Читать книгу LZ-’75: Across America with Led Zeppelin - Stephen Davis - Страница 8

Jimmy Page’s New Yardbirds mutated into Led Zeppelin during tours of Scandinavia and Britain in the autumn of 1968. The band began its first U.S. tour in late December 1968, playing shows in California and the Pacific Northwest. The band’s epochal first album, Led Zeppelin, was released early in January 1969.

I had a new girlfriend at the time, and she was a jazz fan. So was her older brother, whom she wanted me to meet. We were on our way to his house when I stopped at a record store in Cambridge and bought Led Zeppelin’s album with its iconic cover image of the German airship Hindenburg’s catastrophic explosion in New Jersey in 1937.

At the brother’s place, while tea was brewing, I asked if I could play my new record, explaining that Led Zeppelin used to be the Yardbirds, one of my fave English groups. They said they didn’t mind, so I laid the LP on the turntable, dropped the needle into the groove, and turned the volume up. First came the rumble of John Bonham’s leaden wallop, then the unearthly screech of Robert Plant yelling about the days of his youth. This was the first track, “Good Times Bad Times,” and it boasted ferocious energy and a Jimmy Page guitar break that made Jimi Hendrix look sick.

I sensed movement behind me. My new girlfriend and her brother were regarding me with horror, their hands covering their ears to escape the piercing wail, the febrile guitar, and the thunderous hard rock. I lifted the needle, replaced Led Zeppelin with Kind of Blue, drank my tea, went home, and listened to Led Zeppelin under a pair of big headphones.

Immediately, I realized this was new music, an innovative way of making a huge statement with a four-piece rock band. In fact, the term rock didn’t really apply anymore. Soon, perhaps within a year, a music critic borrowed an idea from writer William S. Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch and other visionary, experimental works, to describe the bone-breaking rhythms, crypto-romantic vocals, and light-and-shade guitar playing that typified this new hybrid of hard rock and the din of battle:

“Heavy Metal.”

Led Zeppelin arrived in Boston two weeks later to play four nights at the (completely sold-out) Boston Tea Party. I missed the first night, and heard later their set was plagued by problems with Page’s guitar amp. The second night, Friday, began with “Train Kept A-Rollin’” and surged through “Communication Breakdown” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” and on into “You Shook Me” and the stygian depths of “Dazed and Confused,” during which Page scraped a violin bow across the strings of his guitar, producing tortured noise from the gaping maw of hell. They played for two hours, and I left the Tea Party incredibly impressed—and stone deaf.

Led Zeppelin played for three hours Saturday night. By then their street cred was immense, and young rock fans stood outside the Tea Party in freezing weather because the upstairs windows were open so the crowd inside could breathe, and the loud music could be heard two blocks away. Reviews tended to be raves. “After the Yardbirds comes Led Zeppelin,” wrote Ben Blummenberg in the weekly Boston After Dark. “Rhythms and time patterns shift abruptly. Volume levels change abruptly, yet melodies and chord skeletons merge kaleidoscopically as the band feeds off one another and plays off the ideas thrown out. Intricacy develops out of a form usually quite simple. … Led Zeppelin and the Jeff Beck Group are to rock what Formula One cars are to road racing. Their raw power is compelling and hypnotic while their complexity makes repeated exposure a pleasure. Arrangements of the same song vary on successive nights quite widely. As Jimmy Page told me, ‘If we can’t do it live, we won’t do it.’”

I squeezed into the Tea Party for the last Boston show on Sunday night, January 26, which turned out to be one of the longest the band ever played. The old temple was packed to double capacity, with the throbbing light show doing its psychedelic thing and the amplifiers cranked up to eleven. You could hardly move, let alone dance, so it was best to just stand there and absorb the decibel barrage blasting out from the stage.

The notes I managed to scribble read: “Train [Kept A Rollin’]” “I Can’t Quit You” / “Killing Floor” / “Squeeze My Lemon” / “Dazed” / “Shapes [of Things]” / “Comm. Breakdown” / “White Summer, Black Mountain[side]” / “Babe [I’m Gonna Leave You]” / drum solo (intense!!) / “How Many More Times.”

At the end of their regular, hour-long set, the audience went berserk, and Zeppelin came back for an encore. The same thing happened when they tried to leave the stage again, and so they just kept playing—for three more hours. The room was a steam bath. Jimmy and John Bonham had stripped down to hippie-ish crocheted vests. Robert Plant’s tie-dyed shirt was drenched. The band’s long hair was soaked with sweat. Only John Paul Jones, who didn’t move around much, seemed to keep his cool.

Decades later, Jones said the last night at the Tea Party was “the key Led Zeppelin gig—the one that put everything into focus. We played our usual set and the audience wouldn’t let us off the stage. We ran out of songs we knew and tried to think of things to play—Beatles songs, anything we might know all or part of. We’d go back on and play anything that came into our heads.” (These included “For Your Love,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Please Please Me,” “Something Else,” a long Chuck Berry medley, “C’mon Everybody,” and dozens of others.)

“There were kids actually bashing their heads against the stage,” Jones recalled, “and I’d never seen that at a gig before. When we finally left the stage, we’d played for four and a half hours. Peter [Grant] was absolutely ecstatic. He was crying and hugging us all, this massive grizzly bear hug. I supposed it was then that we realized just what Led Zeppelin was going to become.”

Later a disc jockey who was in the dressing room told me that an ecstatic Grant had actually grabbed the four musicians and lifted them all up into the air.