Indeed, Houses of the Holy mystified critics and fans alike when it was released on March 28, 1973. It had all the ambition of but none of its pluck. The meandering crosscurrents of the music stopped some listeners cold as it hopped from rock to folk to reggae to funk, then doubled back to cover psychedelic and thrash. But there were qualitative obstacles as well. Robert’s voice on “The Song Remains the Same,” buried in the mix, sounded too distant and impersonal, not easily embraced. Although it would explode like a time bomb on stage, “The Rain Song” squandered the power of “Stairway to Heaven” and lacked the fire of “The Battle of Evermore.” The former “Many, Many Times”—now entitled “Over the Hills and Far Away”—was sharp and feverish, a true highlight, as was “No Quarter” for its textural brevity, but “The Crunge” and “D’Yer Mak’er” floundered in cheeky contrivance.

  “Maybe you could attack ‘The Crunge’ and ‘D’Yer Mak’er’ for being a bit self-indulgent,” Jimmy conceded, “but they’re just a giggle. They’re just two send-ups.”

  “There was a lot of imagination on that record,” Robert said in retrospect. “I prefer it much more than the fourth album. I think it’s much more varied and it has a flippance [sic] which showed up again later.”

  It took more than a cursory listen to appreciate the album’s breadth. There were incisive pleasures embedded in its crevices that held the melodic fabric together, but the something-for-everybody aspect disrupted the flow of the record so that it wasn’t instantly comfortable. It wasn’t an obvious Led Zeppelin album; a first listen yielded a collective huh? Criticism was predictably withering. Rolling Stone dismissed it as “a limp blimp . . . one of the dullest and most confusing albums.” Music World called it “a clunker.” Disc and Music Echo faulted it for being “strangely sluggish” and “inconsistent.” The review in Phonograph Record began, “It’s time to bring out the Sominex again.” The critics’ constant din was becoming insufferable. There were the usual suck-ups in Melody Maker and NME—NME found the barefaced cheek to call Houses of the Holy “an album of the highest quality possible”—that offered flattery instead of constructive criticism. Perhaps the most accurate evaluation, in Let It Rock, stated, “Unlike the previous Zep albums, this one takes a few listenings to assimilate.”

  “People still have this preconceived notion of what to expect,” Jimmy accurately observed. “How they should approach our albums is to forget they ever heard of a band called Led Zeppelin, forget about what they expect to hear and just listen to what’s on that particular record. That’s all we ask, but we don’t get it.”

  The fans were impatient when it came to letting an album open and breathe like a fine wine, unwilling to bear with a band’s creative exploration. Change and evolution? Not from Led Zeppelin, brother. They wanted instant gratification, reassurance that Led Zeppelin was the heaviest, headbangingest, mainlining band on record, this record and the next one and the next after that. It was the reason that after five years and forty-three songs, the first shout-out from the audience that cut through every live performance was: “ ‘Whole Lotta Love!’ ‘Whole Lotta Love!’ ”

  The mystery was no longer working. It was time to bring in the cavalry.

  [2]

  Led Zeppelin wanted recognition.

  That seemed absurd coming from a band considered the number-one rock act in the world. But in April of 1973, they were still smarting over being overshadowed by the Stones on their last American tour and fuming at the attacks on Houses of the Holy. They wanted star treatment.

  Led Zeppelin wanted to be loved.

  Their fans loved them, but they wanted warmth and affection from the mainstream rock press—Creem, Crawdaddy, and the iniquitous Rolling Stone, where Zep were looked upon as bottom-feeders and deemed uncool.

  Led Zeppelin wanted to be cool.

  They needed to change their image, to do a makeover of sorts, tucking in their shirttails while preserving a strain of the devilish DNA from their bad-boy bloodlines. BP Fallon, last seen masterminding Marc Bolan’s rise from elfin folkie to glam rock pinup for girls in training bras, wasn’t up to the job. His PR beat was confined mainly to England, where his twinkle-toed, elfin game was tolerated by the rock press. He boasted that he was “the entertainment manager.” He dressed glam—feathers, fur, and glitter. In the States that approach was viewed as toxic. No, Led Zeppelin needed a heavyhitter, and Steve Weiss, who dealt in heavyhitters, legitimate or otherwise, knew just such a guy.

  Weiss went to the top of the PR food chain, contacting Lee Solters, the godfather of press agents. The firm Solters/Sabinson/Roskin represented just about every show-business colossus—Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, a majority of the Broadway shows, Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. How Led Zeppelin fit into their roster was anyone’s guess, but Weiss wanted PR muscle and Solters was about as muscular as it got. Lee was old school—the prototypical paunchy, broad-shouldered, wavy-haired, thick-glasses, Jewish Hollywood tough guy—a workaholic who ate lunch at his desk and stayed there well into the night.

  Solters had just hired a twenty-two-year-old college dropout and failed journalist named Danny Goldberg to shore up his pop music department. Goldberg had street cred, he’d worked for Bob Dylan’s and Janis Joplin’s manager, Albert Grossman, and he loved rock ’n roll, the real thing, not the pretty-boy acts in Solter’s Rolodex. Danny’s turf was the late-night Greenwich Village club scene, with backstage access to the Fillmore East and, more important, the tastemakers at Max’s Kansas City.

  Solters had popped his head into Goldberg’s cubicle and said, “Led Zeppelin—do we want them?”

  That was a tough call. Danny’s tastes ran to Hendrix, Cream, Dylan, the Stones, the Dead, Tim Hardin. He was definitely not a Led Zeppelin fan. To him, “Led Zeppelin was not only not cool, they were uncool.” It would blow his authenticity sky high.

  Nevertheless, he wanted them. “Yeah, of course, they’re big,” he told Solters, who knew zip about the rock ’n roll world.

  Danny explained they had a very mixed reputation. They were known for being unpleasant to journalists, and he laid out their exploits in dealing with Ellen Sander, the Life magazine reporter who had had her dress ripped away by John Bonham. They’d never get mileage from any of the sixties music critics. “We’ll be walking into a negative attitude with the rock press,” he cautioned Solters.

  Didn’t matter. It was money in the bank.

  Solters and Goldberg agreed to make their pitch on April 1, 1973, in Paris, where Led Zeppelin was appearing at the Palais des Sport. The band was holding court at Hotel George V, where throwing TV sets and furniture out the window would have gotten them a swift French boot. Everyone was on his best behavior. To keep the band entertained, high-class prostitutes were hired and a private sex show was arranged so they could watch two women making love to each other. Peter Grant, like a pasha, conducted business in his suite.

  “Tell Peter what you told me,” Solters instructed Danny Goldberg.

  Danny swallowed hard. He’d heard plenty of stories about Grant’s snarly reputation, how he’d just as soon flick someone away with the back of his hand as deal with a pest. He certainly looked the part, a huge, fierce hombre in a Fu Manchu mustache and beard, an undisguised comb-over, blue jeans big enough to reupholster a sofa, with flashy turquoise rings on his fingers and silk scarves draped around his neck.

  What the hell, Danny thought—he’d give it to Peter straight. “Look, the band has a reputation of being barbarians,” he said.

  G stared at him stone-faced, not giving much away . . . and then he grinned, a big Colgate smile. “Yes, but we’re mild barbarians,” he said, laying on extreme charm.

  Mild barbarians. It worked for Danny Goldberg. Lee Solters loved it; it was an angle, he told Danny, that would play in the press.

  The next day Danny met with the mild barbarians, preparing himself to be treated the way they manhandled most journalists. Instead, they reached out to him and asked thoughtful questions, especially Robert, who made it seem as if it had been his idea to hire a publicist. Fame, Robert felt, real fame still eluded Led Zeppelin. He lamented that his father didn’t understand how successful he was. And it continued to bum him out that the Stones had gotten more press on their last tour. The covers of magazines. With Truman Capote. The Stones! Those wankers weren’t worthy of Led Zeppelin’s groupie castoffs.

  Jimmy also bad-mouthed the critics, more so about the bad album reviews than about the Stones. He still had it out for John Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn had poisoned the well for rock journalists, as far as Jimmy cared. And even house pet Chris Welch was now on Jimmy’s shit list for a tepid Houses of the Holy review in Melody Maker.

  Peter introduced what he called “the barbarians thing,” unconvinced that it was bad for their reputation.

  “Look, we were very young when we first started,” Robert admitted. “We’re over all of that now.”

  Danny took him at his word. It was solid—and it wasn’t.

  * * *

  • • •

  There wasn’t time to ease into a proper press campaign. Led Zeppelin was due to arrive in America for a three-month summer tour on May 1, 1973. And it wouldn’t be another version of Bigger and Better. They were going for Epic—playing stadiums the size of small cities in order to break all attendance records. In fact, the show itself would be equally grandiose. They’d given almost as much thought to the production as they had to the music—dramatic changes, no longer just four blokes in jeans and T-shirts standing in front of Marshall stacks and a few beams of spotlight. There was going to be staging and wardrobe and special effects, with a director named Ian Knight to coordinate the whole extravaganza.

  The last week in April, the band and production crew moved into Shepperton Studios, where Dr. Strangelove and Oliver had been filmed and where Peter Grant had done stand-in work in The Guns of Navarone. A sound stage was the perfect place to run through “the new bits and pieces,” as Jimmy referred to “No Quarter” and “The Ocean,” while ironing out the atmospherics. A large-scale production was nothing to take superficially. There was an igloo’s worth of dry ice, exploding cannon fire, a couple of mirrored balls that rotated overhead, strobes, and a refraction mechanism—an eight-foot convex disc covered with broken glass that would be positioned to the right of Bonzo. “When you put the spotlights on all of this,” Robert explained, “it should be like being in the middle of a diamond.”

  Lighting itself was going to be a spectacle. Showco, a production company out of Texas, had built a lighting apparatus on a hydraulic ram. “It was a big box,” explained Benji Le Fevre, a new addition to Led Zeppelin’s road crew, “and you pushed a button and out came a pod with eight or ten power lamps on it.” Their intensity befit the name “Super Troopers.” In addition, there would be three scaffolding towers onstage with follow spots so Robert’s hair would be lit to emulate the Second Coming and another follow spot to match the beats of Jimmy’s violin bow.

  The output of sound was designed to be heard in the next county. “The idea was to put up as many speakers as you could with as many amplifiers as you could, and turn it all up to eleven,” Le Fevre said. The tour also had the very first Eventide Digital Delay device, which added a clean echo to Robert’s voice and fed it back into itself to make his voice soar. They could now digitally set two delay times so that his single voice would be three—and even feed it back onto itself so that it would be six or twelve, producing a veritable Robert Plant chorus. This way, it could duplicate how he sounded on records, which excited him and got him more fully involved.

  Jimmy wasn’t inclined to play second fiddle. Now that Robert was getting star treatment, Jimmy sought to fortify his share of the turf. He intended to be able to play his guitar backward. In the recording studio, he simply reversed the tape and sssssssswt, instant backward guitar. But live, it was impossible to play a note before it had been played. To get around that, he developed with his Echoplex tape-delay effect a system whereby he would play and record something, then it would play back in a loop so that he could play against it—not quite backward, but mesmerizing nevertheless. It would definitely stand up to Robert’s high profile.

  Such a spectacle required comparable attire, custom-made clothing to give the musicians pizzazz. “We decided that the denim trip had been there for too long,” Robert said.

  “Sparkly clothes became available,” John Paul added.

  Jimmy chose a matador-style jacket stitched with hummingbirds along either lapel. He also had a stunning white linen suit with red poppies on the front and ZoSo stitched on the back to stand out against whatever guitar he draped sash-like across his chest. Robert picked out a series of hand-dyed vests, usually open to reveal his décolletage, with a long silk scarf knotted at his neck and tight pants that bordered on the obscene.

  “I got a silly jacket with pom-poms,” said John Paul, hardly the fashionista, “because the people who made Page’s dragon suit came by with a vanload of clothes, and we all just went, ‘Oh, that looks fun.” Another of his jackets had oversize hearts sewn onto the sleeves. It would never make the cover of GQ.

  What Led Zeppelin did make was the Sunday edition of the New York Daily News, which had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the U.S. Danny Goldberg used every last drop of goodwill he had with the News’s Lillian Roxon, the doyenne of rock journalists, to have her cover the band’s arrival at JFK. “Please don’t ask me to see this fucking group,” she pleaded. She had zero interest in their music. “But this is a news article,” Danny assured her, and in the end she let him spoon-feed her the story. He also managed to corral Disc & Music Echo’s New York correspondent, Lisa Robinson, to accompany the band to Atlanta, where they were set to open the tour on May 3.

  So began the practice of co-opting rock writers. With a mandate to court the press and an unlimited budget to do it, the way to ensure good copy was to make writers feel like they were part of the Led Zeppelin entourage, give them VIP access, and make sure they were well taken care of. It was relatively easy to take care of a journalist, most of whom made hardly enough to cover their rent. The band picked up the cost of their plane tickets, provided them with hotel suites, plied them with liquor and food and in some cases cocaine and prostitutes, gave them front-row seats to the shows and backstage passes for afterward. A quid pro quo was understood—they’d basically write puff pieces.

  The show in Atlanta would be a bellwether. It was meant to change the course of everything—Led Zeppelin’s place in the rock pantheon and their image with the press. An epic required epic strategies. Whatever it took. Cost was no factor. The stairway to heaven wasn’t always paved with the best intentions.

  [3]

  Atlanta Stadium was enormous, more than fifty thousand seats, which had challenged no less than the Beatles in 1965. Playing music to a crowd of that size conjured Ben-Hur in the Roman Colosseum. It was surreal, there was an element of gladiatorial bloodlust involved. The stage alone deserved a zip code—it was eighty feet by thirty-five feet, comparable to the dimensions used to put on a three-ring circus—with thirty-three technicians covering its expanse. Concrete crash barriers ten feet high lined a tract in front of the stage to hold back the crowd like a seawall. The entire setup was larger than life, and when Led Zeppelin took to the stage—a half hour late, not bad considering their track record—two sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot screens on either side of the stage assured the capacity crowd that life-size images of Jimmy, Robert, Jonesy, and Bonzo would loom over the stadium.

  Robert was a bit nervous appearing in front of such a multitude. Looking out over the vast sweep of humanity, he flashed on a show Led Zeppelin had done in January in Aberystwyth, Wales, near the Bron-Yr-Aur cottage. “It was a very well-meant gesture on the part of Jimmy and me, intended to drag Bonzo and John Paul up there and give something back to the mountains and the people,” he recalled. “We felt quite warm vibes about the place and, so, when we set up our last tour we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a gas if we did Aberystwyth?’ Like a nostalgic thing.” They’d played a tiny hall that held about eight hundred people—“bearded, pipe-smoking folk,” as Robert recalled them, who were “just aghast.” They couldn’t have been less interested and talked through the show. “I remember Bonzo bashing away and giving me one of those looks that said, ‘This was a fookin’ good idea, wern it?’ ”

  The Atlanta crowd splashed cold water on that memory. Everything about Atlanta was otherworldly. It took Robert a few minutes to get his sea legs. But the sound! As soon as they launched into “Rock and Roll,” that place shook so hard it might have come loose from its moorings. Bonzo had a new Ludwig Vistalite drum kit that replicated the artillery fire at the Battle of Pickett’s Mill. It sent out as many shock waves as it did the backbeat. The light show made eyes spiral, smoke bombs rattled skeletal cages. The production was something to see—and feel.

  A gust of dry ice clouded the floor of the stage during the first few notes of “No Quarter,” allowing Jimmy and Robert to emerge from the mist like Arthurian knights. Danny Goldberg, who was standing in the wings, recalled watching “a teenage boy’s jaw literally drop at the sight of a laser beam hitting the mirror ball as Robert sang the last line of ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ ”

  The next morning, during breakfast at the Atlanta Hilton, the four musicians gathered around a copy of The Atlanta Constitution, whose front page was dominated by three photos of the concert. A headline proclaimed, stadium rocks: led zeppelin plays to 50,000. It was coverage they’d never gotten before; things were looking up.