From
The Washington Post by Chris Richards Part 1
Led Zeppelin listened to each other and found rock-and-roll’s most magical formula
NEW YORK — Maybe you know this one. It’s March 1975, and Led Zeppelin is in the middle of conquering America, rock-and-roll and the future, so Robert Plant slips out onto the balcony of his Sunset Strip hotel room with a proclamation for the traffic puttering down below: “I’m a golden god!”
Thirty-seven years later, John Paul Jones remembers another hotel balcony. Same tour, different city. Plant is out on the terrace, sucking up all the oxygen and sunshine, jittery in his jeans, wanderlust humming in his bone marrow. Jones points to a building on the horizon and brags, “I walked there this morning.”
Plant’s chest hair wilts. A golden god can have all the money, women, powder and pills he desires, but he can’t walk down the street and explore. Wearing the right hat, his less-conspicuous bassist can. Jonesy gives his front man a squeeze on the shoulder. Not an exultant Led Zeppelin moment by any stretch, but one that captures the two elements that make any novel worth reading and every Led Zeppelin album worth owning: empathy and adventure.
Across the ’70s, the members of Led Zeppelin spent countless afternoons like that, champing at the bit in their chandeliered cages, yearning to burst into sold-out arenas where they could triumph as the greatest rock band on Earth.
They lacked the glamour of the Rolling Stones but had all of their lust. They couldn’t eclipse the humanity of the Beatles but had all of their courage. Of any band that ever made rock-and-roll — that gloriously imperfect American music that so many British groups hurled back across the ocean in unbelievable shapes — Led Zeppelin was the most perfect.
“Everyone was a superstar,” says guitarist Jimmy Page. “The key was that we played as a band.”
Where other rock troupes shook the landscape by grinding tectonic egos, the Led Zeppelin members listened to one another. Cue up their music today, and you’ll hear amplified thunder, snowflake balladry, drum fills that feel like your bones snapping in ecstasy, odes to the pleasures of the flesh and the mysteries of the universe — but you’re ultimately hearing the simple magic of four men listening to one another.
“We knew when to shut up and let somebody else lead and enunciate,” Plant says. “So for every big, strong, flamboyant moment, there would be, within it and around it, some kind of subtlety that set us apart.”
Apart and above. Trailing only the Beatles, Led Zeppelin became the second-highest-selling rock band in history, even more popular after they broke up than when they were together. The death of drummer John Bonham in 1980 brought the music to an unexpected halt, sending Jones, Page and Plant in disparate directions. But the three will reconvene at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington this weekend, where they’ll be feted for songs that exploded rock’s possibilities, for concerts that devoured superlatives, for albums that have sold an estimated 300 million copies worldwide and for their ability to listen.
Every band is its own first audience, and at Led Zeppelin’s first rehearsal in the basement of a London record shop on Aug. 19, 1968, they knocked themselves out.
Jones remembers walking down the stairs with only one concern: “The first thing you think is, ‘I hope the drummer is good.’ ”
‘We had no fear’
Page handpicked each of them. A bassist he’d met on the session circuit, a maniac drummer from the Midlands and his howling childhood friend. Time to see what they’re made of. The guitarist called for “Train Kept A-Rollin,’ ” a mutilated jump blues his recently disbanded Yardbirds used to play.
What came out was the sound of four men hitting some cosmic lottery. The colossus behind the drum kit would one day be recognized as the greatest rock drummer of all time, but for now he was shoving his pals off into the unknown, a place where Led Zeppelin would eventually redraw the grand contours of rock-and-roll.
“It was our job to explore,” Page says of his band. “And we had no fear.”
At Manhattan’s Four Seasons, the 68-year-old’s soft eyes search the hotel-suite carpet for other memories. His hair has faded into snowy strands, cinched in a ponytail, and he scootches around in his chair whenever he gets excited, which is often, because Jimmy Page likes talking about Led Zeppelin. He speaks briskly and affectionately, more like a scholarly superfan than the band’s founder.
He’s also Led Zeppelin’s self-deputized custodian and has spent big chunks of 2012 preparing the band’s back catalogue for re-release. And when he finds time to play the guitar, brawny little riffs — not unlike the ones that delineated Led Zeppelin’s extraordinary musculature — still materialize beneath his fingers. “They sort of visit you like new friends,” Page says.
Raised an only child in the town of Epsom, southwest of London, Page took up the guitar as a tween, found session work in London’s recording studios and eventually ran off on tour with the Yardbirds, a mythic rock group that launched kindred guitar gods Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. The experience stoked his taste for high volumes and bold improvisation, two envelopes he would push in Zeppelin.
But Page’s jumbo-size ambitions were initially dismissed as pomp. In an early review, Rolling Stone took a club to Page’s “weak, unimaginative songs.” Other adjectives used in the magazine’s now-infamous review of “Led Zeppelin I”: “prissy,” “dull,” “redundant.”
“Led Zeppelin was always the people’s band — they were never the critics’ band. That, I think, was part of their allure,” says Tom Morello, guitarist of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. “When it comes to the majesty of rock, there’s no band that comes close. . . . They set the standard in songwriting, in musicianship, in aura, that really lit the fire under millions of young aspiring musicians.”
Page would probably second that. He calls Led Zeppelin’s nine studio albums “a textbook” for the generations that have followed. “If you want to learn anything about Led Zeppelin, don’t read any silly books,” he says. “Just listen to the music.”
Then his mouth curves into a sad smile. Like any Zep fan, he seems heartbroken by the fact that there probably won’t be any more of it.