Kitabı oku: «LZ-’75: Across America with Led Zeppelin»

Prologue

Led Zeppelin rarely let journalists anywhere near the band. Shortly after guitarist Jimmy Page founded the English rock group in 1968, relations with the press deteriorated to the point of outright hostility on both sides. Early reviews of Led Zeppelin’s recordings and concerts were negative, unkind, and even vitriolic. Led Zeppelin was described as an unholy amalgam of hype, money, depravity, and Satanism. The band retaliated by banning writers and photographers from their shows, with the exception of a few trusted people who could be counted on to write positive articles and make authorized, band-approved photographs. There were also reliable accounts of journalists being assaulted by members of Led Zeppelin; being spat on; having drinks flung in their faces.

“The press,” as it was known, was terrified of Led Zeppelin. All this changed, somewhat, in 1975. By then, Led Zeppelin was the biggest, highest-grossing rock band in the world, as well as the booming music industry’s biggest act. The records shipped platinum. The tours sold out in moments. Zeppelin started a record label, and the products started selling tonnage as well.

But in 1975, the mainstream media didn’t play along. The rock press was eager for any piece of Led Zeppelin, but as the band prepared a new album of songs, maybe its best ever, and a sold-out tour of North America, the band’s media representatives found certain doors slamming shut and important phone calls unreturned. So it was decided that Led Zeppelin would take the unprecedented step of inviting carefully selected writers, editors, and photographers from the regular media to come along for a taste of the tour from the inside. Backstage passes would be doled out, interviews would be given, a tour photographer was hired. Rolling Stone magazine, hated by Led Zeppelin for unfair treatment since 1969, would be courted. An elite from this small constituency would even be offered the occasional seat on “Starship One,” Led Zeppelin’s flying gin palace, a converted Boeing 727 jetliner, as it ferried the musicians in excelsis, across time zones, state lines, and states of mind.

I was one of those writers.

Between January and March 1975, I covered Led Zeppelin’s tenth American tour, as a magazine journalist. I was well treated by the band, its management, and the road crew, and the whole thing was an adventure. Led Zeppelin paid for everything. I heard a lot of great music, and also witnessed concerts that were far less than brilliant, illustrating how a long, hard-fought rock campaign could be undermined by illness, exile, homesickness, weather, drugs, and alcohol. In other words, I saw that the current gods of rock were mere mortals after all.

While I was on duty in 1975, I kept three notebooks detailing the daily progress of the Zeppelin tour as I was covering it. Some entries were more personal, sketching characters I met, and various situations and experiences. On the notebook’s covers I scribbled LZ-‘75. After I wrote my article, I put the LZ-’75 notebooks in a drawer and forgot about them.

Jump ten years to 1985. I’d been searching for the LZ-’75 notebooks for two years because I was writing a biography of Led Zeppelin, which had disbanded five years earlier after drummer John Bonham died. But I’d moved houses, and the notebooks had been misplaced. I had a few details of that period—Zeppelin’s most important North American tour—from the manuscript of the old magazine article, but most of the in-the-moment, on-the-road 1975 incidents from my notes were absent from Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, which nonetheless became an international best seller when it was published in 1985. (I think this happened mostly because, at the time, there was so little available information about Led Zeppelin’s twelve-year career. There were no Zeppelin videos on early MTV, and although Robert Plant remained active, he didn’t play any of the old songs in concert. In the sudden and complete vanishing of Led Zeppelin after 1980, as if a malign spirit had been banished from the world, millions of rock fans had become obsessed by the legendary band’s raw power, addictive charisma, and hellacious mystique.)

Another ten-year jump, to 1995. I was traveling with Aerosmith while collaborating on the band’s autobiography. One night in Buenos Aires, Jimmy Page asked Joe Perry to give the induction speech marking Led Zeppelin’s entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that year. Joe enlisted bandmate Steven Tyler to share the speech, and asked me to write it. Joe said he wanted some new material about Led Zeppelin, not a rewrite of Hammer of the Gods. Again I searched for the elusive LZ-’75 notebooks, but they were still missing. Somehow, though, I knew they weren’t gone, only hiding. I ended up with a speech about Aerosmith’s early and slavish appreciation of Zeppelin, voiced by the principals themselves. Steven Tyler, who had begun his career as a drummer, choked up during his tribute to John Bonham. After the evening’s speeches, there was one hell of a rock jam in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom that night.

Ten years after that, in 2005, I finally found the LZ-’75 notebooks. It had been three decades since I had covered Led Zeppelin. The notebooks were in a veritable cardboard 1975 time capsule that also preserved some eight-track tapes, the keys to my old BMW, a ceramic bong, six C-90 tape cassettes of interviews, a thick file of news clippings, Polaroid snapshots and several (now archaic) photographic contact sheets, press releases from the Led Zeppelin office, unused concert tickets, New York subway tokens, a cocktail napkin from the Continental Hyatt House in West Hollywood with scribbled phone numbers, various Zeppelin backstage passes, a letter from William S. Burroughs, a goatskin Moroccan kif pouch, and a bundle of teenage fan mail to Led Zeppelin, all dated 1975.

Two years later, Led Zeppelin reunited for a charity concert in London. This single show in December 2007 ignited a planetary wave of interest in the band, with tens of millions reportedly applying online for the 20,000 available tickets. There was a period of intense speculation and hope that this epochal (and famously contentious) group could re-form around the son of its late drummer and reconquer Planet Rock with its dark combo of black magic and Woodstockian fantasy.

But this didn’t happen.

Around then, I began to reread the LZ-’75 notes and discovered there was a story that could be told about being around Led Zeppelin at the apex of the band’s career. The year 1975 was fateful for Led Zeppelin; an examination of what happened to the four musicians during that year could be intriguing to their legion of fans, a legion that has expanded across three generations. And these were, looking back, extremely interesting times. In America, a president had been forced from office in August 1974 over the pointless Watergate burglary. England was plagued with shortages and strikes, and was routinely predicted to be on the verge of chaos. The Vietnam War was still being fought. It was the era of Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Carlos the Jackal, and ABBA. Jamaican reggae music was fighting an insurgency against disco for the soul of the dance floor. Bob Marley was alive and well. In London, the new punk bands were beginning to rehearse in the back rooms of Kings Road boutiques. But Led Zeppelin, secure within its own secret society, operated outside the temporal runnings; few of 1975’s headlines really matter to our story. So I’ve combined my firsthand account with other reliable sources, some recently discovered, and added musical data informed by the nearly complete library of bootleg recordings of the band’s 1975 concerts.

LZ-’75 is a personal portrait of the greatest rock band in history, at the apogee of its flight. For Led Zeppelin, everything they had done until then led up to the epic music they would create in 1975: a year of travel, incredible artistic success, personal exaltation, near-death traumas, and a creative rebirth under painful hardship and dislocation. It was the top year for the band. After 1975, Led Zeppelin would never be the same again.

—S.D.