AlexWilliamsGloves
Well-Known Member
One of my fave "Zeppelin" albums that
Led Zeppelin
- Thread starter ColinBellsjockstrap
- Start date
One of my fave "Zeppelin" albums that
I was blasting out The Lemon Song from that album at 2 this morning. Neighbours not best impressed.
Centurions
Well-Known Member
Although this is an old post I'm puzzled as to the bit about the original foursome? (actually I was puzzled initially about who or what a Bonzo was but we'll skip that bit)
Surely the original Led Zep foursome were Bonham, Plant, Page and Jones?
Or are you going back to The Yardbirds (or The New Yardbirds maybe)?
Stuuuuuu
Well-Known Member
Bonzo = John Bonham.
He meant the standard Zep lineup as opposed to Page & Plant who toured (playing Zeppelin tracks) in the 90s.
Centurions
Well-Known Member
Ah, maybe should have got that. Cheers.
Whole lotta rarities: the strangest Led Zeppelin artwork – in pictures
A new book brings together some of the rarest and most bizarre Led Zeppelin vinyl – from Frankenstein sleeves to limited-edition Beatles pastiches
www.theguardian.com
Jimmy Page on why Led Zeppelin wouldn’t exist today
The rock star talks to Will Hodgkinson about how it all began, Live Aid and the band’s 2007 comeback gig, as he brings out a book about his life
Thursday October 14 2021, 5.00pm, The Times
Speaking to Jimmy Page before 1,200 people at The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, where he reminisced on the concert posters, the album covers, the dragon-bedecked stage suits and the many, many guitars that fill the pages of his life-surveying new book, Jimmy Page: The Anthology, one thought kept coming to me. What if he walks off? I had been warned that if Page felt the interview veered into gossip, he would be out of there. Then, halfway through, he did walk off — but not because of anything I said.
“Can you just excuse me one moment?” he asked, with an eye-crinkling smile. “And I think we need to just . . . cap the sound.” Page, the fearsome leader of Led Zeppelin, had to nip off for a toilet break.
Page turned out to be a gently spoken silver-haired 77-year-old with impeccable manners whose chief concern is to document his life’s work and, as he put it, “quell some of the myths that are out there because The Anthology is the authoritative version”. After turning up with his girlfriend Scarlett Sabet — a striking 32-year-old redhead who must fit right into the gothic mansion in Holland Park, London, where Page has lived since 1972 — and wearing a black suit and scarf that gave him the look of both rock star and ageing bohemian, Page told his life story through the guitars he has owned. One of the most famous is Black Beauty, a 1960 Gibson Les Paul that Page used throughout the Sixties as a teenage session musician, then in the early days of Led Zeppelin, before it was stolen in 1970.
“My dad said to me, ‘I don’t really understand about guitars but I can see you know what you’re doing,’ ” said Page, who described his youthful guitar obsession as “pretty OCD”. He can be seen, aged 13 in 1958, in BBC footage of his skiffle band playing a talent contest, after which he tells its presenter Huw Wheldon that he’ll be doing “biological research” when he leaves school. “This Gibson was in a shop on Charing Cross Road, black and golden, a very sexy instrument, and it was just heaven. My dad agreed to get it for me on hire purchase. In 1970 Zeppelin were going across the border to Canada from Minneapolis, and the guitar gets put on at one end and doesn’t turn up at the other. It was gone.”
Incredibly, Black Beauty turned up 45 years later after an American guitar dealer made it his mission to find the missing instrument. “It had been stolen, stuck under a bed for all this time, and the guy who stole it was a black belt in karate and a speed freak so no one wanted to mess with him. Only when he passed away did it come out"
Could Led Zeppelin happen today? Could one of the world’s biggest bands get away with making albums without as much as their name on the cover, with making far-reaching, hugely ambitious music that veers anywhere from heavy metal thunder to folky laments, all bound together with lyrics that delve into the mysteries of the universe? The answer is a resounding no. “We used to throw songs into the live set that we hadn’t recorded yet, just for fun,” Page said at Cheltenham. “We did that with Immigrant Song at Bath Festival in 1970, and nobody had heard anything like it. You don’t have that freedom now because it would be posted online immediately. It was a fun time as a creative musician, a fun time to be in a band.”
Page recalled another famous episode in the history of Led Zeppelin: recording at Headley Grange, a damp, unheated Georgian manse in Hampshire that the singer Robert Plant, bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham decamped to in 1971. “There was this entrance hall with ornamental brick flooring and wooden panelling, which was around a staircase that went up three floors. John Bonham set up his drum kit in the hall and the sound was ricocheting off all the glass and wood. It was immediate: I knew we had to do [the thunderous blues classic] When the Levee Breaks right there.”
Page talked about the discipline he learnt from playing on sessions for records by the Who, Donovan, Nico, Françoise Hardy and countless others, and about the brutal commerciality of the pop world he witnessed during his stint in R&B pioneers the Yardbirds. It was after his fellow Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck gave him a Fender Telecaster, which Page painted in the dragon patterns that would later become such a feature of his stagewear, that he began to shape in his mind the kind of band he wanted Led Zeppelin to be.
“I started to think about how you looked, how you dressed, so there would be a whole character to Led Zeppelin, and this guitar was like Excalibur because it went through the Yardbirds and into the first Zeppelin albums,” Page said of the “dragon” Telecaster. “I saw Robert Plant’s old band and was impressed by his vocal range, and thought, I’ll get this guy to come to my house in Pangbourne, we’ll go through each other’s records and so on. I played him Babe I’m Gonna Leave You by Joan Baez, which had such an atmosphere to it, and said, see if you can sing the melody to it. The communion we had from that point on was just so cool.”
Famously, Led Zeppelin didn’t do singles. “The singles the Yardbirds were forced to make broke their spirit,” said Page, who realised that the future lay in appealing to the album-based world of American FM radio and underground rock clubs. “I didn’t want to get caught up in it. You’d do Whole Lotta Love and then the record company would say of the next album: where’s the Whole Lotta Love? It was a trap. By the fourth album I had to say: don’t put Stairway to Heaven out as a single. They did put it out in Australia, where you’re never going to find it, are you?”
No band better encapsulated rock in the 1970s than Led Zeppelin. There was the legendary excess, from the sheer scale of the touring operations, to the band’s fearsome manager Peter Grant leaning on his background as a wrestler to persuade terrified promoters to pay up, to its drummer Bonham being found dead in 1980 after downing 40 shots of vodka. (A much-repeated tale of band members defiling a groupie with a mud shark after the Seattle Pop Festival in 1969 proves apocryphal.) There was the virtuosity of the four musicians, coming together to create something bigger than themselves, but also the sheer speed of the band’s trajectory. Page explained how he and Plant dealt with it by escaping in 1970 to Bron-Yr-Aur, a stone cottage in Wales with no water or electricity, where they would write some of their most beloved songs.
“Just looking at the itineraries today makes me dizzy,” Page said of that time. “We had a break at Bron-Yr-Aur and after all this pace it was just so tranquil. We were on the side of a hill with a tape recorder, and I remember Robert singing That’s the Way while I was playing guitar. It was a civilised way of dealing with the craziness, the chaos of life on tour.”
Led Zeppelin was more than just Page’s creation. It was the culmination of his life’s passion. When Page was 12, he picked up a guitar that had been left by the previous owner of his parents’ home in Epsom, Surrey, after a friend showed him a couple of chord shapes. “I thought, I can do this, and now I can change it to another chord, and that was a pause between two chords, and so on. The magic started it, and it never stopped"
It was that total dedication to music — despite the adolescent Page’s claim of an interest in “biological research” on that 1958 television spot, which he says he came up with on the spot through sheer nerves — that appealed to Plant. “There was no consideration of success when we started and that was very appealing to me,” Plant told me in 2014. “But then we became the biggest band of all time and I became this other guy I had heard so much about. I was exposed constantly, at airports and coffee shops and so on. I was stuck in my own flashback.”
All bands are fashioned by the chemistry between their members. Having interviewed both Page and Plant numerous times, always separately, I can see why the chemistry in Led Zeppelin was as volatile as it was exciting. Page is mysterious, rather glamorous, and above all focused and organised. It was his iron will that steered Led Zeppelin towards stadiums. Plant is, despite his former status as a golden god, bumbling and haphazard; the kind of guy who would be happier doing a music quiz in a Welsh pub than hanging out with fellow members of the rock aristocracy in a London members’ club. “When I’d had enough of being with Jimmy Page,” Plant said in that interview, before pausing and correcting himself with a knowing smile: “When I’d had enough of being a rock star, I would go for long walks on the Welsh borders. It cleared my head.”
Led Zeppelin ended with the death of Bonham in 1980, but by then the writing was already on the wall. In 1975 Plant had a serious car crash in Rhodes, and two years later his five-year-old son Karac died of a stomach infection. There were some happy times, such as when Bjorn Ulvaeus gave Page an Ibanez guitar after Led Zeppelin visited Abba’s studios in Stockholm in 1979, but you can understand why Plant didn’t want to go back. To make matters worse, the band’s reunion set at Live Aid in 1985 was a disaster.
“We had two hours’ rehearsal, not even that, and the drummer just could not get the beginning of Rock and Roll,” said Page, bristling at the memory. “We were in real trouble so that was not very clever.” It was only after the talk that I remembered who this hapless drummer was: Phil Collins. Feeling that Led Zeppelin had to, in Page’s words, “stand up and be counted”, he was determined to ensure their one-off gig at the O2 Arena in 2007 did not follow a similar fate.
“I was more nervous doing that concert than any of the sessions I did when I was a kid,” Page said of what became Led Zeppelin’s last stand. “A lot could have gone wrong and I didn’t want to be the one making the mistakes, but you prepare for these things and by the time you’re on stage, you go into a trance state. My hairs were standing on end throughout, so I think it was a superb concert. Unfortunately it was only the one show . . . but there you go.”
Another Led Zeppelin reunion seems extremely unlikely, chiefly because Plant doesn’t want to go back there. In that 2014 interview I asked him why. “For a long time after John passed away I couldn’t deal with the old set-ups, the regimes, the knowing nods . . . I’d had enough. When Led Zeppelin ended, people said to me: how can you walk away from all that? But I had no choice.”
Led Zeppelin was Page’s great vision. The guitar — alongside the mandolin, the sitar and other things with strings — has been his great passion. Before the talk ended, I asked Page where he thought it all came from.
“When I was seven, some friends of my parents invited us to listen to a stereo, which was really rare in those days,” he replied. “They had a record of a train going along, some classical music, and hearing these industrial sounds alongside the width, the depth, the colour of classical music was the game changer, the source of everything that followed. I was just lucky that I was able to create new music through the vehicle of the guitar.”
Jimmy Page: The Anthology is out now published by Genesis, £45
The rock star talks to Will Hodgkinson about how it all began, Live Aid and the band’s 2007 comeback gig, as he brings out a book about his life
Thursday October 14 2021, 5.00pm, The Times
Speaking to Jimmy Page before 1,200 people at The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, where he reminisced on the concert posters, the album covers, the dragon-bedecked stage suits and the many, many guitars that fill the pages of his life-surveying new book, Jimmy Page: The Anthology, one thought kept coming to me. What if he walks off? I had been warned that if Page felt the interview veered into gossip, he would be out of there. Then, halfway through, he did walk off — but not because of anything I said.
“Can you just excuse me one moment?” he asked, with an eye-crinkling smile. “And I think we need to just . . . cap the sound.” Page, the fearsome leader of Led Zeppelin, had to nip off for a toilet break.
Page turned out to be a gently spoken silver-haired 77-year-old with impeccable manners whose chief concern is to document his life’s work and, as he put it, “quell some of the myths that are out there because The Anthology is the authoritative version”. After turning up with his girlfriend Scarlett Sabet — a striking 32-year-old redhead who must fit right into the gothic mansion in Holland Park, London, where Page has lived since 1972 — and wearing a black suit and scarf that gave him the look of both rock star and ageing bohemian, Page told his life story through the guitars he has owned. One of the most famous is Black Beauty, a 1960 Gibson Les Paul that Page used throughout the Sixties as a teenage session musician, then in the early days of Led Zeppelin, before it was stolen in 1970.
“My dad said to me, ‘I don’t really understand about guitars but I can see you know what you’re doing,’ ” said Page, who described his youthful guitar obsession as “pretty OCD”. He can be seen, aged 13 in 1958, in BBC footage of his skiffle band playing a talent contest, after which he tells its presenter Huw Wheldon that he’ll be doing “biological research” when he leaves school. “This Gibson was in a shop on Charing Cross Road, black and golden, a very sexy instrument, and it was just heaven. My dad agreed to get it for me on hire purchase. In 1970 Zeppelin were going across the border to Canada from Minneapolis, and the guitar gets put on at one end and doesn’t turn up at the other. It was gone.”
Incredibly, Black Beauty turned up 45 years later after an American guitar dealer made it his mission to find the missing instrument. “It had been stolen, stuck under a bed for all this time, and the guy who stole it was a black belt in karate and a speed freak so no one wanted to mess with him. Only when he passed away did it come out"
Could Led Zeppelin happen today? Could one of the world’s biggest bands get away with making albums without as much as their name on the cover, with making far-reaching, hugely ambitious music that veers anywhere from heavy metal thunder to folky laments, all bound together with lyrics that delve into the mysteries of the universe? The answer is a resounding no. “We used to throw songs into the live set that we hadn’t recorded yet, just for fun,” Page said at Cheltenham. “We did that with Immigrant Song at Bath Festival in 1970, and nobody had heard anything like it. You don’t have that freedom now because it would be posted online immediately. It was a fun time as a creative musician, a fun time to be in a band.”
Page recalled another famous episode in the history of Led Zeppelin: recording at Headley Grange, a damp, unheated Georgian manse in Hampshire that the singer Robert Plant, bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham decamped to in 1971. “There was this entrance hall with ornamental brick flooring and wooden panelling, which was around a staircase that went up three floors. John Bonham set up his drum kit in the hall and the sound was ricocheting off all the glass and wood. It was immediate: I knew we had to do [the thunderous blues classic] When the Levee Breaks right there.”
Page talked about the discipline he learnt from playing on sessions for records by the Who, Donovan, Nico, Françoise Hardy and countless others, and about the brutal commerciality of the pop world he witnessed during his stint in R&B pioneers the Yardbirds. It was after his fellow Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck gave him a Fender Telecaster, which Page painted in the dragon patterns that would later become such a feature of his stagewear, that he began to shape in his mind the kind of band he wanted Led Zeppelin to be.
“I started to think about how you looked, how you dressed, so there would be a whole character to Led Zeppelin, and this guitar was like Excalibur because it went through the Yardbirds and into the first Zeppelin albums,” Page said of the “dragon” Telecaster. “I saw Robert Plant’s old band and was impressed by his vocal range, and thought, I’ll get this guy to come to my house in Pangbourne, we’ll go through each other’s records and so on. I played him Babe I’m Gonna Leave You by Joan Baez, which had such an atmosphere to it, and said, see if you can sing the melody to it. The communion we had from that point on was just so cool.”
Famously, Led Zeppelin didn’t do singles. “The singles the Yardbirds were forced to make broke their spirit,” said Page, who realised that the future lay in appealing to the album-based world of American FM radio and underground rock clubs. “I didn’t want to get caught up in it. You’d do Whole Lotta Love and then the record company would say of the next album: where’s the Whole Lotta Love? It was a trap. By the fourth album I had to say: don’t put Stairway to Heaven out as a single. They did put it out in Australia, where you’re never going to find it, are you?”
No band better encapsulated rock in the 1970s than Led Zeppelin. There was the legendary excess, from the sheer scale of the touring operations, to the band’s fearsome manager Peter Grant leaning on his background as a wrestler to persuade terrified promoters to pay up, to its drummer Bonham being found dead in 1980 after downing 40 shots of vodka. (A much-repeated tale of band members defiling a groupie with a mud shark after the Seattle Pop Festival in 1969 proves apocryphal.) There was the virtuosity of the four musicians, coming together to create something bigger than themselves, but also the sheer speed of the band’s trajectory. Page explained how he and Plant dealt with it by escaping in 1970 to Bron-Yr-Aur, a stone cottage in Wales with no water or electricity, where they would write some of their most beloved songs.
“Just looking at the itineraries today makes me dizzy,” Page said of that time. “We had a break at Bron-Yr-Aur and after all this pace it was just so tranquil. We were on the side of a hill with a tape recorder, and I remember Robert singing That’s the Way while I was playing guitar. It was a civilised way of dealing with the craziness, the chaos of life on tour.”
Led Zeppelin was more than just Page’s creation. It was the culmination of his life’s passion. When Page was 12, he picked up a guitar that had been left by the previous owner of his parents’ home in Epsom, Surrey, after a friend showed him a couple of chord shapes. “I thought, I can do this, and now I can change it to another chord, and that was a pause between two chords, and so on. The magic started it, and it never stopped"
It was that total dedication to music — despite the adolescent Page’s claim of an interest in “biological research” on that 1958 television spot, which he says he came up with on the spot through sheer nerves — that appealed to Plant. “There was no consideration of success when we started and that was very appealing to me,” Plant told me in 2014. “But then we became the biggest band of all time and I became this other guy I had heard so much about. I was exposed constantly, at airports and coffee shops and so on. I was stuck in my own flashback.”
All bands are fashioned by the chemistry between their members. Having interviewed both Page and Plant numerous times, always separately, I can see why the chemistry in Led Zeppelin was as volatile as it was exciting. Page is mysterious, rather glamorous, and above all focused and organised. It was his iron will that steered Led Zeppelin towards stadiums. Plant is, despite his former status as a golden god, bumbling and haphazard; the kind of guy who would be happier doing a music quiz in a Welsh pub than hanging out with fellow members of the rock aristocracy in a London members’ club. “When I’d had enough of being with Jimmy Page,” Plant said in that interview, before pausing and correcting himself with a knowing smile: “When I’d had enough of being a rock star, I would go for long walks on the Welsh borders. It cleared my head.”
Led Zeppelin ended with the death of Bonham in 1980, but by then the writing was already on the wall. In 1975 Plant had a serious car crash in Rhodes, and two years later his five-year-old son Karac died of a stomach infection. There were some happy times, such as when Bjorn Ulvaeus gave Page an Ibanez guitar after Led Zeppelin visited Abba’s studios in Stockholm in 1979, but you can understand why Plant didn’t want to go back. To make matters worse, the band’s reunion set at Live Aid in 1985 was a disaster.
“We had two hours’ rehearsal, not even that, and the drummer just could not get the beginning of Rock and Roll,” said Page, bristling at the memory. “We were in real trouble so that was not very clever.” It was only after the talk that I remembered who this hapless drummer was: Phil Collins. Feeling that Led Zeppelin had to, in Page’s words, “stand up and be counted”, he was determined to ensure their one-off gig at the O2 Arena in 2007 did not follow a similar fate.
“I was more nervous doing that concert than any of the sessions I did when I was a kid,” Page said of what became Led Zeppelin’s last stand. “A lot could have gone wrong and I didn’t want to be the one making the mistakes, but you prepare for these things and by the time you’re on stage, you go into a trance state. My hairs were standing on end throughout, so I think it was a superb concert. Unfortunately it was only the one show . . . but there you go.”
Another Led Zeppelin reunion seems extremely unlikely, chiefly because Plant doesn’t want to go back there. In that 2014 interview I asked him why. “For a long time after John passed away I couldn’t deal with the old set-ups, the regimes, the knowing nods . . . I’d had enough. When Led Zeppelin ended, people said to me: how can you walk away from all that? But I had no choice.”
Led Zeppelin was Page’s great vision. The guitar — alongside the mandolin, the sitar and other things with strings — has been his great passion. Before the talk ended, I asked Page where he thought it all came from.
“When I was seven, some friends of my parents invited us to listen to a stereo, which was really rare in those days,” he replied. “They had a record of a train going along, some classical music, and hearing these industrial sounds alongside the width, the depth, the colour of classical music was the game changer, the source of everything that followed. I was just lucky that I was able to create new music through the vehicle of the guitar.”
Jimmy Page: The Anthology is out now published by Genesis, £45