When Williamson reacted as one might expect, Plant sneaked into his dressing room and stole the harmonica as revenge. Coincidentally, Page had, precisely a month before, recorded an album with Williamson for Giorgio Gomelski. Lay in the graveyard Dead asleep All that money you got for me You done got it too Cos I don't want no flowers No flowers Cos then I can't smell a thing Plant spent the next few years singing in a variety of local blues bands with names like the Crawling Kingsnakes and Black Snake Moan on the fringe of Birmingham's R&B scene. Bands from the area were getting signed up at this point in the hope that Birmingham would be the next Liverpool. Some, like the Spencer Davis Group or the Moody Blues, would have some success. But others, like the Senators, whose She's a Mod opened the Brumbeat compilation, were no hit wonders. She's a mod plant was in got even that far, though, and his parents were encouraging him to become an accountant, even though by the age of 16 he already knew that he only ever wanted to make music. It was after a gig with the Crawling Kingsnakes that Robert Plant first met John Bonham, the drummer on that track by the Senators we just heard. Bonham was three months older than Plant, but was already married and would soon have his first child. Bonham had played with many bands around the Birmingham area, playing at one time or another with several future members of the Moody Blues, and with Roy Wood and Trevor Burton, later of the move. At the time he was in a band called Way of Life, whose bass player Dave Pegg would later go on to join Fairport Convention. Bonham came up to Plant and told him that his band were great, but that their drummer was rubbish, and that he was better. Soon Bonham was the drummer with the Crawling Kingsnakes, and he and Plant became friends. But Bonham had a habit of either quitting bands, because he was known as the best drummer on the scene, and so would get a better offer. or being fired, because he was a loud player who would drown out the other band members, and had very little discipline and would show off. Soon he had quit the Crawling Kingsnakes and been lured back to Way of Life at a higher pay rate. When Bonham left, the group split up, and Plant moved on to another local band, the Tennessee Teens, who renamed themselves Listen, and muddled their stage show after the move, who had become the biggest band yet to come from the West Midlands. However, Plant almost became the singer with a different band. Neville Holder, who also had occasionally been a roadie for bands that Plant was in, was playing rhythm guitar with a band called The In-Betweens, and suggested that they should get Plant in as their singer. However, their bass player, Jim Lee, vetoed it, saying that if they got in a fifth member, they would make less money each. So Holder continued as the lead singer of The In-Betweens, who was shortly to change their name firstly to Amvo Slade, and then to the name by which they became famous, Slade. Both Listen and The In-Betweens would often play the same bills, were booked by the same agents, and were good friends. So what happened next is all the more surprising. Listen got signed to CBS Records on the strength of Plant's Voice and put out a single, a cover version of The Rascals' You Better Run, which was actually Plant backed by session musicians as the label didn't think the rest of the band were up to scratch. Oh, what you trying to do to my heart? What you trying to do to my heart? Everything I had was yours, not closing all the doors. What you trying to do to my heart? You better run, you better hide, you better leave, run my side. But unbeknownst to them, the In-Betweens had also got a record deal. and their first record came out the same day as Listen's record and it too was a cover version of You Better Run by The Rascals produced by Jimmy Page's old acquaintance Kim Powley who at the time had moved to the UK and was living with PJ Proby. What you trying to do to my heart What you trying to do to my heart You fooling round, you're telling lies You're going round with the other guys What you trying to do to my heart You better run to the heart You better leave my side The receptionist from the booking agency that booked them both claimed in one biography of Plant that at one point she actually had Noddy Holder on one phone line and Robert Plant on the other, both asking her which record she liked best. For the record, she told them both that she preferred theirs, but she secretly preferred the in-betweens version. Unsurprisingly, since both bands were playing to the same audiences in the same area, neither record was a success at all. A shame, as both are actually very good records. The lack of success caused Listen to split up, and Plant was making so little money he had to move in with his girlfriend and her parents and live off the money she was making as a shop assistant. He was 18 at this point and promised her that if he hadn't become a star by the time he was 20 he would give up music. After Listen had split up, CBS, who had only been interested in Plant anyway, decided to go ahead with a solo career for him. His first single, Our Song, appears to be an attempt to give Plant the kind of career that Tom Jones or Engelbert Humperdinck had. Even though it didn't know Our song became just a little bit sad But it didn't seem to matter Even when I kissed you I couldn't please you Plants hated the experience of recording that track. apparently needing 90 takes to get a performance the producer was satisfied with, and the record only sold 800 copies. A follow-up did no better, and Plant was dropped by the label. For a while he tried to have a career in cabaret, using the stage name Robert Lee, and he also briefly sang with a big band whose leader knew his father. But he was getting nowhere, and having to supplement his income by working on a building site. Plant was, though, starting to get inspired by the new music coming from the west coast of America. In particular, there were three bands he would always cite as major inspirations. Moby Grape, Buffalo Springfield, and especially Love. As he said in 1970, All that music from the West Coast just went bang, and there was nothing else there for me after that, three years before I had been shuddering listening to Sonny Boy Williamson. Now I was sobbing to Arthur Lee. Arthur Lee would continue to be one of Plant's biggest vocal influences throughout his career, and while Plant kept his blues influences, he now wanted to make music like the West Coast Musicians. He was also starting to get influenced by bands like the Incredible String Band and other bands that were played on John Peel's radio show The Perfumed Garden. Over the course of 1967 and early 1968 Plant was in three different bands, all called Band of Joy. When he got himself fired from the first group he formed a second band of the same name who performed with war paint on their faces. The original Band of Joy carried on for a while but changed their name to The Good Egg when Plant's band started to become more successful. Then the members of the second band of joy quit and Plant formed the third band of joy including the keyboard player and bassist from the original one along with his old drummer from The Crawling Kingsnakes, John Bonham and guitarist Kevin Gamond who had previously played with the great reggae singer Jimmy Cliff. Bonham's bandmate from Way of Life, Dave Pegg also briefly joined the band but didn't end up sticking around. this third line-up of the Band of Joy toured around the UK playing venues like the Marquee in London and the Club of Go-Go in Newcastle as well as doing a brief tour of support for Tim Rose, the folk singer who popularised Hey Joe and Morning Dew and who had been in a band with Jake Holmes as we heard last episode The Band of Joy also recorded a few demos, mostly cover versions of the kind of songs that Plant now enjoyed like a version of Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth and a version of Hey Joe which was modelled and Moses' arrangement. Also the model for Jimi Hendrix's hit with the song, but with Plant's vocals sounding more influenced by Arthur Lee singing on Love's faster version of the song. But no record label was interested in the Band of Joy and Bonham left the group to play with Tim Rose. Bonham was only with Rose for a short while, but he played on at least one BBC session for John Peel's show. with Rose. Of the four tracks for that session, the one that shows Bonham's playing ability of the most is a version of the old banjo standard Foggy Mountain Breakdown, retitled Foggy Mountain Breakdown on Rye with Mustard, which has definite signs of Bonham's later style. With Bonham gone, the band of joy split up. Trevor Burton of The Move had given Tony Secunda, The Move's manager, a copy of their demo, and Plant and Gammond recorded another demo for Secunda, but that came to nothing. Plant then hooked up briefly with Alexis Corner returning to his blues roots and the two recorded a couple of tracks together with Corner's piano player Steve Miller not the American guitarist of the same name which are the first recordings that show off what Plant could actually do on vocals and harmonica For the first time, Plant was actually singing in a studio like Robert Plant leave you baby ain't coming back home no more and when I quit you woman down the road I'll go steal away now steal away now corner was vaguely interested in recording more with Plant maybe doing an album together but Plant was also very aware that he was about to hit that deadline of 20, the point at which he'd have to quit music and get a real job if he wasn't successful. And that was all the more pressing as his fiancée was pregnant. While he was waiting for stuff to happen with Corner, he formed another band, Obstweedle, with his friend Bill Bonham. No relation to John, and they started playing pubs around Birmingham, playing the same Moby Grape and Love covers that the band of Joy had been playing. And it was that band that Jimmy Page, Chris Dreher and Peter Grant came to see on the 20th of July 1968, one month to the day before Plant's 20th birthday and the promised end of his music career. Before the gig, Page mistook Plant for a roadie, but when he saw Plant on stage he was bowled over by his performance. Page's only concern was that someone with that much obvious star power who hadn't already been discovered must have something wrong with him. Was he impossible to work with or something? But still, Page was desperate for a singer, and even if Plant turned out to be difficult, He was obviously good. Plant got back to his lodgings a few days later to find a telegram from Peter Grant, saying, Priority, Robert Plant, tried phoning you several times. Please call if you are interested in joining the Yardbirds. Now Plant had a decision to make. Jim Lee, the in-between's bass player, would later relate a conversation he had with Plant, where Plant was talking about the Yardbirds offer but saying he would rather play the blues with Corner than play Pop with the Yardbirds. But then at the end of the night, he saw Lee drive off in his sports car. The in-betweens hadn't yet had a hit record, but they were making serious money as a live act, and shouted, Nice car! I guess I'll have to start playing pop! Plant went down to meet up with Page at Page's house in Pangborn, which he found hugely impressive, and which rather confirmed for him that he'd made the right choice, at least financially, in joining what he had assumed was a pop band. But what both men found, more importantly, was that they were sympathetic musically. Their tastes didn't perfectly align. Page had no time for bands like Love and Buffalo Springfield, who Plant adored. But they both liked the pop R&B of the Spencer Davis group and the Small Faces. They both liked the blues, and they both had a love of folk music. In particular, Page played Plant one of his favourite records, Joan Baez's version of Anne Breeden's Babe I'm Gonna Leave You. I'm gonna leave you Tell you when I'm gonna leave you Leave you When all summer time Summer comes a-rolling Leave you When all summer Both agreed that that was exactly the kind of material that they wanted to do, and that they could work up something interesting from it. but they still needed a drummer. Page had asked most of the session players he knew and they had all turned him down as had Keith Moon but Plant had a suggestion his old friend John Bonham. Page and Grant went off to see Bonham play with Tim Rose and were impressed. Bonham, at least at first was less impressed with the idea of joining the Yardbirds. He was making more money with Rose than he had ever made before and not only that but a lot of big name singers were asking him to join their bands including some like Chris Farlow and Joe Cocker, who Paige had played with and had considered for his new Yardbirds, why would he want to join a bunch of has-beens? And not only that, but Bonham's wife was dead set against the idea. Not the idea of joining the Yardbirds, but of going off with Robert Plant, who she thought of as someone who dreamed big but never actually had any success. Bonham had twice been in bands with Plant, and twice they'd gone nowhere. He had a good job now making 40 quid a week. And here came his old mate Plant once again, trying to drag him off on a harebrained scheme. Eventually, though, Bonham agreed. Partly it was for the opportunity to be part of a band, to help shape the material he was playing rather than just playing a frontman's songs. Though Bonham was never someone who hid his light under a bushel. He would play five-minute solos during Tim Rose's sets, for example. But also it was because Page wanted him so much that he offered to give him a vastly increased salary. Early on in the new band's career, everything was coming out of Page's pocket. and rather than getting equal shares, the other three band members were his employees. And so Page offered to pay Bonham £25 a show for UK gigs, £50 for European gigs and £100 for American ones and they already had a 10-date Scandinavian tour lined up. He'd be making more in a night from the New Yardbirds than he made in a week with Tim Rose. That was enough to sway both Bonham and his wife and he agreed to turn up for a rehearsal on the 12th of August. But actually, there was still one member of the new Yardbirds to join. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever given a clear answer as to why Chris Dreher, the only original member of the Yardbirds still with the band, didn't stick with the new Yardbirds. He was still involved with the planning on the 20th of July, when he went with Page to see Plant, but by the 12th of August, when the new band rehearsed for the first time, he was out. Depending on which version of the narrative you read, either he decided he didn't want to carry on in the music business, and wanted to be a photographer, and left Page looking for a new bass player. Or, he bowed out gracefully with no hard feelings when Page got an offer from a better player. Either way, Dreher wouldn't make music again until the early 80s, when he and his former Yardbirds bandmates Paul Samwell Smith and Jim McCarty formed a new band, Box of Frogs, and then Dreher and McCarty toured with a new line-up of Yardbirds from 1992 through 2013, when Dreher retired due to ill health. In his place came Page's old session colleague, John Paul Jones. Jones had been getting antsy about playing sessions ever since a few months earlier, when he'd played a Super Session album titled No Introduction Necessary, which on various tracks had featured Page, Clem Cattini, the drummer that Page had considered for his new band, Big Jim Sullivan, Albert Lee and Nicky Hopkins, all backing a new singer named Keith DeGroote and a bunch of rockabilly covers. Well I'm making alright. Monday morning till Friday night Oh, those lonely weekends Since you left me I'm as lonesome as I can be Oh, those lonely weekends Said you'd be true to me Jones had enjoyed that, just jamming with a bunch of his friends, a lot more than he enjoyed most sessions. He'd been able just to play music that they all liked, rather than playing whatever rubbish some producer he didn't respect wanted him to play, and he hadn't had to write orchestral charts. He'd been making a lot of money as a session bass player and arranger, but he was getting burned out. Like John Bonham, he wanted to make music that would be his, not music that other people wanted. His wife suggested to him that he might want to join a band rather than keep playing sessions, and initially he told her that there were no bands that were worth joining. He wanted to play with good musicians. But then she told him that she'd seen in one of the music magazines that Jimmy Page was forming a band, and suggested he get in touch. Jones had obviously played a lot with Page, and was impressed with his musicianship, and so called Page up and said that if he wanted a bass player, Jones was available. Dreher said later, I wasn't John Paul Jones and Jimmy McCarty was not John Bonham. These were the pivotal players who created that sound. I knew about John Paul and I thought, you're not going to top that, Jimmy, you're a lucky man there. At that point he was a better bass player than Jimmy was a guitar player and of course he understood music. There was no way I was going to interface myself between him joining the band. And you couldn't have met a nicer guy. What a real ace gentleman he was. The four men met up on August 12, 1968 for their first rehearsal It was a bit cautious at first Plant and Bonham had never met Jones and the band members all had wildly disparate tastes in music though there was some overlap They had to get a set together quickly for the Yardbirds tour that was going to take place soon and so Page was casting around for songs they all knew and couldn't find any He suggested Train kept a roll in the Yardbirds live staple and quickly told Jones who had never heard the song what the chords were. The song would become part of the new band's live set for the next year or two. The new band immediately gelled, and after playing that one song, they knew that they could work together. There were still some problems initially. Bonham had a tendency to overplay. He could play with sensitivity and restraint. He just often chose not to. That problem was solved relatively quickly by Peter Grant explaining to Bonham that Jimmy Page was the boss, and if Page told Bonham to be more restrained, Bonham would either be more restrained or he would be both out of the band and out of the nearest window. Bonham took the lesson to heart and many people have credited this decision to tame Bonham's wild man excesses with allowing him to grow and become someone who played for the song rather than just to show off. Though, have no doubt about it, Bonham would always show off. Bonham and Jones became the new band's secret weapon. Page as the guitar hero and Planters the frontman got all the attention but almost every musician who ever talks about the band that formed that day talks about the rhythm section. Bonham's influence from jazz musicians like Gene Krupa, his boyhood idol and Jones' arrangement skills and the influence of Motown bass player James Jameson were very different from the influences of most of the rock bands coming up who already were mostly only listening to other rock bands. As mentioned last episode, at this point Jones only had two rock albums revolved from Pet Sounds and was far more interested in Soul and Rock. They quickly worked up a set of old Yardbirds live favourites like Train Kept a-Rollin' and Dazed and Confused, blues covers like Howlin' Wolf's How Many More Years, their version of Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, and a couple of Soul covers that Plant had been performing with Obstweedle. The new group were good, and they knew it, and worked well together, though there was some amusement among the other three when, at the end of the rehearsal, Page insisted on them all chipping in a few pence for the beans on toast they'd eat during a break. There was just one problem before the band could go much further, though, and that was Mickey Most. Page absolutely did not want Mickey Most to produce anything his new band did. He had hated the experience of working on the Yardbirds tracks with Most, and he had heard bad things about the way that Most had taken control of the Jeff Beck group sessions and sidelined their singer Rod Stewart. Terry Reid later said of his discussions about joining the band, Jimmy was only in the Yardbirds for five minutes, but he wasn't going to allow a repeat of the album with Mickey. Nobody was going to produce the new group but Jimmy. But Grant had to deal with Most that Grant would look after the management and most the production of every artist either took on. There was only one thing for it. Grant would have to con his old friend out of millions. Grant told Most that he had been given only a short time to live and he wanted to leave as much money as possible to his wife and kids. Would Mickey see his way to giving up his half of Jimmy Page's new group so that Peter could make as much money from them as possible in what little time he had left. Most agreed, and now the new group were free to record their first album. Their first album, of course, being Three Week Hero by the has-been crooner PJ Proby. Jones had been hired as arranger, contractor and bass player for Proby's first of many attempts at comeback albums. Put in charge of getting the musicians together for the sessions, he chose Page as one of the guitarists, gave Bonham his first session work as one of the two drummers for the album and got Plant in on tambourine, harmonica and backing vocals to give his new bandmate a bit of extra cash. After that, the group went on their Scandinavian tour. There's not much been written about that tour, surprisingly, and sadly no recordings of the shows appear to exist anywhere. But it became very clear, very quickly, that this new version of the Yardbirds was something special. Plant was the one the other three were worried about and would be for a while, with the new group still wondering if he was the right man for the job almost a year into their career, because compared to the others, he had far less experience. But some of those worries, at least, were put to rest at a show in Stockholm, where Plant's mic broke halfway through the show and he carried on, and his voice was powerful enough that the audience could still hear him, even over the extremely loud instruments. When they got back to the UK, they were tight enough that Paige decided that even though the new group didn't have a record deal yet, they should go into the studio and record the set they'd been playing. The group was still at this point performing as the new Yardbirds, but a strongly worded letter from Chris Dreher's lawyers pointing out that they'd only been given the rights to the name for the Scandinavian shows caused a rethink, and they changed their name to Led Zeppelin, after Keith Moon's joke about the Beck's Bolero session. And also it didn't hurt that the combination of a heavy metal and something flying was reminiscent of Iron Butterfly, who were currently very big in the US. The album would also be called Led Zeppelin, though now it's normally referred to as Led Zeppelin I, to distinguish it from their later albums. The album would be entirely funded by Page, with no advance from a record company, so it had to be recorded quickly. They recorded it in Olympic Studios over a period of nine days, with Glyn Johns, Page's old friend who had recommended him for his very first session work, engineering. Or at least that's how Johns is credited on the final album. As we will see, though, credits can be deceiving. Johns was one of the most sought-after engineers of the period. He engineered almost all the Stones' UK recordings from 1965 through the mid-70s, as well as records by The Small Faces, Chris Farlow, Pentangle, The Move, and many more. And a few months after recording the Led Zeppelin album, he would be the de facto producer of the Beatles' Get Back sessions. When Page asked him to engineer an album by his new band, Johns pointed out that if there was no producer other than the band, Johns would end up essentially being the producer, and so he wanted production credit and a percentage, as was standard. As he said later, I went to see Peter in Oxford Street and said I needed to get an agreement, and he said no problem. We agreed a percentage of the retail price, which was normal, and we shook hands. I wouldn't normally have gone into the studio without a contract, but because I'd known Jimmy and John Paul since we were virtually kids, it never entered my mind that there would be anything amiss. According to Johns, the production was split, with Page and Jones doing the arrangements while Johns took care of the sonic side of things. But Page was the sole credited producer on the finished album, and Johns would never work with Page again, though Johns' brother Andy engineered several subsequent Led Zeppelin albums. In these sessions, Johns accidentally discovered a new technique for recording drums, which he would make a trademark of his work in later years. He had moved one of the mics he usually used for recording drums to record a guitar overdub on one track, and when he put the mic back, he forgot to put it back on the same track as the other drums. When he listened back to the next song recorded, he realised that for the first time he had recorded drums in stereo, and that it made them sound much bigger than his previous technique of just giving one track to the drums. He rearranged the mics so both the floor tom and snare mic were now pointing at the snare, but from opposite directions equidistant from it, and panned the tracks half left and half right rather than have everything in the centre. The result was a bigger drum sound than he had ever achieved before, though it's also the case that Bonham was a louder player than most. It's worth noting as well that Jimmy Page's solo production credit, as well as erasing John's contributions, also erased those of the other band members, particularly Jones, who everyone involved claims had a far bigger hand in the arrangements than he ever got credit for, possibly more so than Page. Indeed, the first Led Zeppelin album is a fascinating example of how credits don't always tell the full story about who did what, and also of how there's a continuum from totally original through totally plagiarised, with songs falling everywhere on that continuum. The album was made up of the set they'd been performing live, and so many of the songs evolved from jams on cover versions, and sometimes the band didn't do a wonderful job of erasing their origins. Of the nine tracks on the album, only two of the tracks now have the same songwriting credits on current issues that they had in the beginning, and one of those two arguably shouldn't. So let's go through the album track by track and look at where they drew from. The album opens with Good Times Bad Times, a song that is part of the originality end of our continuum. The track was originally credited to Paige, Jones and Bonham, but more recent releases have Plant credited as a writer as well. Plant was originally not given any songwriting credits on the album at all, supposedly because he was still under contract to CBS, the label he'd recorded his singles for. That makes little sense to me, because that contract would have covered him as a singer, not a songwriter, and in which case it would surely be more important not to credit him for his vocals. But maybe he also had a publishing contract with them as part of the deal. Either way, Plant's name has now been added to five of the songs. The song was primarily a collaboration between Page, who wrote the chorus, and Jones who came up with the riff on a Hammond organ. The song is a totally original one, though even the most original of songs has influences from other people. In this case, Bonham's drum part is inspired by a much simpler part that Carmen Apice played on the Vanilla Fudges cover version of Ticket to Maid. And according to Apice, one of Led Zeppelin also told him that Jones' riff was inspired by Tim Bogut's bass playing on the same track. Though this seems unlikely to me, because, as I've said, Jones was almost completely ignorant of heavy rock music at the time. The next song, Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, was miscredited. But the fault was, for once, not the band. We heard Joan Byers' version of Babe I'm Gonna Leave You earlier. That song was written by Anne Vreden, a minor folk singer in 1958. And she performed it on various college radio stations and so on. The name I'm gonna leave you Tell you when I'm gonna leave you When that old summer comes Summer comes a-rolling Summer comes a-long That old highway... Freedan's friend Janet Smith heard the song and started playing it herself. And then Joan Baez heard Smith version on local radio and started performing it Baez didn realise that Smith was performing a song he was right as she knew and so on Byers 1962 live album the first time the song was recorded for release, it was credited to traditional, arranged by Joan Byers. Byers was later informed that the song was by Breeden, and corrected the credit when she put out a songbook. And so, for example, when the association recorded their version in 1965, they gave Breeden the credit. Thank you. But Page had learned the song from a copy of Baez's album, which said it was a traditional song. And so his radical reworking of the song was initially credited to traditional, arranged Page, though Planters always claimed that it was him rather than Page who came up with the guitar figure, though in this case I tend to believe Page has claimed that it was his work. I said, baby You know I'm gonna leave you Leave you when the summer comes along Leave you when the summer comes along Unlike with several of the songs we're going to look at, this was an honest mistake and dealt with appropriately. it remained unnoticed until the late 80s when Smith's son was listening to the album and his mother noticed that her friend's song was on it. Breeden got in touch with the group and as it was fairly radically reworked the credit on Led Zeppelin's version was amended to make her and Paige co-writers and amended again later when Plant's name was added to the song and Breeden was given a lump sum in back royalties. The next song on the album is You Shook Me a cover of a blues standard. You shook me all night long You know you shook me baby You shook me all night long That song had started out as Blue Guitar, an instrumental by Earl Hooker. Leonard Chess, the owner of Chess Records, then bought the rights to that track from the label it was released on, and had Muddy Waters overed up vocals on Hooker's backing track. Willie Dixon wrote the new lyrics, and Dixon was given sole songwriting credit on Waters as single, despite the music being the exact same track that had been released with Hooker as the credited composer. Oh, you know you shook me, baby You shook me all night long You know you shook me, baby The song was a favourite of Jeff Beck, and Beck copied the intro for the Yardbirds B-side, Steeled Blues, an instrumental credited to Beck and Keith Ralph, though the song diverges after that point. And as we heard last time, the Jeff Beck group recorded a version of You Shook Me for their Truth album, with Rod Stewart on vocals and featuring John Paul Jones on keyboards. All night long, yes you did. You know that you shook me here. You shook me all night long. When Beck found out that Led Zeppelin had covered the song on their album, he apparently cried with fury. Page always claimed that he hadn't known that Beck had recorded a version, but that seems vanishingly unlikely, given that Jones played on the track, Beck shared a marriage with the group, and the Jeff Beck group were explicitly a band that Led Zeppelin were modelling themselves on. Led Zeppelin's version was appropriately credited to Dixon, although J.B. Lenoir's name has since been added to the credits, as it has on the original. Lenoir was another blues singer who somehow got added to the credits even though nobody seems clear on what, if anything, he contributed. The next track up is Dazed and Confused. We heard last time how Jimmy Page and Jim McCarty had heard Jake Holmes play as original in New York and run out and bought copies of his album. I'm dazed and confused As it stays, it goes Am I being choosed? Well, I'd just like to know Give me a clue as to where I am at and how the song had then become a highlight of the R-Birds live show for the last few months of the group's existence. I just want to know Give me a clue as to where I am at I feel like a mouse and you act like a cat The Yardbirds version, when live versions have been given archival releases, has always had the songwriting properly credited to Holmes. The new Yardbirds had continued to include Dazed and Confused in their set, in largely the same arrangement that the Yardbirds had performed, and when the group recorded their album they included it. By this point, Page had rewritten the lyrics slightly, making them notably misogynist in a way Holmes' original lyrics hadn't been. Been dazed and confused for so long, it's not true Won't let a woman ever bargain for you Lots of people talking, few of them know Soul of a woman was created for love When the album came out, the credit read just Jimmy Page, and it remained that way until 2010. According to Holmes, when he first heard what Led Zeppelin had done, he was under the impression that the law said that copying had to be exact, words and music, and if someone plagiarised your work but altered it, you weren't entitled to credit. Later, he realised that was not the case, but said, I don't want Page to give me full credit for this song. He took it and put it in a direction that I would never have taken it, and it became very successful, so why should I complain? But give me at least half credit on it. it's probably more difficult to wrench that song away from him than it would be any other song and I have tried you know I've written letters saying Jesus man you don't have to give it all to me keep half keep two thirds just give me credit for having originated it that's the sad part about it I don't even think it has to do with money it's not like he needs it it totally has to do with how intimately he's been connected to it over all these years. Paige, over those same years, would completely deny that the song was anything other than original, saying in an interview in 1990, I'd rather not get into it because I don't know all the circumstances. What's he got? The riff or whatever? Because Robert wrote some of the lyrics for that on the album, but he was only listening to We extended it from the one that we were playing with the Yardbirds. I haven't heard Jake Holmes, so I don't know what it's all about anyway. Usually my riffs are pretty damn original. It's notable that when confronted over plagiarism, no matter what the song, Page always blames Plant, even when, as in this case, Plant had no songwriting credit. Eventually, in 2010, Holmes took Page to court and got the fair credit he wanted. The credit for Led Zeppelin's version of the song now reads Jimmy Page, inspired by Jake Holmes, and he gets a chunk of the money. Notably, though, that wasn't the end of his legal battles. Recently, the film Becoming Led Zeppelin included the Yardbirds version of the song, with Holmes' original lyrics, but still crediting Page as writer and without Holmes' permission. Holmes took Page, the song's publishers, and the filmmakers to court, and a settlement was reached in August this year. Side two of the album opened with Your Time Is Gonna Come, another song which seems to be actually original, apart from a few blues-floating lyrics that can't really be attributed to any one writer. hurting that's all you seem to do messing around every guy in town putting me down for thinking I'm someone new always the same playing your game drive me insane trouble's gonna come to you Oddly, on the original release, while most of the other claimed originals were credited to Page, Jones and Bonham, this one was credited only to Page and Jones, though Plant was later added to the credits. That track became the first Led Zeppelin original ever to get covered. The pop singer Sandy Shaw, given the chance to produce an album for herself for the first time, chose to record an album of covers of hip artists like The Loving Spoonful, Dr. John the Night Tripper and The Rolling Stones. Among those tracks was her version of Your Time Is Gonna Come. Next up, after a crossfade, was Black Mountainside, an acoustic instrumental performed by Page on Guitar and Tabla player Viram Jasani, with none of the rest of the band on it. The songwriting credit on that one was solely to Jimmy Page, which was a bit of a sore spot to Bert Janch, who a couple of years earlier had recorded this arrangement of the traditional folk song, Black Waterside. As the original melody was a traditional one, though Janch's arrangement of it for the guitar was very much his own work, Janch's publishers decided it wasn't worth fighting over. Janch would later say, The thing I've noticed about Jimmy whenever we meet now is that he can never look me in the eye. Well, he ripped me off, didn't he? Or, let's just say he learned from me. I wouldn't want to sound impolite. The next song on the album, Communication Breakdown, supposedly evolved on stage from a version of Eddie Cochran's song Nervous Breakdown. However, this is one case where the resemblance is very, very distant. I can hear very little connection between the Cochran song. and the Led Zeppelin one. I Can't Quit You Baby was written by Willie Dixon and first recorded by Otis Rush in 1956 with Dixon on bass. Well, you know I can't quit you, babe But I got to put you down for a while This was one of two acknowledged covers on the album, both of them credited to Willie Dixon. Unlike future Dixon credits on Vlad Zeppelin albums, this one was properly acknowledged at the time. I said I can't quit you, baby. And the final track on the album, How Many More Times, is a patchwork of a few older songs. How many more times Treating me the way you wanna do Credited at the time to Paige, Bonham and Jones, with Plant later added to the writing credits, the principal sources for the song are two Howling Wolf tracks, both recorded in 1951. The better known of them is How Many More Years. How many more, yeah, if I've got to let your dog be around? How many more, yeah, if I've got to let your dog be around? I'd have so rather be dead, sleep and sleep, sleep in the ground. But there's a closer relationship to No Place to Go, which has a more direct lyrical resemblance and which has a very similar riff to How Many More Times. Again, please note that whenever he's pressed about resemblances between Led Zeppelin originals and older records, Page always tries to claim that the riffs are his work in original, and it's only Plant's lyrics that are ripped off. but while Plant did have a penchant for plagiarising old blues lyrics, Page was more than happy to take musical ideas from the same records. There were ideas taken from other songs too. Plant quotes a couple of his own old Alexis Corner collaborations, and there's also this section. How I got my faith Ain't no teacher Ain't no teacher Which is based on The Hunter, a song originally recorded by Albert King for Stax and written by Booker T and the MGs and Carl Wells. They call me the hunter That's my name A pretty woman like you Is my only game I bought me a love girl Just the other day And I aimed To aim And also referencing Mr Pitiful, another Stacks record by Otis Redding, co-written by Redding and Steve Cropper of the MGs. The sessions for the album only lasted nine days, and were productive enough that they actually recorded two more tracks, unreleased until decades later. A rewrite of the Burt Burns song, Baby Come On Home, recorded as a tribute to Burns, who had been a friend of Paige's, and a song called Sugar Mama, a rewrite of Happening Ten Years' Time Ago, with blues lyrics, credited to Paige and Plant. This is not the same as the song Sugar Mama and PJ Proby's Three Week Hero album, though the title of that one might hypothetically have inspired the Led Zeppelin version. That Page and Plank credit would become more common from that point on. Most of the band's originals from their second album forward were credited that way, cutting Bonham and Jones out of the songwriting credits. Jones later said, In all honesty, I'd say that I probably should have paid much more attention to the writing credits in the earlier days of Zeppelin. In those days I'd just say, Well, I wrote that but it's part of the arrangement, or something like that, and I'd just let it go, not realising at the time that that part of the arrangement had more to do with the writing than just arranging something. I always thought that John Bonham's contribution was much more than he ever received credit for. In fact, I know it was. He also said, Zeppelin was really a partnership between four people, and sometimes when you see songs with Page Plant and everything, it makes it seem like it was a Lennon-McCartney situation where they wrote everything and John and I just kind of learned the songs that Jimmy and Robert taught to us. That's so far from the truth, it's ridiculous. However, whatever the truth was as to who wrote or produced what, at this point Jimmy Page's word was law. This was partly because at this stage Peter Grant was loyal not to the group as a group, but to Jimmy Page as an individual. And partly because Page had financed everything. Because Page didn't want to spend much money, he had the group so well rehearsed before going into the studio that the entire cost of the album was only £1,782, including the artwork, a photo of the Hindenburg disaster on the front, and a photo of the four band members on the back. The back photo was taken by Chris Dreher, one of the first commissions he got in his new career as a photographer. Glyn Johns was immensely proud of the results and excitedly played the tracks for the other musicians he was working with at the time, but both Mick Jagger and George Harrison told him that they simply didn't get what he was so excited about and weren't at all impressed. The megastars of the 60s were not prepared for the 70s first supergroup The group started playing clubs around the UK but went down very very badly especially at first when they were still using the new Yardbirds name. The group would eventually become big in the UK but they would never have the same kind of success over here as they would have in the US where they concentrated their efforts. Grant flew to the US and started doing the rounds of the record industry. Initially he had a handshake deal with Mo Austin at Warner Brothers for the North American rights to the band, and with Chris Blackwell at Ireland for the rest of the world. For what was a reasonable amount of money, but then fate stepped in. And by fate, I mean Dusty Springfield. Dusty Springfield was in the US recording the Dusty in Memphis album, and she told the album's co-producer, Jerry Wexler, about the new group she'd heard that John Paul Jones was forming with Jimmy Page. Jones had been the bass player and arranger on a lot of Springfield's records, some of which had also featured Page on guitar, and she insisted that Wexler should sign this new supergroup who were bound to be the best thing around. Wexler knew of Page by reputation and had even met him when Page had visited the US and hung out with his old friend Bert Burns. Wexler had no interest in rock music at all. He loved blues, soul and jazz but Atlantic had been making a great deal of money by signing artists like the Vanilla Fudge and Cream to their Atko subsidiary set up for pop music. Most of these acts had been signed by Ahmet Ertegun who had decided that white guitar groups were the wave of the future, but Wexler saw this as his chance to get another of those acts signed up. He agreed to sign Led Zeppelin without having heard a note of the band's music, purely on the basis of Dusty Springfield's enthusiasm for Jones and Page's reputation. They got an advance of more than $200,000, a huge sum in those days, especially for a totally unknown band, and total sale for every release. Atlantic had no right to change a note of the music, to release anything that Zeppelin didn't approve, or twelter the artwork, and Page had one more concession he wanted. He insisted that the albums not be released on Atco, the white pop label, but on Atlantic Proper, the label that Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin were released on. Peter Grant then decided to pay a visit to Clive Davis at Columbia for a chat. Davis assumed that Led Zeppelin would be recording on Columbia because the Yardbirds had been signed to the label. Grant had a long chat with Davis, and Davis eventually said, So are we going to talk about Jimmy Page? And Grant responded Oh, he's already signed with Atlantic. Davis hadn't realised that when Page had joined the Yardbirds he hadn't been added to any of their contracts and he was a free agent. Grant had just wanted to wind Davis up. It was announced to the press that the group had been paid the highest advance ever paid to a new group. A statement that might even have been true. And this simultaneously intrigued a lot of people who wanted to see what this new band was like, and annoyed the underground music press. And at this point, magazines like Rolling Stone were still seen as part of the underground counterculture, rather than the oppressive mainstream force they later became. The group were the worst thing you could be in the eyes of people like Rolling Stone. They were sellouts, all hype, in it for the money rather than the art. They were greedy breadheads. And indeed they were, in that they actually wanted to get paid what they thought they were worth. In a very short time, in fact, Led Zeppelin would revolutionise the economics of touring for big bands. Because once they were successful, Peter Grant would start demanding that rather than a flat fee, promoters would pay the band 90% of the door receipts, something that the other big bands would copy once they saw it was possible. Led Zeppelin were the first band to make it possible to become really rich from live performance. But that was to come in the future. For now, the group were going to start, if not at the bottom, then at least at the bottom of the bill. Grant put together a list of venues that he wanted the group to play before the album came out in January 1969. Mostly the same venues that Frank Barcelona at Premier Talent booked. The film or the Grandy Ballroom and so on. From Boxing Day 1968 through to the middle of February 1969, Led Zeppelin toured these venues, usually as the support for the Vanilla Fudge, sometimes for other bands like Iron Butterfly or Country Joe and the Fish. By the end of that period, the headliners started to refuse to come on after Led Zeppelin. By the time they got to the Boston Tea Party, they ended up playing 12 encores, running out of songs to do and just covering whatever old Elvis and Little Richard songs all of them knew. They lost money on that initial tour. Page was still financing things, though the advance from Atlantic helped a lot and became the first large sums of money that Plant or Bonham had ever seen. But the point was to make themselves known as the band to see in the US. While they were still stuck playing pubs and student unions in the UK, they were headliners and major venues in the US within a month of their first album being released. The album was commercially successful, making the top ten, but it fared less well with the critics. John Mendelsohn's review in Rolling Stone ended, In their willingness to waste their considerable talent on unworthy material, the Zeppelin has produced an album which is sadly reminiscent of truth. Like the Beck Group, they are also perfectly willing to make themselves a two, or, more accurately, one-and-a-half, man show. It would seem that, if they're to help fill the void created by the demise of Cream, they will have to find a producer, and editor, and some material worthy of their collective attention. Led Zeppelin would have a famously adversarial relationship with the music press for their entire careers, largely as a result of these initial bad reviews. Atlantic wanted a follow-up, and quick, and the group needed to tour the US more. In a brief break between their first and second US tours, they went into the studio again and started work on the album, most of which would be cut on the road. We won't look at every track on the second album, titled Led Zeppelin II, the way we did the first, but it's worth talking about some of the highlights, and the first track cut for the album was one of the most famous tracks of the group cut and another one with disputed credits. I'm gonna give you my love I wanna hold out a love The song was based around a riff that Paige had come up with and was originally credited to the four band members. Paige later explained, I came up with the guitar riff for Whole Lotta Love in the summer of 68 on my houseboat along the Thames in Pangborn, England. I suppose my early love for big intros by rockabilly guitarists was an inspiration, but as soon as I developed the riff, I knew it was strong enough to drive the entire song, not just open it. When I played the riff for the band in my living room several weeks later during rehearsals for our first album the excitement was immediate and collective. We felt the riff was addictive like a forbidden thing. The riff is Pager's composition but it bears a passing resemblance to Earl Hooker's guitar part on Mundy Waters' You Need Love written by Willie Dixon and Robert Plant's lyrics owe much more than a little to that song. And I got funny Baby, you look so Oh, sweet and cunning Baby, way down inside Woman, you need love Woman, you need love You got to have some love I'm gonna give you some love I know you need love Although while he was familiar with that track, Plant was probably not actually directly copying the original. Pages Old Immediate Records colleagues, the Small Faces, who were one of Plant's favourite bands, had recorded their own take on the song, titled You Need Loving, and credited to Steve Marriott and Monty Lane. Compare Plant singing when the instruments drop out. Way down inside Woman you need With Steve Marriott on You Need Loving. Woman, you need a lot of joy. When Willie Dixon discovered the resemblance in 1985, he sued, and now the song is credited to the four members of Led Zeppelin and Dixon, though according to Dixon's family he never thought he got enough compensation. As well as the famous riff, there was an extended instrumental section of the song, on which Page plays the theremin, an idea he had got from Randy California, the guitarist from Spirit, who had played on the same bill with the group. As we'll see in a future episode, episode, Paige may have got some other ideas from Mandy California too. The track was released as a single in most countries, and became a US top 10 hit. The single was the full-length track, but a promo version was also sent out to radio stations with most of the theremin stuff cut out. However, Peter Grant's rule about not releasing singles in the UK applied, and it was never released here. Sensing a gap in the market, Mickey Most released an instrumental version by a group of studio musicians he had put together, CCS, led by Plant's old collaborator Alexis Corner. Their version made the top 20, and started a short run of hit singles for the group, and was also used for many years as the theme tune for Top of the Pops, making it almost certainly the most heard version of any Led Zeppelin song, at least in the UK. I've seen some sources saying that the version used on Top of the Pops was a sound-alike remake by most of the same musicians, recording as the Top of the Pops Orchestra, to avoid the BBC having to pay royalties to make you most slable. A week after recording the basic track for Whole Lotta Love, the group went on their next US tour and the rest of the album was recorded, as Plant later put it, on the run between hotel rooms and the GTOs. The GTOs being a famous band of LA-based groupies, several of whom took a shine to the members of the band. It's this second US tour that really gave the band a reputation for excess that they would keep for the rest of their career. As I've said from the very start, this podcast is about the music first and foremost, and I only talk about the more unsavoury aspects of musicians' behaviour when they are important parts of their history, because sadly it would be much, much easier to list the male rock stars of this period who did not behave in frankly monstrous ways than to list those who did. On the other hand, the appalling behaviour of Page and Bonham particularly has become part of Led Zeppelin's history in a way that would make it irresponsible of me not to cover it. While people talk about the band having a bad reputation. If you look at the stories, whenever an individual or individuals are named, it's always some combination of Jimmy Page, John Bonham and the tour manager Richard Cole. While no doubt both Plant and Jones got up to their share of the kind of behaviour that all rock stars in their 20s do, and they were certainly at least aware of their bandmates' behaviour, and so complicit in that respect, the two only rarely get named as doing anything specific. Indeed, Jones seemed to be separate from the others to an extent, sometimes travelling on his own, and barely ever gets mentioned as anything other than a gentleman. Within a few years, Jimmy Page's admiration for the occultist Alistair Crowley would lead to a rumour among the groupie population of America that Led Zeppelin had sold their soul to the devil in order to become rock stars. All that is, except John Paul Jones, who had refused to sign the contract. I will be covering Led Zeppelin more in the future, and those episodes will cover the period where most of their most notorious acts took place and I will also shortly be doing an episode which will focus very specifically on groupie culture and the way musicians treated groupies so I'm not going to deal with that too much in this episode but it's worth noting that even this early on both Bonham and Page were indulging in behaviour that most people would find revolting. Some of these behaviours like an incident involving Bonham, Richard Cole some members of the vanilla fudge a groupie and a freshly caught fish reports differ on whether it was a mud shark or a red snapper, were consensual, at least on the part of the humans involved, the fish probably had other opinions, and passed into rock legend as humorous stories getting exaggerated along the way. Frank Zappa even recorded a song called The Mud Shark after the vanilla fudge told him about their exploits. But sadly, a lot of what went on was not consensual. The main source for a lot of the stories is Richard Cole, who was not the most trustworthy of narrators. He self-confessedly destroyed his brain with drugs and alcohol during the 70s and did not have a reliable memory. And the living members of Led Zeppelin have denied some of the allegations he made. Plant, who comes off from Cole's stories far better than Page and Bonham, said, These stories would filter out from girls who'd supposedly been in my room when in fact they'd been in his. While Page said of Cole's autobiography, I'm so mad about it that I can't even bring myself to read the whole thing. The two bits that I have read are so ridiculously false that I'm sure if I read the rest I'd be able to sue Cole and the publishers, but it would be so painful to read that it wouldn't be worth it. So, between my own desire not to get sued, the unreliability of the sources, and a natural distaste for talking about such things, I'm not going to go into much in the way of detail about what went on on that tour, other than to say that Jimmy Page has been documented in multiple sources as having a fed election at this time for girls who were significantly under the age of consent, while Ellen Sander a journalist for Life magazine touring with the group to write an article on them ended up not writing her article because on the last day of the tour John Bonham sexually assaulted her and it was only the intervention of Peter Grant that stopped him from raping her but again the worst was yet to come and will be covered in future episodes and this is a podcast about the music first and foremost and it was on that same tour that they recorded most of Led Zeppelin 2 the album that turned them from a big band into the biggest band. Songs like The Lemon Song, I should have quit here Long time again Long time again I would have been here my children They'll find me still alone Which was credited to the four members of the band until Howlin' Wolf pointed out the similarity to his own song, Killing Floor. I should have quit you A long time ago I should have quit you, baby A long time ago At which point his name was added as co-writer. There was also Bring It On Home. I'm gonna bring it home to you I've got my dick, I've got that load Which was credited to the four band members, at least till the 80s, when Willie Dixon noticed that it bore more than a little resemblance to a song he'd written for Sonny Boy Williamson. Vixen now has the songwriting credit for that track. and there was Moby Dick. That started out as a variation of Bobby Parker's Watch Your Step, the same song that the Beatles had lifted for I Feel Fine. But in that case, the track became basically just an excuse for a drum solo for Bonham, a solo that was a few minutes long on the record but could sometimes stretch to half an hour or more on stage. Much of the rest of the album, though, was original material, with Plant in particular stepping up as a lyricist, writing songs about his wife, about his conflicted feelings for his sister-in-law and about Hobbits sometimes all in the same song. While Led Zeppelin 1 had been a continuum of songs modelled on other people's records to varying degrees ranging from passing inspiration to outright plagiarism the songs on Led Zeppelin 2 an album that to this day is often considered the group's masterpiece fall more into a bimodal distribution. There are a handful of songs that are just straight lifts from someone else's record and a handful that are total originals. The album achieved many things. It established Page and Plant as a songwriting team, at least on the songs they actually wrote. It established Page as the producer. Where the first album had been recorded with Glyn Johns as the only engineer, this album had four different engineers in six different studios. Page was going to make sure that nobody was going to be able to take sole credit for the band's sound except him, and it went to number one on pretty much every album chart worldwide, knocking the Beatles' final album, Abbey Road, off the number one slot at the beginning of 1970. The 60s were over and there was a new group at the top. And they had managed to do something that was both artistically satisfying and incredibly lucrative. But at the end of 1969, the group were wealthy, famous and already burned out. How they recovered from that burnout and what they did with their stardom is a story that will wait for another time. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Jim's Blues by PJ Proby. Visit patreon.com slash andrewhickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favourite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500songs.com That's 500, the numbers, songs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. but more importantly tell just one person that you liked this podcast word of mouth more than any other form of promotion is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves thank you very much for listening