With the rehearsal over, Robert and Bonzo, the two Brummies, were almost numb
with joy, slightly tempered by other feelings when, as they were leaving, rich
pop star Jimmy Page asked the literally penniless musicians to help pay for the
food and beer. They didn't know Jimmy's reputation as a miser. Soon they
would be calling him Led Wallet.
On September 14 the New Yardbirds left for
Copenhagen. The act consisted of "Train Kept A-Rollin'," which evolved into a
verseless version of "Communication Breakdown"; Jimmy's version of "Dazed and
Confused" with new lyrics; Jimmy's showpiece "White Summer"; a blues called "I
Can't Quit You Baby," and innumerable spontaneous variations on themes by other
musicians "Fresh Garbage" from Spirit, "We're Gonna Groove" from Ben E. King,
"Shake" from Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, "It's Your Thing" from the Isley
Brothers, and the entire oeuvre of Elvis. The Scandinavian shows were the
laboratory in which the band brewed its alchemy and invented-or reinvented-a
sound, judging the success or failure of each new direction by whether the
Danish kids responded or not. The best thing was the pairing of Robert's
Klaxon-loud wailing and Jimmy's guitar in full cry, in unison. "It happened the first time on stage in Denmark," Robert noted.
"I wasn't trying to scat sing, but the voice was imitating the guitar.
There was no spoken instructions about it ... but we broke into it on 'You
Shook Me' and we all broke into smiles." And Jimmy later remembered a telling
incident during the first gig in Copenhagen, when Robert's amp broke down.
But the group kept playing and, according to Page, "you could still hear his
voice at the back of the auditorium over the entire group."
Even in Scandinavia the band knew that they weren't the New Yardbirds anymore.
A name had to be chosen: Initially they came up with Mad Dogs (which Joe Cocker
would later use) and Whoopee Cushion. Then Jimmy recalled the Entwistle/Moon
brainstorm of the lead zeppelin. "We were sitting there kicking around group
names," Jimmy said. "Eventually it came down to the fact that the name was
not really as important as whether or not the music was going to be accepted.
I was quite keen about Lead Zeppelin ... it seemed to fit the bill. It had
something to do with the expression about a bad joke going over like a lead
balloon. And there's a little of the Iron Butterfly light-and-heavy
connotation." When the band got back to London, the a was taken out of lead
so the thick Americans wouldn't mispronounce it leed.
The group's first album, Led Zeppelin, was recorded in October 1968 at Olympic
Studios in Barnes, south London. Jimmy was producing with engineer Glyn
Johns. The nine tracks on the album (recorded in only 30 hours) were
basically Led Zeppelin's Scandinavian act, minus "Train," "We're Gonna Groove,"
and John Paul Jones's long organ introduction to "Your Time Is Gonna Come,"
improvised in the style of Garth Hudson's "Chest Fever." (The Band was so big
in England in 1968 that Eric Clapton disbanded Cream after hearing the rootsy
Music from Big Pink that summer.) The album was recorded in only thirty hours
of studio time, spread throughout two weeks that month. (By 1975, after this one
album had already grossed over $7 million, Peter Grant would claim it cost
only l,750£ to produce, including the artwork depicting the catastrophic 1937
death of the ocean-going Nazi zeppelin Hindenburg.)
Led Zeppelin was intended to duplicate the band's early live shows so the new
band would have something to sell while it spent the following year touring
America. The album had to have a minimum of overdubs that would be difficult
to reproduce onstage, so the tracks were recorded almost "live" in the studio.
Typically, adhering to Jimmy's light/heavy scheme, the songs started as
acoustic white blues etudes that mutated into Bonzo's stomping thud coupled
with Page's hard-raunch guitar. "Good Times Bad Times" builds slowly until
the whole band stops for an instant and - like a burst of pent-up electrical
energy freed from a capacitor - Jimmy rips into one of his thousand note
flurries. Again, Annie Bredon's folkish lament "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You"
begins with Jimmy strumming an acoustic Gibson J-200 guitar, and then
alternates with grinding hunks of sludge. Robert sounds like he's been
listening to Van Morrison. But the album really breaks open with "You Shook
Me," Willie Dixon's old blues, but taken even slower, heavier, and more
literally than Jeff Beck's previous version. Here Robert's voice and Jimmy's
guitar coined a trademark unison wail that would be copied by garage bands for
the next fifteen years. The first side ends with the epic headphone-classic
"Dazed and Confused" (credited to Jimmy Page with no mention of Jake Holmes),
whose lyric had again been rewritten. Originally about a bad trip, "Dazed and
Confused" now elucidated some of Jimmy's devilish views on the female sex:
"Lots of people talking, few of them know/The soul of a woman was created
below." Dreamy, morbid, glowing with whooshing flocks of baby vultures produced
by bowing the E string of the guitar, "Dazed and Confused" was the album's
tour de force, and when Jimmy digs out the "Think about It"
riff during the second solo and Robert lets loose a fanfare of stygian
shrieks, it sounds like a Wagnerian rock gotterdammerung. A generation of
fans would grow up wondering what Robert was yabbering, submerged under the
wah-wah, before Zep drops the bomb one final time.
This mood is mercifully lifted with the lighter second side. John Paul's
ecclesiastic organ intro to "Your Time Is Gonna Come" leads into Jimmy's new
acoustic guitar prelude, "Black Mountain Side," a modal version in mocksitar
tuning of an old Irish folk riff that had been played in clubs by folksinger
Annie Briggs and recorded by Bert Jansch as "Blackwater Side." A tabla player,
Viram Jasani, was brought in to provide a ragalike rhythm track.
"Communication Breakdown" followed, which replaced "Train Kept A-Rollin'."
The moment when Robert's moan decays into a shouted "Suck!" and Jimmy fires
a deadly burst is a Zeppelin classic. Another Willie Dixon-copyrighted blues,
"I Can't Quit You Baby," was another showcase for Jimmy's blues textures,
mostly borrowed from B. B. King and Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile." The record's
climax is "How Many More Times," which the Band of Joy used to do. Taking
lyrics and riffs from Albert King's "The Hunter" and a medley of other verbal
blues epigrams, this was primal, brain-beating, overwrought Zeppelin at its
most shameless, full of Jimmy's bowed whoops and slides (the guitar solo is
from "Shapes of Things") and a blues rant by Robert, who announces that he's
nervous because he's got a child on the way, which was indeed the case. The
song reaches its denouement with a strummed "Bolero" figure from Jimmy, which
could be a tribute, an inside joke, or a spiteful jab, depending upon whether
or not one was Jeff Beck.
But the songs and the guitar licks on Led Zeppelin
were only part of the story. Somehow Jimmy was able to capture the elemental,
elusive excitement of a rock band in heat. He had strong ideas about how rock
music ought to sound, reflected in his eccentric methods. Most producers just
stuck a microphone in front of an amplifier. But Jimmy would also put a mike
twenty feet in back of the amp, and then record the balance between the two.
"Distance is depth," he would murmur in the studio. Microphone placement was
an arcane science; by close-miking and distance-miking, Jimmy was one of the
first producers to record a band's ambient sound, the distance of a note's
time-lag from one end of the room to the other. Jimmy thought that this is
where a previously hidden ingredient lay, that this was the reason that the
early rock and roll records sounded as if they were recorded at a party.
"The whole idea, the way I see recording," Jimmy said later, "is to try and
capture the sound of the room live and the emotion of the whole moment and
try to convey that across.... You've got to capture as much of the room sound
as possible. That's the very essence of it."
The excitement of these first
Zeppelin sessions was electrifying. Listening to the playbacks, the musicians
and crew just shook their heads. Glyn Johns remembered, "It was tremendously
exciting to make that album. They'd rehearsed themselves very healthily before
they got near the studio. I'd never heard arrangements of that ilk before, nor
had I ever heard a band play in that way before. It was just unbelievable,
and when you're in a studio with something as creative as that, you can't help
but feed off of it."
Most ecstatic of all was Robert, who at last sounded close to what he knew was
his potential. He remembered that moment years later: "That first album was
the first time that headphones meant anything to me. What I heard comin- back
to me over the cans while I was singing was better than any chick in all the
land. It had so much weight, so much power - it was devastating. It was all
very raunchy."
But when the sessions were complete (only "Babe I'm Gonna
Leave You" required significant overdubbing), Peter Grant tried to book Led
Zeppelin into a quick tour of English clubs and universities and was met with
total indifference. Hardly anyone wanted a group called the New Yardbirds,
and nobody wanted an unknown band called Led Zeppelin. But Grant was told by
Jimmy to take whatever was offered at any fee under any billing. So the band
made its world debut as led Zeppelin at Suffey University for 150£. Three
nights later they played the Marquee in London as "Jimmy Page with the New
Yardbirds." Playing above the human pain threshold in the old jazz club, they
played twelve bars of "Train Kept A-Rollin' " as an invocation before roaring
into "Communication Breakdown," Bonzo cruising, Robert singing vocalisms - the
music was too fast for words, Jimmy burping out controlled spouts of wah-wah.
Then they went right into "I Can't Quit You Baby," Robert screaming his brains
out, trying to get noticed while Jimmy played huge chordal slabs and then did
his Hendrix fire-power impression, all show-offy technique and undeniable blues
feeling. This dissolved into one of Led Zep's peculiar early medleys,
encompassing Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor" with "Fought My Way Out of
Darkness" and the lewd lemon lines ("You can squeeze my lemon/till the juice
runs down my leg") from Robert Johnson's "Travelling Riverside Blues." In the
middle of this Jimmy broke into Elvis's "That's All Right." Then Robert,
frantic, singing anything that came into his head just trying to keep up with
Jimmy, went into a jam on, incredibly, Milt Jackson's "Bags' Groove." The set
was climaxed by eleven minutes of "Dazed and Confused." It was a blistering
show, but the audience was only mildly interested. The management complained
about the volume. The following night the New Yardbirds played their last date
at Liverpool University. From then on they were billed as Led Zeppelin.
The initial reaction to the band from Britain's acerbic, often loutish music
press was good. Later it would deteriorate into open hostilities. One paper
described Led Zeppelin "as the most exciting sound to be heard since the early
days of Hendrix or the Cream." The first Marquee date was reviewed positively,
especially what was called "Days of Confusion," but most critics chided the
"heavy music group" for playing too loud.
On November 9 Robert married his Maureen, now eight months pregnant.
That night Led Zeppelin played its London debut at the Roundhouse in Chalk
Farm. Robert's old car broke down on the way to the gig, and he almost didn't
make it. Shortly after, Maureen bore Robert Plant a daughter, named Carmen
Jane.
