![]() Bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones, 24, was also a seasoned London session musician. as a member of the Yardbirds-a superior blues-rock band that had also, at different times, featured Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. Twenty-six-year-old Jimmy Page, a sophisticated London studio musician, had toured the U.S. Led Zeppelin was neither a hippie jam band nor an improvisational jazz outfit, but they took the blues, added Eastern influences, switched into acoustic folk in the middle of a number (they even did a cover version of Joan Baez’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”), and you never knew what they would do next. The Rolling Stones, while fashionably louche, played songs. In 1970 the Beatles, no longer on tour, seemed tame. Plus, with the insane drumming of John Bonham, it was radical, playing at a very, very high level-improvisational on a big-rock scale. There was no real blues rock in that bombastic way before Zeppelin. According to producer Rick Rubin, “Jimmy Page revolutionized everything. But if a legend was about debauchery only, people would still be extolling the virtues of the 1980s hair band Poison, or David Lee Roth. And, just when big music and big money came together, Led Zeppelin gave new meaning to “sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.” Everything was offered to them. There were no cell phones, no Game Boys, no DVDs, no Walkmans, no Internet, no reality TV. 1 with eight and a half hours of live material recorded more than 20 years ago.Īt the beginning of the 1970s people were liberated and angry, frustrated and bored. A whole new generation has discovered the band with a TV ad for Cadillac that features their song “Rock and Roll.” This past spring, Zeppelin entered both the CD and DVD charts at No. Tour promoters have offered untold millions for a Zeppelin reunion. With more than 200 million albums sold, Led Zeppelin is the biggest-selling rock group in history. I don’t think anyone who was there remembers the same thing.”) It was so fast, and over and done with, and no one from the band was there. ![]() And it wasn’t some big ritualistic thing it was in and out and a laugh and the girl wasn’t sobbing-she was a willing participant. (“It wasn’t a shark,” Richard Cole told me years later. And, in 1969 at Seattle’s Edgewater Inn, in a notorious episode that has achieved mythic proportion, the band violated a teenage girl with a live shark. The band attacked a female reporter from Life magazine, ripping her clothes, until, in tears, she was rescued by the band’s manager. One time he was naked, covered with whipped cream, put on a room-service table, and wheeled into a room to be served up to a bunch of teenage girls. I recall a flight to Detroit aboard the band’s private jet when Jimmy got into a fight with a Fleet Street reporter, and the tour manager, the menacing Richard Cole, pulled out a gun.Īnd, of course, I remember the rumors: Jimmy traveled with a suitcase full of whips. I remember the band’s needle-thin guitarist, Jimmy Page, sitting in the dark on a sofa in a corner suite at the Plaza hotel in New York City with a cadaverous David Bowie by his side, watching the same 15 minutes of Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising over and over again-with lines of cocaine on the table. ![]() ![]() Nor do I recall hootenannies with acoustic guitars in the Continental Hyatt House on the Sunset Strip. With all due respect to the movie Almost Famous, I never went on a Led Zeppelin tour where the band spontaneously burst into an Elton John song on a tour bus.
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