LZ-’75: Across America with Led Zeppelin - Stephen Davis

Скачать книгу

plagued by problems with Page’s guitar amp. The second night, Friday, began with “Train Kept A-Rollin’” and surged through “Communication Breakdown” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” and on into “You Shook Me” and the stygian depths of “Dazed and Confused,” during which Page scraped a violin bow across the strings of his guitar, producing tortured noise from the gaping maw of hell. They played for two hours, and I left the Tea Party incredibly impressed—and stone deaf.

      Led Zeppelin played for three hours Saturday night. By then their street cred was immense, and young rock fans stood outside the Tea Party in freezing weather because the upstairs windows were open so the crowd inside could breathe, and the loud music could be heard two blocks away. Reviews tended to be raves. “After the Yardbirds comes Led Zeppelin,” wrote Ben Blummenberg in the weekly Boston After Dark. “Rhythms and time patterns shift abruptly. Volume levels change abruptly, yet melodies and chord skeletons merge kaleidoscopically as the band feeds off one another and plays off the ideas thrown out. Intricacy develops out of a form usually quite simple. … Led Zeppelin and the Jeff Beck Group are to rock what Formula One cars are to road racing. Their raw power is compelling and hypnotic while their complexity makes repeated exposure a pleasure. Arrangements of the same song vary on successive nights quite widely. As Jimmy Page told me, ‘If we can’t do it live, we won’t do it.’”

      I squeezed into the Tea Party for the last Boston show on Sunday night, January 26, which turned out to be one of the longest the band ever played. The old temple was packed to double capacity, with the throbbing light show doing its psychedelic thing and the amplifiers cranked up to eleven. You could hardly move, let alone dance, so it was best to just stand there and absorb the decibel barrage blasting out from the stage.

      The notes I managed to scribble read: “Train [Kept A Rollin’]” “I Can’t Quit You” / “Killing Floor” / “Squeeze My Lemon” / “Dazed” / “Shapes [of Things]” / “Comm. Breakdown” / “White Summer, Black Mountain[side]” / “Babe [I’m Gonna Leave You]” / drum solo (intense!!) / “How Many More Times.”

      At the end of their regular, hour-long set, the audience went berserk, and Zeppelin came back for an encore. The same thing happened when they tried to leave the stage again, and so they just kept playing—for three more hours. The room was a steam bath. Jimmy and John Bonham had stripped down to hippie-ish crocheted vests. Robert Plant’s tie-dyed shirt was drenched. The band’s long hair was soaked with sweat. Only John Paul Jones, who didn’t move around much, seemed to keep his cool.

      Decades later, Jones said the last night at the Tea Party was “the key Led Zeppelin gig—the one that put everything into focus. We played our usual set and the audience wouldn’t let us off the stage. We ran out of songs we knew and tried to think of things to play—Beatles songs, anything we might know all or part of. We’d go back on and play anything that came into our heads.” (These included “For Your Love,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Please Please Me,” “Something Else,” a long Chuck Berry medley, “C’mon Everybody,” and dozens of others.)

      “There were kids actually bashing their heads against the stage,” Jones recalled, “and I’d never seen that at a gig before. When we finally left the stage, we’d played for four and a half hours. Peter [Grant] was absolutely ecstatic. He was crying and hugging us all, this massive grizzly bear hug. I supposed it was then that we realized just what Led Zeppelin was going to become.”

      Later a disc jockey who was in the dressing room told me that an ecstatic Grant had actually grabbed the four musicians and lifted them all up into the air.

       CHAPTER 5 He Cried Twice That Night

      At this point I confess that I missed the last ninety minutes of Led Zeppelin’s epic 1969 concert at the Boston Tea Party. Whatever the legend, the band actually sounded ragged (and a little drunk) after three hours, and I wanted to get home to my sexy new girlfriend.

      (Years later, I was talking about these Boston Tea Party concerts with Steven Tyler, whose band Aerosmith would follow Led Zeppelin into the breach a few years later. Steven Tallarico, as he then was, had hitchhiked two hundred miles from New York to see Zeppelin’s final Boston concert. “I cried twice that night,” he told me. “The first time I cried, was because Zeppelin was so fuckin’ heavy that I had no other emotional way to react to them. The second time I cried, was when Jimmy Page walked out of the dressing room—with the girl I’d been living with in New York, until that moment.”)

      So I followed Zeppelin’s career with mounting fascination over the next few years as they released records and built an immense audience despite critical disrespect and constant slagging in the rock press.

      Led Zeppelin stayed on the road in America for the rest of 1969, recording new music whenever they had a few days off in Los Angeles and New York. So was born that lumbering musical mastodon “Whole Lotta Love” and the other metallic masterpieces on Led Zeppelin II, known by some of the band’s young fans as “The Brown Bomber” for its jacket art depicting the band as the aircrew of a WWII warplane. Also born in those faraway times was Zeppelin’s reputation as hell-raising maniacs. Jimmy Page’s interest in (and actual practice of) black magic was the talk of all the famous groupies and their little sisters. The legendary “Shark Episode,” in which a willing, naked groupie was poked and prodded with a sand shark that the drummer had caught from the window of a seaside hotel in Seattle, was even set to music by Frank Zappa. By the end of 1969, Zeppelin had set a standard of excess and debauchery that remained unattainable to any band that tried to follow them.

      In the following summer, 1970, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote songs in an old farmhouse in Wales, giving the music on Led Zeppelin III a pastoral feel of antique landscapes and misty mountains. (The head bangers were still served by rampaging “Immigrant Song” and the sludgy blues of “Since I’ve Been Loving You.”)

      In 1971, Led Zeppelin’s officially untitled fourth album began its reign as one of the greatest productions of the rock era. “Stairway to Heaven,” with its chiming guitars and lighthearted mysticism, became the anthem of its generation and the most requested song in the history of American radio. In 1972, Led Zeppelin’s tours began to outsell even the Rolling Stones, and the band’s four albums remained high up in the sales charts. A fifth album, Houses of the Holy, came out in 1973 with a garish jacket that spoke of spiritual quests and human sacrifice. Like-wise, the band’s riotous, high-energy concerts became rites of passage for the youngest members of the postwar generation. Alone among the great rock bands, Led Zeppelin’s fans began to identify with the band beyond the music itself. Led Zeppelin, it was generally agreed, had an aura of mystery, mystique, and genius that no other band could touch.

      I remained (mostly) oblivious to this. It was totally uncool for a professional rock critic like myself to appreciate Led Zeppelin, whose music was deemed suitable only for cannon-fodder youth intoxicated on cheap wine and pills. As a music editor at Rolling Stone, I didn’t even know any writer who wanted to touch them. Led Zeppelin was out there, alone, with its crazy young audience: a secret society composed of four musicians, their management and roadies, and about twelve million kids.

      That’s when Peter Grant hired Danny Goldberg.

      So now we’re back in January 1975, and I had to get a magazine assignment if I wanted to ride on the Starship. I called a friend at Rolling Stone to see how the magazine was going to cover Led Zeppelin this time around. In the past, Rolling Stone had mostly ignored Zeppelin’s tours, even when the band began setting attendance records for single-act concerts—no one ever opened for Led Zeppelin after they got big—and became known as the highest-grossing band on the planet. But that attitude of the magazine was over when other publications featuring Led Zeppelin on their covers reported sold-out press runs.

      Still, Rolling Stone would not be punching my ticket to the Starship in 1975. Already assigned to Led Zeppelin was a teenage reporter, Cameron Crowe, who had a reputation for writing glowingly positive mash notes about the

Скачать книгу