On the Road With Led Zeppelin in 1969
Left: Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Bonham performing during Led Zeppelin's show at the Boston Tea Party, Boston, May 1969 Right: Ellen Sander
As a journalist working for Life Magazine, Ellen Sander accompanied Led Zeppelin on tour in May 1969. She recounted the experience in her 1973 memoir Trips. This particular part of the book is often quoted, though not always cited, in articles and books about Zeppelin. That section, which is shared in its entirety at the end of the post, and the following excerpts from a May 2017 article about Ellen are from this source.
The front page of the November 1968 issue of the countercultural monthly The Realist featured “The Case of the Cock-Sure Groupies,” an eye-opening article by 24-year-old music journalist Ellen Sander:
They press up against the stage, the young ones, their faces bathed in delight or clenched in crumpled ecstatic agony. They lean over the edge of the platform, clutching gifts and beads or notes or the group’s latest album. And some reach, reach out, squirm on their bellies trying to get up over the edge of the state, just maybe to-touch-one-of-them . . . once. . . .
Often they work in pairs, sometimes in gangs. . . . They’ll cooperate with each other to outfox whatever stands between them and the rock and roll boys—but only to a point. That is, they’ll gang a door to get inside, but once it’s broken in, it’s every girl for herself. . . .
Since so many of the groupies were underage, Sander used pseudonyms for two of the girls profiled in her article, but in an accompanying caption the editors noted that “the girls want not only their correct names published but also their photo, because of the increasing imposter problem.” The editors agreed to print the grainy Polaroid but identified the girls only by their real first names.
Sander’s gritty pieces on Sixties subcultures soon caught the attention of national editors, and she began to get commissions from national publications. For her first assignment for Life Magazine, Sander agreed to go on the road with a rock band and report on the grueling demands and tawdry hijinks of the concert tour, including the coterie of girls and young women who pursued band members. According to Mick Wall in When Giants Walked the Earth, Sander had hoped to cover The Who, but that didn’t pan out and she was instead invited to join the still-up-and-coming Led Zeppelin for the last two weeks of their second American tour in May 1969.
Led Zeppelin at the Fillmore East, New York, May 1969.
Sander met up with the band in Detroit and stuck it out until their last performance at New York’s Fillmore East. She was so infuriated and disturbed by the now-infamous incident that occurred after that show (and described on the last page of her story), that she didn’t write their publicity-seeking magazine profile. Instead, four years later, after the band had become international megastars, she included her account in the book Trips: Rock Life in the Sixties.
Ellen's piece on her time with Led Zeppelin was republished in the 2017 anthology Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z. The headnote providing more information about Ellen's life was written by the editors of the anthology, Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar.
Below is the author's aforementioned write-up on the band titled Inside the Cages of the Zoo.
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