Led Zeppelin: The Joke That Became the Heaviest Name in Rock
In 1968 Jimmy Page was left with the ruins of the Yardbirds and a clear idea: a band where blues, folk and raw volume would live under one roof. He found a young singer, Robert Plant, a bassist and arranger who could play anything, John Paul Jones, and a drummer from the Midlands whose power frightened people, John Bonham. Four musicians, each strong enough to lead a band of his own.
The name began as a joke. As Page remembered it, Keith Moon said a supergroup like that would go over like a lead balloon. Page liked it, swapped the balloon for a zeppelin, and, the story goes, manager Peter Grant dropped the “a” in “lead” so that nobody would say “leed.” (Not everyone agrees Moon was the author; John Entwistle is named too.) A prediction of disaster became the heaviest name in rock.
Bonham had to be persuaded. He was already drumming for Tim Rose and had better offers on the table. Plant and Grant kept sending telegrams, dozens of them by some accounts, until he said yes. The man who became the greatest rock drummer of his generation had to be begged to join.
Their first album was recorded in about 36 hours and paid for by Page and Grant themselves, before any record company had signed them. Page said later that he financed and completely recorded it before going to Atlantic. That was the whole attitude: they arrived with finished music and the conviction that it was worth every penny.
What they did with sound still reads like a manifesto. For “When the Levee Breaks” the engineer Andy Johns set up Bonham’s drums in the entrance hall of Headley Grange and lowered microphones over the banister of the stairs above, so that the house itself became part of the beat. Heavy blues, acoustic folk, thunder and silence: they treated the studio, the stage and the volume as instruments, and an album as a world to enter, not a pile of singles.
Their story has pages that are not funny. In July 1977 Plant’s five-year-old son Karac died, and the American tour stopped on the spot. On 25 September 1980 John Bonham died, and in December the three who were left said in a short statement that they could not continue as they were. They never replaced him. On 10 December 2007 they came back for a single night at the O2 in London with Bonham’s son Jason on drums, and Guinness World Records counted more than 20 million ticket requests.
Led Zeppelin has its own station in the Exclusive collection of Kalisha. Open the radio and press play.
— Kalisha 🎧
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