Nevison wasn’t used to working under the auspices of cocaine. His experience with The Who had hewed to a different refreshment and timetable. “When I worked with Pete [Townshend] on Quadrophenia, he would start drinking a bottle of cognac at noon, and when it was empty was when we finished, around ten at night.” Cocaine wasn’t set to a standard clock. “With Zeppelin . . . they were waking me up at four o’clock in the morning and we weren’t getting anything done.” Wired to the teeth, convinced it was time to record, they tinkered futilely until passing out. To save his sanity, Ron moved out of Headley Grange to a guesthouse down the road and began locking the remote studio at midnight.

  That, of course, didn’t sit well with the band. Nevison was already on thin ice with them. He’d made it clear he was leaving soon to work on the Tommy movie. And in general they considered him “a bit of a pompous ass.” When he’d turned up in January, it was behind the wheel of a flashy Bentley that raised eyebrows as the ride for a young engineer. Bonzo got pissed at him one day, snuck into the kitchen, and shoved a baking potato into the exhaust pipe of the car. In a scene more suited to an Our Gang comedy, the guys hid behind a tree waiting for Ron to drive off and split their sides laughing when they heard the inevitable bang!

  Jimmy’s irritation with Nevison was more consequential. In the studio, Ron felt the need to get creative, to impress, whereas Jimmy simply wanted him to press “record.” Other times, Ron’s concentration seemed too nonchalant, so that Jimmy took to calling him Ron Nevermind. For the time being, there was détente, but a growing feeling ensued that he wouldn’t be missed when he moved on.

  In the meantime, the rich vein of creativity continued to yield songs. “ ‘Ten Years Gone’ was originally going to be an instrumental,” Jimmy explained. “It has a certain feeling to it, a melancholy feeling, and the theme the lyrics took was exactly along the lines I had been thinking as I had been putting it together.” He and Robert had developed a nice synchronicity in their collaboration. “There’s a certain amount of discussion, but usually it’s just there naturally. I’m sure I could write down on a piece of paper how I visualized a piece of music before Robert writes the lyrics, and they would match up.”

  “Ten Years Gone” played right into their wheelhouse. “I demoed it at home, the guitars . . . everything,” Jimmy said. “I really was quite passionate about getting that one together.” He’d envisioned it as an instrumental, propelled by an expansive overlay of fluid guitar passages, but at Headley Grange, the song blossomed into something more. At the top, Jimmy laid down a rolling, reverb-laden groove that was both melancholy in mood and exotic in texture. For more than a minute, the sound that enveloped the main theme was spellbinding. The chords created a soothing whirlpool effect, building to a crescendo of anticipation.

  When Robert finally broke into the extended curtain-raiser, there was a sense of inevitability. Alas, he sounded miles away, lethargic. The dreamy imagery he contributed was as discursive as the musical texture: “Then, as it was, then again it will be / And though the course may change sometimes, rivers always reach the sea.” But when John Paul and Bonzo staged their long-overdue entrance, the song began to gain momentum. A gyrating guitar solo halfway through served to drive Robert into an earthy R&B groove, swinging “Ten Years Gone” back and forth between deliverance and a more wistful pace.

  The songs’ intricate construction grew out of an all-around collaborative effort. Every musician brought something to the table. “With ‘In the Light,’ we knew exactly what its construction was going to be,” Jimmy said, “but nevertheless, I had no idea at the time that John Paul Jones was going to come up with such an amazing synthesizer intro, plus all the bowed guitars at the beginning as well, to give the overall drone effect.”

  The intro was a lulu, a tour de force. It stretched on for a minute and forty-five seconds, a sound like the mullahs calling the faithful to prayer. John Paul performed a Phantom of the Opera–like overture hunched over a VCS-3 synthesizer, “attempting to get a sort of Indian sound.” Jimmy, who chipped in, bowing his guitar, was ecstatic. “It was just unbelievable,” he rejoiced.

  But not early on, at the drawing board. The track began life as “In the Morning,” with a Plant lyric that set out to outdo “The Lemon Song” in its explicit insinuation. An initial version began: “Sing a song in the morning—come on the one I love.” Reasonably, the line was altered in other takes to “Sing a song in the morning, sing a song of the ocean, hear it every day, it’s a song of salvation.” Robert exchanged the refrain “In the morning, in the morning, in the morning” for “In the light, in the light, in the light,” and gradually the song rambled toward its final shape.

  “Trampled Under Foot” underwent a similar genesis. “When we first ran through it,” John Bonham recalled, “John Paul and Jimmy started off the riff, and we thought it was a bit soul-y for us. Then we changed it around a bit.”

  The first six takes of the song, initially entitled “Brandy & Coke,” were a stumble through musical wilderness, trying to find the right groove. Bonzo was right, the early attempts were too self-consciously funky. Jonesy and Jimmy conspired to play an opening vamp that referenced Stevie Wonder’s peerless “Superstition,” and Bonzo, John Paul said, “came in with this glorious stomp that had a great feel,” pushing the funk quotient further and giving the song “swagger.” But it needed work to refine the structure.

  “I immediately thought the drive and the pace of the thing resembled a car,” Robert said, “so I started and wrote two verses while the band were running through it.” He disappeared into one of the vacant upstairs bedrooms and polished off the rest of the lyrics in half an hour, leaning heavily on a Chuck Berry–style rap scheme that rolled off his tongue. “It’s a wordplay,” he announced triumphantly. “Greasy slick damn body, groovy leather trim / Like the way you hold the road, momma it ain’t no sin.”

  With the lyrics in tow and eight different takes behind them, Led Zeppelin finally hit pay dirt on the ninth go-round with a definitive version that swung between uptown funk and all-out rocker. Musically, the track exploded. The lurching rhythm—its tension and releases, the thrust of the beat—propelled an ensemble climb into the highest of gears. Occasionally, Jimmy stepped out front to deliver a few stinging asides. His guitar fills were loaded with reverb and backward echo that punctuated each measure with editorial precision. John Paul’s elastic solo supercharged the instrumental break, filtering the clavinet’s twitchy figures through a wah-wah, thus paying further homage to Stevie Wonder. If anything, “Trampled Under Foot” made a case for how Led Zeppelin could create a danceable beat if they put their backs into it.

  “The Wanton Song” was more of a jam, a heavy-metal jam, that gave John Bonham a spotlight in which to shine. His angular jabs and ropy fills provided the song with liftoff and steadied it along its dodgy trajectory. His wrist control throughout was astonishing, like a machine but with soul. As Robert once remarked, “I’d never seen another drummer anywhere as near as dynamic.” Bonzo had the shading of a Renaissance artist, so many contrasts and colors. He played on the beat, between the beats, even in the pregnant pauses. “He was a real thrifty player,” Robert said. “It was what he didn’t do that made it work.” He was the master of restraint, at least behind his drum kit.

  Lyrically, once again Robert couldn’t control his adolescent impulses. “Silent woman, in the night you came,” he chortled. “Took my seed from my shakin’ frame.” It was a sop to the young male fans who wanted their music and their fantasies served on the same plate. The combination felt new, yet it was in the tradition of the old blues stylists who dished out the same kind of insinuation in song after song.

  “Sick Again,” recorded in early 1974, was another song about sex, only this time Robert took aim at the groupie scene during the 1973 tour—“about ourselves and what we see in Los Angeles.” His primary target was the “LA queens,” the teenagers who serviced the band, held in high regard until their “downhill slide” into adulthood. Robert’s girlfriends weren’t as young as Jimmy’s; many hovered around the age of consent. His bitterness toward the adolescent girls surfaced in lines like “One day soon you’re gonna reach sixteen / Painted lady in the city of lies.” He didn’t feel the need to hide a fascination: “Said you dug me since you were thirteen / Then you giggled as you heaved and sighed.”

  “The words show I feel a bit sorry for them,” he said. “One minute she’s twelve and the next minute she’s thirteen and over the top.”

  It’s telling of attitudes of the times that cultural commentators didn’t call out such sentiments as offensive. Rock ’n roll bands—especially Led Zeppelin, perhaps the most egregious in the behavior department—were given a pass.

  There were no such quibbles with “In My Time of Dying,” an epic performance adapted from a long line of blues and traditional recordings. The lyrics date back to a 1927 recording by gospel blues evangelist Blind Willie Johnson entitled “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed” and his identical take the following year on a single, “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole.” Charley Patton recorded it in 1929 with the title “Jesus Is A Dying Bed Maker” and Josh White in 1944 as “In My Time of Dying.” White was one of Bob Dylan’s mentors, so it was no coincidence that Dylan recorded a version on his 1962 debut album. By the time Led Zeppelin got their hands on it in 1974, the song’s authorship was credited to “Page, Plant, Jones, Bonham.”

  Jimmy described the band’s version as something “immediate,” meaning “it was being put together when we recorded it,” and over the course of six takes its evolution was apparent. At the outset, they encountered difficulty coming in and out of Jimmy’s sinuous slide-guitar riffs. The split-second timing and syncopation eluded them. But by the third take, the arrangement started to jell.

  Jimmy’s doleful Danelectro guitar established the mood, drawling out long, heavily accented chords that swooped across stereo channels, creating an air of mystery and unease. His phrasing was detailed and dramatic. Southern accents were evident in his usual nuanced style, contributing to the solitude lying just beneath the surface.

  As the title indicates, it’s a dying song, a plea to one’s maker for mercy, for a fair shake in the afterlife, and Robert was more than convincing in his grizzled supplication. He asked for deliverance with regret and penitence, sounding like a man who knew he had only a fifty-fifty chance. “Oh, never did, did no harm, did no harm / I’ve only been that young once,” he implored, and despite evidence to the contrary, one almost believed him. There was an immediacy of feeling, an earnestness he was unable to suppress. The performance, conforming faithfully to the rural blues idiom, was worthy of Robert’s vaunted predecessors.

  The arrangement, on the other hand, dispensed with formalities. The rhythm section owed more to Lynyrd Skynyrd than to Leadbelly. It tore through the veneer of southern refinement like a summer storm. Bonzo, certainly, showed it no respect. “He just played the guitar riff,” Ron Nevison said, “he made it his drum part. Instead of laying down a 4/4 feel with a bass player and letting the riff kind of wander through that, whatever riff Jimmy came up with, he played that riff—and he helped create a very interesting and unique sound.”

  It was savage, merciless, a barrage of thunder created in the cavernous entrance hall at Headley Grange. The band played right into Bonzo’s monster beat. They stretched out, turning the gospel-tinged plaint into a fraught British blues jam that required every reserve of concentration to pull off. A lick or a phrase inserted without warning threatened to capsize the entire thing. There are bass and guitar lines of soaring beauty, but the band got lost as the action snowballed. The song never really drew to a close. “It’s jammed at the end, and we didn’t have a proper way to stop the thing,” Jimmy admitted.

  Robert employed every vocal device in an effort to wrap it up—half a dozen bye, byes, an equal number of I’ll touch Jesuses and oh, oh, oh, ohs, an attempt at go, go, go, take, take, take, even go . . . take—when they finally pulled the plug, someone coughed, and Bonzo announced, “That’s gonna be the one, has to be.”

  Eight new songs in a little under six weeks’ time, with plenty of days off in between to check in with families. They even fiddled with an instrumental of Jimmy’s called “Swan Song” that got lost in the shuffle, though the title would eventually come in handy. But there was a finality to the work at Headley Grange. By the end of February 1974, the musicians’ attention had begun to wane.

  Vanessa Gilbert, one of the band’s Los Angeles entourage now living in London, recalls that, somewhere toward the end of the sessions, she got a call from BP Fallon, who said, “John Paul wants to see you at Headley Grange.” A cab was sent, with Beep and a young female model already seated comfortably in the back. They got lost en route on the maze of country roads, and a roadie named Peppy was sent to recover them. “He was on so many drugs in Bonzo’s new BMW, and he hit everything in his path, like bumper cars,” Vanessa says.

  The scene wasn’t much better at Headley Grange. “Everybody was on drugs,” she says. “They were sitting around a giant table in the kitchen. Poor John Paul had taken too much Mandrax, and his face was in a bowl of spaghetti. The guys had to carry him up to a bedroom, and while they were at it, they threw a live sheep into Beep’s room and lit up an orange smoke bomb to go with it.”

  Yes, definitely time to call it a wrap. There was plenty of material in the can, and a lot left over from the Houses of the Holy sessions. Perhaps enough for a double album. Such an option had already entered the conversation, but there was still much work to be done—overdubs, a mix or two—and anything could happen.

  In the meantime, London was calling. Led Zeppelin had a record company to run.

  [3]

  While Led Zeppelin was recording at Headley Grange, Peter Grant was laying the groundwork for the band’s new record label. He officially opened the office on the King’s Road in London but wanted to establish a presence in New York, where the operation was being combined with Steve Weiss’s law office. In any case, G’s management responsibilities were steep enough. Neither he nor Zeppelin’s principals had any intention of spending time on the day-to-day drudgery of running a record company. Someone else was needed to do the donkeywork. Phil Carson would have been a perfect fit; it still smarted that he’d turned the job down. So, too, had Mark London, with whom G comanaged Maggie Bell. “I thanked him,” London recalled, “but said I didn’t think I could do the job well enough.” Clive Coulson, G’s partner on Bad Company, lacked the necessary polish.

  In desperation, Peter summoned Danny Goldberg, the band’s publicist, to London. He and the guys had grown fond of Goldberg, whom they called “Goldilocks,” and felt he was plugged in to the scene in a way that complemented the band’s hip quotient. The offer Grant made Danny was vague. “I’d like you to be my ambassador in the States,” Peter said. “You’ll still oversee press but liaise with Atlantic’s sales and promotion departments and even handle aspects of the tours.” In exchange, Danny talked G into giving him the title of vice president of the label, which still was without a name. Until they came up with something, he’d be employed by a holding company called Culderstead Ltd.

  Danny moved into Steve Weiss’s suite of offices on Madison Avenue in New York City. Weiss’s law practice was in a state of flux. His elderly, old-line partners had left the firm, which was given over almost entirely to a rock ’n roll clientele. In addition to Led Zeppelin, Weiss represented Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, Herman’s Hermits, Dusty Springfield, and an outlier named Jim Henson, who was shopping around an idea he called the Muppets. The former law conference room was reconverted into a music pad, with studio-quality stereo equipment handpicked by John Bonham. The walls, formerly covered in plush rosewood panels, were papered over with purple velvet, and in the center of the room stood a round purple-and-orange couch. Steve had also undergone a makeover of his own. Gone were the pinstriped suits and close-cropped haircuts. He now dressed almost exclusively in sparkly numbers custom made at Nudie’s in Texas. At Led Zeppelin’s most recent Madison Square Garden concert, Steve had shown up in a lime-green paisley suit over a flowered shirt. He’d let his hair grow long, weirdly long, and he had a girlfriend, Marie Ivey, in tow in place of his wife, Joan, who’d remained behind at their Great Neck estate. He’d even painted his 1957 Rolls-Royce forest green and tan.

  According to Danny Goldberg, Steve Weiss took some getting used to. “I never really knew what to make of him,” Danny says. “He was a tough guy and quick-tempered, a shady character—Tom Hagen, Zeppelin’s consigliere—and gave the impression that he associated with gangsters. He made the people at Atlantic nervous.” Steve’s swagger and take-no-prisoners attitude suited Peter Grant’s way of doing business. “But he worshipped Peter. If Peter said ‘Jump,’ Steve said, ‘How high?’ ”

  The London office was another matter altogether. It remained a pretty bare-bones operation. Grant bought a cottage in Hay’s Mews so he could stay in town, close to the business, but he rarely came into the office. He’d become hostage to his growing cocaine habit. Instead, he delegated the daily responsibilities at King’s Road to Richard Cole, a man with his own significant drug issues. “There were low-life drug dealers always hanging around the office,” says a colleague. In fact, Ricardo had already solidified a reliable contact in the neighborhood, a sleazy character named Byron who dealt out of Granny Takes a Trip, a boutique around the corner.

  Mark London moved into the second-floor office, where he ran a music publishing company, Color Me Gone (London cowrote the hit “To Sir with Love,” among other songs), and looked after Maggie Bell. Otherwise, the nuts and bolts of Culderstead Ltd. were left to Carole Brown, Peter’s long-suffering assistant.