Led Zeppelin All the Songs

THE AIRSHIP TAKES FLIGHT

Led Zeppelin rose from the burning embers of the Yardbirds in autumn 1968. At the end of March, Keith Relf (vocals, guitar), Jimmy Page (guitar), Chris Dreja (bass), and Jim McCarty (drums) embarked on a seventh US tour: twenty-five concerts from March 28 (Schenectady, New York) to June 5 (Montgomery, Alabama). As various members of the group were already developing other projects, this was to be the last. “It was in Los Angeles that the Yardbirds—Jim and Keith—decided to call it a day and pursue a new musical direction,” remembers Jimmy Page, before adding, curiously, “The day before their announcement I visited a palmist who told me that I was soon to make a decision that would change my life.”¹

From the Yardbirds to Led Zeppelin

In 1968, while the baby boomers were dreaming of free love, of changing the world and ditching the rulebook, the music scene was also undergoing a revolution. The previous year had seen rock music radically transformed by the Beatles with their concept album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by Pink Floyd with The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, by the Doors with their eponymous first album, by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention with Absolutely Free, by the Jimi Hendrix Experience with Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love, and by Cream with Disraeli Gears. A year later, following the emergence of the first two power trios of the rock era—the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream—two more groups started to draw attention to themselves by pumping up the decibels: Iron Butterfly, with the title track and album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (which sold some eight million copies in 1968 alone!) and Vanilla Fudge, whose eponymous debut album (1967) included impassioned covers of “Ticket to Ride” and “Eleanor Rigby” (by Lennon/McCartney), “People Get Ready” (by Curtis Mayfield), and “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” (by the Motown trio Holland-Dozier-Holland). It was not long since Jeff Beck had also broken free. Jimmy Page’s former Yardbirds colleague had formed the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart (lead vocals), Ron Wood (bass), and Micky Waller (drums), recording the superb album Truth (between May 1966 and May 1968, released in August 1968) which includes “Beck’s Bolero,” written mainly by… Jimmy Page.

This hard or heavy rock, often tinged with psychedelia, is the very route Jimmy Page was determined to go down. The departure of Keith Relf and Jim McCarty from the Yardbirds provided Page with an unexpected opportunity to do just that. For the moment, Page and Dreja obtained the right to carry on the adventure under the Yardbirds name, but felt duty bound to honor the band’s existing commitments. At the same time, the guitarist started drawing up a list of musicians with whom he wanted to play. He hoped to convince the drummer B. J. Wilson—with whom he had contributed to Joe Cocker’s cover of “With a Little Help from My Friends” (released as a single in October 1968)—to join him in the new venture, but Wilson was now a member of Procol Harum, a band that had been at the forefront of symphonic rock since “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and was going from strength to strength. Page therefore received a polite refusal from the drummer…

As for the lead singer, Page initially thought of Steve Marriott, whose work as front man of the Small Faces he rated highly, and then Terry Reid, of whom he had great memories from September 1966, when Peter Jay and the New Jaywalkers, of which Reid was a member, supported the Rolling Stones on tour alongside the Yardbirds. However, Terry Reid had to turn down the offer for contractual reasons, having signed with Mickie Most as a solo artist and begun recording his first album (Bang, Bang You’re Terry Reid). Reid suggested that Jimmy Page contact another singer he admired, one Robert Plant, then a member of a Birmingham-based band by the name of Obbstweedle. On July 20, 1968, Page, Dreja, and Peter Grant (manager of the Yardbirds and future manager of Led Zeppelin) traveled to Walsall College (in the West Midlands) to see the band in concert and were won over. A few days later, Jimmy Page invited Robert Plant to his riverside home in Pangbourne (Berkshire) on the Thames, and told him of his plans to form a new group. “I was taken aback,” explains Plant to Paul Rees. “I mean, the Yardbirds had cut some serious shapes at one point and obviously they were working in America. Then I met Jimmy and he was so charismatic. His contacts were phenomenal.”²

Moreover, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant shared the same musical tastes, ranging from the psychedelic folk rock of the Incredible String Band to the urban blues of Muddy Waters and the rock ’n’ roll of Chuck Berry. Trust developed rapidly between the two men, forming the basis for a solid friendship. When Page told Plant that he was still looking for a drummer (following another refusal, this time from Rolf Harris, who was committed to a tour of West Germany, and unsuccessful approaches to Aynsley Dunbar, Mitch Mitchell, and Bobby Graham), Plant had no hesitation in suggesting John Bonham, with whom he had shared a short-lived adventure in the blues-rock band Crawling King Snakes and then Band of Joy. John Bonham was currently in the Tim Rose band. “I went to see him play in London, then I knew immediately there was no one else,”¹ explains Jimmy Page.

The last piece of the puzzle was the bassist. During the Yardbirds’ final tour, to the United States, Chris Dreja had decided to abandon music to become a rock photographer. John Paul Jones, whom Page had known for several years, having played alongside him on a number of recordings when they were both session musicians, got wind of the guitarist’s plans and put himself forward.

In autumn 1968, the four musicians plus Peter Grant formed Superhype Music Inc. in order to ensure their total artistic freedom (that is to say freedom from hypothetical producers). The initial rehearsals began on August 19 in a room above a record shop on Gerrard Street in London’s Soho district. “It was wall to wall amplifiers, terrible, all old,” recalls John Paul Jones. “Robert had heard I was a session man, and he was wondering what was going to turn up—some old bloke with a pipe? So Jimmy said, ‘Well, we’re all here, what are we going to play?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. What do you know?’ And Jimmy said, ‘Do you know “Train Kept A-Rollin’”?’ I told him no. And he said, ‘It’s easy, just G to A.’ He counted it out, and the room just exploded. And we said, ‘Right, we’re on, this is it, this is going to work!!!’”³

It was as the New Yardbirds that the four musicians set off on a ten-date tour of Scandinavia (six other dates having been canceled) between September 7 (Gladsaxe, Denmark) and 15 (Gothenburg, Sweden), 1968. This was the last tour the Yardbirds had signed up for before Keith Relf and Jim McCarty decided to bail out. The set list comprised ten numbers: “Train Kept A-Rollin’,” “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” “Dazed and Confused,” “White Summer,” “Communication Breakdown,” “For Your Love,” “You Shook Me,” “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” “As Long as I Have You,” and “How Many More Times.” Three more gigs had been scheduled for when they got back home: at the Mayfair in Newcastle (October 4), the Marquee in London (October 18), and Liverpool University (October 19). It was not until October 25, at the University of Surrey in Guildford, that the group gave its first show—the first of many—as Led Zeppelin.

Jimmy Page, the Magician of Epsom

By the time the members of the New Yardbirds came to pool their talents and enthusiasm, a momentous decision that would influence the rest of their lives, the four musicians had already played a part in the explosion of British rock music that had occurred in the early sixties.

James “Jimmy” Patrick Page was born on January 9, 1944, in the West London suburb of Heston. He was the only son of James Page, a human resources manager, and Patricia Elizabeth Gaffikin (of Irish background), a medical secretary. After moving a number of times, the Page family ended up at 34 Miles Road in Epsom. As if prophetically, “a guitar had been left at the house by a previous owner,”¹ recalls the future member of Led Zeppelin. To start with, Jimmy paid little attention to it, but before long, rock ’n’ roll entered his life and this would change. “It was sitting around our living room for weeks and weeks,” he writes. “I wasn’t interested. Then I heard a couple of records that really turned me on, the main one being Elvis’s ‘Baby Let’s Play House,’ and I wanted to play it. I wanted to know what it was all about.”⁴ Then a schoolmate named Rod Wyatt played him a song by Lonnie Donegan, the father of skiffle. The thirteen-year-old Jimmy Page told his friend he had a guitar at home and Wyatt replied, “Well, bring it to school and I’ll show you how to tune it and play a few chords.”⁴

This first six-string was a Spanish guitar of unidentified make with steel strings. At that time the US pioneers of rock ’n’ roll ruled the airwaves, and before long Jimmy’s father, impressed with the progress his son was making, presented his son with an acoustic Hofner President Sunburst. Soon after that Jimmy had his first taste of an electric, specifically a Resonet Grazioso Futurama, a replica of the legendary Fender Stratocaster. He acquired guitar after guitar throughout his years of apprenticeship, one instrument that stands out being a Gretsch Chet Atkins Country Gentleman.

The teenager from Epsom had caught the bug. In 1960 he accompanied the English Beat poet Royston Ellis on guitar during a reading at the Mermaid Theatre in London. He then joined a local band, the Paramounts, and a few months later Red E. Lewis and the Red Caps, soon to be renamed Neil Christian and the Crusaders by their manager, Christopher Tidmarsh (Neil Christian being the name Tidmarsh adopted after deciding to replace the Red Caps’ singer himself). The band specialized in covers of hits by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

It was with this group, which worked the clubs of London and the south of England, that Jimmy Page, at just seventeen years of age, started to earn a reputation for himself as a guitarist, thanks not least to the single “A Little Bit of Someone Else”/“Get a Load of This,” released in July 1963. From Liverpool the Beatles had already kicked off the British rock revolution, and the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Animals were now shaking good old Britannia to her foundations. While Beatlemania was at its height, Jimmy transformed the family living room into a rehearsal room, recording studio, and meeting place for young musicians from Epsom, initially, and before long the London suburbs as well. Among them were the future guitar hero Jeff Beck, also born in 1944, and Glyn Johns, soon to become one of the most sought-after sound engineers in rock music. It was around the same time, albeit not in the family home but in a smoke-filled London venue, the Marquee, that Jimmy made the acquaintance of a certain Eric Clapton, then with the Roosters.

In 1963, at the urging of the very same Glyn Johns, Jimmy Page began working as a studio musician for three producers who were among the most famous on the rock scene: Shel Talmy, Mickie Most, and Andrew Loog Oldham. The list of performers and groups to whom he lent his musicality and skills as a virtuoso guitarist is indeed impressive. For the period January 1963 to September 1968 the names include Jet Harris and Tony Meehan (“Diamonds”), Lulu and the Luvvers (“Shout”/“Forget Me Baby”), the Rolling Stones (“Heart of Stone”), the American blues pianist Otis Spann (“Stirs Me Up”), Petula Clark (“Downtown”), the Who (“Bald Headed Woman,” the B-side of the single “I Can’t Explain”), the Kinks (“I’m a Lover Not a Fighter” and “I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain”), Donovan (“Sunshine Superman” and “The Hurdy Gurdy Man”), Nico (“The Last Mile”), David Bowie/The Manish Boys (“I Pity the Fool”), and Joe Cocker (“With a Little Help from My Friends”), and among French artists, Françoise Hardy (“Je n’attends plus personne”), Eddy Mitchell (“Si tu n’étais pas mon frère”), Johnny Hallyday (“À tout casser”), and Michel Polnareff (“La poupée qui fait non”). In 1966, in parallel with his work as a session musician, Jimmy Page agreed to join the Yardbirds—first of all as the bassist, alongside his friend Jeff Beck, and then as the guitarist—an offer he had previously declined in March 1965 when accepting would have meant stepping into Eric Clapton’s shoes. His first gig with the London-based group was at the Marquee in June. This was followed two months later by the first United States tour. After the Yardbirds came the New Yardbirds and finally Led Zeppelin.

Robert Plant, the Frenzied Singer of Black Country Blues

Robert Anthony Plant is a native of West Bromwich, a town not far from Birmingham in the British Midlands. He was born on August 20, 1948, to Annie Celia Plant (née Cain), a stay-at-home mother, and Robert Charles Plant, a civil engineer who had served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Robert Plant Sr. was a decent violinist who also nurtured a passion for soccer. And the singer’s paternal grandfather, another Robert, had made a name for himself in the town by starting a brass band.

Robert and his younger sister Alison were brought up in the Catholic faith at the heart of the Black Country, so-named because of the coal mines and steel works that contributed to the United Kingdom’s industrial development while making the region into the most polluted part of the country. The Plants belonged to the middle class. Taking full advantage of the economic policies of the Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan (whose slogan “You’ve never had it so good” was no lie), at the end of the fifties the family left West Bromwich for Hayley Green, a verdant suburb of Halesowen, some ten miles from Kidderminster, a town Robert would visit regularly. They lived in a redbrick house at 64 Causey Farm Road, not far from the Clent Hills, the inspiration for J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings.

If the teenage Robert Plant immersed himself in Tolkien’s heroic fantasy world and, more generally, the Celtic and Welsh legends in which the Midlands were steeped, he was also interested in the new sounds he heard on the radio: Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, and Eddie Cochran on the one hand, and Lonnie Donegan on the other. It was Elvis who made the biggest impression on him—to such an extent that he began to spend hours in front of his mirror mimicking the King’s moves. At the King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys in Stourbridge, he made friends with Gary Tolley, a fan of the same rock ’n’ roll singers, but with an even greater passion for blues pioneers such as Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and, especially, Sonny Boy Williamson II. While Britain was beginning to sway to the rhythm of the Beatles and groups that had emerged from the local Brumbeat scene, such as the Spencer Davis Group, Plant and Tolley began to explore the blues scene in Stourbridge and the surrounding area, notably the Swiss Café and the Seven Stars Blues Club, where Robert’s father regularly took him—despite Robert Sr.’s reservations about his son’s consuming passion. In fact, Robert’s parents had quite different hopes for him, and made him take up a traineeship as a certified accountant.

Robert got his real start in music with the Delta Blues Band, while at the same time jamming with other musicians, notably Chris Wood (who would later join Traffic), Andy Silvester, Stan Webb, Christine Perfect (soon to be McVie, of Fleetwood Mac), members of Sounds of Blue and future members of Chicken Shack. The guitarist of the Delta Blues Band, a certain Perry Foster, enthralled Plant with his eight-string guitar, on which he sounded every bit as good as Big Joe Williams. Showing little aptitude for numbers, Robert Plant left home at the age of sixteen and in 1964 began singing and playing harmonica with the Crawling King Snakes, a band from the neighboring town of Kidderminster whose drummer was one John Bonham. Taking their name from a blues number, the Crawling King Snakes had an ephemeral existence. In fact they lasted just long enough to support the Spencer Davis Group, Gene Vincent, and the Walker Brothers in concert, and for Bonham and Plant to become firm friends. In 1966, Plant joined the group Listen (initially called the Tennessee Teens), with whom he recorded the single “You Better Run” (a cover of the Young Rascals song), which was released by CBS in 1966 without the slightest glimmer of success. Two solo singles, “Our Song” (an adaptation of the Italian ballad “La Musica è finita”) and “Long Time Coming,” both released in 1967, also went largely unnoticed. In reality it was with Band of Joy—formed in 1966 before going through three different lineups, the last of which, in 1968, comprised Mick Strode (guitar), John Kelsey (keyboards), John Hill (bass), and John Bonham (drums)—that Robert Plant was able to launch his career, thanks mainly to the support of the influential DJ John Peel. After recording a demo at Regent Sound Studios in London (with covers of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” the traditional “Hey Joe,” and original compositions “Memory Lane” and “Adriatic Sea View”), the group broke up for good, leaving the future lead singer of Led Zeppelin high and dry. Plant nevertheless managed to form a duo with Alexis Korner, one of the fathers of British blues, before joining Obbstweedle, his final band before the decisive encounter with Jimmy Page and Peter Grant.

John Bonham: Drum Pyrotechnics

John Henry Bonham was born to Joan Isobel (née Sargent) and Jack Bonham on May 31, 1948. Although he entered the world in Redditch, Worcestershire, he spent his childhood in the neighboring town of Kidderminster, where his father was a carpenter. While so many British teenagers were growing up to the sound of the pioneers of rock ’n’ roll, Bonham preferred jazz, developing a boundless admiration for Sonny Payne (Harry James’s drummer, whom he had been taken to see, while still a child, by his father), Gene Krupa, Max Roach, and Buddy Rich. His ambition, then, was to become a drummer, and indeed he had been showing a special interest in percussion ever since he was five. Whatever he could find in the kitchen at home—and especially his mother’s cooking pots—helped him, little by little, to develop a good sense of rhythm… and to drive his parents to distraction. On his tenth birthday his mother gave him a snare drum, and then at fifteen his first, “prehistoric” (as he would later describe it), drum kit. John was clearly extremely talented. In 1964, after turning sixteen, he quit school in order to work with his father, but above all so that he could devote all his free time to the drums. Even at this tender age, his drumming was characterized by an uncommon power, which would later be combined with a formidable swing. This was the alchemy that would turn Bonzo, as he was later nicknamed, into one of the greatest of rock drummers. For the time being he played with the Blue Star Trio alongside Terry Beal (vocals, guitar, composition) and Mick Ellis (vocals, guitar), before moving to Terry Webb and the Spiders, and then the Senators, comprising Terry Beal, Trevor McGowan (vocals, guitar), Graham Dennis (vocals, guitar), and Bill Ford (vocals, bass). This third band was something of a milestone as they would record “She’s a Mod” (included on the compilation Brum Beat, released by Dial Records in 1964), at the Hollick & Taylor Studios in Birmingham, the first-ever recording by the future Led Zeppelin drummer. Other local bands that would contribute to Bonham’s apprenticeship in the Midlands include Pat Wayne and the Beachcombers later in 1964, the Nicky James Movement (with Roy Wood and Bev Bevan, later of the Move, and Mike Pinder, later of the Moody Blues) and Steve Brett and the Mavericks the following year, and Danny King & the Mayfair Set and A Way of Life (with future Fairport Convention member Dave Pegg) in 1966. By this time, John Bonham had married Pat Phillips (in 1965) and was living in a flat in Dudley, the newlyweds’ first marital home having been a trailer belonging to Bonham’s parents.

In 1967, Bonzo succeeded Nigel Knowles in the Crawling King Snakes. This band had Ian “Inky” Watts and Johnny Pasternak on guitar, Bruce “Maverick” Oakes on bass, and a young, blond-haired dandy from West Bromwich, otherwise known as Robert Plant, on lead vocals. A real bond developed between the singer and the drummer. And when Robert Plant formed, and was recruiting for, Band of Joy, John Bonham joined the group during its final incarnations in 1967–68, having briefly played in Locomotive and hooked up again with A Way of Life in the meantime. “In came this fantastic guitarist, Kevyn [Gammond], who’s also with Bronco now, and we hit it off well,” explains Plant. “We had a good bass-player and John Bonham came in on drums. It was debatable whether he’d join because it was a long way to go and pick him up and we didn’t know whether we would have the petrol money to get over to Redditch and back! We always laugh about that.”⁵

In June 1968, after Band of Joy split up, John Bonham was invited to drum for Tim Rose. The rest is rock ’n’ roll legend… the Country Club performance in front of an impressed Jimmy Page, the fifty or so telegrams sent by Robert Plant and Peter Grant offering him a place in the band—but ignored by the drummer, who had other offers from Joe Cocker and Chris Farlowe, and, eventually, Bonham’s decision to come along to an initial rehearsal in London. “It wasn’t a question of who had the best prospects, but […] which music was going to be right,” he explains. “When I first got offered the job, I thought the Yardbirds were finished, because in England they had been forgotten. Still I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got nothing anyway so anything is really better than nothing.’ I knew Jimmy was a good guitarist and that Robert was a good singer, so even if we didn’t have any success, at least it would be a pleasure to play in a good group… So I decided I liked their music better than Cocker’s or Farlowe’s.”³

John Paul Jones, Session Musician and Musical Director

The third musician to join Jimmy Page in the New Yardbirds was John Paul Jones, real name John Baldwin, born on January 3, 1946, into a family of musicians living in Sidcup, Kent. His mother was a singer and dancer and his father, Joe Baldwin, a pianist and big band arranger during the swing era (notably with Ambrose and His Orchestra), having previously accompanied silent movies on the piano in motion-picture theaters. John started to teach himself the piano at the age of six. “I was a choirmaster and organist at our local church at the age of 14. That’s how I earned the money to pay my first bass guitar,”⁶ he recalls.

Because his parents moved around a lot with their work, John was sent to a boarding school in Blackheath when he was just five, and then to senior school in Eltham Green. He wasn’t exactly a diligent student, by far preferring music to his lessons. His father wanted him to learn the saxophone, claiming that the instrument would open up a range of opportunities, but at the age of thirteen the teenager bought his first bass, a Dallas Tuxedo, convinced of the instrument’s potential. The solo played by bassist Phil Upchurch on the track “You Can’t Sit Down” (1961) came as a real revelation to the young John Baldwin and confirmed his intuition about the future of the electric bass. He soon joined various bands, notably one with which he got to play at US military bases, and also played in a piano-bass duo with his father, performing at local festivities and other miscellaneous occasions. His influences were as much classical (Rachmaninov) as blues (Big Bill Broonzy) and jazz (Charles Mingus). At the beginning of the sixties, having failed to get into the Royal College of Music in London, he abandoned his studies and started looking for work in London’s Soho. He soon made the acquaintance of the bassist Jet Harris, who, after quitting the Shadows, had formed Jet Harris and Tony Meehan with the drummer Tony Meehan (also ex-Shadows) and was having some nice hits, including “Diamonds,” with Jimmy Page on acoustic guitar, which topped the UK charts in 1963. For this recording, Harris played guitar, leaving the bass to John Baldwin. The band, which also included John McLaughlin on rhythm guitar, toured a great deal in the UK. It was presumably during one of the many concerts by the quartet that the young bassist first met Peter Grant—then driving a van for rock ’n’ roll trailblazer Gene Vincent.

The Jet Harris and Tony Meehan experience lasted for exactly eighteen months and helped to familiarize the young John Baldwin with the London music scene and the music business generally. Having changed his name to John Paul Jones—the idea of Rolling Stones manager and Immediate Records founder Andrew Loog Oldham, inspired by a poster for John Farrow’s 1959 movie John Paul Jones about a naval hero during the American Revolution—the bassist started working as a session musician and musical director/arranger for Oldham in 1964. That same year he recorded a debut single “Baja” (a Lee Hazlewood cover), which was coupled with an original composition, “A Foggy Day in Vietnam,” under his own name and released by Pye Records in April 1964. Before long, John Paul had become one of the most sought-after session musicians in the United Kingdom. Most prominently, he played alongside Jimmy Page on a number of Stones sessions (“Each and Every Day of the Year,” “We’re Wastin’ Time,” and “[Walkin’ thru the] Sleepy City,” on the 1975 album Metamorphosis), and also on P. P. Arnold’s “Angel of the Morning,” Nico’s “The Last Mile” (a song co-written by Jimmy Page and Andrew Loog Oldham), and Lionel Bart’s “Maggie May.”

In 1965 and 1966, while still collaborating with Oldham, John Paul Jones was appointed musical director for Robert Stigwood and Mickie Most, an association that gave rise to some of his finest arrangements: “No Milk Today” for Herman’s Hermits; the albums Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow, and The Hurdy Gurdy Man for Donovan; “The Boat That I Row” and “To Sir with Love” for Lulu; “Little Games” and “Ten Little Indians” for the Yardbirds—not to forget Françoise Hardy’s “En vous aimant bien” and “Mais il y a des soirs” on the album Ma jeunesse fout le camp… (1967). By 1968, the list had grown even longer, with work for Cliff Richard, Cat Stevens, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, the Everly Brothers, Champion Jack Dupree, Bo Diddley, and Marianne Faithfull. Worthy of special mention are Jones’s string arrangements on “She’s a Rainbow” on the Rolling Stones psychedelic album Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967).