We could have called ourselves the Vegetables or the Potatoes....
What does Led Zeppelin mean? It doesn't mean a thing.
-Jimmy Page
Jimmy retreated to his boathouse in Pangbourne and weighed his options. With
Peter Grant retaining the name, Jimmy could go on playing Yardbirds-style hard
rock indefinitely, all over the world. A Scandinavian tour was already set up
for the fall; Japan, Australia, and America were available after that. But,
lulled by the bucolic river life, Jimmy's tastes ran to softer, folkish music
like Pentangle, the Incredible String Band, and Joni Mitchell. There must, he
thought, be a middle ground between light and heavy music. By summer 1968
there was little indication of whether the second wave of English bands would
have the same unqualified success as the first. But late in July the response
to the Jeff Beck Group's gigs at the Fillmore East showed both Jimmy and Peter
Grant that they had to carry on.
After Beck had left the Yardbirds, he didn't play a note for five months. But
in March 1967, inspired by one of Jimi Hendrix's aural firestorms, he put
together the first Jeff Beck Group, with Ron Wood on bass, Aynsley Dunbar on
drums, and a Scots singer named Rod Stewart. His first album, Truth, came out
in July 1968. Mixing Willie Dixon R&B classics ("You Shook Me," "I Ain't
Superstitious") with updated Yardbirds ("Shapes of Things") and softer songs
like "Greensleeves," "Beck's Bolero," and folksinger Tim Rose's "Morning Dew,"
Truth had a bluesy, rough-edged feel. Jeff made his guitar bark like a dog and
whine like a tomcat in rut. This was also the debut of Rod Stewart's gritty,
emotional vocal style and mike-swinging stage act. When Peter Grant and
Mickie Most brought this band to Bill Graham's Fillmore East, they found a lot
of anticipation on the street due to Beck's exalted status with the Yardbirds.
Opening for the Grateful Dead, with Rod Stewart so frightened that he hid
behind the amps for the first three songs, the Jeff Beck Group shook the
audience with its dramatic, white man's blues.
At home by the Thames, Jimmy almost never touched his electric guitar,
preferring to strum and pick acoustically. But he and Grant knew that they had
to follow their gut instinct for where the real money was, "heavy music" in
America. The biggest-selling band there was Iron Butterfly, whose album
In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida consisted of repetitious, droning blues scales and had
survived on the charts for years. The other big band of the day was Vanilla
Fudge, who played it somewhat lighter, alternating "white blues"
with softer, less bombastic passages.
There were other factors for Page and Grant to consider if a new "supergroup"
was going to be successfully manufactured. By August 1968, Cream was breaking
up after three successful albums. At first it looked like Jeff Beck was going
to fill the gap. The new Progressive Rock FM stations that Jimmy so loved
would be desperate for a new British blues act. But Peter Grant knew the real
truth. The Beck group was already unstable. Rod Stewart and Ron Wood were
already giggling like schoolgirls, and Beck was odd man out. No matter how
thrilling they were on stage, if the personalities didn't mesh, the band
couldn't last.
Jimmy insisted that his new band be self-owned and financially and artistically independent.
He had seen the Yardbirds fall apart, and the only real cause had been poor
management. Jimmy Page would never let himself be manipulated again. Early
in September he and Peter Grant formed a new company called (ironically)
Superhype Music Inc., which liberated them from further obligations to record
for Mickie Most. But within a month the Yardbirds had to fulfill contracts
for a short tour of Scandinavia, and Jimmy had to find a band. Chris Dreja
was still on bass at that point. And if Jimmy had been able to choose, they
probably would have been joined by pop crooner Terry Reid and drumnier B. J.
Wilson, then with Procol Harum. Wilson had been the drummer on a 1968 session
that Jimmy had played for Joe Cocker, "With a Little Help from My Friends,"
and he expressed interest in the muchrumored new group that Jimmy was forming.
Jimmy was uncertain. In his ideal group the drummer was the key, a lead instrument
almost co-equal with Jimmy's guitar. Unfortunately for Terry Reid, he had just
signed with Mickie Most as a solo act, which put him out of reach of the New Yardbirds.
Another musician who asked Jimmy about his plans was John Paul Jones, the
session bassist and arranger who had already played with Jimmy on dozens of
recording sessions since 1965. Even before the demise of the Yardbirds, Jimmy
recalled, "I was working at the sessions for Donovan's 'Hurdy Gurdy Man,' and
John Paul Jones was looking after the musical arrangements. During a break he
asked me if I could use a bass player in the new group I was forming. Now John
Paul Jones is unquestionably an incredible arranger and musician - he didn't
need me for a job. It was just that he felt the need to express himself, and
he thought we might be able to do it together.... He had a proper music
training and he had quite brilliant ideas. I jumped at the chance of getting
him."
His real name was John Baldwin, and he was born January 3, 1946, at Sidcup,
Kent. His parents were "in the business" with a variety-style double act.
By the time he was two, he was already on the road. His father had played
piano at the silent movies, and John himself was playing piano by the age of
six. Later John and his father had a piano/bass duo, working at hunt balls,
bar mitzvahs, and cocktail parties. In the summer they had a residency at the
Isle of Wight Yacht Club. John had gotten his first bass at the age of
thirteen, bought reluctantly by his dad and only because he had joined a band
and couldn't get his piano in the van. His father had said, according to John, "
'Don't bother with it. Take up the tenor saxophone. In two years the bass
guitar will never be heard of again.' I said, 'No Dad, I really want one; there's
work for me.' He said, 'Ah, there's work?' And I got a bass right away."
He was living at his boarding school, Christ College, when he formed his
first band. He was heavily influenced, he says, by jazz bassists like Charles
Mingus and Scott LaFaro, who played with Bill Evans. One day he heard Phil
Upchurch's bass solo on "You Can't Sit Down" on the radio and the proverbial
light went on in his head. The bass could be a lead/solo instrument in rock,
just as Mingus had proved it could be in jazz.
By the time he was sixteen, John Baldwin had a band that was playing at
American military bases all over the south of England. Huge black sergeants
used to make them play "Night Train" all night long. The following year, 1962,
he left school and got the first job he auditioned for, with Jet Harris and Tony
Meehan, who had just left the Shadows and had a number one single, "Diamonds"
(on which Jimmy had played guitar). Just seventeen, John was hired on bass.
The rhythm guitar was John McLaughlin, already the best jazz guitarist in England.
This job lasted eighteen months, and gradually John Baldwin began to turn up at recording
sessions to play bass. In 1964, at the age of eighteen, he changed his
name to John Paul Jones and put out his first record, an instrumental called
"Baja." The B side was an original composition called, presciently, "A Foggy
Day in Vietnam."
By 1965 John Paul Jones was one of the top session bassists in London, working
regularly with singers like Tom Jones and Dusty Springfield, and session
players like Jimmy Page. "It was always Big Jim and Little Jim," he says,
"Big Jim Sullivan and Little Jim [Page] and myself and the drummer. Apart
from group sessions, where he'd play solos, he always ended up on rhythm
guitar because he couldn't read too well. I used to see him just sitting
there with an acoustic guitar, just sort of raking out chords." After two
years John Paul moved up to arranger and musical director. It happened at a
Mickie Most session for Donovan's "Sunshine Superman," where John Paul decided
the arranger was incompetent and demonstrated a better rhythm section to Most.
Hired on the spot as a staff arranger, one of his first assignments was
Herman's Hermits. Mickie Most would later claim that the Hermits records
John Paul arranged outsold the Beatles in 1965-66, selling twelve million
singles in America alone. Working with Donovan, Lulu, and other acts, he
spent his days strapped in his Fender bass, often directing large studio
orchestras. By 1967 he was twenty-one years old. He had married his wife,
Mo, the previous year and had a daughter and another on the way. His most
prestigious session came that year, when Andrew Oldham hired him to produce
the string charts for "She's a Rainbow" on the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic
Majesties Request. He also worked with Jeff Beck and Terry Reid, whose first
album for Most had many of the same chord changes as Led Zeppelin's first, a
testament to Jones's presence. But by 1968 he was burned out. He remembers:
"I had started running and arranging about forty or fifty things a month. I ended up just putting a blank piece of
score paper in front of me and just sitting there and staring at it. Then I
joined Led Zeppelin, I suppose, after my missus said to me, 'Will you stop
moping around the house; why don't you join a band or something?' And I said,
'There's no bands I want to join, what are you talking about?' And she said,
'Well, look, I think it was in Disc, Jimmy Page is forming a group ... why
don't you give him a ring?' So I rang him and said, 'Jim, how're you doing?
Have you got a group yet?' He said, 'I haven't got anybody yet.' And I said,
'Well, if you want a bass player, give me a ring.' And he said, 'All right.
I'm going to see this singer Terry Reid told me about, and he might know a
drununer as well. I'll call you when I've seen what they're like.' "
If this account seems somewhat fey and tongue in cheek, consider that the
dry-humored Jones told another interviewer he got the job as bassist in Led
Zeppelin after he answered an ad in Melody Maker.
It was obvious to Jimmy and Peter Grant that there weren't any good singers in
London who were available. Since the new band was patterned on the Jeff Beck
Group, they needed a singer with the romantic persona of a Rod Stewart, someone
with the nerve to get on a stage and emote vocally along with an electric guitar.
But all the good singers - Steve Marriott, Steve Winwood, Joe Cocker, Chris
Farlowe - were busy. Terry Reid, only eighteen, had been snatched by Mickie Most
at the last moment. One day Jimmy and Peter ran into Reid on Oxford Street.
Reid told them about an unknown singer with a band called Hobbstweedle up in
Birmingham, a great tall blond geezer who looked like a fairy prince with this
caterwauling voice, who was heavy into blues and the West Coast bands.
They called him "The Wild Man of Blues from the Black Country." His name was
Robert Plant, and Terry Reid recommended him highly, having gigged with Robert's previous group, the Band of Joy.
Peter's office telegraphed Robert at home and Jimmy got on the phone with him.
They made plans for Jimmy and Peter to see Robert at a Hobbstweedle gig that weekend.
When Robert asked about a drummer, Jimmy said he was still looking. Robert said he
knew someone Jimmy should hear.
