When Jimmy got back to London, he found his manager sidetracked with two other bands. Peter Grant had undertaken the direction of Jeff Beck’s new group with the remnants of Vanilla Fudge’s rhythm section, Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice. They’d tried talking Rod Stewart into staying on for the vocals, but he jumped ship and joined the Faces instead. Stewart issued a farewell warning to Appice. “Don’t work with Jeff. He’s just going to screw around and mess up your career.” But BBA, as the new band was called, reconfigured as a power trio, slapping together an album for Columbia Records. “We had a sold-out tour of the South—ten shows,” Appice recalls. “Five shows in, we went to the next gig . . . and Jeff went home. That was the end of BBA.”

  Grant fared better with the other band, Cartoone, which he signed to a multialbum deal at Atlantic. After the first record tanked, the band’s guitarist, Leslie Harvey, told Grant he had another better group, Power, with girlfriend Maggie Bell in Scotland. Grant was skeptical but said, “Well, we’ll all just have to go up there and see what the story is.”

  Power had a residency at Burns House in Glasgow, where they were performing when Grant’s limo pulled up. “Tom Waterson, the man who ran the club, was a right little asshole and warned us about being pinched by sharpies when he saw Peter and Richard Cole arrive,” Bell recalls. Waterson had a contract with the band, paying them a paltry £12.50 a night playing to packed houses.

  The band was everything Leslie Harvey had cracked it up to be. They rocked hard, had great songs, and—that singer! What a voice!—part Janis Joplin, part Billie Holiday. Maggie Bell was a showstopper, a natural, and Grant was sold. “After the show, Mr. Waterson barricaded us in a back room,” Maggie says. “Peter told him, ‘You’d better open the door or I’ll have to break it down.’ He put us in the limousine, took us back to a hotel to talk about plans, and two weeks later we were in London.”

  Grant renamed the band Stone the Crows and banished them to a basement flat in Earl’s Court to rehearse with new sidemen—Jimmy McCulloch, late of Thunderclap Newman, and Fleetwood Mac virtuoso Peter Green, fresh out of rehab and raring to play.

  With another North American tour set for Led Zeppelin—nineteen performances in just three weeks’ time, beginning on October 17, 1969—there was little attention paid to BBA and Stone the Crows. Zeppelin was breaking wide open, what with a new album due for release and a prestigious kickoff concert at no less than Carnegie Hall in New York.

  Carnegie Hall was leery of rock ’n roll bands. It was a storied venue, dating to its opening night in 1891, when the composer of the program’s featured symphony, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, sat in the audience. The Beatles and the Stones had played there in 1964, with wild, anarchic audiences that ran roughshod through the house. Since then the venue had been placed off limits to anything groovier than, say, Johnny Mathis. Amazingly, Carnegie Hall’s board of directors decided that Led Zeppelin’s audience was likely to be courteous and civilized.

  It was the hottest ticket in New York. A second midnight concert was added to accommodate demand. Right up until showtime, scalpers worked the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, pocketing twice the highest ticket price of $5.50. (It was a different day.) New York’s rock cognoscenti vied to attend. A reporter noticed “every musician that happened to be in town standing at the side of the stage during the show.” The mainstream and underground press turned out in droves.

  Peter Grant was taking no chances when it came to press. Still distrustful and disdainful of reporters, G, as he was now known to insiders, singled out those he considered friendly to Led Zeppelin and whom he could control with perks and favored access. It became a business strategy that was practiced successfully throughout the band’s career. There were those in the press who could be bought, so to speak, by being made to feel they were part of Led Zeppelin’s trusted entourage. Some, like Melody Maker’s Chris Welch, got preferential treatment early on, beginning with the Carnegie Hall show. “Chris was considered all right,” according to Richard Cole. Welch was flown to New York from London, not by his employer but on Led Zeppelin’s dime, and put up in an all-expenses-paid suite at the New York Hilton, with gifts lavished by his benevolent hosts. “Turned out they’d arranged to have some hookers and porn films and whips delivered to my room,” he recalled, “but the girls had been stopped by the house detective before they got up to my floor.”

  Welch didn’t disappoint. In an “exclusive report,” he delivered a rave—in this case deservedly so. It was one of those New York shows that would become part of the rock ’n roll narrative. Led Zeppelin at Carnegie Hall: there are few more incongruous citations. Courtesy and civilized behavior weren’t anywhere on the premises. “It was the first time I had ever seen a New York audience, and I couldn’t believe how wild and noisy they were,” Welch recalled. “They literally went completely mad the moment the band came on.”

  It was also the first time any of the audience had heard songs like “Whole Lotta Love,” “The Lemon Song,” and “Heartbreaker”—songs that took electric blues into the heavy-metal sphere. Bonzo stretched his “Moby Dick” solo to an eternal twenty-five minutes, playing the tom-toms with his hands, elbows, and anything else within his grasp, in a tribute to his drum idols, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, whose performances at Carnegie Hall had been similar sensations. Three encores at the midnight show put the period at the end of the story. You could almost hear Chuck Berry sing, “Roll over Beethoven—and tell Tchaikovsky the news.”

  Five days later, when the album dropped, it was almost anticlimactic. Word had flashed from coast to coast that the new songs were something fantastic—something else—and Led Zeppelin II, as it was titled by the group, shipped gold, with advance orders of 500,000 units in the United States alone. By the end of the year, it would be the bestselling album in America.

  It was a handsome package—a sepia-toned photograph of a Luftwaffe division that navigated the Zeppelins that bombed England during World War I. The four pilots’ faces were replaced by those of Messrs. Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham. The surrounding pilots were adorned with superimposed headshots of Peter Grant, Richard Cole, blues stylist Blind Willie Johnson, and actress Glynis Johns, the latter a dig at the first album’s aggrieved engineer.

  Reviews, for the most part, were glowing, especially from the music industry trade magazines that served to spur airplay and point-of-purchase sales. There were a few that took swipes at cosmetics like Robert’s “tortured voice and Page’s guitar, which at times sounds as disturbing as car tires screaming to a crash.” Greil Marcus, then a Rolling Stone editor, assigned the magazine’s review, somewhat mischievously, to John Mendelssohn, who’d made his contempt for the group well known in his review of their previous album. And there was mutual animosity; Robert Plant had threatened him from the stage in Anaheim, California. This time around, Mendelssohn’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “[Marcus] was probably hoping that I’d be amusing,” Mendelssohn recalls, contrite-ish fifty years later. “As a drummer, I should have enjoyed that album just for Bonham. I listen to it now and think, ‘How did I miss how terrific he was?’ ”

  In any event, it increased the band’s ire at Rolling Stone, if not at critics in general. “Led Zeppelin was very touchy when it came to criticism,” says Chris Charlesworth, who covered the band for Melody Maker, along with Chris Welch. “With a band like The Who, criticism bounced right off their backs, but Zep had very thin skin, Jimmy most of all. As they got bigger and bigger, their minders got more and more aggressive with us. Especially Peter Grant. We were seriously afraid of him. Seriously. Afraid. He still gives Welch and me nightmares.”

  New Musical Express’s Nick Kent was another journalist who toed the manager’s line and was granted routine backstage access. “Peter made it abundantly clear he wouldn’t be at all happy if anything negative appeared in my write-ups,” Kent said.

  G’s brutishness sharpened in direct proportion to the band’s success. It had always been simmering, making snap appearances at salient moments. But his exercise of power reverted to the thuggish ways he’d once learned from the streets. “I don’t believe in pussyfooting around if it’s my affair,” he said with typical candor. Managers, as a rule, were tough characters out of necessity in dealing with shady promoters, shifty lawyers, bootleg merchandisers, and talent poachers. If pushed, a manager had to be able to push back and protect his act. Peter knew how to push—sometimes down a flight of stairs. Often it was the four-finger jab right under the rib cage or a slap across the back of the head with a trademark farewell: “Fuck off, ya cunt.” He brought a gangster mentality to the game.

  In Detroit, the night after the Carnegie Hall triumph, Led Zeppelin shared the Olympia Stadium stage with Grand Funk Railroad in their hometown. Something about the rival band’s performance stuck in Peter’s craw, either their cockiness in front of longtime fans, their extended set, or the audience’s worshipful approval. Furious, he sought out Terry Knight, Grand Funk Railroad’s manager, grabbed him by the neck, and lifted him inches off the ground. “You’ll take the group off stage . . . immediately!” Peter roared. Knight obediently pulled the plug. When the bands appeared together two days later, at Public Hall in Cleveland, Terry Knight was nowhere to be seen.

  “If somebody had to get trod on, they got trod on.”

  Such was the punishment that befell fans if they dared to take a verboten picture of Led Zeppelin during a concert. Grant was known to troll through arenas, snatching cameras and demolishing them. Once, in Vancouver, he spotted a fan surreptitiously recording a performance and smashed the apparatus to smithereens, with a bonus shove or two to the solar plexus, only to discover the person was neither a fan nor a bootlegger but an inspector from the Noise Abatement Society checking levels in the arena with a decibel meter. “Four men dragged me upstairs and started to beat me,” claimed the inspector, a man named Mac Nelson, who insisted on pressing charges. It took swift intervention on Steve Weiss’s part and a packet of cash to get the subsequent warrant for Grant’s arrest dismissed.

  No matter, it did nothing to ease his inflexible authority over Led Zeppelin’s interests and the demands—his demands—on those who dealt with him. The idea was to isolate Led Zeppelin in a protective bubble so they could sow their creativity without outside interference.

  Following the release of Led Zeppelin II, G demanded that Atlantic Records honor the band’s wish that no singles be issued. No singles? It was unheard of. Hit singles not only stimulated album sales, they provided a huge windfall to both recording artists and labels. Moreover, they were the engine that drove AM Top 40 radio. It didn’t take a genius to pick the obvious hit single from LZII. FM radio had already plucked out “Whole Lotta Love,” playing it ad nauseum at its five-minute-thirty-five-second length. In record-company parlance: it started to blow up big.

  No matter how big, however, Peter Grant put his foot down, reminding Atlantic Records that the band’s contract gave them complete control over how the record was released. And not just over albums but over singles. Just in case the label had forgotten, he reminded it again: no singles.

  Jerry Greenberg, the head of Atlantic’s radio promotion department, was understandably frustrated. The big chain of stations he oversaw was begging for a version that conformed to the Top 40 format. “AM radio was not going to play a five-minute cut,” Greenberg says. “So I called Peter and said, ‘Do me a favor. Ask Jimmy to make an edit so I can get it played on AM stations.’ ” Grant called back a few minutes later and said, “Jimmy says we’re not a singles band. Forget it.” And he hung up.

  The pressure on Greenberg for a single increased with each passing day. The station manager of KFRC, San Francisco’s top AM channel, called him and said, “We can’t play that record, but—God, it’s number one here in the city. Do something, will you?”

  Greenberg was caught between two masters. He placed another call to Grant. “Please, you’ve got to give me an edit,” he begged. “Or at least let me try one, and I’ll send it to you.”

  Grant explained that it was probably futile but relented somewhat, telling Greenberg he was welcome to give it a shot.

  As Jerry recalls, “I’m in our studio, watching the clock. At two forty, they are into the hook.” Need a whole lotta love, need a whole lotta love, need a whole lotta love . . . “I order a fade and we’re out at 3:05.”

  He cut a dub and sent it to Grant’s office with the message: “This is how we can break the band wider in America. I want to press up a few copies, send it to my ten biggest stations, and get it going.” After an excruciating few days when he heard nothing from England, Jimmy, to his surprise, gave it his blessing.

  A few copies became two thousand, with the short version on one side, the original version on the flip.

  “Boom, it exploded!” Greenberg recalls. “I mean—exploded!”

  Grant called him two weeks later and said, “Jimmy wants to know when it’s coming on the charts.”

  “Peter, it can’t come on the charts,” Greenberg responded. “It’s not released as a single.”

  After a brief interval, only a few minutes at best, Grant called back and said, “Jimmy says it’s okay to release it, but you can only put it out in America.”

  Apparently, Atlantic’s office in London did not get the message. The UK label had recently hired Phil Carson to run its operations—the same Phil Carson whom Peter Grant had pulled out of Cal Danger’s car and threatened seven years earlier. In the interim, Carson had played bass for the Springfields, a pop trio with Dusty and her brother Tom, and Houston Wells & the Marksmen, an English country band that had supported the Beatles on an early tour of cinemas in Scotland. Carson gave the order to release “Whole Lotta Love” as a single and shipped around four thousand copies. As a result, he was summoned to 155 Oxford Street to explain himself to Peter Grant.

  “Peter was not pleasant,” Carson recalls.

  With Mickie Most looking on, G backed Carson against a wall and bellowed, “What the fuck do you think you are doing? Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  Carson, no shrinking violet, says, “I told him who the fuck I thought I was, but it didn’t seem to matter. He was furious, but I stood my ground, telling him about my strong background in marketing and how I knew what I was talking about.”

  “You don’t fucking know enough,” Grant roared.

  They both raised their voices, nearly coming to blows, until Carson realized how physically overmatched he was and made a quick exit.

  After some transatlantic dickering, Atlantic’s president, Ahmet Ertegun, told Carson to “call the fucking record back.”

  Later, Carson would acknowledge Grant’s savvy and call him “a marketing genius” for withdrawing the single in the UK. “Since kids couldn’t get a single, they had to buy the album,” he concluded, “and Led Zeppelin II started selling as if it were a single.” They’d approved the single in the United States because there were hundreds of AM radio stations there. In England, at the time, there were only a handful. The BBC was unlikely to play “Whole Lotta Love” no matter how long or short it was. A single just didn’t make good business sense.

  And business was good, extraordinarily good. The album hit the UK charts in February 1970, where it remained entrenched for ninety-eight weeks, dislodging the Beatles’ Abbey Road from its stranglehold on the number-one position. By April, LZII had sold over three million copies—double platinum—in the United States alone, with the band’s take estimated “in excess of $5 million.”

  A brief tour of Europe, from February 23 to March 12, reintroduced Led Zeppelin to an audience that was starved for a glimpse of the headline-making band. Last time around, they’d played these same venues as the New Yardbirds with rented, barely adequate equipment. This time they took their own Watkins PA, a replica of one The Who used to blow the roof off buildings. Everywhere Led Zeppelin went, “the audience surrendered totally,” as the Stockholm papers reported, not just in Sweden but in Helsinki, Vienna, Munich, Hamburg, and Düsseldorf as well.

  The only glitch arose in Copenhagen, where the granddaughter of Ferdinand von Zeppelin threatened to sue the band for appropriating the family name. Countess Eva von Zeppelin had been dunning RAK’s Oxford Street office with solicitors’ letters objecting to the band’s name from the time they announced the switch from the New Yardbirds. To safeguard against any complications with their appearance in Denmark, Led Zeppelin appeared as the Nobs instead, named after Claude Nobs, a Swiss promoter close to the band. But graciously, they extended an invitation—more tongue-in-cheek than sincere—to Ms. von Zeppelin to meet them and hopefully reconcile in a local studio where they were doing some recording. Imagine their surprise when she accepted.

  The rapprochement turned out to be a pleasurable affair. The lads were on their best behavior, and the dowager was friendly and diplomatic—that is, until she was leaving the studio and spotted a copy of the first album, whose cover depicted her family trademark exploding in flames.

  “I had to run and hide,” Jimmy recalled. “She just blew her top.”

  Robert heard her say “she wasn’t going to have any ‘babbling apes’ making money from the family name.”

  At least the concert—the first and last-ever performance of the Nobs—came off without a hitch, save for a distraction at a postgig press conference held at a local art gallery. “We had a couple of idiot journalists at the reception,” said Phil Carson, who accompanied the band, “and they had to be thrown out bodily.”