With such a sweet groove going, the band decided to take advantage of Stu’s versatility and segue into another jam. He “just started improvising this amazing lick on [the piano],” as Jimmy recalled, “and the other guys started playing tambourine, hand-claps, and stomping in the hallway.” Robert handled the rhythm-guitar chores, with Jimmy busy on mandolin. “It wasn’t an intellectual thing, cause we didn’t have time for that,” Robert said. “We just wanted to let it all come flooding out.”

  The song’s structure, while extemporaneous, wasn’t original. It was based on Ritchie Valens’s doo-wop classic “Ooh My Head,” from a posthumously released album; the lyric Robert came up with was an obvious steal. Later, Jimmy and John Paul would overdub a slapping sound to pull back the rhythm track from where it threatened to gallop out of control. It was an expert tweak by two smart session musicians who knew how to salvage a balky execution, but it wasn’t enough. It didn’t stand out from the pack. The song was ultimately shelved—for the time being, at least—with the working title “Boogie with Stu.”

  There was a lot of fire and fury in these Headley Grange sessions, but it wasn’t all balls-out rock ’n roll. Led Zeppelin enjoyed spiking their repertoire with an acoustic blend of folk and traditional music, and all the snarky reviews about their drift into CSNY land weren’t going to steer them off that track. They were intent on keeping a nice balance of sound on the new album, just waiting for the right opportunity to slow down the pace.

  Nights were low-key affairs at Headley Grange. Most evenings, after a hearty communal dinner prepared by their cooks, the musicians assembled in the main hall to stay warm, sitting around the fireplace, entertaining themselves with quantities of sharp cider and an assortment of recreational drugs. Richard Cole made sure there was always plenty of weed and hash on hand and the occasional line or two of cocaine. The last time Led Zeppelin was at Headley, Andy Johns had taken a defiant stand on drugs. “If you chaps bring cocaine into this, I will just go home,” he’d declared. But working with the Stones on Sticky Fingers had brought him up to speed. He must have seen crested buttes of the stuff on that session, so that by the time he reunited with the Led Zeppelin contingent, cocaine was a fixture of his daily diet. “Keith [Richards] led him down that path,” his brother, Glyn, says with regret. In any case, there was no resistance from Andy this time around.

  “One night I came downstairs and Jonesy’s mandolin was lying there,” Jimmy recalled. The room was enormous; instruments of all shapes and sizes were scattered about. The other three musicians sat in front of the fireplace, sipping cups of tea. “I’d never played a mandolin before, and I picked it up and started messing around with it.” He had a similar experience while working on “Gallows Pole,” coming upon John Paul’s banjo, picking it up as if it were a foreign object, and giving it a whirl. “I just . . . started moving my fingers around until the chords sounded right, which is the same way I work on compositions when the guitar’s in different tunings.” His experiment with the mandolin sounded like an old English instrumental—“a dance around the maypole number.” Andy Johns slapped a microphone on Jimmy, Robert started singing along, and “The Battle of Evermore” surfaced on the spot.

  Robert had no trouble putting lyrics to the melody. “I’d been reading a book of the Scottish border wars just before going to Headley Grange,” he said. He drew on some of those graphic battle scenes but also larded the lyrics with imagery from The Lord of the Rings, one of his favorite fantasies.

  He and Jimmy also dusted off the fragments of another mellow song they’d begun writing in Wales. They’d both listened incessantly to Joni Mitchell’s Blue, chock full of gauzy treasures like “California,” “River,” and “A Case of You.” That woman was an enchantress, in more ways than one. “She brings tears to my eyes,” Jimmy said. For years he had expressed a desire to meet her. Robert, too. “When you’re in love with Joni Mitchell, you’ve really got to write about it now and again,” he confessed. In no time, Robert had roughed out the lyrics to “Going to California,” a laid-back ballad filled with yearning that affected a distinct Southern California feel: “Someone told me there’s a girl out there, with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair . . .” The portrait he painted was right on the nose. “It’s so simple,” he said, “and the lyrics just fell right out of my mouth.”

  Not as immediate was an electric twelve-bar blues number that paid homage to the early Yardbirds era, when R&B was being reimagined by teenage rebels armed with guitars and amps. Taking a standard like “Smokestack Lightning” or “Bright Lights, Big City” and putting their own souped-up spin on it was the flash point that touched off a revolution—and Led Zeppelin hungrily paid their respects to that tradition. “There are so many classics from way back which we can give a little of ourselves to take them through the years,” Robert said. The band prided themselves on foraging a great old song and making it greater—or at least different—in this case the 1929 country-blues gem “When the Levee Breaks,” by Memphis Minnie and Joe McCoy, which Robert culled from an old album in his collection.

  The band had tried “Levee” at Island Studios and “it sounded really labored,” according to Jimmy. In fact, it really wasn’t at the top of the list to record at Headley Grange. “We’d been working on another song, and there was a lot of leakage from the drums,” John Paul recalled, “so we moved them out into the hall where there’s a big stairwell.”

  Actually, it was a new Ludwig drum kit that had been delivered late one afternoon while Led Zeppelin was engaged in an alternate take of “Misty Mountain Hop.” To capture the sound in a more vibrant way, they decided take a pub break, giving Andy Johns adequate time to reposition the mics.

  “All right,” the engineer agreed, “but Bonzo has to stay behind.”

  Keeping Bonzo from the pub was tantamount to denying a junkie his fix, and he reacted as one might expect. But Andy appealed to his drummer’s instincts, explaining that he’d given thought to Bonzo’s countless complaints about the sound of his drums and had an idea how to fix it.

  Up to this point, the band had been playing in the front room of Headley Grange. Together, they hauled the new drum kit into the palatial entranceway, known as the minstrels hall, with its soaring cathedral ceiling. Andy hung two ambient mics from the staircase, ten feet above, aiming them at Bonzo’s setup. A requisite bass drum mic would be superfluous. Echo would make the drums sound like canon fire. When Bonzo listened to a playback in the mobile unit, he was ecstatic. “Whoa! That’s it,” he shouted. “That’s what I’ve been hearing.”

  “Jesus,” John Paul marveled, “will you listen to that sound!”

  The moment Jimmy heard the drums in the hall, he couldn’t get over the hugeness of the sound. The only word he could use to describe it was frightening. It was that powerful. “Hold on,” he said, “let’s do ‘Levee Breaks.’ ”

  He grabbed his Fender twelve-string guitar that was stepped down in an open G tuning, which made it reverberate in that space almost as mightily as Bonzo’s drums. “Jonesy and I came out in the hallway with our headphones and left the amps back in the room,” he said, “and banged out the rhythm track to ‘When the Levee Breaks’ right then and there.”

  They also tried a version of “Night Flight,” a spry, melodic tease that undercut its anti–nuclear arms sentiment with rapturous accompaniment by John Paul on Hammond organ. But like “Down by the Seaside” and “Boogie with Stu,” it wasn’t given priority and ultimately was shelved.

  Jimmy had a more important piece of business that he wanted to get back to. The inspired concept song, still in unrelated sections, that’d been gnawing at him for months was ready for some serious spadework. The action culminated one night early in the stay as he and John Paul were sitting around the fireplace, drinking cider. It was relatively quiet in the house. Robert and Bonzo had gone to the pub, giving the two old session veterans time for contemplation.

  As John Paul recalled, “Page had a few things worked out on the guitar. He had these different sections, and he was just playing them through.” Jonesy picked up a bass recorder that was on the floor and started accompanying the rundown. Afterward, they worked out the transitions between the sections, knitting them together with keyboard flourishes on an electric piano.

  “Both Jimmy and I were quite aware of the way a track should unfold and the various levels it would go through,” John Paul said. “I suppose we were both quite influenced by classical music and there’s a lot of drama in the classical forms.”

  The arrangement they composed was fraught with drama—a kind of rock ’n roll Ring cycle with its leitmotifs. The simple guitar-recorder duet that introduced the piece was a mood setter in all its fairy-tale frippery, so understated that any further layering to the passage would have destroyed the tranquility. In fact, the way they planned it, an electric guitar wouldn’t make an appearance until three minutes into the piece, and the drums, ominous in their staggered punch, a minute and a quarter later. Until then, the melody almost tiptoed in its approach to an intersection where one might expect renegade musicians to jump from the sidelines in an attempt to pick up the beat. Somehow, restraint persisted.

  Sharp strums across the guitar strings after five minutes shattered the illusion they had created and acted like a fanfare to announce the song’s next stage—something trenchant and harder. The transition opened up, at which point Jimmy’s guitar solo burst from out of nowhere with the kind of fury reminiscent of “Communication Breakdown” and lashed away, picking up speed, as though goading the others to keep up. The runaway riff surged and swelled, gaining intensity, extending the fireworks, until a few razor-edged shrieks at the height of the coloratura—“a hysterical trill,” Jimmy called it—drew the song to an unexpected climax.

  Calling it “Götterdämmerung” would have been almost an injustice. It was “hammer of the gods,” one of Robert’s mumbled asides from “Immigrant Song,” come to life. Jimmy and John Paul had the whole lollapalooza mapped out in an hour or two, with intervals marked where the others would engage.

  The following night, the same creative show prevailed, only the dramatis personae had changed. John Paul escorted Bonzo to dinner at the Speakeasy in London, while Robert took his seat in front of the fireplace.

  “I was sitting with Jimmy, and I was feeling really, really tranquil,” he recalled. Tranquil for a time—he’d been reading The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain by Lewis Spence—but an undertow of anxiety pulled him away as Jimmy played him the opening chords. Something changed inside. “I was holding a pencil and paper, and for some reason I was in a very bad mood. Then, all of a sudden, my hand was writing out the words: ‘There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold / And she’s buying a stairway to heaven.’ ”

  Huh? Stairway to heaven?

  “I just sat there and looked at the words, and then I almost leapt out of my seat.”

  Robert felt “as if I were being guided to write down what I did.” The lyric’s main theme came quickly, but it wasn’t until the next afternoon, while the band was running down the song, that the rest of the words fell into place. “While we were doing it, Robert was penciling down lyrics,” Jimmy said. “He must have written three quarters of the lyrics on the spot.”

  No one minded that they were rather cryptic. There were words that have no meaning, spirits that cry for leaving, pipers that lead to reason, bustles in the hedgerow, rings of smoke, and shadows taller than our soul.

  “Nobody’s quite sure what ‘stairway to heaven’ means,” John Paul mused, “but it seems to fit.”

  Robert attempted a brief interpretation. “The lyrics were a cynical thing about a woman getting everything she wanted all the time without giving anything back.” At other times, he expanded the premise, adding, “It’s like she can have anything forever, so long as she doesn’t have to think about it.” The lyrics, to Robert, sounded “almost medieval.” That stood to reason, inasmuch as his influences were drawn from the Spence book. But forever after, “Stairway to Heaven” would confound most listeners.

  The arrangement was organic for the most part. As John Paul explained it, “Somebody would start something and somebody would follow, and it would turn into something else. You would sit down and work out what sections you’ve got and you’d put them together. It was all very easy, very relaxed.”

  Relaxed—but incomplete. It needed a controlled environment where the engineer could manage effects, like ambience and echo, necessary to dramatize each of the sections properly. “We really couldn’t have done the acoustic guitar and drums at Headley,” Jimmy concluded. “We needed a nice big studio.”

  At the end of January 1971, Led Zeppelin went back to Island Studios to finish what they had started. There were fourteen songs in various stages of development, enough for a double album. Songs that either were too elusive or had stalled at Headley Grange suddenly began to come together. “Four Sticks,” for instance.

  “I couldn’t get that to work until we tried to record it a few times,” Jimmy said. He seriously considered abandoning the song altogether. The time signature seemed too difficult for Bonzo to handle—a rhythmic pattern that swung inconsistently between five- and six-beat measures. They decided to take a day off from struggling with it to give them a little perspective. That night, Bonzo went to a show in order to blow off some steam. Instead, it had the opposite effect.

  “He had been to see Ginger Baker’s Airforce, and he came in and was really hyped about it,” Jimmy recalled.

  Baker was one of Bonzo’s idols, but seeing him take center stage at the Royal Albert Hall, strutting and showboating with reinforcement from two extra drummers, had touched a competitive nerve. Settling down behind his kit, Bonzo primed his performance with a can of Double Diamond pale ale and picked up his sticks—not the usual two, but four, two in each hand.

  “We did it again,” Jimmy said, “and it was magic, one take. The whole thing had suddenly been made.”

  Jimmy added several guitar tracks to “Black Dog.” He was looking to give the song a more aggressive snarl by triple-tracking each riff. “I wanted a totally different tone color,” he said, “so I ran my guitar through a Leslie [speaker] and mic-ed that in the usual way.” They also polished “When the Levee Breaks,” adding slide guitar riffs and backward echo, with a hypnotic harmonica solo contributed by Robert.

  “The Battle of Evermore” needed another element, but—what? The song, which Robert described as a “playlet,” begged for a vocal foil—a town crier, so to speak—to play against his bluesy delivery. He and Jimmy huddled and came up with a possible solution. Jimmy suggested they bring in his old art-school mate Sandy Denny, who had recently bowed out of Fairport Convention. There was no argument from Robert, who considered Denny his “favorite singer out of all the British girls.” Besides, they were already studio friends, her voice and his having intertwined so harmoniously on a “Gallows Pole” outtake. On “Evermore,” they reprised their ensemble singing with a lovely call-and-response that polished off the song.

  Things were moving at a brisk, businesslike pace, and Andy Johns was enjoying the experience. With Led Zeppelin, “there was never a struggle to get a decent groove,” he said. These musicians were pros, he thought, not prima donnas. “With the Stones, sometimes you would sit there for days and days and days, just trying to get a basic track.” Led Zeppelin worked fast, no fragile egos intruded, there was no hand-wringing, no one-upmanship, thanks in no small part to Jimmy Page, “who had his hands on the reins.”

  For better or worse, Led Zeppelin remained Jimmy’s band. “Even in rehearsals, Jim was always in charge,” says Phil Carlo. “Peter made sure of that. Whatever Jimmy did, G thought was great, as opposed to Robert, whom he called ‘that cunt.’ ” John Paul, Robert, and Bonzo felt secure in their roles, but they deferred to Jimmy. Even John Paul, who brought as much expertise to the equation. He, like the others, recognized that Jimmy had the name—and the ambition. In the studio, Jimmy rose to the occasion. He rode the board as capably as any top-ranked engineer or producer, with the determination to replicate any sound that was in his head. And he was headstrong, sure of himself.

  The confidence allowed him to tackle a beast like “Stairway to Heaven,” whose inventive but ungovernable construction begged a game hand and an open mind. There were so many moving parts, a labyrinth of circuitry. It required a ringmaster to put it all together.

  The rhythm track, rerecorded in the studio, laid the song’s groundwork and acted as a guide. It required nothing more than a basic setup—Jimmy on guitar, John Paul on electric piano and Moog bass, and John Bonham on drums. Afterward, listening to the playback, Bonzo delivered the verdict. “Sounds wonderful,” he said triumphantly. “That’s it, then.”

  Jimmy wasn’t so sure. He sat staring at the tape deck, contemplating the situation, reluctant to give it his seal of approval.

  Bonzo was ready to move on but picked up on Jimmy’s indecision. “What’s wrong?” he wanted to know. “Is this the take or isn’t it?”

  Jimmy equivocated. “It’s all right,” he conceded, but the perfectionist in him prevailed. “I think we’ve got a better take inside us.”

  For some reason, Bonzo took it personally. He grabbed his sticks, stormed out of the control room, and posted himself behind his kit, seething.

  “When he finally comes in [on the take],” said the tape operator, Richard Digby Smith, “he beat the crap out of his drums, and all the meters are going into the red.”