Читать книгу LZ-’75: Across America with Led Zeppelin - Stephen Davis - Страница 9

At this point I confess that I missed the last ninety minutes of Led Zeppelin’s epic 1969 concert at the Boston Tea Party. Whatever the legend, the band actually sounded ragged (and a little drunk) after three hours, and I wanted to get home to my sexy new girlfriend.

(Years later, I was talking about these Boston Tea Party concerts with Steven Tyler, whose band Aerosmith would follow Led Zeppelin into the breach a few years later. Steven Tallarico, as he then was, had hitchhiked two hundred miles from New York to see Zeppelin’s final Boston concert. “I cried twice that night,” he told me. “The first time I cried, was because Zeppelin was so fuckin’ heavy that I had no other emotional way to react to them. The second time I cried, was when Jimmy Page walked out of the dressing room—with the girl I’d been living with in New York, until that moment.”)

So I followed Zeppelin’s career with mounting fascination over the next few years as they released records and built an immense audience despite critical disrespect and constant slagging in the rock press.

Led Zeppelin stayed on the road in America for the rest of 1969, recording new music whenever they had a few days off in Los Angeles and New York. So was born that lumbering musical mastodon “Whole Lotta Love” and the other metallic masterpieces on Led Zeppelin II, known by some of the band’s young fans as “The Brown Bomber” for its jacket art depicting the band as the aircrew of a WWII warplane. Also born in those faraway times was Zeppelin’s reputation as hell-raising maniacs. Jimmy Page’s interest in (and actual practice of) black magic was the talk of all the famous groupies and their little sisters. The legendary “Shark Episode,” in which a willing, naked groupie was poked and prodded with a sand shark that the drummer had caught from the window of a seaside hotel in Seattle, was even set to music by Frank Zappa. By the end of 1969, Zeppelin had set a standard of excess and debauchery that remained unattainable to any band that tried to follow them.

In the following summer, 1970, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote songs in an old farmhouse in Wales, giving the music on Led Zeppelin III a pastoral feel of antique landscapes and misty mountains. (The head bangers were still served by rampaging “Immigrant Song” and the sludgy blues of “Since I’ve Been Loving You.”)

In 1971, Led Zeppelin’s officially untitled fourth album began its reign as one of the greatest productions of the rock era. “Stairway to Heaven,” with its chiming guitars and lighthearted mysticism, became the anthem of its generation and the most requested song in the history of American radio. In 1972, Led Zeppelin’s tours began to outsell even the Rolling Stones, and the band’s four albums remained high up in the sales charts. A fifth album, Houses of the Holy, came out in 1973 with a garish jacket that spoke of spiritual quests and human sacrifice. Like-wise, the band’s riotous, high-energy concerts became rites of passage for the youngest members of the postwar generation. Alone among the great rock bands, Led Zeppelin’s fans began to identify with the band beyond the music itself. Led Zeppelin, it was generally agreed, had an aura of mystery, mystique, and genius that no other band could touch.

I remained (mostly) oblivious to this. It was totally uncool for a professional rock critic like myself to appreciate Led Zeppelin, whose music was deemed suitable only for cannon-fodder youth intoxicated on cheap wine and pills. As a music editor at Rolling Stone, I didn’t even know any writer who wanted to touch them. Led Zeppelin was out there, alone, with its crazy young audience: a secret society composed of four musicians, their management and roadies, and about twelve million kids.

That’s when Peter Grant hired Danny Goldberg.

So now we’re back in January 1975, and I had to get a magazine assignment if I wanted to ride on the Starship. I called a friend at Rolling Stone to see how the magazine was going to cover Led Zeppelin this time around. In the past, Rolling Stone had mostly ignored Zeppelin’s tours, even when the band began setting attendance records for single-act concerts—no one ever opened for Led Zeppelin after they got big—and became known as the highest-grossing band on the planet. But that attitude of the magazine was over when other publications featuring Led Zeppelin on their covers reported sold-out press runs.

Still, Rolling Stone would not be punching my ticket to the Starship in 1975. Already assigned to Led Zeppelin was a teenage reporter, Cameron Crowe, who had a reputation for writing glowingly positive mash notes about the bands he covered. Clearly, Danny Goldberg had gotten there ahead of me and was taking no chances that a more seasoned rock writer would smear Led Zeppelin once again in Rolling Stone.

Who else would give me an assignment? Danny wanted a national publication, so that ruled out my local newspapers. The other national music magazines—Creem, Crawdaddy, Circus, Hit Parader—I simply did not want to write for. An editor at The Village Voice told me I was out of my mind. So I called my mentor, Bob Palmer, the greatest of the contemporary music writers, who had written for me at Rolling Stone and was now the senior pop music critic at The New York Times. Bob told me that he had recently written a piece about jazzman Ornette Coleman for The Atlantic Monthly, the venerable American political review. There was a young editor there who was trying to inject pop music coverage into the stodgy old magazine. Bob told me that he was treated well, his copy almost untouched, and the pay was good. So I called the editor, Richard Todd, and he invited me to the Atlantic‘s venerable premises at 8 Arlington Street, overlooking the Boston Public Garden. They’d been there for a hundred years.

I was familiar with the Atlantic because my father had sold them a couple of short stories back in the fifties, and the magazine was a fixture in our household. I was under no illusion that the Atlantic—then under the editorship of a former State Department hack—was actually going to publish a feature story about Led Zeppelin. But something told me that I really needed to get on the Starship. The Atlantic Monthly was still a prestigious American magazine, and Mr. Todd clearly was on a mission to try to reach a younger, more with-it audience than the academics and literary types who were the mag’s core readership. He had barely heard of Led Zeppelin, so I pitched the idea as the story of a band that was bigger and more important than the Rolling Stones, but no one, outside their high school fan base, knew about it. Richard Todd had heard of the Rolling Stones. He was a nice guy, and I got the assignment.

I called Danny Goldberg and told him. “The Atlantic? You’re kidding. The Atlantic Monthly? What the fuck! Who cares? You’re on the plane. When can you come to New York? I’ve just signed a friend of mine to Swan Song; she’s really cool, and I want you to hear her.”