LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 4 Vision of the Future

      I had first heard about Led Zeppelin seven years earlier, in the autumn of 1968. I was a university student and the editor of the college newspaper. I knew a guy named Don Law, who had graduated the previous June and was now the manager of the Boston Tea Party, the city’s rock venue and electric ballroom. (Don’s father, also named Don Law, had produced all the recordings of blues legend Robert Johnson in the 1930s.) One day I heard that a new band from England, the Jeff Beck Group, was playing the Tea Party, so I called Don Law and arranged for press tickets for me and our paper’s star photographer, Peter Simon.

      When we got to the Tea Party, housed in a former temple in Boston’s South End, Don ushered us into the dressing room to meet the band. I was excited because I was a massive fan of the rip-roaring Yardbirds, whose raving, improvised elaborations on the R&B format had revolutionized rock & roll and propelled it into what was being called hard rock. Jeff Beck had replaced original Yardbirds guitarist Eric Clapton a couple years earlier and had now left to go on his own with a new band.

      Boston was considered an important tryout town by British musicians because it had a huge student population and the multimedia that catered to it. When Fleetwood Mac arrived from London earlier in the year, they became virtually the Tea Party’s house band. Many UK bands started American tours in front of generally friendly Boston audiences who were about the same age as the group. So Peter with his camera and I with my notebook were politely received by brilliant guitarist Jeff Beck, bassist Ronnie Wood, and drummer Mick Waller. Less effusive, in fact completely ignoring us, was the group’s young singer, Rod Stewart, who was staring at himself in the full-length mirror, using spit to straighten the ends of his exquisitely shag-cut hair.

      The band was nervous. This was a big tour for them, and they were supporting a terrific record, Truth, that had several careers depending on its success. We told them we loved the record and played it all the time. The famously moody Jeff Beck loosened up a bit, and Ronnie Wood cracked a few jokes. When the drummer disappeared into the bathroom, Wood informed us that “Wanky” Waller liked to have a quick jerk before playing the show. Rod continued to obsessively tend his coiffure. We were invited to help ourselves to bottles of imported Watneys Red Barrel beer from the ice chest and hang out backstage while the opening band, the Hallucinations, finished their set.

      As I was sipping beer, standing against the wall while Jeff Beck and Ron Wood tuned their guitars, my eyes gradually adjusted to the dressing room’s low light. After a while, I noticed two figures sitting in a dark corner. One was a huge man of enormous girth, the other a slender figure in velvet clothes and very long dark hair. Don Law explained that the large one was Peter Grant, who managed the Jeff Beck Group. The slender hippie was his other client, Jimmy Page, who had been playing bass with the Yardbirds and was now stepping into the lead guitar role recently vacated by Jeff. Jimmy was joining the Beck tour for a few days to check out the reaction of the American kids to the new, guitar-heavy rock bands emerging from England. Later that winter, Don told me, Jimmy Page was coming back to America with his band, then called the New Yardbirds, playing a new style of heavy rock that people were saying would blow everyone else out of the sky. Peter Grant was just now booking the Tea Party for Page’s new band.

      That night, the Jeff Beck Group was a smash at the Boston Tea Party. Rod Stewart was so shy in those early days that he usually began the set out of sight, singing his gravel-road lyrics from behind the stacks of Marshall amplifiers. Jeff was incredible, making the guitar howl like a hound and purr like a leopard in heat. In the back of the hall, watching the audience grooving and cheering, stood Jimmy Page and Peter Grant—taking it all in, seeing a vision of the future they would eventually come to own.