This month features Hammer of the Gods: Led Zeppelin Unauthorized, Stephen Davis, Pan, 0330342878, £7.99 |
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This isn’t a great book but it has a truly great subject – or three great subjects and one resolutely ungreat one.
Great Subject One: Jimmy Page aka Led Wallet (for his miserliness). By the time he got round to forming Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page was already a legendary guitarist in the r’n’b clubs and recording studios of Sixties’ London. Tall, bony, effeminate, quietly spoken and a long-time devotee of the ‘Great Satan’, Aleister Crowley. If Eric Clapton was God, Jimmy Page was looking to be Lucifer.
Great Subject Two: Robert Plant aka Percy (after Blue Peter gardener Percy Thrower). As Stephen Davis puts it, ‘There were two Roberts. One was the Celtic visionary and spiritualist, the other was the vulgar rock star in pursuit of the normal vices of his profession.’ Slender and fey, he once, halfway through an interview, bounded out onto the balcony of L.A.’s Continental Hyatt Hotel and yelled, ‘I’m a golden god!’ (Cameron Crowe stole this detail, along with many many others, for Almost Famous, his cinematic ode to Seventies Rock.)
Great Subject Three: John Bonham aka Bonzo aka The Beast. The latter nickname should give you a pretty good idea of his character – Keith Moon minus the comic genius and charm. Jazz drummers do something called ‘dropping the bomb’; John Bonham was a carpet-bombing B-52. Here are a few of Bonzo’s entries in the Index: ‘assault charges, Oakland… car collection of… French hotel destruction… Monte Carlo gun incident… stripping onstage…’ And of course, ‘violent behaviour of, 234-35, 238, 240-1, 248-50, 258-60.’ The Acknowledgements include, ‘Thanks also to the late John Bonham, a warm and funny man…’ Then comes the clincher, ‘…when I met him.’
Ungreat Subject One: John Paul Jones aka… not interesting enough to have a decent nickname. If so, it would probably be Johnny or Jonesy. One acquaintance observed of him, ‘He happened to be the act, but he could have run the record company as well.’ And he could have done their accounts, probably. Enough said.
As rock biographies go, they don’t come much more mould-casting than Hammer of the Gods. The opening ‘Overture’ retells the central myth of rock:
‘In the Delta of the Mississippi… they said that if an aspiring bluesman waited by the side of a deserted country crossroad on the dark of a moonless night, then Satan himself might come and tune his guitar, sealing a pact for the bluesman’s soul and guaranteeing a lifetime of easy money, women, and fame.’
Zeppelin, true blues aficianados, were rumoured to have made the Faustian pact, too – all of them but one: John Paul boring Jones.
‘Don’t quote me, the girls said (and still say), but Led Zeppelin sold their souls to the Devil in exchange for their instant success, their addictive charisma, their unbelieveable wealth.’
After this, the book follows a fairly predictable arc – rise and fall and battered middle-aged comeback. What makes the story so gripping is the sheer vertiginousness of the rise and the straight-down plummet of the fall. No-one had ever been as successful as Led Zeppelin; no-one lost it faster.
Don Delillo, who was certainly watching Led Zeppelin as well as the Rolling Stones and David Bowie very closely, wrote in his 1973 rock novel, Great Jones Street:
‘Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across grey space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the conselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity – hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs.’
Which isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of laughs along the way. But many of them, such as the truly infamous ‘Shark Episode, 78-80’ have a dark flipside.
Led Zeppelin’s music is based almost entirely on misogyny. Their defining lyric is ‘soul of a woman was created below’. (Although this is partially contradicted by the line ‘a big legged woman ain’t got no soul’.) Whenever Robert Plant ran out of something to sing, he fell back on the woman-worshipping-woman-chastising clichés of the blues. And if all else failed there was always, ‘Baby-baby-baby… waaaaaagh!’
(Incidentally, I have a friend who believes all rock and pop lyrics that use the word baby are actually about pre-toddler infants. For example, listen to Bob Dylan’s ‘I’ll be your baby tonight.’)
By the late Seventies, Jimmy Page was forced to give interview after interview denying the ‘curse’ of Zep:
‘“Just say,” he told Melody Maker, “that Jimmy Page is upset by the use of the word ‘karma’, I just don’t know what’s going on.”’
What had been going on was the death from a ‘mystery virus’ of Robert Plant’s son – this coming after a car crash which almost killed his wife and left Percy wheelchair-bound for six months. What had been going on was Bonzo’s alcoholism. What had been going on was Jimmy Page’s alcoholism, heroin addiction, depression, etc.
All along, beneath the supernatural success, a more melancholy life was being lived. One associate recalled:
‘My take on this period was that it was really boring. They were tired. One of the stories that doesn’t get told was how many times there weren’t wild parties, and how lonely and exhausted they would get…’
A few pages later:
‘To a reporter, Jimmy whispered, “We’re all terribly worn out. I went past the point of no return physically quite a while back.”’
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