Innehållsförteckning för Classic Rock Special: Led Zeppelin - 7th. Edition från Classic Rock

It’s ironic when you consider that although Led Zeppelin were never a singles band, they still manage to be present every week on Top Of The Pops – the UK TV show that celebrates the singles chart itself. In November 1970 ‘Whole Lotta Love’ dented the UK Top 20, but Zep weren’t the band behind the single. Rather, it was CCS – or Collective Consciousness Society – and their version of the song. It was CCS’s big-band arrangement of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ that was subsequently adopted by TOTP as its theme tune in the mid-70s. After a period of absence the programme revived the song as its theme in 2000, taking elements of the Zep original and adding a drum ’n’ bass makeover. In 1996 dance act Goldbug took ‘Whole…

Copenhagen, Denmark, September 1968. A former Yardbirds guitarist, an in-demand session bass player, a jobbing drummer and a big-in-the-Midlands vocalist begin a 10-date Scandinavian tour. Billed as The New Yardbirds for contractual reasons, they are the band’s first gigs after getting together only three weeks previously. With them on the trip is their manager, a large, bearded, imposing man with an ‘unconventional’ dress-sense; ex-coffee bar and club doorman, ex-wrestler, bit-part actor (doubling for Anthony Quinn in The Guns of Navarone, small parts in TV programmes), and former manager of 60s chart-toppers the Animals, Jeff Beck and others. On returning to England, the band go into a London recording studio and polish off their entire debut album in just 30 hours at a cost of £1,800 including the cover (seven years…

ROGER DALTREY: “Robert’s got one of the best voices of any rock singer. The quality of his voice made him special. He’s a singer’s singer.” PAUL RODGERS: “Robert interpreted the blues very very accurately and took it to another level. He took it out of the smaller blues clubs and into the arenas, which is a beautiful thing to do. I think even the blues people appreciated that. He was your ultimate front man and probably still is.” ANN WILSON: “Vocally, Robert Plant influenced me as a sexy, philosophically powerful blues singer.” CARMINE APPICE: “Robert’s range was amazing. And just the way he uses his voice as an instrument. Sometimes he didn’t even sing lyrics, he sang something and it became a hook of a song.” STEPHEN STILLS: “There’s just…

PHIL COLLEN: “I still get chills when I hear Whole Lotta Love. It’s so dynamic – it builds up to this incredible climax and you just go with it. That weird, hippie bit in the middle of the song is really cool, too. And then when Jimmy hits those chords at the end, it’s like Pete Townshend on Won’t Get Fooled Again. He’s just hitting those strings really hard, and you can feel it.” KELLY JONES: “Led Zeppelin II was the first album I ever had on vinyl. It’s still my favourite Zeppelin album. Even now, it amazes me how many great songs are on there. It was all blues and songs about women and sex and all that: The Lemon Song, all that stuff about squeezing my lemon till the juice runs down my…

DAVE MUSTAINE: “Four Sticks has probably since become my all-time favourite song of Zeppelin’s.” KID ROCK: “With Zeppelin, I always go to IV, the old man with that thing on his back. Not only was it that they were such popular songs, but When The Levee Breaks, I used to DJ that at basement parties. It’s at the end of side two on the vinyl, isn’t it? I mean, if you’ve got a song that good at the end of your album, what does it say about the rest of your record!” STEVE LUKATHER: “Stairway To Heaven is one the greatest guitar solos of all time. It’s perfect. The way it builds, the choice of notes, it’s the ultimate. I couldn’t imagine that solo being any other way, it’s that good. It was a mind fuck. It’s still every bit…

RICHARD COLE The first time we actually went to see Elvis was at Madison Square Garden but we didn’t meet him then. That came later. The band met him around the same time as the opening of SwanSong. We’d all been up all night and we went to his show at The Forum. They put the spotlight on Zeppelin. After the show, we all went back to see him at the hotel. We had to go underneath the Forum into the hotel. And we went up and met him. I remember Peter [Grant] sat on Elvis’s dad Vernon. It was a funny evening. Everyone was kind of tiptoeing around ‘cause this was Elvis. And this is something different. He’s like lot of people, you meet them for the first time,…

JIMMY PAGE: “In Through the Out Door was done in three weeks, so I can’t see why people have to take so long to do an album. I don’t know why people take two years to do an album. I really wouldn’t have the patience.” TAYLOR HAWKINS: “I’m just going to be that guy that pisses everybody off and say I love In Through The Out Door and Casa Hombre is my favourite track. I love that record; I love the weirdness of it. I don’t really have time for Zeppelin doing the blues. I love the fact that there’s tons of weird keyboards all over the place. That’s like almost their prog rock record in a way.” ANN WILSON: “In Through The Out Door was transitional for Zeppelin and everyone. They rose, as always, to the pure…

Although the story of Led Zeppelin ostensibly ended that bleak day in September 1980 when it became clear John Bonham’s inert form could not be roused, new chapters have been added on a regular basis. The first – the posthumous release in 1982 of the odds-and-sods Coda album – was meant to have closed the book. Despite modest sales (a million in the US, compared to seven million for Zep’s final album In Through The Out Door, and only 60,000 in the UK where …Out Door had sold over 300,000) it added to the curiosity, combing the band’s back catalogue for leftovers and finding plenty to suggest they were far from the spent force that punk-obsessed critics claimed at the time of their demise. “I wanted to do a live…

The second Plant solo album, released in July 1983, was, like its predecessor, too keen to have its cake and eat it. That is, while the singer was clearly keen to try and step out from the gigantic, forbidding shadow of Zeppelin, he hadn’t yet figured out a way to do that and retain his commercial appeal – still an important element in his need to prove he could live without the Zep legend. Written, produced and played by virtually the same team as Pictures…, ultimately what makes The Principle Of Moments a better album is the quality of its best material. Still somewhat too in thrall to the past – the angular Black Dog-like rhythms of Messin’ With The Mekon; the bolted-on feel of Blunt’s Kashmir-like guitar motif in…

According to the legend, John Paul Jones was the only member of Led Zeppelin not to have signed a pact with the Devil, which is why he was spared the personal disasters – death, divorce, drug addiction – that befell the other three. Nonsense, of course, but there’s a reason the story still persists: Jones was always the ‘sensible one’ in the band. The traditional ‘quiet man’ bass player, in the Bill Wyman/John Entwistle mould, seemingly happy to allow the singer and guitarist – even the drummer – to hog the spotlight while he got on with the important job of holding the whole musical structure together. But while Jones may not have shared the charisma of the other Zeppelin members, he certainly didn’t lack the talent. Which is why,…

It’s Friday, November 2, three days before the third ever Classic Rock Roll Of Honour, and this magazine has just been given some bad news. In an hour or two the story will be all over the world, shining out of web pages, burbling out of radios, squeezed into late-night editions of newspapers. Once again, Led Zeppelin are making headlines, and for Classic Rock they have very serious implications: Jimmy Page, it turns out, has broken a finger. Zep’s comeback gig will have to be postponed, and – just maybe – Jimmy won’t be able to make it to our awards. Ulp! Steven Tyler has already flown in from Boston. At Gibson HQ there’s a Les Paul specially signed by Les Paul himself, waiting for Jimmy. Somewhere in Luton, an…

ANDY JOHNS ENGINEER ON LED ZEPPELIN IV As a producer, Jimmy was very innovative. Also, he was very thorough. He knew what he wanted, which is a very important thing for a producer. As a producer you don’t always know how you’re gonna get there but you know where you need to go. And that’s pretty much what I saw in him. Of course, when I was working with Jimmy I was just a young engineer. This was in 1973, and I hadn’t produced anything at that point in my career. I was pretty much in awe of the whole thing. I contributed as much as I could. Whenever you’re working with a member of a band who’s a producer, like a Jimmy Page or Pete Townshend, there’s nobody in…

The announcement of a Yardbirds gig at Newcastle’s Mayfair Ballroom in October 1968 barely caused a ripple of interest in the North East, let alone elsewhere. After a string of Top 10 hits a few years earlier, their career was on a downward slide and they were perilously close to becoming yesterday’s men. What the people of Tyneside didn’t know was that the band had actually split up a few months earlier. But rather than cancel a Scandinavian tour, guitarist Jimmy Page had taken the opportunity to relaunch the band with singer Robert Plant, drummer John Bonham, and noted session player John Paul Jones on bass and keyboards. And so the few dozen people who turned up at the Mayfair for what was supposed to be the first date of…

‘WHOLE LOTTA LOVE’ Zeppelin’s penchant for borrowing blues influences and reshaping them got them into legal trouble on three of the tracks on ‘Led Zeppelin II’. Most famously, they were issued with a lawsuit over ‘Whole Lotta Love’. It took some 15 years for Chicago bluesman Willie Dixon to claim that his composition ‘You Need Love’ – as recorded by Muddy Waters in 1962 – was used without credit as the basis for the lyrics of the opening track on ‘Led Zeppelin II’. He successfully won a court case in 1985 for royalties. ‘WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD NEVER BE’ This song was previewed in June 1969 at the BBC sessions, and then premiered at Zeppelin’s Lyceum show on October 12, 1969. It was revived by Page and Plant for…

Ever on the lookout for new ideas to present the band in a different light, the art-schooled Jimmy Page came up with the idea of an unpronounceable title made up of four distinct symbols, or runes, for their fourth album. “After all the crap that we’d had with the critics, I put it to everybody else that it’d be a good idea to put out something totally anonymous,” Page remembers. “At first I wanted just one symbol on it, but then it was decided that since it was our fourth album and there were four of us, we could each choose our own symbol. I designed mine, and everyone else had their own reasons for using the symbols that they used.” The use of four symbols as the title for…

In late April 1972, Led Zeppelin decamped to Stargroves, Mick Jagger’s Berkshire mansion, to start work on their fifth album. According to Robert Plant, it was a chance for Zeppelin to show another side to their personality. “It’s time that people heard something about us other than that we were eating women and throwing the bones out of the window,” the singer said at the time. The man they initially brought in to help them get their goal on tape was renowned South African-born producer/engineer Eddie Kramer. Kramer had worked with Zeppelin on III, on which he was credited as ‘Director Of Engineering’, although his most recent encounter with the band had ended badly following a row during sessions the previous year at Electric Lady studios in New York. “Everything…

Drummer John Bonham was the heartbeat of Led Zeppelin. When his great heart stopped the life went out of the band. It was a tragedy for rock music as well as for friends and family when he died at the age of 31 on September 25, 1980. After several personal tragedies had rocked the band in the mid-70s, it seemed as if Zeppelin were poised to make the ultimate resurgence. Instead it all came to a dramatic end when John died in the throes of rehearsals for what would have been the band’s biggest tour in years. To understand why Bonham died so young we must also understand the pressures of life with the greatest rock band in the world. Being in Zeppelin brought him great rewards, fame and success,…

TONY IOMMI: “Led Zeppelin I had a great atmosphere, they wrote some really good songs. That stuff hadn’t been heard of. I mean there were other bands doing an amalgamation of blues and rock but this was different. I really think it was down to the quality of the songs.” PAUL STANLEY: “One afternoon FM radio in New York played the first track off this new album and it was Good Times Bad Times. It absolutely stunned me. It was as though somebody had shot adrenaline into my heart. My blood started pumping and I had the sense that the music was going to destroy my speaker because it had such energy and such commitment.” JOE PERRY: “When the first Zeppelin album came out I was already playing and I used spend hours…

MICHAEL ANTHONY: “He’s the classic example of a really underrated bass player. To this day, I’ll put on The Lemon Song and John Paul Jones’s bass playing just blows me away. What I loved about him was he was good without trying to play lead guitar on a bass, which a lot of bass players do today.” RICKY PHILLIPS: “He’s not just a bassist, he’s a composer, and an amazing keyboardist. He knew how to lay down a tight groove with John Bonham, but he also had a way to do it with his note choices and his phrasing, which is so unique. He does more with the blues scale that I’ve ever heard anyone do.” MICK JONES: “He could play anything – he’d play organ, keyboards and he’s an amazing bass…

JOEY KRAMER: “I love John Bonham. It’s about what he doesn’t play. And it’s about his finesse and his feel. He was one of those few guys when you heard him behind the drums you knew it was him because he had a very distinctive sound.” MARKY RAMONE: “Bonham could do anything. He could do rock. He could do jazz. He had a heavy blues sound. He was extremely powerful and never let up. His showmanship was unbelievable but his playing was tight.” CARL PALMER: “He had a definite sound, which he would capture on whatever drums that he played. As far as I’m concerned he was probably one of the most original sounding players of that time.” GARY ROSSINGTON: “My God, he’s one of the best drummers that ever…

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ “Houses Of The Holy is probably my favourite Led Zeppelin record. It’s the first proper album that I discovered and I enjoyed without my father’s guidance.” NANCY WILSON “Not unlike Stairway To Heaven, The Rain Song really incorporates a lot of sophisticated musical theory and change, and also builds into an epic rock song. It’s everything - the words, the melodies, the track itself. And it’s in a tuning that every guitar player has a different idea about what it is! It’s a Holy Grail for me.” JOEY KRAMER: “I can’t really pick a favourite album but I have some favourite Zeppelin songs. I really like The Crunge and The Ocean. I’m about the funk and the space and those tunes have it. That’s what Bonham brought to those songs.”…

Classic Rock is at Rockfield Studios in South Wales, sitting on a large green sofa opposite Robert Plant, reading out an email from the man who played drums on the vocalist’s first two solo albums, following the demise of Led Zeppelin a quarter of a century ago. “Well,” laughs the former Led Zep frontman, “having played in Genesis, being with us had to be good fun, didn’t it?” Plant is back at these studios in Monmouth for a reunion with the band that helped him make those first post-Zeppelin albums, 1982’s Pictures At Eleven and the following year’s The Principle Of Moments. Sitting to his right in the living room at the studio’s Coach House accommodation is former Black Sabbath keyboard player Jezz Woodroffe, while guitarist Robbie Blunt hovers nearby,…

It’s a drizzly, overcast day in September 1982. I’ve just completed an interview with Robert Plant about his first post-Led Zeppelin solo album, Pictures At Eleven, and we’re standing outside Blakes Hotel in South Kensington conducting an impromptu photo session with Ross Halfin. Belying his unapproachable rock god status, Plant is amenable and co-operative. He poses in this position and that, crouching low, stretching high, making my body feel brittle and stiff by comparison. However, Plant has to apologise for not being able to straighten out an arm for one particular shot – the legacy of that car crash in Rhodes in August 1975 when he and his wife Maureen were seriously injured, which left Plant wheelchair-bound for a time and which caused an unexpected hiatus in Led Zeppelin’s career.…

SHAKE MY TREE Coverdale Page Coverdale Page, 1993 When word got out that the former Zep maestro was working with the ex-Whitesnake charmer, most critics nearly gagged on their tea and digestives. And yet what should, on paper at least, have been a disaster turned out to be the best thing either man had done since their respective 70s heydays. And here was the proof right from the off. Built on a bastardised version of Zep’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine riff, such was its appeal it wasn’t long before Robert Plant was on the blower persuading Page he should come back and do the real thing. BURNING DOWN ONE SIDE Robert Plant  Pictures At Eleven, 1982 First solo album, track one – some kind of statement needed here? It’s irrelevant…

At one point it looked like it may never happen. But finally, five years later and despite Jimmy Page’s initial concerns about it being “a massive job to embark on”, the DVD film of Led Zeppelin’s 2007 comeback show is out. Celebration Day captures their performance at the Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert at London’s O2 Arena in all its dazzling pomp. With Jason Bonham on drums in place of his late father John, it was the band’s first headline show in 27 years. The DVD follows a worldwide theatre release, and a series of slightly tetchy press conferences in which the three remaining founder members fielded enquiries about a further Zeppelin reunion with a mixture of tolerance and irritation. The whole thing, true to the band’s gilded history, felt like…

In 1969, Chris Welch was the star writer of Melody Maker, then the most influential and prestigious music paper in Britain. He’d been there when Hendrix first set fire to his guitar at the Speakeasy; hung out in the studio while The Who wrestled with Tommy; kept Dylan waiting in reception for an interview while he finished his lunch; driven Rod Stewart home from gigs in the days when Rod was too poor to afford his own wheels. But, Chris says, he had never – ever – heard anything like this. “One of the younger writers brought an early pre-release copy of the album in and played it on the office stereo – and it just leapt out at you! It really did feel like a great leap forward, in…

In the USA, singles taken from albums gained valuable radio airplay that, in turn, led to all-important album sales. Consequently, Zeppelin manager Peter Grant had no problem with Atlantic Records issuing an edited version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ as a single there. Its ascent to the Top Five of the Billboard chart by January 1970 confirmed Zep as the hottest act of the new decade. Grant had no plans to allow such a release in the UK, but Atlantic Records presumed differently and went ahead and pressed an initial quantity of the 3.12 edit of the song backed with ‘Livin’ Lovin’ Maid (She’s Just A Woman)’. Allegedly, around 500 copies were distributed to press and radio stations and another 500 ended up in a warehouse in Manchester ready for release.…

As president of Atlantic Records in those days, I had been Led Zeppelin and Peter Grant’s go-to guy since the beginning. As a musician myself, I had built up a great relationship with the band, even playing bass on stage during an encore at a show in Germany, doing Whole Lotta Love. Zeppelin’s 1973 tour of America was their ninth over there, but it was clear right away that this one was different. For a start, the band looked different. Glam rock had seen bands like the Stones and the Faces taking on a much more glamorous look on stage, and Zeppelin were the same. This tour was the first time Jimmy wore his ‘moon and stars’ suit; Robert still went on bare-chested, but he’d be wearing a puffed-sleeve blouse;…

You must be immensely proud that 25 years after your father’s death he remains one of the most revered and successful rock musicians we’ve ever known. After 25 years it still feels like yesterday to me. But for me, the fans still talk about dad in the present, never the past. It’s always, ‘When he does this’ and never, ‘When he did that’. And that I find that really endearing. Even now, with these Foreigner shows I’m playing and there’s all these 20 to 25-year-old people wearing that Zeppelin ’77 T-shirt that’s become very popular these days. My kid goes to school over here in America and he’s suddenly realised how cool granddad was. Last night we met up with the Miami Heat coach, one of the biggest basketball teams…

In early 1968 there were two session musicians doing the rounds in London – one was Yardbirds guitarist Jimmy Page, and the other a bass player named John Paul Jones. At the same time, a singer named Robert Plant and a drummer called John Bonham were playing in a pub band called Band Of Joy. Ultimately, the quartet would hook up and create a popular beat combo called Led Zeppelin… PAUL RODGERS The first time I heard about Jimmy Page was just around the time that Free had first gotten together. There was a big blues boom going on at that time. I met Robert [Plant] up in Birmingham. Free were touring with Alexis Korner and Robert got up to jam. He came back to the hotel for a cup…

In 1974, The Babys guitarist Michael Corby was living in London when he happened to cross paths with Led Zeppelin. Little did he know he’d end up selling his favourite guitar to the day’s biggest guitar hero. Corby takes up the story… “I was living in Battersea, South London, I was engaged in putting together a rock’n’roll band which subsequently became known as The Babys. An associate of my manager, the late Adrian Millar, called Noddy Mackenzie was friendly with Raymond Thomas who was Jimmy Page’s guitar roadie. After informing Raymond that I was the custodian of a three pick-up original Gibson Les Paul ‘Black Beauty’ I found myself commanded to appear at the court of Led Zeppelin at their rehearsals in a disused cinema in Fulham, owned by Emerson…

JAMES DEAN BRADFIELD: “I got III cheap in Woolworth’s I think, I got it on cassette, I couldn’t be bothered with all that artwork they had going with the vinyl, it reminded me of an advent calendar. It was a strange album for me because when you’re 14 or 15 you think you know what Led Zeppelin are, this rock leviathan, and then you hear III and realise how subtle they could be. Tangerine did it for me straight away, and Since I’ve Been Loving You has to be their best blues translation ever by a mile. You can hear the bass drum pedal squeaking on it.” LUKE MORLEY: “When I watched the film Almost Famous, it had all these lovely, almost pastoral acoustic songs from Led Zeppelin III – and it really made me think about how this element of…

DUANE EDDY: “Jimmy’s a brilliant player, just brilliant. He’s one of the few guys that blazed away on the guitar and still has something to really say with it. It was about soul, feeling, technique and skill, he blended it all together. There’s only a few guys that I know of who’ve done that.” MARK TREMONTI: “I learnt early on that Page was probably the best guitarist ever. The vibe he put forward was so different. I love his dark and twisted stuff, but I was a bigger fan of his pretty stuff; the airy open tunings, and all the clever little licks.” NANCY WILSON: “Guitar wise, Jimmy is my musical poet.” NEAL SCHON: “One of the most important things is when a player arrives on a style and people…

RITCHIE BLACKMORE: “Kashmir and When the Levee Breaks were probably my favorite Led Zeppelin songs. Kashmir inspired me to write Stargazer for Rainbow incorporating the Turkish element.” ROGER DALTREY: “I sang a Zeppelin song for a project (British Rock Symphony) with an orchestra and it was interesting to do it, but I found Kashmir tricky. The reason it was tricky was just for the sentiment of it. I just found it hard to put myself into a Led Zeppelin lyric.” RON NEVISON: “I never knew that Physical Graffiti was going to be a double album. When we started out we were just cutting tracks for a new record. I left the project before they started pulling in songs from Houses Of The Holy and getting them up to scratch. So I didn’t know it was a double until it came out!” LUKE MORLEY: “In My…

Robert Plant’s first solo album, released in June 1982 – his last recording to be issued on the rapidly disintegrating Swan Song label – was a transitional work, at best; an exercise in treading water, at worst. Although in later years he would bend over backwards to unshackle himself from the legacy of his time in the world’s most extravagantly gifted – and most over-the-top – rock band, Pictures At Eleven found him never straying far from the sound he was then best known for. In ex-Steve Gibbons Band guitarist Robbie Blunt, Plant had found someone he felt immediately comfortable writing with (check out the ‘trad’ rock guitar on album closer Mystery Title). As a result, of the eight tracks, five can safely be characterised as straightforward rockers, two as…

Jimmy Page suffered most from the loss of Led Zeppelin. While Robert Plant was plainly relieved to shed the responsibility of helping to keep the Zeppelin legend alive, and John Paul Jones seemed content to retreat even further into the shadows, Page was left absolutely bereft, both musically and personally. As he told me not long afterwards: “There was a point after [John Bonham died] where I hadn’t touched a guitar for ages and I just related everything to what had happened, the tragedy. But I called up my road manager one day and said: ‘Look, get the Les Paul out of storage.’ He went to get it and the case was empty! I think somebody took it out and borrowed it. They shouldn’t have. It eventually reappeared. But when…

The inside story of Led Zep I, II, III, IV, Physical Graffiti and more! The Epic Oral History: The Zep story as told by their friends, fans and contemporaries – Paul Rodgers, Leslie West, Alice Cooper, Roger Daltrey, Slash, Roy Harper & more Life after Led Zeppelin: What Page, Plant and Jones did next and the solo tracks every Led Zep fan should own Peter Grant: The last interview – Zep’s legendary manager looks back Jimmy Page interviewed! The ultimate collection THE FULL STORY – FROM THE PAGES OF CLASSIC ROCK MAGAZINE THE BEST OF CLASSIC ROCK 40 YEARS OF STORIES…