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Born
out of the wreckage of the Yardbirds in the summer of
1968, Led Zeppelin combined the talents of two top London
studio pros, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul
Jones and two provincial unknowns, Birmingham singer
Robert Plant and drummer John "Bonzo" Bonham.
Their 1969 album, slammed out in just 36 hours, defined
the 60's term heavy, although Zeppelin turned out to be
much more then that. |
| Robert
Plant |
Since
I was 19 and I met Jimmy and Led Zeppelin came out of the
Yardbirds. The last thing that we relied on was formula. |
| Jimmy
Page |
We
were everything, really. We touched all these different
areas of the norm. The blues, the rock and the acoustic
and then we went also into our own music as well. |
| John
Paul Jones |
Well,
we all had totally diverse musical tastes and we found
something that was could get through reasonably enough to
have some sort of performace adrenaline and we chose The
Yardbirds and I didn't know about them and they said it
was easy and it was and we did it and there was sort of
this "Oh, something's happening here". |
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Page
and Plant were classic British frontmen, whip thin, wild
but sensitive and, of course, sexy. But, the pounding
heart of the group as even they knew was Bonham. |
| Jimmy
Page |
The
amazing thing about Bonham and obviously I wasn't aware
of it at the time was, everyone was aware, was the fact
off how inventive he was, how forward thinking he was
with the drums. Part of it was that he made drums sound
like drums when he played them. He's the loudest drummer
I've ever played with and the most incredible thing was
that he just used his wrists. It wasn't all of his arms
smashing, it was just his wrists. It was quite something.
It was the reason why we got big amplifiers. |
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Zeppelin's
first European tour took them to a Danish TV studio where
they encountered a woman who nearly stopped Zeppelin dead
in its tracks. |
| Jimmy
Page |
And
it was Baroness Von Zeppelin and she was so overjoyed
that we used the family name with all the pleasantries
and such. They took her to the studio and showed her the
album cover of the zeppelin crashing to the ground. There
was this almighty shrieking and she was threatening to
have her lawyers stop the show and all of this was going
on right to the moment of transmission, so it relects in
the show, I can tell you. |
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Chief
amongst Zeppelin's arsenal of stage stunts were Page's
violin bowed guitar solos, a technique he first used with
The Yardbirds and which had been suggested by the father
of Man From U.N.C.L.E. star David
McCallum, a classical session violinist. |
| Jimmy
Page |
So I
started picking up the violin bow and playing guitar with
the violin bow and he never heard anything like that, let
alone know what was done with it. |
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Led
Zeppelin topped the US charts with the second album, an
LP that was written and recorded on the road using
8-track studio equipment that today would seem ancient. |
| Robert
Plant |
And
sometimes I would sing on the same track as the lead
guitar, so I had to make sure my "Ahh" had just
gone before the first lick of the guitar or vice versa,
so it was very interesting. It was very adventurous. |
| Jimmy
Page |
In
those days you had to get a tape recorder and juggle with
them and it was all part of the thing, the labor of love. |
| Jimmy
Page |
Once
we finished in the studio, we'd done the best we could
there and we employed the numbers into the stage act and
that wasn't the end, that was the start. We'd make those
numbers work for us. We weren't content to play them note
for note perfect, as many people do now and did even
then. |
| Robert
Plant |
By
the time we'd gotten to Led Zeppelin III,
there was obviously something very, very crucial about
what we were doing because we already developed so many
different strands of music within our four man structure. |
| Jimmy
Page |
I
guess that was one of the key factors why Zeppelin was
able to go into all these different...new ground or touch
new ground with our music because we didn't ahve to
bother with sticking to a formula. |
| Robert
Plant |
The
last thing we relied on was formula and knowing that we
were doing fine and when Led Zeppelin III
followed the album with "Whole Lotta Love" and
"Heartbreaker" and stuff on it, people were
like, "Why kill a perfectly good career?" And
you make moves, you have musical turns and twists to
satisfy yourself. That's what has to come first. |
| Jimmy
Page |
And
the record company would have like to hear something like
"Whole Lotta Love" with different lyrics, I'm
sure, but that's not what we were at. It's like whenever
we got together to record an album, it was just summing
up where we left off. |
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Zeppelin's
fourth album surprized even the band by spawning one of
the biggest radio hits of all time, "Stairway To
Heaven". |
| Robert
Plant |
You
can't say that "Stairway To Heaven" was a clear
cut way of getting good radio success because it was 9-10
minutes long and it didn't have a chorus, it didn't have
anything and we used to play it at concerts and people
used to play it at concerts and people used to slow hand
clap with it because they didn't know what it was. |
| Jimmy
Page |
I
worked on it for quite a while on and off. I was putting
all these different sections together before I even
presented it to the band. |
| John
Paul Jones |
People
used to say about "Stairway To Heaven"
"Well, what was it like when you first wrote
it?" ya know, as if there were three wisemen
knocking at your door "Excuse me, are you writing
"Stairway To Heaven" here?" |
| Jimmy
Page |
The
doubleneck came after the release of the album so that we
could do it on stage. I couldn't do it with a 12 string
and a 6 string. Curiously, people thought we recorded it
on the doubleneck. So, I set that one straight. |
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Zeppelin
cemented it's position as top hard rock band of the
decade with Houses Of The Holy in
1973 and two years later with Physical Graffiti,
an album that showcased Page's hypnotic riff mastery on
the classic track "Kashmir". |
| Jimmy
Page |
I
think riffs really come from the blues. I certainly spent
a lot of time working on riffs and created a lot of new
inside sections. |
| Robert
Plant |
Led
Zeppelin had so much variety that it would be good if
some of these...if classic rock is the bain of
progressive music or whatever it is, it would be nice if
they went to an album like Physical Graffiti
and they played things like "The Rover" or
"Custard Pie" cause it's the variety that kept
Zeppelin alive. |
| Robert
Plant |
Physical
Graffiti was probably the greatest moment
musically or greatest set off moments because it was done
with a mobile 16 track studio in an old house and we were
stuck in there and we wrote things on the spot like
"Trampled Underfoot", "Stairway To
Heaven" was written at Headley Grange, actually for
the fourth album, so I'm lying. "Kashmir",
"In The Light" and stuff like that which was
really, really good. |
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Zeppelin's
distinctive blend of hard rock power and compositional
complexity was memorably demonstrated on the group's 1976
album Presence with a track called
"Achilles Last Stand". |
| Jimmy
Page |
That
one was my brain child really, with all the guitar parts,
all the sort off ascending guitar figures and I remember
John Paul Jones wasn't really sure whether, you know, um,
when I said I've got a scale that goes over these
specifics."You can't, there isn't a scale". I
said, "Believe me, I've got one". |
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1979's
In Through The Out Door was the last
album Led Zeppelin would put out as a band and as a thumb
to the nose of critics who considered the band an over
inflated hype, they put it out in a paper bag. |
| Jimmy
Page |
It
goes on from the early days of being hammered buy the
press and we said, "We'll put it out in a brown
paper bag then. |
| Robert
Plant |
It
sold unfashionably 10 million copies as well. It was
funny, really funny people used to knock it and go,
"Oh, sorry". You'd look through their records
"Oh no, that's not really there, that's just a brown
paper bag". |
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By
1979, punk rock was taking aim at all of rock's reigning
superstars, so when Led Zeppelin played its first show in
two years at the Knebworth festival, the band had
something to prove and it definitely did prove it. |
| Jimmy
Page |
It
was fantastic, actually. It was really emotional. It was
a day to remember, days to remember. |
| Robert
Plant |
We
were transcending into another period from the mid 60s
with the panned psychadelia and into the 70s, with all
the languid period of excess or whatever and we were
clawing our ways out and we were a wild group who needed
to get to know each other again. We never got to know
each other. |
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A
decade of rock and roll excess finally did catch up to
Led Zeppelin on September 25, 1980 when John Bonham died
at the age of 32. |
| Jimmy
Page |
It
was a great loss to music in general of course. There
hasn't been a drummer anywhere near him in rock since and
I think every drummer would be the first to admit that. |
| Robert
Plant |
He
was confident, he wasn't loud. He got louder as he
ordered bass drums from Ludwig in Chicago. He got free
drums from Ludwig and there was no holding him back and
they kept getting bigger and bigger bass drums and
sometimes two. We used to take one away when he used to
go out for a cup of tea. If he had two bass drums set up,
we used to take one away. He could do more on one bass
drum then anyone could do on two. |
| John
Paul Jones |
Bonzo's
favorite music was actually the slow Motown stuff. It was
either James Brown or the real sweet soul music, which he
loved. This is why the bands that sort of say or sound
like us never get it because its "mmm BASH mmm
BASH" ya know and there's never all this...if you
listen to what Bonzo did, there was all sort of this
little stuff going on. |
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Three
months after Bonham's death, Led Zeppelin unwilling to
continue without him, disbanded. In 1982, a collection of
miscellaneous tracks called Coda was
released as apparently the group's swansong. That same
year, Jimmy Page released his Death Wish II
album and Plant launched a successful solo career of his
own. Led Zeppelin appeared to be history. Plant and Page
have gone on to do guest spots o each other's albums, but
in 1985, there was a full fledged Led Zeppelin reunion at
Live aid. Three more years passed until Led Zeppelin's
survining members were persuaded to reunite again, this
time at the 40th anniversary of their label, Atlantic
Records with Jason Bonham, son of John, sitting in on
drums. In the summer of 1990, Jimmy Page returned to
Knebworth to join Robert Plant and his new band for a
tear of a Zeppelin tune that they had never performed on
stage, the track "Wearing and Tearing". |
| Jimmy
Page |
We
only had a night's rehearsal on that beforehand and it
had a very unusual sequence to it, actually to remember
it, especially of course Led Zeppelin never actually
performed this number live on stage. We recorded it and
that was that. Yeah, it was pretty dangerous to do that. |
| Jimmy
Page |
We
had already created so many fine compostions. We'd done
so much on these live performances. It's natural that,
uh, there's a hell of a lot there between us, ya know.
Blood's thicker than water. |
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Led
Zeppelin may never regroup, but it doesn't really have
to. The band's memory and unforgetable music live on to
this very day. |
| Jimmy
Page |
For
starters, it was four outstanding musicians and yes, we
had the added dimensions. We had the chemistry there. |
| Robert
Plant |
We
worked and we had no idea off what it was. We just did it
and it was spectacular. Spectacular, loud, confident and
wrong most of the time. |