#ledzeppelinarticle

1974, and the world of LED ZEPPELIN is expanding. Their new Swan Song label has signed Bad Company, their office walls are painted red so they "won't show the blood", and their manager is sending dead chickens to his staff. It is, apparently, "like being in Dante's Inferno but having a good time". But as the '70s roll on, the hedonism comes with more and more menace, and the immortals seem fallible. Three decades on, Uncut charts the decline and fall of the Zeppelin empire, and the tragedies that overwhelmed the band…

AT THE END OF OCTOBER 1973, as David Cassidy topped the pop charts and the world reeled from an Arab oil embargo, a little-publicized milestone was reached in rock 'n' roll. Led Zeppelin's five-year contract with Atlantic Records — signed on October 28, 1968 — came up for renegotiation. The most heavyweight, Dionysian, statistic-shattering rock group of the '70s used their bargaining power adeptly. As a condition for staying with Atlantic, they asked to be given their own record label. Atlantic could hardly refuse; Zeppelin accounted for a quarter of its annual sales.

Thus, a band more accustomed to chopping out cocaine in the comfort of a private jet, or riding motorbikes up and down hotel corridors, enthusiastically became record executives and A&R scouts. "This label won't be just Led Zeppelin, that's for sure," Robert Plant promised. "It's an outlet for people we admire and want to help. "They named it Swan Song, after the title of an unreleased composition by Jimmy Page. A swan's dying cry, Page earnestly explained to the label's American vice-president Danny Goldberg, was "one of the most beautiful sounds in the world". Not that anyone was expecting this particular swan to die. Financed and distributed by the mighty Atlantic, the new label would have prestige, lavish budgets and global reach, as well as personal supervision from Zeppelin's much-feared, much-esteemed manager, Peter Grant. "Obviously it will be a winning label, "Phil Carson, an Atlantic executive, enthused. "Peter does have a knack of seeing things coming."

But Grant, for all his managerial acumen, could not have foreseen one thing: that Swan Song would be much more than a label. Between 1974 and 1980, it would be the international facilitator for Zeppelin's debauchery and demolition, their high-stakes business deals, their ruthless entourage and their descent into darkness. "When you ask what Swan Song was like," says the actor and singer Michael Des Barres, whose band Detective signed to the label in 1975, "it was like being in Dante's Inferno but having a good time. It was an elitist, hierarchical place where you were untouchable and immortal. But that's where the darkness comes in, because one day you suddenly stop believing it."

THE KING'S ROAD was in transition when Swan Song opened its London office there in 1974. The city's fashion golden mile, stretching from affluent Sloane Square to the council blocks of World's End, was dotted with boutiques such as Alkasura (where Marc Bolan bought his glitter outfits), Granny Takes A Trip (the onetime psychedelic mecca, rapidly losing its lustre) and Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, a little retro shop run by an odd couple named Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. Swan Song moved into No 484, behind the anonymous façade of a three-storey Victorian terraced house.

There was no glitz, glamour, smoked glass or parquet flooring. "We had the scruffiest offices you've ever seen," says Cynthia Sach, a former Swan Song secretary. "For all their millions, [Zeppelin] didn't spend a penny on doing the place up. It was just somewhere for them to hang their hat." The band's tour manager, Richard Cole, who lived locally, was a regular sight during the week. Telexes clattered and clacked back and forth between London and New York, where Danny Goldberg worked out of the plush Madison Avenue headquarters of Steve Weiss, Zeppelin's attorney. Peter Grant might telephone from his moated Sussex Tudor mansion—the girls at Swan Song kept a Zep album on the turntable just in case, so Grant would hear 'the boys' in the background—or perhaps he would materialise in person, his 25-stone body fee-fi-fo-fumming up the stairs. Jimmy Page would pop in for meetings, invariably looking underfed and trailing the bottoms of his flared jeans behind him. The girls found him charming. So polite! So thin!

"There was no 'eye of newt' or anything," remarks Unity MacLean, who left her job at CBS to become Swan Song's office manager and head of promotions. "Jimmy was a very pleasant, mild-mannered guy. He could be quite a nondescript character. The police picked him up one night and arrested him for stealing Jimmy Page's credit cards." But there was an aura, too, that this waif-like genius seemed to be able to switch on and off, as though he were half-mortal and half-Paganini.

Daniel Treacy, a King's Road teenager who spent a summer working at Swan Song, remembers his first encounter with Page. "Unity had told me not to look at him or speak to him," Treacy says. "He came in, looking very smart in a black frock coat with a scarf. I'm not joking, but it was like an icy cold blast blowing into the room on one of the hottest days of the summer." MacLean judged Page to be "an inquisitive man in awe of his own talent and presence. He was a little bit like quicksilver. Hard to get hold of."

Robert Plant was totally different. He didn't visit the office often, but he was usually in a genial mood and would sit fluffing up his hair in front of a mirror engraved with the name of his beloved football team, Wolverhampton Wanderers. Bassist John Paul Jones was more affable still, and so free of airs and graces that the staff would sometimes not notice he was in the room. But the most popular Zep member at Swan Song was drummer John Bonham, whose deranged behaviour on tour had earned him the nickname 'The Beast'. Cynthia Sach defends him: "Bonzo was lovely. One day he came into the office and asked for a pair of scissors. He got down on his knees and started cutting up the carpet. I said, 'Give me those scissors right now,' and snatched them out of his hand. He said, 'But it's my office!' I said, 'I don't care whose office it is, you're not cutting up the carpet.'"

And then there was Grant. And people's voices tend to go a bit quiet when they talk about Grant. "Did I ever meet Grant? I've probably still got the imprints on my neck," shudders Daniel Treacy. "He was like Shrek meets The Long Good Friday. Unity sent me to cash a cheque for £350 at Swan Song's bank in Mayfair, and I accidentally went to the wrong branch. The cashier refused to give me the money. When I got back to the office, Grant came stomping up the stairs, lifted me up and pinned me to a wall. He goes, 'You've really fucked it up for me and Jimmy, you little bastard.' Then he let go and I slid down the wall. I later found out that half the money was for a dress for Grant's daughter, and the other half was for a bike for Page."

Michael Des Barres was dazzled by Grant, an immense figure who exuded menace, action and power. The scenes in The Song Remains The Same, where Grant plays an Al Capone-style crime lord, were not intended to be a joke. "Peter epitomised '60s gangsterism," Des Barres notes, "and had the natural instinct of a general in the street war of rock 'n' roll. He was the leader. He was the Gangster Commandant." Unity MacLean had the dubious honour of being asked out by Grant on a date. She politely declined, preferring to keep their relationship on a professional footing. The next day, Grant sent her a package in the post. Inside was a dead chicken.

ONE OF THE first artists to sign to Swan Song was Maggie Bell, a razor-voiced Glaswegian blues singer tipped by Grant (who managed her) to become a household name like Janis Joplin. Grant also had high hopes for Bad Company (whom, again, he managed), a band formed by Paul Rodgers (ex-Free) and Mick Ralphs (ex-Mott The Hoople). Grant would be wrong about Bell, but spectacularly right about Bad Company, whose 1974 debut, Bad Co, gave Swan Song its first No 1 album in America. The taste of the champagne was only slightly diluted by the knowledge that Swan Song 'shared' Bad Company with another label, Island, who released their records in Britain. Even so, Bad Company were a Swan Song sensation. They'd begun their US tour as support to The Edgar Winter Group, and ended it as stadium headliners. If this was what it took to run a successful label, Zeppelin were making it look easy.

The other act on the roster was The Pretty Things, chameleonic veterans who could boast a mid-'60s R'n'B pedigree ("Rosalyn"), a pioneering psychedelic rock opera (S.F. Sorrow) and, more worryingly, an industry-wide reputation for being impossible to work with and prone to dire luck. Plant and Page were big fans. The Pretties' Silk Torpedo, one of the strongest albums of their career, became Swan Song's first worldwide synchronized release (in October 1974), an event celebrated with a party at Chislehurst Caves in Kent, featuring magicians, a fire eater, inexhaustible supplies of Kahlúa (Peter Grant's favourite) and women in cages dressed as nuns. The Pretty Things had never had such a welcome.

"We were sick of the business and we'd had a few raw deals," singer Phil May reminisces. "We said to Peter, 'OK, we'll join your label as long as you'll be our manager.' Peter said, 'Fuck off, I've heard you're unmanageable.' But it went well. He'd be there in his big old armchair, and we'd be on the floor smoking dope, with a big pile of coke on the table, and he'd say (holding the phone away from his ear), 'Ahmet [Ertegun, president of Atlantic] wants you to go into the studio.' And we'd say, 'We'd rather go back on the road, Peter. 'So he'd say, 'Ahmet, they ain't going into the studio. They're going on the fucking road.' Slam down the receiver, and that would be the entire conversation."

Silk Torpedo had not been cheap. For one song, the Pretties used the London Philharmonic Orchestra and a large brass band from Wales (who rolled into Abbey Road drunk), while most of the tracks were recorded at Headley Grange, the country house in Hampshire whose remarkable acoustics Zeppelin had exploited on "When The Levee Breaks" and "Rock And Roll". The Pretties arrived to find Headley Grange a shambles. "Bad Company and Zeppelin had been there before us," groans May. "There wasn't a bed with four legs left. There was a Canaletto hanging on the staircase with a big hole punched in it. There were all sorts of things missing." On the first day of recording, the band's bad luck returned to taunt them. May: "A Bosendorfer piano that we'd ordered from Harrods was dropped by the delivery men taking it off the lorry, and smashed to pieces. Our producer, Norman Smith, drove up in a Rolls-Royce and proceeded to walk out of the sessions within the first hour, because we had a song called 'Psychosomatic Boy' and Norman said, 'I'm not doing a song about cripples.' (Laughs) Peter Grant rings up and asks how it's going. I said, 'Well, the piano's in bits and the producer's gone.' He said, 'What do you mean, gone? You've only been there 20 minutes, you cunts. 'After we finally left Headley, we got a memo from Peter addressed to all the groups, saying, 'Could you kindly return the bamboo table with the glass top, the two Chinese duelling pistols, the such-and-such a painting…' I typed out a reply saying, 'Dear Peter, I am very offended by your insulting memo, and unless I receive an apology I will come round and blow your head off with my two Chinese duelling pistols.' In the end Swan Song paid the bill for everything—but it was Zeppelin who did most of the damage."

Swan Song flew the Pretties to LA to promote Silk Torpedo. There, they witnessed Zep-style destruction at first hand. Both bands were booked into the Continental Hyatt House—the infamous 'Riot House'—where the Pretties' drummer Skip Alan buddied up with John Bonham. "Zeppelin have got the top floor and we're underneath," says Alan. "Now, everything you've heard about Zeppelin, if you quadruple it, that's what it was like. Total lunacy. I stayed in Bonzo's room one night, and you know you hear about him breaking up rooms? I'm talking to him and all of a sudden he gets up and starts systematically wrecking all the furniture. All the flat pack wardrobes, he's whacking them down, kicking them and smashing them. Then, when he's flattened everything, he moves it into a big pile in the middle, and phones down to Cole to get him another room. It was unbelievable, really. It was like he felt he had a job to do. 'What time is it?' 'Three o'clock, Bonzo.' 'Better flatten the room, then.'"

May: "Sometimes we would travel to Zeppelin gigs in the limo with Bonham, and you're looking at him thinking, 'He can't possibly do three hours onstage.' None of us would have slept for two nights and we're all fucked. And Robert's got a sore throat, you know, and none of them have been looking after themselves. It's like watching a high-wire act. Will they fall? Then they go out onstage and it's absolute magic."

Alan: "They would get red carpet treatment wherever they went. As soon as they got into a club—say you were in Paris with them—they'd start picking up everything off the table and chucking food around. There'd be Dover soles going all round the restaurant. They were just insane. Cole would always sort out the aggro. He'd drop a few hundred quid to the manager and say, 'Sorry about that, mate.'"

But there was a nasty edge to the anarchy. Bonham had a way of spotting the happiest couple in the restaurant—a man dining innocently with his wife—and throwing a dinner plate at their heads. The plate would smash. The woman would scream. The man would leap to his feet. Zep's on-hand enforcers would very meaningfully tell him to sit down. Bonham would be brought another plate. For those outside the Swan Song bubble, it must have been hard to see how this could be someone's idea of fun.

IN FEBRUARY 1975, Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti became Swan Song's third long-playing release. It was an extravagant, super-confident double album with intricate artwork that had delayed its appearance for some months. A window into Zeppelin's world? Almost literally so. Experimenting with every kind of rock from Eastern to funk to black snake moans ("Kashmir", "Trampled Under Foot", "In My Time Of Dying"), it also entertained the purchaser with tantalising photos of the band in various states of dress (including drag). By revealing only this much and no more, Physical Graffiti added considerably to their mystique. Two million pre-orders ensured it went double platinum before even reaching the shops, at which point all five of Zeppelin's previous albums joined it in the US charts. Another stat to satisfy Grant; another first for rock 'n' roll.

Zeppelin, of course, could achieve these landmarks without any need for publicity. Their deep mistrust of the media had been an important factor in creating their mystery in the first place; but it was still a shock for Unity MacLean, Swan Song's head of promotions, to learn that her job entailed keeping the band out of the music papers, not putting them in. Grant's attitude of "fuck the press" had worked like a charm for Zeppelin, but here came the problem—because Grant's profane aloofness was no help to The Pretty Things (Silk Torpedo had failed to chart in either Britain or America), or to Maggie Bell, whose album Suicide Sal sold only moderately. "Mags was brilliant," says Cynthia Sach. "She should have gone far. But Peter Grant held her back. She was one of the best girl singers in the country, but he bloody wouldn't let her do anything."

Only Bad Company (Straight Shooter) had any degree of success in 1975. It was becoming clear that there were drawbacks when you signed to a label run by Zeppelin and Grant. "It was sometimes difficult," says Richard Cole, "because you had to get five opinions on everything. Anything sent through to the office would have to be sent to Peter, and he'd have to coordinate it with the other four. But two of them lived in Worcestershire and the other two lived in Sussex." And there were no emails or mobile phones. And when Grant's marriage broke up and his wife abandoned him to his isolated moated mansion, the grief-stricken giant began devoting less time to Swan Song and more time to drugs. Swan Song became, as Daniel Treacy puts it, "a ghost town record company". There were no board meetings or new releases. Tumbleweed blew through 484 King's Road for months at a time. Abe Hoch, the label's director of European operations, realised there were no European operations to direct. "I would look out the window, and there was a huge Durex sign outside. I would stare at this sign and think, 'My God, this is an indication of where my life's going.' There was nothing happening. Swan Song had become more illusion than reality."

INSIDIOUSLY, surreptitiously, the darkness had begun to seep in. Page, Bonham and Grant were all on heroin. In Page's case it didn't do a great deal for his weight. In Bonham's, it was helped down with cocaine and enormous quantities of alcohol. The gentleman farmer was increasingly given to irrational displays of rage. "When Bonham got drunk," says Danny Goldberg, "he was unpleasant, belligerent and scary. He was a very strong guy. Jimmy tended to be remote and distant, although when he wanted to be, he could be very nice. But when too much cocaine and heroin is around, it doesn't bring out the best in people." Goldberg avoided cocaine himself, and was nervous about the effect it had on Zeppelin's key personnel. "There was always a certain level of stress any time Zeppelin were around. The stakes always seemed so high."

Unity MacLean knows exactly what Goldberg means. She describes "a pervasive attitude in the office of aggression, frustration and self-destruction. There was always an underlying current of anger. There was a lot of anger in Peter. Paul Rodgers was a very angry man. Clive Coulson [Bad Company's co-manager] was always angry and threatening. There were all these angry people around, looking for a fight. One day they painted the walls in one of the rooms bright red. I was walking past and I said, 'God, that red's a bit overpowering. 'One of them turned to me and said, "Well, it won't show the blood then, will it?' That was the way they all talked. Angry conversations about revenge and violence, and whose head was going to get kicked in."

As an abstract concept, as a state of mind, Swan Song was all-powerful. As a label, however, it made no effort to adapt to the marketplace by scouting new talent. Demo tapes would accumulate in the office, posted by hopeful bands eager to work for Zeppelin, only to be discarded in cardboard boxes and go unheard for years. (One tape was Iron Maiden's. They signed to EMI instead.) "There was an act that I thought we really should have signed," says Abe Hoch. "A guy in Seattle had sent me a tape of two girls from Vancouver, with a note saying, 'One of these girls sings like Robert Plant with more balls.' It was Heart. There was a version of 'Rock And Roll' on the tape, and I wanted to play it to Robert, but he didn't even get past the note. 'Whaat? More balls than me?' So we never signed Heart."

All the same, two new additions came to the roster in 1975-6. One was an established hitmaker—Dave Edmunds, the lightning-fingered Welsh guitarist, who'd been identified as perfect for Swan Song by Plant. The other new signing was Detective, an Anglo-American quintet fronted by the handsome English nobleman Michael Des Barres, whose wife Pamela had had a long-running affair in California with Page. Phil May sniffs, "Detective always seemed like the odd chicken in the nest to me. The others I could understand—Bad Company, Maggie—and then suddenly there's Detective, who didn't really seem to fit."

Oh, but they did. Though they would struggle to get a commercial foothold on either continent, Detective were rock gods in their heads, every bit as rapacious in their drug consumption as Zeppelin. "We were precisely what rock 'n' roll should be," declares Des Barres. "Magic and chaos mingled." Their first album took more than a year to record, was scrapped at least once, and cost a fortune. Des Barres: "It was like if Caligula had a rock band. It was orgiastic, it was laborious, it was spectacular." Producer Jimmy Robinson remembers Page visiting the studio to see how Swan Song's exciting new charges were getting on. Robinson: "He listened to a few tracks and said (very hesitantly), 'Uh, don't you think it sounds a little bit like … us?' Which was hilarious because all Detective wanted to do was sound like Zeppelin. They were a good band, but this was the era when bands would be in the studio with half-a-million-dollar budgets and pounds of blow, thinking to themselves, 'Hey, we're living the dream.'"

Detective was released in April 1977 just as punk swept Britain. Its creators had become obsolete before anyone had even heard them. Detective made another album for Swan Song a year later (It Takes One To Know One), which comes as news to Des Barres, who has no recollection of it whatsoever.

IN ALL THE years that he worked for them, Richard Cole only heard Led Zeppelin talk about money on one occasion: in November 1975, in the bar of Munich's Arabella Hotel, during the recording of their seventh album, Presence. Bonham came down for a drink, buoyed after a conversation with Grant, and casually informed Cole that the members of Zeppelin had all just made €5 million each. Wealthier than their wildest dreams, Zep were now officially tax exiles. And then the bad things started to happen. Tours of America and the Far East had to be cancelled when Plant broke an ankle and an elbow in a car accident on the island of Rhodes. His leg was in a cast for several months, requiring him to sing his vocals on Presence from a wheelchair. Page, in the grip of heroin, somehow got the album over the finishing line in 17 days.

"Presence was pure anxiety and emotion," Page later commented. "We didn't know whether we'd ever be able to play in the same way again. It might have been a very dramatic change, if the worst had happened to Robert." Plant had been warned by doctors that he might never walk again, so Page was not exaggerating the fear. Presence was released in April 1976, to a widespread sense of anticlimax. Disappointment or not, Presence topped the world's charts. In October came the film (and accompanying soundtrack album) The Song Remains The Same, another huge hit, but another disappointment. This time even Page was critical. Bad Company continued to fly the Swan Song flag (Run With The Pack made the US Top 5 in 1976), but The Pretty Things' Savage Eye was unsuccessful and the band were, as Phil May puts it, "staggering around like an elephant that's been shot".

While Zep had been absent from the King's Road, their overthrow had been plotted by a new generation who drank in pubs a mere 200 yards to the east. First renamed Sex (and later Seditionaries), McLaren and Westwood's provocative premises became a centre of operations for punks in England's south-east. At Swan Song, where everyone wore jeans and cowboy boots, eyebrows were raised at the new fashion styles outside their window. "We used to see Jordan [punk fashionista Pamela Rooke] traipsing down the road in her leotard," says Cynthia Sach. "Nothing else, just a leotard." The look of the King's Road changed from hippy casual to safety pins and spiked hair. Yet it's often forgotten that Zeppelin approved of punk at first, and offered an early olive branch. Page and Plant were there when The Damned played The Roxy in January 1977, returning the week after with Bonham. But that was when it all went wrong. It was obvious the punks hated them. Bonham, 28, was humiliated and called an old fart after challenging Rat Scabies to a drumming contest.

"I lived in a King's Road council block and had a band called The Television Personalities," says Daniel Treacy. "We recorded our first single with money I'd saved from my Swan Song job, and we printed up 867 copies, which was all we could afford. Jimmy Page came into the office one day as I was reading about our single in Sounds. He said, 'Got a band, have you? Are you punks?' I explained that we were doing it all ourselves: the recording, the mastering, printing the labels. He was fascinated." Enterprise! Ingenuity! It was just what Swan Song lacked.

But jovial chats with Page were rare in 1977. Abe Hoch was noticing a darker, more paranoid atmosphere around Zeppelin than he was comfortable with. Danny Goldberg had left Swan Song in 1976, detecting a "sour, negative vibe". Michael Des Barres saw an escalation in drug abuse drive a wedge between the members of rock's biggest band. "You start to realise it's bullshit, all the drugs, all the adulation," he sighs. "The myth becomes so fragile, so flimsy and so absurd, that dark things start to happen. And then the fear grows, and friends start to separate from one another, and the creativity is lost. And that's what happened to Led Zeppelin."

In July 1977, the last rays of sunlight in Zeppelin's world were extinguished. An American tour, which saw them perform to an estimated 1.3 million fans in 30 cities, descended into horrific violence. An employee of Bill Graham, the promoter, was beaten unconscious by members of Zeppelin's entourage—including their new 'security coordinator', tough-guy actor John Bindon—and an appalled Graham, who filed a $2 million lawsuit against the band, swore never to book them again. "Bindon was very dangerous," notes Skip Alan of The Pretty Things. "One day we were in a van coming back from lunch. There was me, Robert, Bonzo, Cole and Bindon. We're driving along the King's Road and suddenly Bindon says, 'Who's that cunt looking at?' He opens the door, gets out, smacks some poor guy in the face and gets back in the van again. He was an absolute nutter."

"It has to be said, a lot of the darkness [Zeppelin] brought on themselves," reasons Phil May. "But at the same time, they needed heavy security. They'd go to a club in LA and if they didn't have 18 gorillas around, they wouldn't get a moment's peace. One time when Cole let them go off on their own, and they got in some huge ruckus. Peter Grant went fucking mad. Cole turned up to meet us at LAX [airport] with a big blackeye. That was the way we all used to live. When I look back on it now, I can see why we got a lot of flak."

The nightmare was just beginning. In his hotel room on the US tour, Robert Plant received a phone-call from his wife Maureen, giving him the shocking news that their five-year-old son Karac was dead. "That was a dreadful day. That was a disaster," says Unity MacLean, who manned the phones at Swan Song. "But you've got to weigh up the balance here. It was a freak accident that Robert's little boy died. It wasn't anything to do with a 'curse'. The poor child became dehydrated. It means they can't bounce back. People don't realise how quickly a child can go downhill."

In his book, Stairway To Heaven, Richard Cole writes that everyone in the Swan Song organisation wondered if this was the end of the band. On October3, Page held a radio press conference to rubbish rumours that they were splitting up. No more would be heard of Zeppelin until summer 1979.

A SPECTOR-OBSESSED producer whose career was a curious blend of cult status and commercial nous, Dave Edmunds had a reputation as a studio boffin and recreator of classic'50s rock 'n' roll sounds. He was also, as a co-founder of Rockpile with Nick Lowe, popular with new wave audiences. As Swan Song reeled from crisis to crisis, Edmunds became its ebullient saviour, bouncing up the charts with "Girls Talk" and "Queen Of Hearts". Edmunds remembers Swan Song fondly. "It was heaven from an artistic point of view. Besides the figures involved, which were generous, it freed me from the usual hang-ups that artists have with labels. The boys were interested in what I was doing, but wouldn't interfere. I've been getting royalty cheques every three months for the last 35 years. It's the best deal I ever had."

In August 1979, with "Girls Talk" chiming away in the Top 10, Zeppelin re-emerged after a two-year silence, releasing a new studio album (In Through The Out Door) and headlining two massive outdoor concerts at Knebworth. These should have been triumphant occasions. Instead, Peter Grant picked a fight with the promoter, Freddie Bannister, and the atmosphere backstage was murderous when Zeppelin strolled onstage. While they'd been out of the country, recording at ABBA's studio in Stockholm, John Bindon had burst into the Swan Song office, bleeding and panic-stricken, telling Cynthia Sach that he'd just stabbed John Darke, a renowned London gangster, to death. Could Cynthia phone Zeppelin and ask for their assistance? She most certainly could not.

Grant was now a recluse in Sussex. In October, he attempted (but failed) to suppress the news that a young photographer, Philip Hale, had been found dead at Page's home in Plumpton. An inquest ruled Hale's death as accidental. The following September, as Zeppelin rehearsed for their first US tour in three years, Grant phoned the office and told Unity MacLean to send everyone home. He gave no reason. "I went back to my flat," she recalls, "and my husband said,' Come and have a drink.' He took me to the pub round the corner, sat me down and said,'David Wigg from the Daily Express phoned. He wants to know if it's true that John Bonham died last night.' I couldn't believe it. It still gives me shivers to think of it."

The press were desperate for a Zeppelin comment. But they didn't get one. Bonham had died in bed, aged 32, at Page's home in Windsor after an all-day drinking binge. Not until December would the band release a statement announcing that they were discontinuing. It was left to the NME to wonder rhetorically, "Why do people associated with Led Zeppelin seem to die?" But the question suggested that there was some logical explanation, when there was only chaos, madness and tragedy.

"It all fell apart after Bonzo died," says Dave Edmunds sadly. The Pretty Things had split up. Bad Company were on an extended hiatus. Unity MacLean, pregnant and reluctant to "be around people who seemed hell-bent on destroying themselves," left Swan Song soon afterwards. The label remained active, nominally at least, for a further three years, releasing solo albums by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page among others. But the releases stopped in 1983. Peter Grant died in 1995.

At the time, nobody thought it would work. Keith Moon, after hearing the Yardbirds’ Jimmy Page explain his idea for a new blues-based band, simply laughed. The band, the Who’s drummer predicted, would go over not like a lead balloon but like a lead zeppelin.

Needless to say, Moon was wrong. Led Zeppelin was a smash virtually from the moment its first album, Led Zeppelin, was released in 1969, and the band would dominate rock & roll for the next decade. Yet it was an entirely new kind of success. Unlike the rock titans of the Sixties, Led Zeppelin had little use for singles; albums were the band’s currency, generating a whole new canon, including tracks like “No Quarter,” “Immigrant Song,” “Communication Breakdown” and the eternally popular “Stairway to Heaven.”

Classics, every one of them, but classics of a new sort. Other bands had done their best to make rock seem bigger, louder, tougher and more ambitious, but it was Led Zeppelin that made the music heavy. From the galloping rumble of “Whole Lotta Love ” and the blues-spiked growl of “Black Dog” to the exoticisms of “Kashmir,” Led Zeppelin’s sound was invariably larger than life. Yet the band’s music rarely conveyed the brutality of proto-metal acts like Black Sabbath or Deep Purple; its impact was more a matter of intensity than jackhammer insistence.

Live, Led Zeppelin was without peer. Constantly reinventing itself onstage, the band made improvisational forays through songs like “Dazed and Confused” that were the stuff of legend. And as the fans flocked to its concerts, Led Zeppelin seemed to tower over its competition; by 1975, the band was unquestionably the most popular group in rock. It may also have been the most powerful, thanks to the band’s manager, Peter Grant, who changed the way business was done on the concert circuit, shifting the power and the money from the pockets of the promoters to the hands of the artists.

Such success, of course, was not without its cost. Before long, Led Zeppelin’s very preeminence assumed the status of myth, and all sorts of stories sprang up. Some were sinister, some salacious, some downright silly. The band was alleged to have indulged in everything from secret devil messages (ostensibly on “Stairway to Heaven”) to seafood orgies (in which willing groupies took in the catch of the day). There were also tragedies along the way, among them a car accident in Greece that put singer Robert Plant in a wheelchair (and nearly killed his wife) and an altercation in Oakland, California, with promoter Bill Graham that landed drummer John “Bonzo” Bonham in jail. But it was Bonham’s death in 1980 that finally grounded Led Zeppelin. Apart from Coda, an album of previously unreleased material that emerged in 1982, there has been no new music from Led Zeppelin in more than a decade.

Since Bonham’s death, the three surviving members of the band Page, Plant and bassist John Paul Jones have performed in public only twice, at Live Aid, with drummers Phil Collins and Tony Thompson, and at Atlantic Records’ fortieth-anniversary concert, with Bonham’s son Jason on drums. There seems to be little chance of a Who-style reunion for the band. “For me, it’s impossible to consider Led Zeppelin in the present tense,” Plant said in Cleveland recently.”Because if you took Bonzo’s drumming away, the band would sound useless. I think apart from the pride in the work that I did in that band, everything is very much in the past tense.”

Indeed, all three are busy with post-Zeppelin pursuits. Although Page recently returned to London after remastering tracks for a 54-song Led Zeppelin retrospective due for release in October, his first priority is the solo career he took up after the demise of the Firm. Plant is now touring behind Manic Nirvana, his sixth solo album. Jones has been in Barcelona, Spain, recording an “industrial flamenco” group called La Sura Dels Baus.

It’s been almost a whole decade since Led Zeppelin broke up, and yet for a lot of fans, it’s like it never ended.

Plant: Well, it hasn’t ended for anybody, really. I mean, Bing Crosby hasn’t ended, either, you know? Elvis certainly hasn’t.

Do you worry about that?

Page: Oh, good Lord, no. Why should I? I thought I was in the greatest band in the world. But musically, around that point in time, things were so healthy in so many areas.

Did you, as you were remastering tracks for the box set, find yourself thinking about where Led Zeppelin stands right now in rock history?

Page: Yes, and I realized what an absolutely brilliant textbook it was, and obviously still is. Because of the different areas of music that we touched on, and the different pathways that we were prepared to tread down sometimes really mosey down, steamroller down that gave such a wide variety of styles. And you know, pretty much it was all done really very well. There was a lot of soul and depth in it.

These days, though, radio particularly classic-rock radio seems to be a major factor in preserving the Zeppelin legacy. Do you think that’s a healthy perspective?

Plant: It depends. If that had happened in 1968, I don’t think we’d ever have been heard at all. If we’d been on the receiving end of this conservatism, maybe we’d have never been exposed. Because we didn’t sound like Tommy James, and we didn’t sound like Gary Puckett or whatever.

But Led Zeppelin did meet a lot of resistance early on, from press and radio.

Plant: Not from radio. Just from the press. And that was because we just didn’t play whatever game the game was. We figured the best thing to do was shut the fuck up and play, you know? It’s no good trying to be prophetic when you’re 20 years old. So the thing was, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, keep quiet.

Jones: The first review we got from Rolling Stone [“RS 29”] was... the total subject matter was all about the hype of Led Zeppelin. You know “It’s just another band of do-nothings, and here they are hyped up by everybody, and it’s a bunch of shit anyway.” And that was really hurtful at the time, because we knew we’d done a good record. It helped foster my general hatred of the press.

But the audiences had no difficulty responding to what you were doing.

Jones: Yeah, well, they came to the gigs. That was the difference. It was the same thing in England. We packed our gigs everywhere we went. There were lines right way round the block where the clubs or pubs were. Purely people there by word of mouth. You know “This is a good band, this will be a good gig. Go to it.” And they did. And the press, I feel, were a little bit miffed at the fact that they weren’t really there at the making of the band. So they chose then to ignore it, and we chose to ignore them. It was actually quite nice, not having to answer an enormous amount of stupid questions. I’m not saying that this is the case at this very moment [laughs], but you know what I mean.

Plant: It’s funny, really, because the acclaim always came from the street, never from the written critique. And really, in a much more basic manner, the same thing is happening to me now. Because people are comparing me, or not comparing me, or trying to screw me down, or complaining about my constant changes as a solo artist. All I’m doing is what I was always part of doing anyway I’m having a great time and weaving around like a fucking lunatic. But it’s the same kind of situation, two generations on journalists who were sucking their mother’s breast when the first querulous Led Zeppelin reviews came in are now doing the same thing to me.

You know, Led Zeppelin’s sledgehammer attitude or reputation, if you like, was only just one part of the whole spectrum of what it was. Sometimes it was gross and very indecent, and sometimes it was delicate and beautiful you know?

Jones: Certain people just don’t get it at all. There was a lot of humor in the group, a lot of humor in the music. Not all this glowering, satanic crap [laughs].

What about the way Led Zeppelin has begun to be seen in almost mythic terms?

Page: It’s only a myth to people who never heard us live, I suppose. I mean, if you heard us live, you’d know exactly where it was at.

Obviously, though, there are quite a few bands out there whose only point of reference is Zeppelin’s recorded word and that make almost slavish attempts to recapture the power of those recordings. Isn’t that a sort mythification?

Page: They miss the point. They miss the whole spirit that was behind it and the passion passion’s the word. They just get caught up in imitating the riffs without going for what was underneath. It was a very passionate band, and that’s what really comes through the whole thing.

What about the fans? Do you think they understand what the band was about? Or do they have their own vision of what made Led Zeppelin great?

Plant: Well, I don’t know, because nobody ever tells me anything about what they feel. They just go, “Yeah, man, Zeppelin.” And that’s it! They don’t say, “Did you really fuck somebody with a snake on your head?” [Laughs] You don’t get the dreamscapes.

Well, did you ever fuck somebody with a snake on your head?

Plant: Ahhh, no, that must have been Jimmy [laughs]. But there’s a devotion, and I don’t think the contributing factor is the hedonistic lifestyle or anything like that. I think the fact is that some songs do actually have a timeless appeal. I don’t know whether it would have been better that they didn’t, so that I could get on with my life without constantly having to cross t’s and dot i’s that belong in sentences way back, you know? But it doesn’t matter, really. One should always be proud of any good piece of work. And there are whole bunches of good pieces of work going back there.

Did you have a concept for the group?

Page: Well, certainly on the first album, I had a very good idea of what I wanted to try and get with the band. Because at that stage, I was extremely instrumental in the total direction of it. Obviously, there was a definite concept of what one was trying to do and achieve there, and it was done. But we were definitely right out there on a limb, weren’t we? Doing what we believed in. And it didn’t really follow any sort of trend that was going on at all or certainly nothing relative to any other band.

Did you ever look at other bands as competition the way, for instance, the Beatles looked at the Stones?

Plant: We were more concerned with diversity, self-satisfaction, creativity. So, really, there was nobody to compete with, because we were trying to entertain ourselves first and foremost, with no intentional stab at a pretty song for a pretty song’s sake.

From the beginning, really, it was a group policy that singles were not to be considered, that the whole game would be that if you wanted to find out about Led Zeppelin, you had to get into the whole thing. We would not put out singles as calling cards. So, really, there was nobody to compete with. It would be nice to think that we could walk alongside Kaleidoscope or Buffalo Springfield for diversity. I don’t think Jimmy’d agree with that [laughs], because I don’t think he thought much of Buffalo Springfield.

But I think the way the music moved around in its Englishness and its blues roots the inspiration didn’t allow it to compete with anybody, really. Because it wasn’t a pop band. I mean, it’s popular, but it certainly was not pop.

There’s probably no better example of that than “Stairway to Heaven.” which may be the most popular radio song of all time yet has never been available as a single.

Plant: Yeah, but the fact that it caught people’s imagination is interesting, really. Because it’s kind of the legend that created “Stairway to Heaven.”

How do you mean?

Plant: Well, because when we played it at the beginning, before the album came out, you could often see people settling down to have forty winks.

Really?

Plant: Yeah! Because people hadn’t heard it. They didn’t know what it was.

Page: Oh, that’s not true. No, I remember playing that at the L.A. Forum, and... I’m not saying the whole audience gave us a standing ovation, but there was this sizable standing ovation there. And I thought: “This is incredible, because no one’s heard this number yet. This is the first time they’re hearing it!” It obviously touched them, you know. And that was at the L.A. Forum, so I knew we were onto something with that one. Because it’s always difficult to hear a number, especially something that long, which you’ve never heard before.

Jones: “Stairway” embodies a lot of what Led Zeppelin was about. It actually had a sort of precedent in a song on the first album called “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,” which had many of the same elements: the acoustic start, the build and the sort of “heavy” end.

It’s a good tune, for a start. Jimmy came up with the original guitar phrases and the original idea, and I think Robert might have had a short lyric, a first verse or something, a couple lines. And then Jimmy and I basically sat down, just the two of us sat down and worked out the entire arrangement, we plotted it through. It came together, basically, through quite a lot of hard work.

What strikes me about “Stairway to Heaven” is that there are folk-oriented songs like “The Battle of Evermore” and “Going to California,” and there are hard-rock songs like “Black Dog” and “When the Levee Breaks” and “Stairway” seems to be where the two sides meet.

Plant: Yeah, I think you’re right I mean, it wasn’t particularly unique, that approach, because some of the West Coast bands were doing it, combining that sort of stuff. It’s just that it’s ambiguous to such a degree that the only thing you know about it is that it’s affirmative, and it’s going the right way.

Obviously, Led Zeppelin drew from a wide range of musical styles how did the band find its common ground?

Jones: It wasn’t a purist band, as you get nowadays, where the entire band listens to the same type of music. Between the blues influences of Robert and the rock & roll influences of Jimmy who also had strong blues influences the soul influences of Bonzo and my soul and jazz influences, there seemed to be a common area, which was Led Zeppelin. The fusion of all different types of music and interests.

There was also quite a difference in experience, too, between the four members. Robert, what was it like for you and Bonham who were essentially unknown before joining Led Zeppelin to be thrown in with established, successful players like Page and Jones?

Plant: Everything is in the eye of the beholder. Jimmy was a member of the Yardbirds, and he was a session musician, so he was successful. Jonesy was much more the back-room boy I didn’t care, really, whether he’d produced “Mellow Yellow” or not, because it was a pop song, and it just started and stopped. Pretty song, but somebody had to write the song, never mind organize it. So their sort of positions and previous roles weren’t really that daunting.

But how they handled themselves with us was important Jonesy was a bit... not withdrawn, but he stands back a little and shoots the odd bit of dialogue into the air. It’s good stuff, but an acquired taste, really. And Jimmy’s personality, initially, was... I don’t think I’d ever come across a personality like it before. He had a demeanor which you had to adjust to; it certainly wasn’t very casual to start with. But then again, the music was so intense that everything was intense. The ambition was intense, and the delivery was intense, and where we were going was intense. Nobody knew what the fuck it was, but we all knew that this power was ridiculous from the beginning. So it was very hard to relax, sit down, have a beer and be the guys from the Black Country. Bonzo and I were much more basic in every respect in how to deal with everything including Jimmy. Because he had to be dealt with.

It must not have been all that difficult, though. Didn’t the lineup click from the first time the four of you got together?

Page: Yeah. We got together in this small rehearsal room and just played “Train Kept a-Rollin’ ” which was a number I used to do with the Yardbirds, and I think Robert knew it. And at the end of it we knew that it was really happening, really electrifying. Exciting is the word. We went on from there to start rehearsing for the album.

What was it about the way you four played together that made the music so exciting?

Jones: In a band like that, everybody’s got their ears open. That’s what it is. It is a chemistry, I suppose, that nonmusicians might not understand, but you follow the music, really. All sorts of ways, in all sorts of combinations. Which was very important for us. There’s no way I could have been in a band where you’d have to tho me records note for note every night and the only person who got to play any different was the lead guitarist you know what I mean? And at the time we really didn’t think about how anything would go down. We weren’t worried about making a record that would sell. The records were primarily for us, I think. So it wasn’t a case of analyzing the first album to work out what was successful, like they do these days. It was like “That’s done now it’s ever onward.”

Zeppelin had an ability to skip from style to style. Where did that come from?

Plant: Personalities.

There must be more to it than that.

Plant: Yeah, but you didn’t see the Band of Joy, before Zeppelin. And that was the same.

Really?

Plant: Yeah! Me and Bonzo in the Band of Joy we used to do versions of “White Rabbit,” the Airplane thing, with “March of the Siamese Children,” from The King and I, in the middle. In half time. We did all sorts of strange stuff... “Hey, Grandma,” from Moby Grape, which turned into something else most peculiar. There was always that looking around and getting goose bumps. When I first heard Om Kalsoum, it was a very important day for me, because it opened, it just enriched my life so much Even though I hardly understand a word she’s singing, because it’s in Arabic, I had to take some of the effect it had on me and put it into the music. As with Manic Nirvana right now, you stimulate yourself through your own excitement.

Don’t you still need a certain amount of ability to pull that off?

Plant: But if nobody else is doing it, you’ve got nothing to be measured against. We got it right, at times. Tracks like “Friends” and “Four Sticks” Jimmy and I went to India, and we recorded versions of these two tracks with the Bombay Symphony. We’d got a sort of disheveled gang of musicians together in Bombay, and we recorded two Led Zeppelin tracks. The session went very well until I got a bottle of brandy out, and there’s nothing like a good Indian, and there were no good Indians in that room at the end of the bottle. It’s a shame, really, that they won’t include it on this box set.

Why not?

Plant: I don’t know. Maybe Pagey didn’t think about it [laughs]. I didn’t think about it until just a second ago.

Page: Well, the only things that were left over that had complete vocals all came out on Coda. Those tracks were something that we were going to work on, probably at some later point in time. The actual master plan after having done that was to maybe do a tour through the Far East, going through Egypt and Bombay, then on to Thailand and all the rest of it, and then recording in those places. And that was like a first taste, to see how it would go. Of course, we never got that far. But that’s one of the game plans we had at the time.

Plant: We liked to travel and explore. I mean, we can’t be considered anthropologists or anything like that, but we knew of a few good brothels in the Far East.

“Knew a few good brothels” — now, that’s more typical of the Led Zeppelin myth than imagining you guys with the Bombay Symphony.

Plant: You can do a lot of things in one day.

Indeed. Of course, back then there was what now seems an almost legendary groupie scene the likes of which may never be seen again. That seems to leave a lot of younger fans feeling as if they’ve been gypped.

Page: You mean the whole scene, in the younger fans’ minds, has changed from sex, drugs and rock & roll to contraceptives, no drugs and rock & roll? [Laughs] That’s what you mean, is it?

Exactly. Was it as wonderful back, then as kids today imagine?

Page: You’d better ask Robert [laughs].

Plant: Yeah. That era, the whole thing of the G.T.O.’s and what was that Zappa album? 10,000 Hotels? “I’ve Been to Bed With Robert Planet.”. . . Yeah, shoving the Plaster Casters’ cast of Jimi Hendrix’s penis up one of the girls’ assholes at some hotel in Detroit was... quite fun, actually. I don’t remember who did it, but I remember I was in the hotel at the time.

It was... free love.

And it’s pretty much gone now, isn’t it?

Plant: Well, I think you now have to adapt a totally different attitude to the whole thing. Just when my stamina is really getting good, too [laughs].

But it was great. And that whole preposterous thing of the vocalist being larger than life — the way I was viewed in the mid-1970s was hysterical. Actually, I couldn’t take myself seriously for very long, because I would be constantly hacked to pieces by my fellow band members, who’d be giggling at me.

Didn’t they call you Percy?

Plant: Mmmm.

After Percival, the hero?

Plant: It was something to do with my anatomy. At the time. Maybe they wouldn’t call me that now, I dunno [laughs].

While we’re on the subject of Led Zeppelin legends, fundamentalist groups have claimed for years that there are satanic messages backward-masked onto “Stairway to Heaven.” Is there any truth to the charges?

Page: Well, I don’t pass any comment on them [sighs].

Plant: I mean, who on earth would have ever thought of doing that in the first place? You’ve got to have a lot of time on your hands to even consider that people would do that. Especially with “Stairway.” I mean, we were so proud of that thing, and its intentions are so positive, that the last thing one would do would be. . .I found it foul, the whole idea, you know? But. . . it’s very American. Nowhere else in the world has anybody ever considered it or been concerned or bothered at all about that. I figure if backward masking really worked, every record in the store would have “Buy this album!” hidden on it.

Page: You’ve got it, you’ve hit the nail on the head. And that’s all there is to say about it.

Jones: Of course, it’s fatal, you know, because you tend to wind these people up after a while. If you go around saying, “Oh, yes, if you play track 8 at 36 rpms, you’ll definitely hear a message,” they’ll say, “All right,” and go right home and try it. English bands tend to be more ironic and sarcastic, and once they discover the average American lack of irony and humor, it’s just sitting ducks, really. You just sort of have to go for it.

That cuts both ways, though. I mean, just look at all the fans who think Stephen Davis’s “Hammer of the Gods” is actually some sort of tribute to Led Zeppelin. I would imagine you three were a little less enthusiastic about it.

Page: I think I opened it up in the middle somewhere and started to read, and I just threw it out the window. I was living by a river then, so it actually found its way to the bottom of the sea [laughs]. That’s a fact.

I mean, I couldn’t bother to wade through that sort of stuff. I mean, that’s true masochism. The whole humor of the band disappeared in the parts that I read, and it was just a sensationalist book. I can understand obviously what you’re saying that fans read it just purely out of interest. And there’s no smoke without fire. But it wasn’t a very factual account.

Thinking about the way Led Zeppelin is perceived now, I wonder: Would people even recognize Led Zeppelin if it were around today?

Plant: Of course not. It couldn’t possibly be anything like where it was when it stopped. We’d probably be a lounge act now in San Antonio who knows? I mean, it wouldn’t be recognizable, I wouldn’t think. Could we play “Black Dog” for a further 10 years? I don’t think so. Only if it turned out like Dread Zeppelin, and then you could enjoy yourself. I mean, we were doing reggae versions of “Stairway to Heaven” when Tortelvis was thin. Just doing sound checks and stuff like that. I mean, it wasn’t sending the thing up it was just like “Here’s another way of doing it.”

Page: Our trademark, so to speak I suppose you could tell it anywhere. Like Robert’s voice is his trademark. And hopefully the same can be said of my guitar [laughs]. So even though we obviously would have gone through a lot of changes and tried all different musical approaches, nevertheless that would have been the telltale clue that it was Zeppelin. It would be immediately recognizable by the audible qualities of the four players.

What was that quality, though? What was it that gave Led Zeppelin and its music such a distinctive spirit?