“Well, we’re all here,” he said. “What are we going to play?”

  After some shuffling around and shoulder shrugging, Jimmy suggested the old Johnny Burnette standby “Train Kept a-Rollin’ ” and asked John Paul if he knew it. “It’s easy, just G to A.”

  Without any more discussion, Jimmy counted it out: “. . . two, three, four.”

  “The room just exploded,” John Paul recalled. It was like a dam had broken, with music surging out.

  “Far too loud,” Jimmy thought, “but so fantastic.” All that power! “It just locked together like something that was pretty scary, but had to be.” It turned the song’s jaunty rockabilly groove into something fierce and feral. And Robert, at his most intense, sold it with his naked cat howl. It kept moving forward, faster, fiercer—and seamless, as though everyone knew his part and how it knit together.

  When they’d finished without imploding, everyone broke into laughter.

  “Shit!” Jimmy hooted. “What was that?”

  Robert had an idea. There was nothing pretty about it. In his view, “It was just an unleashing of energy.”

  “The sound was so great,” he thought. “Very, very, very exciting and very challenging. I could feel that something was happening within myself and to everyone else in the room. It felt like we’d just found something that we had to be very careful with . . . or we might lose it.”

  John Paul was sold as well. “Right, we’re on,” he knew. “This is it, this is going to work.”

  Jimmy Page, perhaps more than anyone, was aware of protecting their interests. The sound they had made was exactly what he’d fantasized for his band. “It was there immediately,” he said. “It was like a thunderbolt, a lightning flash.” It was time to close ranks.

  The next day, flush with excitement, he gave Peter Grant an account of the rehearsal and expressed concern about contractual liabilities. With RAK’s involvement, he feared that Mickie Most would demand to be their producer, which was out of the question as far as Jimmy was concerned. He saw how Mickie had turned the Yardbirds’ albums into a repository for his soft-core tunes. It was imperative that he not come anywhere near this band.

  There was a hitch: Peter and Mickie had an agreement. The Yardbirds, who were signed to RAK, were managed by Peter and produced by Mickie. The same went for the Jeff Beck Band. There was no way Jimmy would agree to that arrangement. It would not only corrupt the band’s sound, it would destroy their credibility. That had been the case with Beck’s Truth album, with Mickie’s insistence they fill the tracks with songs like “Ol’ Man River” and “Greensleeves.” He’d worked sessions so often with Jimmy and John Paul, it was unlikely that he’d withdraw from producing their new band.

  Instead of swapping rights—letting Grant completely control the new Yardbirds band in exchange for giving Mickie all rights to Jeff Beck—as had been reported over the years, Peter’s strategy with his partner was more devious. The two men discussed the situation the day following the rehearsal and came to an understanding. Mickie laid it out for his wife, Chris, when he arrived home that evening.

  “I’ve got some terrible news,” he told her. “Peter hasn’t got long to live. His doctor told him to get his affairs in order. He wants to leave his kids as much money as he can, so I’m giving up my RAK Management shares in Jimmy Page’s new band.”

  Chris Most was aghast. “Are you mad?” she said. “I’m heartbroken for Peter, but your deal shouldn’t make any difference to him.”

  “It’s okay,” Mickie assured her. “We’ve got enough money.”

  He decided that it was more important to give his partner, Peter Grant, some peace of mind in the little time he had left.

  “Later on,” his wife says now, “he knew he’d been conned, but he never spoke about it again. I think he was too embarrassed—embarrassed that Peter put one over on him, but also that Jimmy Page didn’t want him involved.”

  In a way, Mickie was relieved to gradually wash his hands of the partnership. The Kray brothers, Ronnie and Reggie, had begun popping up to the RAK offices on Oxford Street to offer their protection services. Mickie knew them by reputation; they were villains involved in all sorts of local rackets, ranging from threats and assault to murder. It was apparent that Peter had sent them. He knew them from his days tending the door at tatty London clubs, where they hung out. This was one more torment Mickie could live without.

  With that about settled, Jimmy and Peter mapped out a strategy they hoped would put this band on the path to stardom. The dates in Sweden and Denmark would give the guys a chance to work on material and get accustomed to playing together, out from under the prying eyes of the UK rock ’n roll media. As soon as they returned, toward the end of September, they’d head into the studio to record an album. To that end, Jimmy called his old Epsom buddy, Glyn Johns, to see if he was interested in working on it.

  Johns was surprised to hear from Jimmy. It had been several years since they’d been in touch, and the scope of the project sounded a bit un-Jimmy-like. “He didn’t seem to me the sort of bloke who would form a group,” Johns says. However, the minute Glyn heard John Paul Jones was involved, he changed his tune. “That guy is a genius bass player and an unbelievable musician. I mean, fantastic. I’d worked with him forever. We were pals. This would have to be good.”

  Glyn was told he had to talk to Peter Grant about any arrangement. “If you want me to do this,” Glyn said, “I’m going to end up producing the album, because there won’t be anyone else in the studio. So I’m going to want a deal as the producer.”

  “Go and see Peter Grant,” Jimmy repeated.

  The two men wasted no time hammering out a deal. “It was clear I’d been hired as a producer,” Johns recalls. “My deal was simple, a straightforward percentage deal, and I didn’t insist on a contract. It was for Jimmy, and since he and I had grown up together, I figured it was fine.” They shook hands on it.

  In the meantime, the newly reconstructed Yardbirds fulfilled an obligation that remained on John Paul Jones’s books, performing as studio musicians on an album by P. J. Proby. Shortly after that, before they left for Denmark, Robert Plant chose a private moment to approach Peter Grant and take him into his confidence.

  “Mr. Grant, I’ve got a problem,” Robert began. “Actually, two—I’ve been seeing sisters.” He explained how he’d met them near his home a few years earlier, a pair of Anglo-Indian beauties. For a time, he had lived with Maureen Wilson while also dating her sister Shirley. “I’ve got one of them pregnant, but I love them equally. Which one of them do you think I should marry?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Grant replied. “I think that would have to be the pregnant one.”

  It was decided to put off wedding plans until they got back from Scandinavia. The ten dates required the band’s utmost concentration, without distractions. Nothing was to interfere with developing a solid set of material and a killer stage act. In addition to the upcoming album plan, Grant was cobbling together a U.S. tour, much like the one he’d just completed for the Jeff Beck Group. It would be a make-it-or-break-it opportunity for these new Yardbirds, so everything had to be airtight by then.

  The band’s set list came together effortlessly. There were songs that all four musicians knew: “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” “I Can’t Quit You, Baby,” and “You Shook Me” were blues standards that most British bands included in their repertoires. They also rehearsed a haunting version of “Dazed and Confused.” It had been a staple of the Yardbirds ever since August 1967, when they appeared on the same bill with its author, singer-songwriter Jake Holmes, at the Village Gate in New York City.

  “I loved it immediately,” Jim McCarty explains. “It was quite moody and had a great descending bass riff, with plenty of opportunity for Jimmy to improvise.” Right after the show, McCarty made a beeline to a Bleecker Street record shop and bought a copy of The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes so they could put their own stamp on it. Jimmy, with his keening violin bow and the intrepid atmospherics it produced, had adapted “Dazed and Confused” to the degree that he now considered it his song—a Jimmy Page original. He also introduced the “self-penned” “How Many More Times,” which sounded suspiciously close to Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More Years.” And their version of “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,” with a florid discharge of Robert’s vocal pyrotechnics, aimed at obliterating its traditional origins. At least “Communication Breakdown” seemed to be an authentic Jimmy Page number. To round out the set, they updated two covers that Robert Plant had been performing in the Band of Joy and Obs-Tweedle: Garnet Mimms’s 1964 soul standout “As Long as I Have You,” “I’ve Got to Move” by Otis Rush, and “Flames,” an infectious romp with its penetrating rush of energy, by Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera.

  The New Yardbirds’ inaugural shows in the suburbs of Copenhagen had all the awkwardness of a first date. The rented equipment was uncooperative, the band somewhat reticent, the audiences a bit bewildered. This band doesn’t sound or look like the Yardbirds. There was a degree of uncertainty and indecision onstage.

  Their appearance, for one thing, looked oddly mismatched. Jimmy drew attention in an all-white outfit, silky pants, and a matching shirt with an abundance of ruffles that might have turned heads in the court of Louis XIV. Robert, no less flamboyant, was trussed in tight pants and a flowery, puckered shirt whose only nod to modesty was that it knotted at the waist. Their hairstyles, a cascade of shoulder-length waves and curls, had the breadth and heft of cumulus clouds. John Paul and Bonzo dressed more for function with by-now-traditional Beatles haircuts, allowing the front men to stand out.

  “In Scandinavia, we were pretty green,” Robert recalled. “It was very early days, and we were tiptoeing [around] each other.” Jimmy persevered through various hiccups and false starts, admitting, “We were really scared, because we’d only had about fifteen hours to practice together.”

  That may have been so, but the music came together very quickly. Everything started to jell after four or five appearances. The band started to swing—swing for the fences. The songs took on new, exciting shapes, the musicians began to communicate and trust one another. If Jimmy had any reservations about Robert’s ability to carry the load, they were put to rest on September 12 during an outdoor gig at an amusement park in Stockholm. Halfway through their performance, the power blew on his mic, but Jimmy said “you could still hear his voice at the back over the entire group.” The guy had an amazing set of pipes, and he was beginning to unwind and command the spotlight.

  By the end of the tour, the Yardbirds had gotten their sea legs. They were feeling more confident onstage, beginning to anticipate one another. “The songs began to stretch out,” according to Jimmy, “and I thought we were working into a comfortable groove.” The shows were more fluid, top to bottom. Peter Grant, who got his first look at the band, agreed. “There was this incredible chemistry,” he said. “I can’t say that all the notes were correct, but the feeling was there and the magic was there.”

  There was also a new element woven into their makeup: power—raw, uncompromising power. These Yardbirds made no concession to volume. The Stockholm Daily News reported, “They were so loud it almost hurt.”

  Jimmy was intrigued by the way modulation affected the mood of songs. The surface gestures in music conveyed the full range of feelings, all of which could be regulated by volume. “I wanted to play hard, heavy rock sounds,” he declared. But there was also a part of him that luxuriated in the comfort of traditional folk elements. Loudness was one form of expression, but so was subtlety. “Dynamics,” he explained, “whisper to thunder. Sounds that invite you in and intoxicate.”

  Sounds that invite you in and intoxicate. He’d heard stirrings of it in the few gigs they’d played in Scandinavia, the ability to bounce between radically different sounds—moments of carefully calibrated poise and ferocious bursts of intensity. Such were the qualities that emerged during the brief tour. It was time to see if he could capture it on tape.

  [2]

  A block of time had been booked at Olympic Sound Studios in Barnes beginning on September 27, 1968, just two weeks after the Yardbirds returned from Sweden. The interval was just long enough for everyone to tie up loose ends at home and catch their breath before recording their debut album—a ridiculous timetable for a group of musicians who had been together for only a little more than three weeks.

  A rehearsal at Jimmy’s boathouse in Pangbourne was relaxed, unstructured. The concept behind the album was to re-create the band’s live act, so it would not require a lot of preparation. Everyone was loose. They had the blues songs down pat. “Dazed and Confused” was a pretty well established part of their repertoire. John Paul Jones recalled, “My contributions were ‘Good Times, Bad Times’ and ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’ ”—songs that swung between the extremes, one loaded with demonic energy, the other dulcet and graceful. Jimmy brought in “Black Mountain Side,” a tribute to one of his guitar heroes, Bert Jansch, whose innovative “Black Waterside” was evident in every stanza. And they jammed. John Paul discovered a vintage Hohner reed organ in the corner of Jimmy’s parlor—not exactly a B-3, but efficient, with enough clout—and piloted it into a full-throttle arrangement of the Band’s “Chest Fever,” which shook the rafters. Another warm-up, Jimmy’s “Tribute to Bert Berns” gave everyone a chance to air it out in a kind of loose, bluesy groove meant to cement a musical bond.

  Most times it just felt like a jam—an improvisational jam, the way jazz cats might handle it. “We were all into the idea of opening songs up,” Robert explained. “There was a structure, but the structure was prompted and edited according to cues.” That meant paying attention to what everyone was playing and anticipating where things might head. It was liberating—but nerve-racking at the same time.

  Robert and Bonzo remained a bit overwhelmed. There were remnants of the North-South divide in the air, perhaps more from their perspective than their London counterparts’. They continued to feel somewhat out of their depth. “We’d drive home from rehearsals from Pangbourne,” Robert said, “and we started communicating as two guys from the Black Country who had a lot to take in.” They were motivated by the need to measure up—“playing with guys who were leagues above and beyond anything we’d played with before.” It was musically challenging but stimulating. They were exhilarated. It was encouraging how much they’d risen to the occasion. As a result, their confidence was riding high as they regrouped in the studio the last week in September.

  Olympic Sound had started life as an independent four-track operation on Baker Street before moving into bigger, more accommodating digs, a converted cinema in Barnes, in southwest London, with an updated eight-track board. “It was certainly the most versatile room I’d ever worked in,” says Glyn Johns, who’d engineered countless sessions in the facility. “The acoustics in there could deal with anything.” He assumed he’d pushed them to the limit on a recent session with the Stones but was completely unprepared for the output of the Yardbirds. “The minute they started to play, they just blew me out of the fucking chair,” he says. “I was on the bloody floor from the sound that was coming at me.”

  He was astonished at how the band was so prepared. They were ready to play minutes after they’d unpacked their gear. The Stones had been so loose about showing up on time; Keith was rarely in tip-top shape. When Johns had recorded the Beatles, they were punctual but “dicked around” with the songs, rehearsing and rewriting while the meter was running. Not so with the Yardbirds. “They were fine-tuned when they arrived, the material was tight, perfectly arranged,” he recalls.

  “The first album was done methodically, with ruthless efficiency,” according to Jimmy. He had his eye on the clock, inasmuch as he was personally bankrolling the session. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do in every respect. I knew where all the guitars were going to go and how it was going to sound—everything.”

  Not quite everything. John Bonham’s drums were a force unto themselves. “They made the most astonishing sound,” says Glyn Johns, owing to the “phenomenal way Bonzo tuned them.” They’d already been deemed “unrecordable” by an engineer at Ladbrooke Sound in Birmingham, and this gave Jimmy and Glyn a problem to cope with.

  Jimmy recalled his session days and the way engineers had recorded Bobby Graham, by isolating him in a booth with a mic positioned smack up against his drums. It was the reason they always sounded tinny on playback. “Essentially, it came down to placement,” Jimmy said. “I simply moved the mic away to get some ambient sound.” Glyn pitched in by putting Bonzo on a riser and used multiple mics placed to get a stereo effect, a discovery, he says, that intensified the drums’ sound and forever changed the way they were recorded. The drums seem to force their way into the mix. Years later, Brad Tolinski, the editor in chief of Guitar World, credited bringing those drums forward as “one of the biggest musical events of the past fifty or sixty years.”

  John Paul Jones was an instant beneficiary. His bond with Bonzo, as the band’s rock-solid rhythm section, was immediate and profound. “It was a lot of fun playing with someone so shit-hot, with such great musicality,” he said. But fun was only a fraction of the payoff. Jonesy had found someone who complemented his style of play—someone able to mine the energy in songs to deliver a stirring rhythmic balance. “Lots of people can play fast, but to play slow and groove is one of the hardest things in the world, and we could both do it. It was a joy to sit back on a beat like that and just ride.”

  Their collaboration—and joy—was evident from the outset. Everything the band had rehearsed seemed to come together in a blaze of efficiency.